Everyday Abundance explores the hidden histories behind everyday activities and the technologies we don’t even know are technologies. Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann dive into the surprising stories behind everything from brushing your teeth to music and driving your car. Sponsored by the Abundance Institute.
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For nearly all of history, hearing music required someone physically making it nearby and the only music humans ever heard was whistling or singing. Even when instruments became widespread, music was rare. The idea that people could hear any music they wanted at the push of a button was undreamed of. Listen along with Virginia, Charles, and special guest musician/historian/engineer John Hardin as they play the chords of the great transformation of music from dearth to digital, from scarcity to Spotify.
One of the most popular books published in the 19th century was Looking Backward (1888), Edward Bellamy’s science-fiction novel about the fantastic, faraway world of A.D. 2000. Characters listen to music in their homes through cable “telephones.” Bellamy correctly predicted that future listeners would have near-instant access to music from anywhere.
But he missed the crucial breakthrough: recording.
Instead, Looking Backward portrayed live musicians playing over the wires. And that made all the difference.
The ability to capture, reproduce, duplicate, store, transmit, remix, and stream sound transformed music from a fleeting experience into a permanent and infinitely reproducible one. Entire industries emerged. Old business models collapsed. New art forms appeared. The very meaning of listening changed.
(00:04:48) - Every New Music Technology Was 'Cheating'
(00:06:05) - Bellamy's Dream of Unlimited Music
(00:11:26) - The Phonograph and the Birth of the Recording Industry
(00:20:32) - Radio Changes Everything
(00:27:10) - Microphones, Tape, and the Modern Studio
(00:37:02) - Hip-Hop, Sampling, and the Digital Revolution
(00:41:10) - Streaming, AI, and the Future of Music
Brushing Your Teeth: The 12,000 Year War
Episode 3
Monday, June 8, 2026 • Duration 35:40
When George Washington was inaugurated, he had only one natural tooth left—a condition far more typical in the past than modern people realize. For thousands of years, tooth pain was simply part of human life. A primary reason for the problem: effective tooth-cleaning methods simply didn’t exist. Join Virginia and Charles as they celebrate two overlooked but vitally important technological innovations: the toothbrush and toothpaste.
As schoolchildren learn, the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago was among the great turning points in the human story. Farming created reliable food surpluses that allowed for the creation of big cities and states.
It also wrecked humanity’s teeth.
The new agricultural diet—full of carbohydrate- and sugar-rich cereals and grains—triggered an explosion of tooth decay. Millennia of oral misery ensued. Painful jaws were an inescapable part of daily life, and nothing could be done about it. As recently as the 1970s, most American 70-year-olds didn’t have a single tooth in their head.
Then the dental outlook changed—slowly, at first, then rapidly.
In 1780, William Addis, an English rag trader, was thrown into jail, supposedly for inciting a riot. Confined in London’s infamous Newgate Prison, he carved a chicken bone into the prototype for a now-ubiquitous occupant of contemporary bathrooms: the toothbrush. He began selling them soon after he was released. Then, in 1873, came the first mass-produced commercial toothpaste: Colgate (yes, the same Colgate sold today). And the world began to change, or at least the world’s mouths did.
Subjects discussed include:
The Grisly Dental Aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo
Apparent Failures of Evolution
Charles’s Astounding Dentists
Early Modern English Prison Conditions
Proper Stick Etiquette
References, further reading, and credits:
Chapters
Making a Meal of the Family Meal: Cooking Dinner
Episode 2
Monday, June 8, 2026 • Duration 40:00
Evening after evening, billions of people march into the kitchen and cook dinner. Standing over the stove seems like a timeless activity—an impression reinforced if one comes across old TV shows like those starring Lucille Ball or Dick Van Dyke. Watching those black-and-white families in the kitchen, it’s easy to believe you are looking through the screen into the long-ago past. But for most of human history, people neither cooked nor ate the way modern families do. Kitchens were hidden, meals were irregular, and “family dinner” barely existed. Sit at the table with Virginia and Charles as they serve up a survey of the long line of convulsive changes that led to the “long-standing tradition” of cooking dinner in the kitchen.
Zillow photographs today routinely feature glamorous expansive kitchens with islands, track lighting, and gleaming appliances, inviting viewers to imagine gathering friends and family for dinner.
Historically, this is extremely strange.
For most of human history, people neither gathered around the table for a family meal nor hung around the kitchen. Instead, they mostly ate whenever they wanted, with whomever they wanted (although, to be sure, people have always celebrated communal feasts).
