Month: December 2016

Some people save for years to enjoy a meal at one of the top restaurants honored by the Michelin Guide. But starting Friday, December 16, New York City diners will be able to purchase a one-star meal for less than the price of a grande latte at Starbucks. As Gothamist reports, Tim Ho Wan, the cheapest eatery to earn a coveted Michelin star, is bringing its dim sum to a new location in Manhattan’s East Village.

In 1900, Michelin started publishing annual city guides as a way to encourage travel among its customers. Today, restaurants around the world can receive up to three stars from the company—one if it’s worth a stop, two if it’s worth a detour, and three if it’s worth a special journey.

These honors are usually awarded to fine dining establishments, which is why Tim Ho Wan captured the food world’s attention in 2010 when it secured a star for its affordable dim sum menu. Based in Hong Kong, restaurant founders Mak Kwai Pui and Leung Fai Keung have since opened dozens of locations around the world. Their New York outpost marks their 45th, and it will serve up many of the same specialties diners find in Hong Kong including barbecue pork buns and steamed shrimp dumplings. The menu will also feature two new items that are unique to the city: fried vegetarian spring rolls and French toast with custard filling. What makes the offerings sound even more appealing is that they’re all priced at $5.50 or less.

The full menu will be available when the restaurant has its soft open this Friday. Unless you’re planning a trip to Singapore, where street vendor Chan Hon Meng was awarded a Michelin star earlier this year, you’ll be hard-pressed to find Michelin-approved eats this cheap elsewhere.

[h/t Gothamist]

If you’re feeling pressure to buy the perfect Christmas or Hanukkah present, experts have some advice for you: Don’t try so hard. According to The New York Times, social science researchers say that most people are satisfied with receiving a generic, boring, or even regifted gift instead of one that’s surprising, novel, thoughtful, or unique. To put it bluntly, as researchers concluded in a 2012 study, “If you want to give a gift that someone will appreciate, then you should focus on getting a good gift and ignore whether it is a thoughtful gift or not” [PDF].

Next time you hit the mall, follow a few guidelines to save time and effort. One major rule of thumb is to buy loved ones a practical object—not a novelty object intended to astonish or delight, the Times advises. In a recent study published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, business professors from Indiana University and Carnegie Mellon University found that gift givers often focus on how someone will react when they open their present, and not on whether the gift is actually something they will keep and use.

“We exchange gifts with people we care about, in part, in an effort to make them happy and strengthen our relationships with them,” Jeff Galak, a study co-author and associate professor of marketing at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, said in a press statement. “By considering how valuable gifts might be over the course of the recipient’s ownership of them, rather than how much of a smile it might put on recipients’ faces when they are opened, we can meet these goals and provide useful, well-received gifts.”

To avoid feeling like you’re giving a boring gift, study co-author Elanor Williams recommends pairing a practical gift with a fun accessory, like a blender and margarita mix, for instance.

Studies also show it’s best to just give the people what they want. Researchers from Stanford and Harvard business schools published research in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that revealed that—gasp!—most people prefer getting something they’ve asked for.

If your loved ones don’t provide you with a wish list, there’s no shame in giving a gift card—just choose one that gives them flexibility in how they use it. A study published in The Journal for Consumer Research found that people are less likely to redeem a gift card if it’s to a specific institution. “For example, a giver might personalize a gift card for a friend who loves sports by getting him a gift card for his favorite sporting goods store or a local sports venue,” the study’s lead researcher, psychologist Mary Steffel, said in a press statement. “However, the sports lover might prefer a more general card, like a Visa- or Mastercard-backed gift card, as it would allow him to purchase sporting equipment, tickets to a sporting event, or anything else that he might want or need.”

Another tip: Don’t feel like you need to give everyone in your life a personalized gift—especially when the recipients don’t know each other. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that the more specific you get with your presents in order to avoid giving the same gift to multiple people, the more likely you are to choose one that someone doesn’t like—so if you’ve found an object that will win over everyone on your holiday list, stick with it. For example, if several of your friends like sports, go ahead and give them all subscriptions to a sports magazine.

There are eights days left until Hanukkah begins and nine until Christmas—happy shopping!

