As a kid on the early internet, I loved typing because no one could know how small and thin my hands were, how scared I was all the time, how I struggled to talk out loud. Online, back in 1991, I wasn’t made of anxious flesh and brittle bone; I was made out of keystrokes. When I could no longer bear to be myself, I was able to become for a while a series of keys struck in quick succession. And on some level, that’s why I’m still typing all these years later.

So even though it isn’t a perfect keyboard layout, I still give the QWERTY keyboard four stars.

THE WORLD’S LARGEST BALL OF PAINT

I DON’T LABOR UNDER THE DELUSION that the United States is an exemplary or even particularly exceptional nation, but we do have a lot of the world’s largest balls. The world’s largest ball of barbed wire is in the U.S., as is the world’s largest ball of popcorn, and the world’s largest ball of stickers, and the world’s largest ball of rubber bands, and so on. The world’s largest ball of stamps is in Omaha, Nebraska—it was collected by the residents of the orphanage known as Boys Town.

I visited the ball of stamps twenty years ago, on a road trip with a girlfriend during which we crisscrossed the country seeking out roadside attractions. Our relationship was falling apart, and so we sought a geographical cure. We visited Nebraska’s Carhenge, an exact replica of Stonehenge built out of junked cars, and South Dakota’s Corn Palace, a massive structure with a facade made primarily of corn kernels. We also visited several of the world’s largest balls, including both the world’s largest ball of twine rolled by one person in Darwin, Minnesota, and the world’s largest ball of twine rolled by a community in Cawker City, Kansas.* We broke up soon after, but we’ll always have Cawker City.

There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” It’s one of the only poems I’ve managed to commit to memory. It ends like this:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -

Several years ago, a plank in reason broke within me, and I dropped down and down, and hit a world at every plunge. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but precedent is cold comfort when you feel the funeral in your brain. As I struggled to recover, or at least slow the plunge, my thoughts drifted back to the road trips I’d taken, and I decided to try a geographical cure. I drove to see the world’s largest ball of paint, which ended up kind of saving my life, at least for the time being.

I’m fascinated by roadside attractions because they are one place where we see the work of huge systems intersect with the work of tiny individuals. We have so many roadside attractions because we have so many roads—our interstate highway system is built to move lots of people across vast areas of land.* Once you’re on an Interstate, it’s easy to stay on it until you need gas or food. To tempt you away from the cruise-controlled straightforwardness of the American highway requires something extraordinary. Something unprecedented. The world’s largest ______.