Far from flaunting their cooking areas, the first thing anybody with money did with the kitchen was to hide it—outdoors, if possible, in a separate space, where its smoke and smell would be unnoticeable. In the 19th century, the kitchen was brought indoors, but even then it was kept away from view. It was a place for servants. But over the twentieth century the entire interior of the house inverted itself…
Subjects discussed include:
The Honeymooners
Charles’s Pilgrim Ancestors
Starches and Cellulose, Ripping Apart
Slow Horse Digestive Systems
Tiny Human Teeth
Algonkian Stews
No Chimneys, No Nails
References, further reading, and credits:
Chapters
Working Out: The Invention of Exercise
Episode 1
Monday, June 8, 2026 • Duration 38:33
I worked out after work: Few sentences would have been more baffling to people in the 19th century, especially if spoken by a woman. Join Virginia and Charles as they explore a little-noticed revolution in daily life: the transformation of hard physical labor from a daily burden to an emblem of personal virtue—and a globe-spanning, multibillion-dollar industry whose omnipresence is as much a sign of our time as social media beefs or flying drones.
They are everywhere: women carrying gym bags filled with sneakers, sports bras, and high-waisted leggings; men hauling duffels stuffed with performance joggers and training gear. So ubiquitous today is exercise culture—and so large the industries that support it—that it is hard to realize that they are thoroughly new phenomena, enabled by recent breakthroughs in textiles and materials.
A century ago, people expended so much effort in their daily lives that the idea of seeking out more was literally unheard-of. A few isolated souls promoted “physical culture,” but exercise was not a common ideal, especially for women, until the arrival of one of the more important U.S. cultural figures in the 20th century: Jack LaLanne, who launched the first televised workout program in 1953. And then came the 1960s, the discovery of “fitness,” and a revolution that literally reshaped the human body.
Virginia and Charles explore how exercise evolved from necessity to aspiration—and how gyms, Lycra, bodybuilding, aerobics, and athleisure conquered the modern world.
Subjects discussed include:
Virginia as Class Traitor
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Body-Fashion Icon
Charles Dickens’s Ideal Life
References, further reading, and credits:
Chapters
Doing Laundry: Appliances of Freedom
Episode 5
Monday, July 6, 2026 • Duration 53:08
The electric washing machine may be the single most liberating household technology ever invented. Before it arrived, millions of people—mostly women—spent enormous portions of their lives bent over washtubs and washboards. Join Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore how laundry technology transformed work, family life, public health, and modern society itself.
Except for fire and stone tools, clothing may be our species’ oldest technology—it was invented 170,000 years ago or more. The first humans to don clothing soon made a discovery: worn too often, their garments would become infested with lice. Soon followed another invention: laundry.
That laundry was presumably done by banging animal skins on rocks, more or less as people do with rugs today. Soap did not become part of the process for tens of thousands of years. Indeed, the first recipe for soap in the historical record dates only to ancient Babylonia, where big commercial laundries served all the main cities.
Over the centuries, clothing became the province of an extraordinary industry of toil—one that was blown apart in 1907, when the first electric washing machine appeared. In a few decades, it upended the domestic life of half the human species. A way of life that had endured for centuries was so thoroughly and rapidly ended that most of us today have no idea it existed.
Forget the flying car. We’re going to the laundromat!
Subjects discussed include:
Charles’s Mumbai Laundry Epiphany
Vermin Evolution
No More Open Pores!
Undercover Laundry Reporter Elizabeth Banks
Not-so-trad Tradwives
Rural Electrification
1900 U.S. Census Categories
Charles’s Attempt to Use a Washboard
References, further reading, and credits:
Lice, human hairlessness, and the origin of clothing: Ian Gilligan, , 2018. (Gilligan bases his fine account on, among other things, these two .)
Chapters
Blowing Your Nose: The Handkerchief-Industrial Complex
Episode 7
Monday, August 3, 2026 • Duration 39:10
Nineteenth-century cities were crowded, polluted, and brim-full of tuberculosis. The combination of disease and dirty air led to enormous nasal issues—and the rise of the surprisingly large and influential handkerchief trade. Then came Kleenex and the rise of disposable hygiene. Join Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the strange history of nose-blowing, tissues, and the modern culture of throwaway consumer products.
People have been blowing their noses as long as there have been people, but phlegm control did not become an industry until after the industrial revolution in the late 18th century.
Rising affluence, industrialization, and urbanization led to a global increase in polluted city air. Exacerbated by ubiquitous coal smoke, a host of respiratory diseases became constant presences in those cities, tuberculosis most prominent among them. Constant coughing, sneezing, and nasal discharge became ordinary features of city life.
Enter the handkerchief.
A remarkably sophisticated physical object, it became a cultural focus, a vital part of the middle- and upper-class wardrobe, and an icon of approved male behavior. Like so many other aspects of 19th-century society, the handkerchief-industrial complex died in the trenches of the First World War.
But technology developed for that same war gave rise to the complex web of creped, plied, and folded wood-pulp fibers known as tissue paper. Kleenex, introduced by Kimberly-Clark in 1924, was more than just a new method of cleaning your nose, it was a harbinger of a new age of disposability—for good and bad, the age we live in now.
