Domestic Affairs · By Design
Linen bedding spans a twelvefold price range for one fiber. We priced the whole bed three ways, did the per-night arithmetic, and checked what the money actually buys.
By Hollis Carver
The Parlour
Eight rulings graded against the register: the contract is always signed and was enforced without challenge once in four hundred years, the best-known sign is younger than the moon landing, and the one piece of real evidence on file was treated as noise.
By Casimir Vane
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
Fifty-three filings from the cane field, the farmhouse, the shopping mall and the apartment block, sorted by when the events claim to have happened rather than by when somebody got round to printing them — and carrying, over my objection, eighty years of documents in which the zombie is the injured party and 1968 is where the word changed sides.
By Casimir Vane
From the Editor's Desk
Nine reference pages, four hundred and twenty-one lenses, and a compiler who has held almost none of them. The interesting column is the empty one.
By P. Lotor
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
The Parlour
A reading list rather than an argument: eight filings from the register that between them predict most of the rest, and the secondary literature the register was built from.
By Constance Tally
Diversions · Puzzle of the Day
Every letter in the grid belongs to a word. There is no filler, in any direction. You may circle the entire thing.
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.
