In the Golden Age of video arcades, there was nothing more intimidating, or enticing, to a kid than a new video game with some wacky control interface — the game Defender had about 100 buttons, Atari’s tank commander game Battlezone had two handles that (I guess) were supposed to simulate…

If there’s a polar opposite to the kind of underground, lefty, beat-poet-ridden coffee shop that American cities reliably produced from the 1950s to the early 2000s, the Capital One Board of Directors has perfected it with the Capital One Café. The café as a hangout for dissidents, rebels, and poets…

Why is that the inventor of the light bulb, the telephone, and the radio are all household names, but the inventor of the thing that (until relatively recently) we spent the most time staring at — the television — is not remotely as well known? Applying Occam’s Razor to this…

Every so often, the Gallup Poll asks Americans whether or not they believe that the Bible is the literal Word of God. As one might expect, the proportion of people saying “Yes” has been declining slowly but steadily over time, and as of June 2022 it had dropped to 20%…

If I’m re-considering it, the fizzy sugar-water industry is in trouble I am not a nutritionist. If anything, I am an anti-nutritionist. I do have fuzzy ideas about “all things in moderation”, but in my context that means keeping myself to a single Little Debbie cupcake per meal. While the rest of the world already got the message about sugar being…

One of the trivial hardships of summer in North America, along with poison ivy (or oak, or sumac), sunburns, and a spoiled half of a watermelon taking up good refrigerator space, is the fruit fly: Drosophila melanogaster. The fruit fly’s greatest weapon may be that it, in small numbers, it…

To understand what the street of the future will be, you have to take a step back and think about what a street is. A street is part of the public space between private properties. It’s sometimes called the “public right-of-way”. All that means is that this is square footage…

The idea of a city for the rich is tantalizing. …

Americans are probably more obsessed with decorative mulch than any other civilization has ever been. Every spring, America’s big box stores pile up plastic bags of colored wood chips in their parking lots so that suburban homeowners can try to sculpt the perfect lawn. …