Essays

The toilet is the ultimate venue of control. It’s where you start to learn control, as a toddler, and where you eventually lose it, as a golden ager. And yet, today’s toilet has abandoned its role as the temple of control.

Sales of bumper stickers have been dropping. Some blame it on digital and social-media advertising as replacements for the stickers, buttons, and campaign pins of yore.

Though it has recaptured some market share in recent years, the cork industry is now fighting against the newly discovered appeal of plastic and aluminum. Much of cork’s current struggle can be attributed to one group in particular: Millennial wine drinkers, a generation that has less of an allegiance to traditional cork closures.

Everything about the stapler reeks of a time gone. The all-metal body. The satisfying and audible cha-chunk of its operation. The details, too, like the rubberized pads in its undercarriage to prevent shifting on the desk or table while the violence of paper fastening is enacted.

There is the not-so-subtle correspondence drawn between aerial velocity and road speed. Acceleration obliterates both space in front of us and time behind us. But we no longer have the old promises or futuristic fantasies of space travel.

17th-century scientists understood the limitations of the human senses. Our eyes can only do so much observing on their own; they need lenses to see things far away, and to see the minute details of things up close.

Today, fingerless gloves are practical tools before they are outerwear, sportswear, or fashion. Fingers have become the tools that make the difference between sub-human and super-human action for us ordinary folk, via technology rather than ability.

On the surface, funeral cards look like Catholic trading cards, adorned with religious figures like Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, or a popular saint. On the backs of these 4.25-by-2.5 inch cards are the names of the deceased, their birth and death dates, and brief prayers or poems. The lure of memorial cards extends beyond a morbid fascination with death.

Pour-over coffee values deliberation, flavor, and quality, treating coffee as something to be savored rather than pure brain fuel.

While most first-generation devices have faded away to make room for more modern iterations, the malleable wire hanger has endured, with startlingly few modifications, for well over a century.

The number of “words” for snow in Eskimo languages is a misnomer, a strange lost-in-translation sort of way of explaining that you can use “snow” and its variant terms in as many different sentences as you wish.

Blue Apron does something funny to dinner: it turns it into a predictably good thing to make and consume. It seems to come out just right, every time. This is profoundly weird, if you think about it: the idea that every meal should be perfect. What life is this?

Modern-day mortars and pestles, no matter the composition, connect their owners to this ancient culinary and material history. The design has changed very little over the past several millennia: When you use it to grind spices into powder or make food into paste, you’re using essentially the same tool as the Aztecs, the Celts, the Sioux, the ancient Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Romans, to name just a few.

The reverie of travel has long ceased for most leisure travelers; mere survival is the goal.

Is bread toast only insofar as a human toaster perceives it to be “done?” Is bread toast when it reaches some specific level of nonenzymatic browning?

With the growing threats of climate change and habitat loss, the Monarch’s numbers continue to drop every year, and its fate looks increasingly uncertain. The number of Monarchs migrating from the U.S. has dropped by 90 percent in the past 20 years.

Partially because they’re made to blend in, prosthetic eyes aren’t something that the average person knows much about. Many would be surprised to learn, for example, that false eyes are not spheres and they’re not glass, and haven’t been for quite some time.

The tension between fantasy and reality, in turn, led to the trait that would come to define the action figure’s enduring appeal: its ability to take on new meanings at the hands of its owners.

Chaos cannot be tamed, but it can be recorded for posterity. And there is perhaps no object more lasting than the encyclopedia. An attempt to organize the knowledge and history of our world, encyclopedias also can transcend our world.