Hello lovely email friends. This week I’ve had cause to spend some time on the motorway. Not the most exotic of travel but, this year, you take what you can get.
🚪 A short history of door handles: For as long as there have been doors there have been door handles; our critical interface with the structure and the material of the building. Yet it is often reduced to the most generic, cheaply made piece of bent metal; a potent critique of the value we place on architecture.
🚙 Gary Numan Is Here In My Car Air Freshener: The inimitable Mr Numan, who hasn’t featured here in too long, can now be placed in your car, where you feel safest of all, thanks to this dangly air-freshener. It’s the only way to live.
🍜 The History Of Instant Ramen: Consumed and beloved the world over, this quick and cheap meal became universal in an age before persistent connectivity. Much is owed to a deceptively simple packaging innovation: a simple, multifunctional cup that also serves as cooking vessel and bowl.
🎟 The Inside Story of Pepsi’s Philippines Bottle Contest Fiasco: An excellent write-up of an early-Nineties marketing stunt that went gravely wrong. Philippine soda drinkers were promised a chance at a million pesos. But an error at a bottling plant led to 600,000 winners—and to lawsuits, rioting, and even deaths.
🏙 The Radical Plan to Save the Fastest Sinking City in the World: Many of our coastal cities are imperiled, but none have plotted an escape quite as audacious as Jakarta’s.
⛰ My three decades alone, basking in the company of a mountain: When Suzanne Sener moved into an isolated mountain cabin at the end of an abandoned logging trail, other renegade mountain-dwellers placed bets on how long she’d last. Twenty-eight years later, she’s the last one left.
🛩 Private Jet Secrets, From Sex to Pets to Celebrity Bad Behavior: From comforting naked celebrities who are afraid of flying to cleaning up after pet (and human) accidents, nothing is surprising among those who fly privately for a living.
🥪 Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches: Possibly the finest use of deep learning and computer vision yet devised: just how do we make optimal peanut butter and banana sandwiches?
The high road
Motorways feel like they’ve been there forever. Plans for the UK’s first motorway, the eight-mile-long Preston Bypass, began in 1937. It opened in 1958, starting the first era of rapid motorway-building.
A stretch of the M1, the first long-distance inter-city motorway, opening the following year. But the Preston Bypass, now part of the M6, has now been completely rebuilt so there’s nothing in particular to distinguish it. Curiosities lie elsewhere.
Motorways are notable for their homogeny: they share more with one another than with their surroundings. Some landmarks, like the Gateshead Flasher, are intentional. Others exist solely because of the motorway and are taken to heart by passing motorists, like the graffiti on the Chalfont Viaduct. The finest example of this stands near the highest point of the whole network.
High up in the Pennines, halfway between Manchester and Leeds, the two carriageways of the M62 separate to pass either side of a farmhouse. Since the motorway’s construction in the 1970s, many motorists have assumed that a stubborn farmer refused to move from Stott Hall Farm and ended up surrounded.
In fact, awkward geology forced the carriageways to be separated, but the myth persists. Perhaps we like to think that if a motorway encroached upon our farmhouse, we’d resist its advances.