Tag: history

• Why NYC isn’t the sea of dog doo I was promised (October 7, 2026)

  When I was a very young reader of Mad magazine I would giggle in horror at its frequent jokes about dog poop all over the sidewalks of New York City, and the sometimes insurmountable challenge of avoiding it as a pedestrian. I therefore always felt a bit curious why the NYC of my adulthood—and the Boston of my younger adult years—didn’t seem to have this problem. Apparently a prime mover of this change was New York lawyer and legislator Edward H. Lehner, who died last month.

• Return of the Warren Sawyer (September 27, 2026)

  The nor’easter currently delaying my flight back home disgorged a chunk of 1884 shipwreck onto a Nantucket beach.

• The best Mario cross-media adaptation (September 25, 2026)

  In 1986, Bandai produced a dexterity-based board game adaptation of Super Mario Bros. Players manipulate a little magnetic Mario-or-Luigi figure through a tightly designed fidget box of an obstacle course, racing against a timer in the form of a Bowser-shaped token on a spring that slowly rattles its way down a flagpole—and which physically blocks the final passageway when it hits bottom. Absolutely ingenious, and almost as old as the game it’s based on. (Via Supper Mario Broth )

• Your monkey’s on fire (July 13, 2026)

  Mimi Smartypants discovers this mid-century cartoon on a coaster in an antique store. She writes how she was initially stopped short by its seeming complete nonsense, and then decoded it with some amount of effort and deep-cultural recall—but at the risk of it all falling apart again if you analyze it too far past that point.

• All grow fat from laughter (June 24, 2026)

  I very much enjoy A Most Amusing Bot, a Mastodon bot by Andy Lundell which regularly posts scanned newsprint ads of novelty gadgets from the 19th and 20th centuries. And I like the very eerie note that this one ends on.

• Cursed weapons (August 31, 2025)

  In A Haunting Relic From America’s Past, Wright Thompson describes his encounter with the Army-issued pistol that was used to beat and murder 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Thompson located the gun while writing a book about the context and legacy of that murder. Subsequently, the person who had inherited it—a local crop duster—donated it to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, where it just went on permanent display.

• A stone in Portland (August 19, 2025)

  An inscribed paving stone found in the East End neighborhood of Portland, Maine:

• Your flag is what you fly (August 13, 2025)

  Posting this amidst a two-week vacation in Freeport, on the Maine coast. I can report that the 1901 Maine flag, with two simple shapes on a plain background, is ubiquitous on souvenir merchandise here. In shop after shop I see it embroidered on caps, screened onto T-shirts, and carved into coasters. People here are proud of the design, and visitors clearly love it too, buying every sort of representation to take back home. I shall be among them.

• The Guru Letters (July 15, 2020)

  A favorite podcast features a sorta-neighbor.