How different was the world before today?
Americans spend more at the checkout than ever before — but is that the whole story? Adjusting for inflation reveals some genuinely surprising winners and losers in the modern supermarket, and the cart itself looks almost nothing like it did fifty years ago.
Driving across America in the 1920s wasn't a vacation — it was an expedition. Unpaved roads, unreliable cars, and towns with no gas for a hundred miles made coast-to-coast travel a genuine feat of endurance. So how did we get from that to a casual long weekend behind the wheel?
For most of the twentieth century, medical knowledge lived almost entirely with the doctor. Patients trusted, waited, and accepted. Then came telephone hotlines, WebMD, and eventually AI symptom checkers — and suddenly everyone became a part-time self-diagnostician. Whether that's progress depends on who you ask.