The Great Rest Stop Grill Mystery: Who's Actually Using Them?

Each week, the small irritations of modern life accumulate into a kind of cultural archaeology — revealing, in their triviality, something true about how we design spaces, adopt technologies, and tell stories. This week's dispatches from the ordinary world ask why we build things no one uses, whether convenience makes us more inconsiderate, and how a century of filmmaking still hasn't solved the problem of a convincingly full coffee cup. These are not important questions, and yet they are exactly the questions worth asking.