The Year We Gave Up Our Smart Phones

...ve to eat is freeze dried Beef Stroganoff in a Martian prison of their own making. We used their stranding as an opportune moment to rid our culture of the things that were holding us back. My own personal smart phone addiction recovery path began back in 2018. I was building the most complex project I’ve ever attempted, a chest of drawers. It required intense concentration and I kept getting interrupted by the ping of text messages, junk phone ca...

Read…

What You Can Do to Make Our Streets Safer

...can think of at least two simple things you can do to begin the process of making our cities more livable and safe, especially for our children and elders. Burn Your AAA Card The Automobile Club likes to hide behind the cheery road trip facade epitomized by their magazines and free travel advice. But behind the scenes they are a lobbying group as powerful and nefarious as the tobacco industry. They’ve never seen a road they don’t like and have spe...

Read…

How to be a Tudor by Ruth Goodman

...ever see that described? Yet somehow, I feel better for understanding the making and maintenance process of these things. Now the ruff seems less like the inexplicable product of an alien civilization. Just think, someone (many someones) made that ruff and all those baubles and do-dads by hand Did you know folks could change the color of their ruffs in and out by treating them different colored starches? Or that there were colored ruffs at all? (...

Read…

I made shoes!

As regular Root Simple readers know, I’ve been obsessing on making shoes for some time now, but was not able to wrap my mind around the process without help. Help arrived this weekend in the form of the wonderful–and wonderfully patient– Randy Fritz, who taught me and four other intrepid souls how to make turnshoes over the course of the last 4 days. Lesson 1: As we have all suspected, shoes are not easy to make. Seriously not easy. Four full day...

Read…

Saturday Tweets: Don’t Fear the Green Reaper

...for @medium https://t.co/MiTvTW6rxE — douglas rushkoff (@rushkoff) January 31, 2019 This is SO good pic.twitter.com/NJRNtneNSo — Ellie Mae O’Hagan 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@MissEllieMae) January 29, 2019 Ariana Grande got a Kanji tattoo she thought meant “seven rings” but actually means “small charcoal grill” https://t.co/CZNjQUWu7d — Root Simple (@rootsimple) January 30, 2019 The Democrats Are Climate Deniers: https://t.co/KBb3grWNH2 — Root Simple (@rootsimple)...

Read…