For sixty years, letters in American cities traveled underground at thirty-five miles an hour, fired through a network of pneumatic tubes from 1893 until 1953. Open Culture revisits that vanished system this week alongside the joke it accidentally vindicates: when Senator Ted Stevens described the internet as a series of tubes, the ridicule was immediate, though as some commentators noted at the time, the analogy was not quite as outlandish as it sounded. Words have always needed pipes.
That is the thread running through this week's reading, once you notice it. We argue endlessly about what to read and almost never about how it gets to us. Yet nearly every story in the past few days is, underneath, a story about a route.
Longreads went to south Mull, where secondary school means leaving home at eleven. No timetable keeps those children at the family table on a Tuesday night; the geography makes the ferry part of the curriculum. The piece's sharpest turn is toward the adults: "Their parents' silence was never consent." A delivery system that is merely inconvenient for grown-ups can be formative for a child, and the difference is easy to miss from the mainland.