Yesterday's Reasons
The hidden history of ordinary things. Everything ordinary was once a decision.
Why does the weekend have two days? Why is your kitchen laid out the way it is? Each story here starts with something you use every day and follows it back to the people who argued it into being.
Every story is the written version of one of our videos, with each date, name and number linked to its source. Watch, read, or both: the video sits at the top of each story.
Stories
Who Gave Us Saturday Off? How the Weekend Was InventedThe two-day weekend was not a gift. It was bargained for over a century, from Saint Monday in English workshops to Henry Ford, a Soviet experiment and a German union poster written in a child's voice.
The 1926 Kitchen Hiding Inside Yours: The Story of the Frankfurt KitchenYour fitted kitchen goes back to a tiny room in 1920s Frankfurt. How a young architect from Vienna designed it with a stopwatch, and what its cooks thought.