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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…
Phillip Reid

February 2023

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…
Phillip Reid
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…
Phillip Reid

January 2023

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…
Phillip Reid
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…
Phillip Reid
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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…
Phillip Reid

December 2022

One of the baddest dragons historians of technology had to slay was “form follows function,” the best-known articulation of modern technological…
Phillip Reid
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…
Phillip Reid

November 2022

Some historians, like fiction writers, set their work deeply and exclusively in a specific locale, but what they have to say transcends those bounds as…
Phillip Reid
As most people know, actor William Shatner rode a rocket not long ago, thanks to Jeff Bezos. Today’s gazillionaires can have their own spacecraft. When…
Phillip Reid

October 2022

This is a re-work of something I wrote a few years ago that’s still important to me. When Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth came out, I knew I’d want…
Phillip Reid
This is not the piece I meant to put out this weekend. That piece needs a bit more work to pass muster, and I don’t have time for that right now. I’ve…
Phillip Reid
© 2023 Phillip Reid
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