[h/t The New York Times]

New York City’s subway has more riders than any other city transit system in the U.S., averaging more than 5.5 million riders per weekday over its 660 miles of track. (It’s possible to ride the whole system in a day, if you have 22-plus hours to spare.) It’s easy to imagine what a single train looks like at rush hour, but how about the whole system? An intrepid Columbia University student decided to find out, as CityLab reports.

Using data from the Metropolitan Transit Authority and Google Maps, Will Geary created a moving map of New York City subway data from a single day. Geary has previously done the same with the city’s bike share service, breaking down Citi Bike activity by gender over the course of October 2015.

Each train line is represented by the color it’s assigned by transit maps. The visualization spans 24 hours, and has been sped up around 400 times its real-time length. It’s set to some classical music, making it a much calmer experience than actually riding a subway train.

[h/t CityLab]

B.F. (Burrhus Frederic) Skinner was one of the most eminent American psychologists of the 20th century. Skinner founded “radical behaviorism”—a twist on traditional behaviorism, a field of psychology that focused exclusively on observable human behavior. Thoughts, feelings, and perceptions were cast aside as unobservable.

Skinner dubbed his own method of observing behavior “operant conditioning,” which posited that behavior is determined solely by its consequences—either reinforcements or punishments. He argued that people can be manipulated to exhibit or inhibit a behavior based on these consequences.

To Skinner’s critics, the idea that these “principles of reinforcement,” as he called them, lead to easy “behavior modification” suggested that we do not have free will and are little more than automatons acting in response to stimuli. But his fans considered him visionary. Controversial to the end, Skinner was well known for his unconventional methods, unusual inventions, and utopian—some say dystopian—ideas about human society.

1. HE INVENTED THE “OPERANT CONDITIONING” OR “SKINNER” BOX.

Skinner believed that the best way to understand behavior is to look at the causes of an action and its consequences, responses to stimuli. He called this approach “operant conditioning.” Skinner began by studying rats interacting with an environment inside a box, where they were rewarded with a pellet of food for responding to a stimulus like light or sound with desired behavior. This simple experiment design would over the years take on dark metaphorical meaning: Any environment that had mechanisms in place to manipulate or control behavior could be called a “Skinner box.” Recently, some have argued that social media is a sort of digital Skinner box: Likes, clicks, and shares are the pellet-like rewards we get for responding to our environment with certain behavior. Yes, we are the rats.

2. HE BELIEVED ALL BEHAVIOR WAS AFFECTED BY ONE OF THREE “OPERANTS.”

Skinner proposed there were only three “operants” that had affected human behavior. Neutral operants were responses from the environment that had a benign effect on a behavior. Reinforcers were responses that increased the likelihood of a behavior’s repetition. And punishers decreased the likelihood of a behavior’s repetition. While he was correct that behavior can be modified via this system, it’s only one of many methods for doing so, and it failed to take into account how emotions, thoughts, and—as we learned eventually—the brain itself account for changes in behavior.

3. HE’S RESPONSIBLE FOR THE TERM “POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT.”

 
Skinner eventually moved on to studying pigeons in his Skinner Box. The pigeons would peck at a disc to gain access to food at various intervals, and for completing certain tasks. From this Skinner concluded that some form of reinforcement was crucial in learning new behaviors. To his mind, positive reinforcement strengthens a behavior by providing a consequence an individual finds rewarding. He concluded that reinforced behavior tends to be repeated and strengthened.

4. SOME CRITICS FELT THIS APPROACH AMOUNTED TO BRIBERY.

Critics were dubious that Skinner’s focus on behavior modification through positive reinforcing of desired behavior could actually change behavior for the long term, and that it was little more than temporary reward, like bribery, for a short-term behavioral change.

5. “NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT” ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK.

Skinner believed negative reinforcement also helped to strengthen behavior; this doesn’t mean exposing an animal or person to a negative stimulus, but rather removing an “unpleasant reinforcer.” The idea was that removing the negative stimulus would feel like a “reward” to the animal or person.

6. SKINNER TAUGHT PIGEONS TO PLAY PING PONG.

 
As part of his research into positive reinforcement, he taught pigeons to play ping pong as a first step in seeing how trainable they were. He ultimately wanted to teach them to guide bombs and missiles and even convinced the military to fund his research to that effect. He liked working with pigeons because they responded well to reinforcements and punishments, thus validating his theories. We know now that pigeons can be trained in a whole host of tasks, including distinguishing written words from nonsense and spotting cancer.

