The kitchenware company's head engineer, Mack Mor, had dug through the archives to find some product prototypes to help me understand how OXO designs and develops gadgets. Now, sitting on a table in the employee break room, amid jury-rigged cherry pitters and spiralizers constructed from sawed-apart water bottles, was a large, baby blue Tiffany box, of the sort in which you might expect to see encased a sparkling wedding present. Mor opened the box--and revealed the company's very first salad spinner. OXO revolutionized the salad spinner, to be sure. But to see this humble prototype--Frankenstein'd out of a child's toy top and some hand-carved plastic, dull with age--swaddled inside a gorgeous Tiffany box made me laugh. OXO, with its embrace of dutiful, functional design and every-cook utility, certainly wasn't Tiffany. Maybe not, but don't tell that to the people who love OXO.

In our high-vocational stress household, the most volcanic tension usually erupts over control of the PlayStation. I'm still – still – absorbed in the game of Fallout 4 I started a year ago, with thousands of hours spent on perfecting the aesthetics of post-apocalyptic settlement-building. My partner prefers a wordless immersion in the splattery worlds of first-person shooters and war games but we reconcile over rounds of two-player Diablo, fighting demons and hoarding treasure together. I've come a long way from the handheld Donkey Kong I cherished as a child, or the Pitfall caves I explored on a home PC, or the small parties of teens that gathered to play Sonic the Hedgehog on the loungeroom TV. The demands of fun are more complex now – but the need for fun remains the same.

To the editor: Doyle McManus was only partially correct about President Trump blowing the deal on healthcare. The president has more problems. First, his attention span is too short for him to study any complicated issue. He has acknowledged that healthcare is complicated, but he has refused to or cannot learn the details. Second, he does not like to read.