How Our Home Delivery Habit Reshaped The World
The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchases reach our homes. This divorce of a product from its voyage to us is perhaps the thing that Amazon has sold us most successfully.
What Happened To Giant Flying Boats? The Saunders-Roe Princess Story
In 1943, Saunders-Roe, an iconic British aircraft builder, began planning for the future by drafting a design for a truly next-generation flying boat. But by the time the Princess took its first flight, the world had been completely transformed by the rapid development of runways and advances in land-based aircraft.
When Artists, Engineers, And Pepsico Collaborated, Then Clashed At The 1970 World’s Fair
A year and a half in the making, the Pepsi Pavilion drew eager crowds and elicited effusive reviews. Just a month after the opening, the partnership with Experiments in Art and Technology—E.A.T.—collapsed amidst a flurry of recriminating letters and legal threats.
Google Maps Is Different Depending On Your Location
If you go on Google Maps in Japan, the region between South Korea and Japan is shown as the “Sea of Japan”. However, if you’re using Google Maps inside South Korea, it will instead appear by the name “East Sea”. Two names for the same body of water on the same site.
Living In Switzerland Ruined Me For America And Its Lousy Work Culture
Long commute, full-time, no benefits. No way, I thought. Who would want to do that? And then it hit me: Either I had become a completely privileged jerk or my own country was not as amazing as I had once thought it to be. This wasn’t an unusually bad offer: It was just American Reality.
How Philadelphia Became The One And Only Cream Cheese
There is only one cream cheese, and that is the brick-shaped silver package with the bright blue lettering: Philadelphia. Philadelphia cream cheese’s dominance isn’t a happy accident. Its cult popularity is likely the result of equal parts clever marketing and good timing.
How Campbell’s Soup Changed Tomatoes’ DNA For The Worse
The perfect tomato to eat is red, plump, juicy, and bursting with flavor. When mass-produced, tomatoes also have to be easy to remove from the vine. That is why the Campbell Soup Company cultivated a variety with a genetic mutation more than a half-century ago.
Will The Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?
In this era, you come to understand, design was the product. Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same.
The Heart Of Today’s Billion-Dollar Sneaker-Collecting Boom Is 35 Years Old
Nowadays, sneakers aren’t just for wearing. They’re an asset class, on display at museums, and fueling an increasingly profitable resale market. Much of that traces back to Nike putting a superstar rookie’s name on a new pair of kicks in 1985.
Zoom Company Story: How Eric Yuan Defeated Skype
Chances are you’ve used some sort of video call with family, friends or even to school and most likely it’s been Zoom, the videoconference software has taken the world by storm. But in the presence of giants like Microsoft, Skype, Teams and Google Hangouts, why is everybody using Zoom?
Larry Krasner’s Lonely, Radical Crusade To Solve America’s Gun Problem
Unlike traditional prosecutors, Krasner does not measure success by accumulating convictions and toting up lengthy prison sentences. Instead, he has promised to address abuses by the criminal justice system and imprison fewer people for less time. And he thinks all of that can drive down gun crime.
The Lawyer Whose Clients Didn’t Exist
A well-known attorney helped land a $2 billion settlement for Gulf Coast seafood-industry workers after a BP oil rig 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana, had exploded. But who was he really representing?
Why Are Hardcover Books Published Before Paperbacks?
Despite their popularity, it’s still impossible to find paperback versions of many new books when they debut. It’s a common practice among publishers to release new titles as hardcovers and publish the paperback edition about a year after the initial print run.
What Does Uber Love More: Restaurants or Investors?
Eateries are getting squeezed by delivery apps. Restaurants can enjoy a 69% profit margin onsite, versus just 38% from deliveries. Uber could give up profit to keep them happy, but that’s not what IPO investors want to hear.
L’Oréal’s Clip-on Sensor Tracks Your Exposure To UV Rays
The future of wearable skincare technology is roughly the size of an M&M. L’Oréal’s La Roche-Posay My Skin Track UV sensor clips onto clothing and measures the wearer’s exposure to UV radiation, a form of radiation that is known to damage skin and, in large amounts, cause skin cancer.
The Rise And Fall Of Delia’s, The Catalog That Ruled America
For a few years around the millennium, Delia’s and its direct-to-consumer catalogs were the hottest brand in the country. It was a glimpse of things to come. At its peak, 55 million copies were sent out to girls across the country every year.
The Art World’s Mini-Madoff And Me
Inigo Philbrick made his money betting big on a rise in price for a few artists, notably Stingel, who is known for his seemingly endless series of indistinguishable paintings of wallpaper, and Wool, whose most famous text painting fittingly spells out the word FOOL.
Craft Beer Has A Diversity Problem
Dom Cook discovered craft beer by accident. A Bronx father searching for inspiration after the death of his infant son, he picked up The Search for God and Guinness, his eye drawn to “Search for God.” In 2017 Cook launched Beer Kulture, a lifestyle brand that welcomes black drinkers to the craft community.
The Complicated, Problematic Influence Of TripAdvisor Restaurant Reviews
The travel site is beloved and trusted by tourists — a fact some New York restaurants are exploiting however they can. While locals are more likely to turn to user-generated review sites like Foursquare, Yelp, or Google Maps to navigate the city’s shifting restaurant landscape, TripAdvisor holds considerable clout with international travelers.
How Lego Became The Apple Of Toys
In the last 10 years, Lego has grown into nothing less than the Apple of toys: a profit-generating, design-driven miracle built around premium, intuitive, highly covetable hardware that fans can’t get enough of. An exclusive look inside the company’s top-secret Future Lab.
The Madness Of Airline Élite Status
When you fly a lot for work, as I do, you check your frequent-flier mile balance often, to provide data for competitive commiseration. Frequent fliers sometimes go to great lengths to keep their airline élite status, and those efforts are often completely out of proportion to the perks.