Domestic Affairs · The Method
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
Domestic Affairs
Owning the right number of socks is not a personality. It is a buffer calculation, and it fits on one line.
By Iris Petty
Domestic Affairs
It is not a hygiene failure. It is a five-to-ten-year putty replacement that shipped with the sink and was never written down.
By Vera Stipple
Domestic Affairs
The corner that pops off at 3 a.m. is not a tucking failure. It is a sizing standard that quietly stopped matching the mattress it is sold to cover.
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
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
Domestic Affairs
Running out of the one thing you cannot run out of is not absent-mindedness. It is a missing threshold, and the threshold is one line of arithmetic.
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.
