Essays

Quietly, these hairbrushes play a role in shaping their users’ identities. In various places and at various times in history, hair has been seen as a signifier of status or a means of identifying with a certain community, something to show off or something to hide.

Among those who dwell under oak canopies, the experienced will learn to sweep, rake, or blow the leaves and acorns off of porous surfaces quickly. But even the vigilant can’t keep up with nature.

It’s unclear whether topsy-turvy dolls were first created to reinforce racial and sexual power dynamics or if they were something more subversive. Either way, the dolls have since the beginning been reinterpreted and appropriated.

Approximately 650,000 people undergo chemotherapy treatment annually in the United States. The medical port has become an integral part of treatment for many of them.

Let’s take a trip back in time to revisit the worst fonts of each decade since fonts became usable on computers.

The invention of color music (and the instruments that perform it) is rooted in the similar way humans experience sound and light, two entirely unrelated phenomena that behave in similar ways—both can penetrate materials, radiate in all directions equally, and diminish with distance following the square-cube law.

The pregnancy test provides endless opportunities for misinformation and dramatic comedy.

For its participants, real vampirism isn’t a fad to be adopted one day and discarded the next (and those who treat it as such dismissed as mere “lifestylers” by the community). They feed out of what they are convinced is a biological need.

The enjoyment I find in a poem is in the words, sounds, and structures that repeat, connect, or hang together in specific ways. For me, football is most beautiful in the interplay of such pattern and variation.

For evolutionary biologists, the bill is iconic.

Dioramas: created to mimic the natural context of the animals that they contain, these scenes invite their viewers to question how those animals relate to each other, their environment, and humans.

The fishing shirt pledges to spirit us through the world with foresight, durability, and protection; but it also nestles blandly into the consumerscape numbly taking place all around.

Reanimating the once-dead, mobile on-demand industry, Uber brings you services and products ranging from alcohol to haircuts, from house call doctors to laundry.

The Mason jar’s resurgence is due, in part, to the variety of ways in which it can be repurposed. It’s repeatedly praised for its reusability, its aesthetic appeal, and its purity. It has, however, recently taken on a negative connotation of its own.

While airlines go to great lengths to sell the experience of flight as individuated, personal, and endlessly customizable—the lavatory is the only truly private place on normal commercial airliners.

What refrigerator magnets do best is to make a boring, mass-produced appliance seem more individualized than it otherwise would be. They give us a chance to fill the largest blank space in our houses other than our walls with whatever we decide defines us at any particular moment.

Aside from their contribution to climate change, most natural-gas leaks pose little threat. And, for that reason, the gas company generally lets them be. They belong to a much broader world that is often well beyond our control, even when we try to pretend otherwise.

Seeds. Seeds everywhere, just like there used to be before the Great Unseedening. Back when watermelon was a seasonal, seeded fruit, it was really something else entirely.

K-Cups—those self-contained coffee pods for Keurig Green Mountain instant brew machines—were once as hot as, well, coffee. But they have cooled off considerably. Even assuming Green Mountain erodes and browns into oblivion, what are we supposed to do with all those brewers?

Plastic surgery sells norms of youth and beauty by offering consumers opportunities to recreate their appearance. However, they don’t always succeed. It’s when plastic surgery is visible—think of Michael Jackson’s infamous nose—that social fears of disfigurement manifest as revulsion.