Domestic Affairs · Works & Repairs
The low-battery chirp at three in the morning is not coincidence and not malice. It is physics: a marginal battery, a falling temperature, and a threshold crossed while you sleep.
By M. Plumb
Domestic Affairs
Portland General Electric's residential customers used 20% less electricity in 2024 than in 2000 and paid 141% more for it. The appliances worked. The savings were collected by the unit price.
By Hollis Carver
From the Editor's Desk
We are a manual with a masthead. Everything in these pages is real, testable, and faintly insulting in how obvious it turns out to be.
By The Editor
Domestic Affairs
The pre-rinse feels diligent and is counter-productive. Modern detergent is built to attack food residue. Remove the residue and you remove its target.
By Vera Stipple
The Kitchen Desk
Caffeine leaves at a fixed proportional rate, not a fixed hour. A quarter of the afternoon mug is still in circulation at bedtime, and the people who insist it does not affect them are the ones sleeping through the evidence.
By Vera Stipple
The Parlour
The history of extraterrestrial arrival, assembled from the only archive available. With corrections, and one personnel matter regarding our staff illustrator.
By The Editor
Domestic Affairs
You cannot end the laundry. You can stop making decisions inside it: one wash class, one buffer quantity, one identical load, forever.
By Iris Petty
Diversions · Puzzle of the Day
A grid with no blocked squares at all. Every letter is checked in both directions, and the across and down answers are the same words, which halves the work.
Attempt it →
The Sections
What the household owns, cleans, stocks, repairs, and shares its premises with.
Food, cooking, and provisioning meals that continue tomorrow.
What the household reads and watches, listed rather than reviewed, and kept here all year: the registers, the tens and the family files.
The puzzles page, and the strip. Sincerely presented. Quietly impossible.
Notes on the edition, and notices from the paper.
