On the 100th Birthday of Our House: The Past and Future of Housing in the U.S.

...commodity and convenience has become the oil that lubricates the wheel of time, allowing more activities, to take place either at one time in the same place (i.e. using the cellular car phones while driving), or in a particular time period but in a different place (i.e. doing grocery shopping, while dishes or clothes are machine washed). In the book, The Overworked American, 1991, Juliet Schor suggests that “U.S. employees currently work 320 more...

Read…

News From Nowhere

...for everybody; so that no man is sacrificed to the wants of another. From time to time, when we have found out that some piece of work was too disagreeable or troublesome, we have given it up and done altogether without the thing produced by it. Now, surely you can see that under these circumstances all the work that we do is an exercise of the mind and body more or less pleasant to be done; so that instead of avoiding work everybody seeks it: an...

Read…

Changing the World One Party at a Time

Artist’s depiction of Jennie’s monthly neighborhood party. Extra points for finding our new dog in the painting. Once a month, our neighbor Jennie Cook (our guest on episode 50 of the Root Simple Podcast) hosts a cocktail party for neighbors. She started the party ball rolling by sticking handwritten invites in mailboxes up the block. Usually, around twenty people show up. I’ve come to believe that the most revolutionary acts in our lives are tho...

Read…

From the Archives: That Time Kelly Accidentally Ate Hemlock

...be wise to avoid this family entirely. That said, Pascal tells a story of running into a group of older Armenian woman gathering hemlock. When he questioned them they explained that they boil the hemlock and change out the water multiple times to make the leaves edible. I suspect they were using the plant medicinally. Neither Pascal nor Root Simple endorse this. Happy summer foraging and watch out for the hemlock! Let us know in the comments if y...

Read…

In Praise of Backward Compatibility

...n’t work in our neighborhood (thanks for not letting me know that ahead of time!). In the end I was forced to switch to Time Warner for slightly better and equally expensive service. Our overseas readers should know this is common in the U.S., that we pay a lot of money for poor telecommunications services. But the electromechanical geek in me had a delightful surprise. Either Time Warner or the folks who designed the modem Time Warner provides ha...

Read…