Source: Wikipedia
Home footage was not something you watched. It was an event that had to be set up, required equipment, involved the whole household and happened perhaps twice a year.…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
One set meant that watching was a collective activity requiring agreement, and that everybody in the household saw the same thing at the same time whether they had…
Source: Wikipedia
The directory was one of the few objects that arrived in every home whether or not anybody wanted it, and it stayed for a year doing several jobs at…
There is a specific social awkwardness that everybody has encountered from one side and nobody from both.
Visiting an unfamiliar house, you register its smell immediately — not unpleasant necessarily,…
Source: Wikipedia
A radio left running is a completely different object from one somebody switches on to listen to. It becomes the background of a house, and everyone absorbs it without…
Soap is one of the oldest manufactured substances and one of the most consequential, and almost nobody can explain what it does.
The common assumption is that soap is a…