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The Air of Superiority
Today in Tedium: The 1902 invention of air conditioning has long been hailed as one of the most important inventions of the 20th century, one that has forever changed the way we live. But as we hit an...
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Waaaaay Left of the Dial
Today in Tedium: TV on the Radio isn't just the name of a really freaking good band. Instead, it's a quirk of the design of analog television. But a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity: As...
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Let's Dial Up the Weirdness
Today in Tedium: NYNEX hasn't been a going concern since Smash Mouth was first telling us to walk on the sun. (You might know it under its current post-merger name, Verizon.) But that didn't stop me...
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Hometown Proud
Today in Tedium: While I don't hold the simple, evocative opinions of small-town life that John Mellencamp does—I think large cities are pretty cool, and I'm not sure where I'll die yet—I do...
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The Best Mouse Pads Money Could Buy
Today in Tedium: Is there a product that has meshed as well with the modern office as the mouse pad? The squishy, rubbery rectangle, home to a million snazzy designs and a defining piece of cubicle...
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Time Is Running Out
Today in Tedium: The latter months of 1999 were like looking into the great unknown, and all thanks to a computer bug the public barely even understood. A logical person could tell you that odds were...
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Charmeleon Chaos Theory
Today in Tedium: There's something wild about watching people play this game that everyone won't shut up about. And I think it has a lot to do with how it shifts social order in an unexpected way....
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What Made Scunthorpe Famous
Today in Tedium: The internet's many messy algorithms—the things that tell a server somewhere how to handle a given issue—have never been perfect. To the contrary, they break often, partly because...
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Asbestos: It Isn't Snow
Today in Tedium: Throughout our history as a country, we've quickly turned on popular products we once liked because of unintended effects from that product, usually health-related. (You know, like...
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Recorded For Quality Assurance
Today in Tedium: Customer support is a big frustration for the public. We want to be treated well, we want the human on the other end of the line to correctly pronounce our name, we want them to be...
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They Should Stop
Today in Tedium: Of all the turf wars that have complicated the landscape of grammar over the past few hundred years, the most complicated and frustrating may be that of the singular "they." It may be...
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Tastes Great, Less Filling
Today in Tedium: When it comes to products we eat or drink, we love our gimmicks. In the past two days alone, Crystal Pepsi has returned to the shelves after a 23-year absence and Burger King tried...
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When Robots Can Write
Today in Tedium: It seems like a constant refrain of the internet era–the robots are coming to steal our jobs, and they're getting better by the day. So far, that has mostly meant that heavy...
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Network Effects
Today in Tedium: When you travel to different places—in the U.S. in particular, perhaps less so outside of it—the airports often feel like they're designed of a single piece of cloth, despite the fact...
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Bare-Metal Writing
Today in Tedium: I'm writing these opening lines in Markdown, using a Mac app called Focused, one of many attempts to rethink the word processor as a minimalist exercise. Every one of my articles...
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Eye Of The Tiger
Today in Tedium: Let's get something out of the way right away. Compared to what Sega, Nintendo, NEC, and Atari were peddling in the early '90s, it's downright stunning that Tiger Electronics, the...
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Let's Teach Textbooks A Lesson
Today in Tedium: When I recently wrote about airport stores, one of the most interesting (albeit minor) facets of the piece was the fact that airport travelers are generally considered a captive...
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The Wires Barely Reach
Today in Tedium: We take so much of our online connections for granted. You probably visit hundreds of pages a day on a device fast enough to melt fabric, gobbling up gigabytes of data without even...
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I'm Floating On Air
Today in Tedium: Nine months ago, I made a lot of people mad for the dumbest reason. I criticized something that a lot of people surprisingly hold dear: Mattresses. Specifically, I pondered why the...
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What a Wonderful World
Today in Tedium: If you grew up in the '80s, you already you probably know this, but that decade's toy industry was a fascinating place. At this juncture, parents were already used to having to get...
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