The stop sign is the only octagonal object most people encounter in a normal day. It is a strange shape to manufacture, it wastes material compared to a square, and…
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Before there were discotheques, clubs or anything with a disc jockey in it, the Saturday night out in most American towns of any size meant a hall with…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The home party is remembered as a joke: a living room of women, a demonstration, some faintly humiliating games and a catalogue. It is one of the most…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There are a small number of American habits that produce the same reaction in every visitor, and this is the purest of them. The price on the shelf…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a quiet oddity in American civic life that almost nobody examines, which is that the country conducts its elections on a working day in November.
Most…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
It is one of the most universally shared complaints in the history of television, and for most of that history the people being complained to had a technically…