7. HIS FIRST BOOK, THE BEHAVIOR OF ORGANISMS, BROKE NEW GROUND.

Published in 1938, Skinner’s debut tome made the case that simple observation of cause and effect, reward and punishment, were as significant to understanding behavior as other “conceptual or neural processes.”

Skinner believed behavior was everything. Thoughts and feelings were just unreliable byproducts of behaviors, he argued—and therefore dismissed them. Many of his fellow psychologists disagreed. Regardless, Skinner’s theories contributed to a greater understanding of the relationship between stimuli and resulting behavior and may have even laid the groundwork for understanding the brain’s reward circuitry, which centers around the amygdala.

8. HE CREATED “THE BABY TENDER.”

Skinner was fond of inventions, and having children gave him a new outlet for his tendencies. He designed a special crib for his infant daughter called “the baby tender.” The clear box, with air holes, was heated so that the baby didn’t need blankets. Unlike typical cribs, there were no slats in the sides, which he said prevented possible injury. Unsurprisingly, it did not catch on popularly.

9. HE ALSO DEVELOPED HIS OWN “TEACHING MACHINE.”

 
You may have Skinner to thank for modern school workbooks and test-taking procedures. In 1954 Skinner visited his daughter’s classroom and found himself frustrated with the “inefficiencies” of the teaching procedures. His first “teaching machine”—a very basic program to improve teaching methods for spelling, math, and other school subjects—was little more than a fill-in-the-blank method on workbook or computer. It’s now considered a precursor to computer-assisted learning programs.

10. SKINNER IMAGINED AN IDEAL SOCIETY BASED ON HIS THEORIES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR.

Skinner admired the work of Henry David Thoreau’s famous book Walden, in which Thoreau writes about his retreat to the woods to get in greater contact with his inner nature. Skinner’s “Ten Commandments” for a utopian world include: “(1) No way of life is inevitable. Examine your own closely. (2) If you do not like it, change it. (3) But do not try to change it through political action. Even if you succeed in gaining power, you will not likely be able to use it any more wisely than your predecessors. (4) Ask only to be left alone to solve your problems in your own way. (5) Simplify, your needs. Learn how to be happy with fewer possessions.”

11. HE WROTE A UTOPIAN NOVEL, WALDEN TWO.

 
Though inspired by Walden, Skinner also felt the book was too self-indulgent, so he wrote his own fictional followup with the 1948 novel Walden Two. The book proposed a type of utopian—some say dystopian—society that employed a system of behavior modification based on operant conditioning. This system of rewards and punishments would, Skinner proposed, make people into good citizens:

“We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, desires, the wishes.”

12. SOME FELT HIS IDEAS WERE REDUCTIONIST …

Critics, of which there were many, felt he reduced human behavior to a series of actions and reactions: that an individual human “mind” only existed in a social context, and that humans could be easily manipulated by external cues. He did not put much store in his critics. Even at age 83, just three years before he died, he told Daniel Goleman in a 1987 New York Times article, “I think cognitive psychology is a great hoax and a fraud, and that goes for brain science, too. They are nowhere near answering the important questions about behavior.”

13. … OR WORSE. HIS ACADEMIC COLLEAGUES WERE HORRIFIED BY WALDEN TWO.

Astronomer and colleague JK Jessup’s reaction is a good example of their take on his idealized world. Jessup wrote, “Skinner’s utopian vision could change the nature of Western civilization more disastrously than the nuclear physicists and biochemists combined.”

14. HE IMPLIED THAT HUMANS HAD NO FREE WILL OR INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

 
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Skinner wrote several works applying his behavioral theories to society, including Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). He drew fire for implying that humans had no free will or individual consciousness but could simply be controlled by reward and punishment. His critics shouldn’t have been surprised: This was the very essence of his behaviorism. He, however, was unconcerned with criticism. His daughter Julie S. Vargas has written that “Skinner felt that by answering critics (a) you showed that their criticism affected you; and (b) you gave them attention, thus raising their reputation. So he left replies to others.”

15. HE DIED CONVINCED THAT THE FATE OF HUMANITY LAY IN APPLYING HIS METHODS OF BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE TO SOCIETY.

