In our world, most things we own, we buy. They’re made in a factory, usually somewhere quite far away from us—usually, now, in Southeast Asia or China. They’re “marketed” by people who get paid lots of money to do nothing else than create a demand for whatever it is they’re…
Those of us who grew up with Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (and, more recently, devoured the remake with Neil De Grasse Tyson) cannot forget the story of the…
If there’s one valuable service those of us with experience can provide the neophyte researcher (in any subject), it’s tools to overcome the…
I’m a crackerjack editor. A professional writer has to be; there is no such thing as no word limit. I can edit a piece down to an arbitrary number in…
What if your ninety-two-year-old mom died, and you were cleaning out her attic, and you found one of those old round birth-control-pill dispensers with…
1
I owe thanks to my kind mentor and collaborator Nick Burningham for making an observation about the “Retro” piece that led directly to this one. In the…
One of the baddest dragons historians of technology had to slay was “form follows function,” the best-known articulation of modern technological…
Historians of technology tend to preoccupy ourselves with a narrower slice of the human experience than we have to; most of our work focuses on the…
See all

Leeway