Kalyani Tupkary

The sun makes days, seasons, and years, and the moon makes months, but people invented weeks. What makes a Tuesday a Tuesday, and why does it come, so remorselessly, every seven days? A week is mostly made up.

No one has ever really been able to topple the seven-day week. French revolutionaries tried to institute a ten-day week. Bolsheviks aimed for a five-day week. No one tried harder than Miss Elisabeth Achelis, a New York socialite, heir to the American Hard Rubber Company fortune, and an admirer of Melvil Dewey, he of the Dewey decimal system and

Singer, an Australian philosopher, popularized the concept of “speciesism,” which he compared to racism and sexism. “All animals are equal,” he asserted, adding, “The basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical  treatment;  it requires equal consideration.” Singer did not actually advocate for legal rights but for expanded

I n eighty-five essays, contributors nominate “extinct” objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal accounts, speaking not only of obsolete technologies, but of other ways of thinking, making, and interacting with the world.  Extinct  is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future that never