The New Workforce Dilemma
...Gallup poll, Americans expressed little interest in classroom-based, off-site training programs, and even less interest in online training — which is an increasingly common approach to worker training. Workers were...
Real Shaving: a Gift Guide for 2023
...ItalianBarber.com – The Dead Sea 345Soap.com – Aces Over 8s ChiseledFace.com – Summer Storm Ariana & Evans: aegrooming.com Løthur: lothurgrooming.com Phoenix & Beau: phoenixandbeau.uk Declaration Grooming: declarationgrooming.com Van Yulay: vanyulay.com...
The Kitchen Bladesmith
...the American Bladesmith Society, of Texarkana, Texas), he underwent five years of practice and study, culminating in the manufacture, through hand-forging, of six knives. Five had to be of gallery-quality...
Tomorrow’s Library
...the first online publishing and search system, eventually purchased by America Online in 1995. “They had something we didn’t have,” Kahle says with a laugh. “They had a business plan.”...
The Healing Power of “Bello”
...residents. After the residents conclude their three-and-a-half year program at SanPa, 90 percent of them land jobs. photo by Susan West Third, the entire program is free to the residents...
The Celluloid Gumshoe
...executives in search of lost treasures. THE DETECTIVES’ LAB o understand what these two film fanatics were looking for, I made my own trip to Los Angeles. My target was...
Walmart’s Made-In-USA Shell Game
...sitting idly by. As of mid-April of 2016, one could still search Walmart’s website for products under the search term, “Made in USA,” and be given the same results. At...
The long trail to becoming a maker girl
...https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/toys-are-more-divided-by-gender-now-than-they-were-50-years-ago/383556/ Atlantic piece written by Davis developmental psychologist professor. Let Toys Be Toys & Pink Stinks: http://www.lettoysbetoys.org.uk//, http://www.lettoysbetoys.org.uk/tvads/ & https://pinkstinks.wordpress.com/ Two UK advocacy groups fight the over-gendering of toys and...
Is France Making Planned Obsolescence Obsolete?
...deceptive commercial practice…,” and had agreed to pay its fine. In the years since that victory, Vasseur has relentlessly led or assisted a series of campaigns, all successful to one...
The best bicycle seats on the planet: A factory tour
...bottom, the back hide is just right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZMpU0kSEGI Forget your images of a lightning-fast factory assembly line; Brooks workers may be quick, but they don’t rush. It’s been more than...
The Apprenticeship Ambivalence
...demand for “knowledge” workers—those with high analytical and social skills. Then again, those jobs don’t all require sitting at a desk. Nor does the training for them have to be...
Eco-Fashion’s Animal Rights Delusion
...This is why PETA encourages consumers to buy “cruelty-free” silk alternatives like polyester and viscose (popularly known as rayon). Consumers have hardly needed PETA’s prodding. In a single decade, consumption...
Do the Most Interesting Musical Pipes Come from Ireland?
...over the finish line. To that end, he’s made ingenious use of computer-assisted design, or CAD, files, which have allowed him to quickly cut out pieces with a water jet....
The Rawhide Artist
...than relying on a piece of steel in its mouth. For the original vaqueros, the hackamore was an indispensable tool for training their horses. And while it’s been largely forgotten...
The Power of the Scribe
...version. Most texts also have to be written in order, so if a mistake is made and not caught immediately, the scribe has to start over. Unless, that is, one...
Parts & Recreation
...Sometimes, this involves a nationwide-search. Once it’s located, they travel to the vehicle and take hundreds of detailed photographs, cataloguing every tiny part—and the car as a whole. (For newer...
The Many Stripes of Sustainable Agriculture
...on only one key practice, or blur at the edges. Some of these approaches are also ideologically driven, which only adds to the muddle, causing conflicts that are not only...
Pablita Velarde’s Legacy: The Pueblo Artisans of the Southwest
...Honyumptewa: 505-310-2152 or Rt. 42, Box 80, Santa Fe, NM 87501 Michelle Tsosie Sisneros: P.O. Box 873, Espanola, NM 87532, M2MSisneros@gmail.com Steve LaRance & Marian Denipah: dlfineart@aol.com, text (505) 901-0328...
Could Co-Ops Solve Income Inequality?
...school) in Eibar, once the world famous “City of Guns.” The Escuela was the main school in Basque country to formally combine theory and practice with weapons manufacturing, the major...
A Home-Grown Social Entrepreneur
...a fully online program and were ready to go.” Their 9-week summer camp, too, was held online, with “camp-in-a-box” kits mailed out in advance and live instructors interacting with the...
The Reed Artist
...only if you also give lessons free of charge. We would sometimes try to give him little gifts, like sugar for the tea. He would just get mad. He wouldn’t...
The Bonsai Kid
...differently from standard bonsai practice, but his vision grew out of years spent closely studying classical Japanese technique. GI SOUVENIRS onsai (correctly pronounced, “bone-sigh” rather than “bahn-zai”) originated in China...
The Human Cost of Recycled Cotton
...funded by the fashion industry, that trains farmers with small landholdings to practice more sustainable cotton farming techniques. In bad years, the costs required to use ‘Bt cotton,’ a GMO...
