As anyone who’s opened a pill bottle in the last fifty years can attest, childproof packaging has remained remarkably consistent: push and twist, and off the top pops. It’s a concept that hasn’t changed in decades, until now. The legalization of recreational marijuana is unleashing a wave of creativity among package makers, as they look for ways to reinvent child-resistant design.
Let’s be clear: The transgender people currently entangled in America’s so-called “bathroom bill” debates aren’t asking for all of the US’s restrooms to be redesigned.
Every year around this time, Americans engage in a cultural battle. Some of us lament that the true meaning of Christmas has been subsumed by consumerism. Others rail that commercial products aren’t Christmas-y enough. That Starbucks’ holiday-themed cups didn’t bother to say “Merry Christmas” was enough to inspire viral internet outrage.
A new kind of subscription service—many of them, actually—have joined the ecommerce fray, offering delivery of menstruation supplies. Yes, “monthly tampon club” sounds more like the name of a Nirvana song than a business category, and some services have folded since their initial launch in 2013. Still, at least eight such sites are still up and running in the US:
La mañana después de que nació mi segunda hija, le tomé una fotografía—donde estaba hermosa y serena—y la publiqué en Facebook. La imagen mostraba muchas cosas que mis amigos podían deducir y que los vendedores podían explotar: por ejemplo, su fecha de nacimiento, su color de ojos y su nombre. Pero lo que sabían con certeza era que Athena había nacido en un hospital.
It’s the morning after the JP Morgan cyber breach, in which hackers stole the information of 76 million households. I’m holding my phone over my debit card, taking a picture that will automatically decipher the digits so the LevelUp app can link directly to my bank account.
The morning after my second daughter was born I took her picture—she was beautiful, serene—and posted it on Facebook. There was much my Facebook friends could surmise from the photo, and much that marketers could mine: her date of birth and her eye color and her name, for instance. But what they knew for certain was that she had been born at the hospital.
Beware the end of the escalator, our mothers always said—if you don’t hop off quickly, your shoe will get caught.
My husband and I inherited a 1996 Volvo station wagon a few years back. Once upon a time it had been a luxury car of sorts, the first such vehicle we’d ever had. It replaced our 1999 Honda Civic hatchback, also a gift, which was stolen from our Brooklyn neighborhood. The Volvo had heated, leather seats, all-wheel drive and dual climate control (I like hot, hubby likes cold). It was perfect, save for being a gas-guzzler (we assumed: the odometer was broken) and constantly needing large infusions of cash to keep it running.
The backpack as we know it today—never mind the caveman’s animal skin version—may have started with an avid outdoorsman who had a knack for sewing. Gerry Cunningham claimed to have created the world’s first zippered backpack in the 1930s. It was designed for day trips, with compartments to carry equipment and lunch. His company, Gerry, went on to redesign tents, carabineers, kid-carrying contraptions, and, it claims, the world’s first nylon backpack.
The former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz stirred up quite a storm earlier this month with his New Republic essay “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League”—a damning critique of the nation’s most revered and wealthy educational institutions, and the flawed meritocracy they represent. He takes these arguments even further in his upcoming book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Part cultural commentary, part philosophical treatise on the meaning of education itself, the book reads like a self-help manual for ambitious yet internally adrift adolescents struggling to figure out how to navigate the college system, and ultimately their own lives. Deresiewicz, who is also the author of A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things That Really Matter, spoke to me on the phone from his home in Portland, Oregon.
It seems intuitive that if you want to remember something, repetition is the key. How many of us could have survived high school without late nights spent endlessly rehearsing historical dates or conjugating verbs?
Michael Graves has done chairs before. The architect and designer who almost single-handedly brought the concept of no-brow—high design for the masses—into American culture conjured teak patio chairs for Target; Arts and Crafts-inspired lounge chairs for Arkitectura; sleek stacking chairs for Kron USA.