In 1990, he died of leukemia at age 86 after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association. Proud of his work, he was nonetheless concerned about the fate of humanity and worried “about daily life in Western culture, international conflict and peace, and why people were not acting to save the world.”

For decades, students desperate for a summary of Crime and Punishment or a thematic analysis of motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved looked no further than the yellow and black guides available at their local bookstore. Started by a Nebraska bookworm in 1958, CliffsNotes has been the salvation of many a time-crunched, inquisitive—and yes, downright lazy—student. But who was Cliff, anyway? And who wrote the guides? Consider this your study guide.

1. THERE REALLY WAS A CLIFF.

Born in Rising City, Nebraska in 1919, Clifton Hillegass was a voracious reader who reportedly read five books a week up until his death at age 83. A math and physics major in college, he worked as a meteorologist for the Army Air Corps during World War II and eventually took a job distributing textbooks for the Nebraska Book Company. In 1958, he borrowed $4000 from the local bank and began channeling his love of literature into a series of guide books he called Cliff’s Notes. Within 10 years, his little black and yellow books were a million-dollar business. Hillegrass spent 40 years at the helm of his company, retiring after IDG Books Worldwide (publishers of the “For Dummies” series) bought him out for $14.2 million.

2. BEFORE THERE WAS CLIFF’S NOTES, THERE WAS COLE’S NOTES.

In the 1950s, Hillegass got to know a Canadian book store owner and publisher named Jack Cole, who put out a series of study guides called Cole’s Notes. Cole convinced Hillegass to become the U.S. distributor for his guides, starting with a run of 16 Shakespeare titles. Reluctantly, Hillegass agreed, and in 1958 printed 33,000 copies of the guides. With his wife mailing letters to contacts while his daughter stuffed envelopes, Hillegass ran the business out of his Lincoln, Nebraska basement. He sold more than half of the guides, which he renamed, in the first year, and managed to grow his sales each following year. By 1964, Hillegass’s side business had become so lucrative, he quit his job at the Nebraska Book Company and devoted himself full-time to writing and distributing Cliff’s Notes.

3. THE NAME HAS SUBTLY CHANGED OVER THE YEARS.

By the early ’60s, Cliff Hillegass was producing so many of his own study guides, he stopped distributing Cole’s Notes. To signify this break, he dropped the apostrophe, and “Cliff’s Notes” became “Cliffs Notes.” For decades the company operated under this name, until John Wiley & Sons, which became publisher in 2001, streamlined the name to CliffsNotes.

4. CLIFF NEVER INTENDED THEM TO BE “CHEATER BOOKS.”

With their chapter-by-chapter plot summaries, character descriptions, and analysis of structure, themes and other elements, CliffsNotes’ literature guides became, for many students, a substitute for doing the actual reading. This dismayed Hillegass, who always maintained that his booklets should be used as supplemental aides. For decades, the company printed an edict alongside Hillegass’s signature inside its guides: “These notes are not a substitute for the text itself or for the classroom discussion of the text, and students who attempt to use them in this way are denying themselves the very education that they are presumably giving their most vital years to achieve.”

5. THE COMPANY STILL MAINTAINS THEY ARE STUDY GUIDES.

With plot summaries, pre-written reports and other shortcuts scattered across the internet, the threat of CliffsNotes seems almost quaint these days. Still, the company (now owned by publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) upholds Hillegass’s vision of CliffsNotes as a literary supplement rather than a substitute. “Most people use CliffsNotes by reading a chapter of the book or an act of the play, and then reading the corresponding section in the CliffsNotes,” its website asserts, perhaps wishfully.

6. GRAD STUDENTS WROTE A LOT OF THEM.

CliffsNotes has long promoted the fact that teachers and professors write its literary guides. But in interviews, Hillegass revealed that most of the work fell to graduate students. This was primarily a strategic move, since Hillegass didn’t want to overburden his guides with scholarly details and asides. “Someone involved in 20 years of teaching Shakespeare often has too specialized a knowledge,” he said in a 1983 interview.

