The American 250 Weekly Recap: #152 - 156

Wally: Beaver... you got crumbs in the butter again. Boy, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s crumbs in the butter.

The buffalo herds had roamed the continent for millennia, an unbroken sea numbering in the tens of millions. In a generation, they shrank to fewer than a thousand animals. A systematic hunting campaign was mostly to blame—we’ve seen the photographs of giant piles of skulls. For the surviving creatures, their doom was sealed by the wire that cut the plai…

Sometimes I wish I were living 150 or 200 years in the future, because I’ll never visit Florence (or any touristy place) when it isn’t clotted with other people. Depopulation, we are told, is coming, possibly in unthinkably dramatic fashion. It’s just not coming fast enough for my lifetime.

When automobiles were invented, a majority of Americans lived in rural places. Most of those people had never been more than five miles from home. In the first decade of the 20th century, the idea of such people owning a car was laughable—cars were an expensive, unreliable luxury, ill-suited to country roads. Until the Model T.

All he did was cut three rectangles into the glass, boom-boom-boom. It shouldn’t be interesting, much less fascinating. And yet it is.