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The Lunch Box That Built America

You’d see them crowding the subways and buses at rush hour. Big, powerful men straight out of a Carl Sandburg poem: reading their newspapers in the morning, soaked with sweat in the evening but always clenching a lunch box in their ham-fisted left hand. From the depths of The Great Depression through the early 1960s, American cities were rebuilt by an army of craftsmen, tradesmen and construction workers, fueled both by a beneficent blend of government and private funding and… Read More »The Lunch Box That Built America

Chemax: Hourglass Figure

My Chemex broke this morning. Its rim barely brushed the tile backsplash of my kitchen counter and it imploded, suggesting that it was a quarter century of near-misses, rather than this lone event, that caused its demise. The inevitability of glass shattering is the Achilles heel of a design which is, in every other respect, perfect. How was this lowly coffee maker elevated to an object of cult worship? Indivisibility. A single component, the Chemex has been distilled to its… Read More »Chemax: Hourglass Figure

Big Yellow Flashlight

“Hell yes! It’s exactly where I thought and ‘Click!’ it works! Damn!!!” Brighter. Lighter. Smaller. Lipstick-sized cylinders capable of cutting through pitch-blackness, flashlights have become marvels of technology and efficiency. Of course, when you’re stuck in a midnight rainstorm and need to change a tire, you’ll never find the thing. The yellow-handled, 2D cell flashlight is another of those designs which, decades later and despite more advanced alternatives, remains unsurpassed. Sure, LEDs have replaced incandescent bulbs, battery life has been… Read More »Big Yellow Flashlight