The Jewelry Archaeologist
...Incredulous but curious, the driver agreed. For the next couple of hours, in the humid New England summer heat, Kohl hauled stuff off the dump truck in search of his...
Mezcal’s Dance with Extinction
...main component of mezcal. The methods on display at Montelobos are standard practice for traditional cooking, but Don Abel also marks the process with his own personal choices. For wood,...
The Soul Of Community
...New Orleans,” says Blackspace founder Pierce Freelon. During the 19th century, enslaved Africans, along with free blacks, gathered at Congo Square each Sunday to dance, play music, and conduct business....
The Hidden Wonders of the Musée des Arts et Métiers: Paris’ Museum of Art and Invention
...advertising beer and other goods. Léon Foucault was the epitome of the 19th-century inventive genius. He had no formal scientific training, yet built his own steam engine as a boy....
When Indigenous Women Win
...the men shouted at the women with threats and insults. When that didn’t scare the women off, the loggers climbed out of the truck’s cab. The women immediately sprung at...
Led by the Nose
...fresh hyacinth and narcissus blooms purchased in a Barcelona flower mart. Because the scent of these delicate petals doesn’t survive modern methods of heat-based extraction, Fernández pours scent-free coconut oil...
The Secrets of an Italian Gelato Master
...living in their native valley after decades in Germany (www.gelatierizoldani.com); and has just come out with a huge book, Avanguardia Gelato, written with three other master gelatieri. He attends trade...
Homemade Artisan Bread Made Simple
...method for making bread that looked, and somewhat tasted, like those crusty, dark loaves you buy from top artisan bakeries. The article immediately gained popularity, spawning a new generation of...
Throwaway Nation
...farmer’s son, Ford aspired to make reliable cars for the masses. Each Model T that rolled off his Michigan assembly lines included a toolkit that allowed buyers to fix their...
The Drought Fighter
...The practice follows the second often-ignored rule of cultivation: disturb your soil as little as possible. While the concept is not new, it’s been widely misunderstood, and poorly executed. No-till...
Japan’s Gorgeous, Precarious Fishing Poles
ome years ago, my cousin in Japan, a modest man with a passion for fishing named Tomoki Koharu, told me that he was training to become a maker of Japan’s...
The Clay Conjurer
...method. The practice dates back at least 2,000 years in the American Southwest, where it traveled from much earlier origins in Mexico, some 4,000 years ago. But the woman who...
Smart Farming
...which he will mail out free of charge. Write to: minfarms@gmail.com. Literature on organic farming & its future In May, 2015, Simon & Schuster published a book that could (if...
Real Film Strikes Back
...limits of human perception itself. By now, most filmmakers (myself included) have passed through the grief stages of film’s demise and embraced digital video’s undeniable advantages. As a virtually cost-free...
Made in Prison: A Craftsmanship Mini-Documentary
...Delle Donne explored the textile industry, she immediately noticed its enormous waste—some plants sent entire rolls of fabric off for pulping—a custom that presented an opportunity to get free raw...
The New Water Alchemists
...income opportunity inherent in 12 hours of free solar energy. “All this is beamed at us. We just need to harness it,” he says. “I think of this as solar...
The Soul of French Invention
...me free to search for ideas, forms, inspiration for my furniture. Any of the grand musées of Paris can do that, no? The ceiling of Musée des Arts et Métiers....
The Sculptor vs. The Robots
...training. As demand for Italian marble has grown, and the finer stone has become increasingly difficult to find, mining methods have gotten more sophisticated, and more aggressive. Many Italians now...
The Case for a Maintenance Mindset
...as CoEvolution Quarterly, and Whole Earth Review) was put online. All are available for free at wholeearth.info. To this day, Brand continues to think about tools, and what they can...
In Praise of The Makers
...home place, to the materials it supplies, and to their own practice, his hosts fashion a way of knowing and living. The fine makers, he claims, are “at once decisive...
Can the U.S. Bring its Supply Chain Back Home?
...quality luxury goods, or what might be called “artisan industrial.” Photo by Romain Blanquart. As this paradigm played out (making it clear that there’s still no free lunch), more and...
The Toolbelt Masters
...infinitely adjustable. As they pieced together the Diamondback product line, and found manufacturers to fill back orders, Crook and Williams had some good luck. First, Diamondback’s URL—toolbelts.com, a fabulously search-friendly...
The Conductionist
...as a moment-by-moment activity, a paradoxical form of free improvisation. The simplest yet most composerly of Morris’s hand signals was to hold up a digit… or two… or three… or...
The Lost Prophet of California Agriculture
...with the very practice that had contributed to the plight of the Oakies huddled in squalid camps a few miles away. “The idea hit me,” he recalled. “I thought, why...
The VW Doctor Is In
...saying he’d work for free, and immediately proved that the price was right when he was told to install new spark plugs in a Mercedes and had to ask the...
Let Tinkerbell Tinker
...this capacity, but there’s agreement that the gap is reduced to inconsequence with practice. Karen Wilkinson, the Tinkering Studio’s director, says that without hands-on experience to “solidify abstract concepts,” real...
India’s Rug Saint
...mother. The Child Labor Dilemma Granted, there is self-interest involved; by training young weavers, Jaipur Rugs maintains an enduring labor pool. Still, Chaudhary firmly believes that when children know that...
