It's never been easier to own stuff, and yet for millions of consumers, ownership is becoming as obsolete as newspapers. The costs are too high, the benefits too negligible.

One South Carolina prison bans publications like Time, Newsweek, and even the Christian devotional Our Daily Bread, because the staples binding the magazines supposedly pose a security risk.

Contemporary graffiti emerged not as an alternative to advertising but as an emulation of it.

Should we mourn the death of cursive handwriting?

Many Americans still live in the wake left by Cold War civil defense hysteria.

How the Internet can free prisoners and reduce recidivism.

The changing status of the radar detector in a hyper-surveilled world.

Imagine a world where meter maids provisioned with police dogs routinely check your car for cocaine, where postal carriers and their detective dogs give your front porch a good going-over on occasion.

The before and after photo has been ready for the current era of ruthlessly short attention spans and hyper-efficient communication strategies for well over 100 years.

The U.S. Postal Service struggles to stay self-sufficient.

In the early, heady days of its mid-1990s expansion, Borders was a bold, democratizing force, a noble attempt to liberate comprehensive, intellectually promiscuous bookstores from the insular, marginalized realm they occupied in college towns and a few big cities.

if our demand for station wagons has waned over time, our demand for the values that informed them has only grown.

"Smoking Typewriters" chronicles the emergence of the alternative press and the democratization of news.

It's been a long time since the mall felt revolutionary. Today we're too busy updating our Facebook statuses to shop for jeans in one store, then electronic gadgets in another.

Barbie's perennial boy toy Ken turns 50. But this is no mid-life crisis for him.

Juiced up workers in industries of all kinds will grow even more productive and essentially perform themselves out of their jobs.

The book "Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World" is the rare pro-gaming manifesto.

In the old days, of course, no one would dream of eating anything as tricky as a plate of spaghetti in a movie theater. No longer.

Are evangelists selling tiny houses short when they position them as antidotes to consumerism? After all, it's just as easy to position them as potent temples of consumerism.

Has modern technology ruined our self-control?