Subjects discussed include:
Charles’s Memorable Shaanxi Snot Shower
The Handkerchief-Industrial Complex
Dying Attractively from Tuberculosis
Advertising Unmentionable Products (A Digression)
References, further reading, and credits:
Chapters
Shopping for Groceries: The Hunger Games
Episode 6
Monday, July 20, 2026 • Duration 01:03:08
Grocery shopping in a supermarket is such a commonplace part of everyday existence that it is routinely mocked as a ritual of narcotized consumerism. In fact, the modern supermarket is a radical break with the past—and a nexus of innovations central to contemporary life. Markets have existed for millennia, of course. But they were nothing like the modern grocery store, with its shopping carts, self-service selection, shelves of branded, packaged goods, and lineup of cash registers. Walk the store aisles with Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the now-invisible network of technologies that arose to create the supermarket.
Nowadays a Cracker Barrel is a restaurant where you eat down-home food amid rustic décor. But crackers and other provisions used to actually come in big wooden barrels from which store proprietors scooped out and weighed goods for customers. They represented a whole lost world of grocery shopping. Service was personal, choices were limited, prices were high, and quality was inconsistent. This is where “bottom of the barrel” originates. You didn’t want crackers—or flour or anything else—from down there.
The cracker-barrel model fell under attack in the mid-19th century, with the arrival of the first packaged goods—items made in factories, stuffed into branded boxes, and transported to stores.
But the real beginning of the end was February 1898, when 114 different bakeries making a host of different products merged into a cookie colossus: the National Biscuit Company (today known as Nabisco). Its head, Adolphus Green, dreamed of making a single baked good that could be sold across the nation—an identical product, identically fresh, identically packaged, sold everywhere from Boston to Bakersfield. Green’s dream would become a landmark in the history of consumption.
Subjects discussed include:
Fig Newtons, Origin of
Actors in the Aisles
Inflation, Effect on Price Stickers
Fame of Tristam Shandy, Lack of
Uneeda Biscuits
References, further reading, and credits:
Chapters
Driving Your Car: What Makes Commutes Possible
Episode 8
Monday, August 17, 2026 • Duration 46:51
Cars transformed modern life—but automobiles alone were not enough. Cars would have been useless without a second invention: driving. Behind the daily commute is a vast, intricate system of customs, laws, and innovations that make driving possible. This system evolved over decades and its development wasn’t easy or fast. Ride along with Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the hidden history of traffic, road design, and the strange creation of modern driving.
Picture the main street in a classic Western movie like Shane or High Noon. There are no lines down the middle. No stop signs, no speed limits, no left-turn lanes—in fact, no lanes at all. People ride their horses or drive their carriages wherever they want, however they want, no matter how crowded the street. They can do this because horses are intelligent beasts that won’t run into each other.
Then came the automobile.
People are now in charge—suddenly, totally, in ways they have not been before. The result: a tsunami of fatal car crashes. In 1913, more than 33 people died for every 10,000 vehicles on the road—more than 20 times today’s vehicular death rate.
One year later, Detroit police sergeant Harold “Harry” Jackson introduced the first stop sign, placing it at a particularly hazardous intersection. The idea caught on. It was the beginning of a thorough reworking of the landscape, one that changed daily lives so thoroughly that its very existence has been forgotten.
Subjects discussed include:
Maple Syrup Fortunes
Private Colonial Turnpikes
Herbert Hoover’s Mighty Role
Curious Explanations for Driving on the Right
Stop Signs as Infringements on Pedestrian Rights
Pennies from Inuit Children
The Lincoln Highway
Emily Post’s Cross-Country Drive
Gasoline in the Pharmacy
How Big Government Began
References, further reading, and credits:
Chapters
Origin of George Washington’s False Teeth
Tidal Wave of Dental Exemptions from Second World War Draft
Statistical Failures in Twentieth-Century Oral-Hygiene Testing
The Fluoride War(s)
From Mount Vernon (Washington’s home, now a museum), a full exploration of the president’s false teeth, replete with images and videos.
World War II military video in which the army instructs recruits on how to brush their teeth. “Whatever it is, the majority of you fellas simply refuse to look after your teeth.”
Kathrine Switzer’s account of becoming the first woman to officially enter the Boston marathon (registering as K.V. Switzer) in 1967. She was attacked by the race manager but finished the race.
Correction: In discussing journalists like Banks, Virginia says 18th and early 19th century when she means 19th and early 20th century.
Famous economics paper evaluating the washing machine as liberatory technology: Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri, and Mehmet Yorukoglu, Engines of Liberation, The Review of Economic Studies, 2005.
Early turnpikes and right-hand driving: Albert C. Rose, Public Roads of the Past. 1952-53 (2 vols.) From the preface: “Future generations will place Mr. Rose’s name among the very few that may be called major highway historians.”
Blue Book: Automobile Blue Book. 1901-1917 (vol. 1 of 3). The first Blue Book was in 1901, but it just covered the Northeast. The first edition that covered almost the entire country was 1907.
(00:04:33) - The Social Technologies We Never Notice
(00:08:18) - The Invention of the Stop Sign
(00:12:03) - When Roads Had No Rules
(00:17:56) - Google Maps Before Google
(00:20:11) - The Lincoln Highway Dream
(00:30:20) - Route 66 and the Interstate Revolution
(00:36:08) - How Gas Stations Conquered America
(00:39:09) - Standardizing Road Rules
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