7. SOME TEACHERS USED THEM.

In a 1985 interview with The Chicago Tribune, the executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English admitted some of his members used CliffsNotes. Many of these teachers utilized the guides when they were students, and found them helpful in planning lessons. Others, meanwhile, read the guides in order to catch would-be plagiarists. Writer Jessica Reaves remembered her mother, an English teacher, kept a collection of CliffsNotes at home. “Every time my mom wrote a test or even a quiz on a book she was teaching, she would first sit down with the corresponding Cliffs Notes (and any spinoff cheater books that were on the scene) and painstakingly write the test around the information in the booklets,” Reaves wrote in Time magazine. “In other words, she made it virtually impossible to cheat.”

8. …BUT MOST TEACHERS HATED THEM.

“The sole purpose of Cliffs Notes is to get a kid through a course and fake it,” one teacher told the Tribune. Said another: “What’s onerous is not that they summarize the plot, but that they offer commentary on what to think about literature that is accessible and vibrant.” In addition to what they considered pre-packaged analysis and summary, teachers have constantly battled with students who plagiarize the guides. Pre-internet, some instructors tried to stay ahead of the problem by assigning books that had no corresponding CliffsNotes. Others took even more drastic measures, like a teacher in Washington, D.C. who told the Tribune he once went into the bookstore next door to his school and moved all the Cliffs Notes copies of Moby-Dick, which he was teaching at the time, to the romance section.

9. THE COMPANY RESPONDED TO CRITICISM BY REVISING ITS GUIDES.

After years of deflecting claims by angry teachers that it was helping students cheat, CliffsNotes in 2000 began updating its literary guides to encourage critical thinking and get students engaging with the source text. The new guides asked questions, referred students to web sources, and offered more background information about each book’s author and the time period in which it was written.

10. SPY MAGAZINE LAUNCHED A PARODY SERIES IN THE LATE ’80s.

In 1989, the satirical magazine Spy put out “Spy Notes,” a CliffsNotes parody that focused on hip urban novels by authors like Brett Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Jill Eisenstadt. Sample essay questions included “Who’s cooler, McInerney or Ellis?” and “Why do so many authors rely on dead-mother plot devices?” “Spy Notes” got rave reviews from lit critics, but CliffsNotes was not amused. Thinking the booklets too closely resembled its study guides in form—including yellow-and-black covers—and in content, Cliffs Notes sued Spy and won, but had the case overturned on appeal. Summing up the legal intricacies of the case, Spy founder Kurt Anderson told the Chicago Tribune, “We’re not trying to start a competing line of study aids for lazy students.”

11. THE PASS/FAIL GRADING REVOLUTION HURT SALES.

Between 1969 and 1975, sales of Cliffs Notes plummeted from 2.8 million per year to less than 1.8 million. The reason? Hillegass and general manager Dick Spellman blamed the rise of experimental grading systems like pass/fail, which swept the nation beginning in the early ’70s. “Students weren’t interested in grades anymore,” said Spellman in 1983.

12. THEY GOT SHUT OUT OF BARNES & NOBLE.

In 2002, the bookselling chain abruptly took CliffsNotes off its shelves. This wasn’t because the study guides weren’t selling well—quite the contrary. Rather, Barnes & Noble wanted to exclusively stock SparkNotes, a competing study guide series it had purchased the previous year. The guides appeared on shelves for a dollar cheaper than CliffsNotes, giving Barnes & Noble a big sales boost. Eventually, the company lifted the ban, and these days you can find a trove of CliffsNotes titles on its website. 

13. COLLEGE BOOKSTORES BANNED THEM.

Twenty years ago, a group of professors at Villanova University signed a petition asking the school to discontinue sales of CliffsNotes in its campus bookstore. The university complied, and in doing so joined a growing number of schools like Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore in shutting out the popular study guides. Administrators acknowledged it was mostly a symbolic gesture, since students could simply buy the booklets from another source. “We don’t put our institution’s endorsement behind it,” the associate dean for academic affairs told the Associated Press at the time. CliffsNotes, meanwhile, wasn’t taking any of this lying down. The company took out a full-page ad in Villanova’s student paper calling the move “censorship.”

14. COMPETITION IS FIERCE THESE DAYS.

CliffsNotes has always had competitors. And for decades, the company was able to win out through the strength of its name and through its ties to bookstores, who would typically only sell a limited number of study guide brands. Nowadays, though, with online sources and digital publishers able to bypass traditional channels, the competition has exploded. Looking for a summary of Crime and Punishment? You have hundreds of options to choose from. Even contemporary titles like The Girl on the Train, an unofficial survey by the Observer found, have as many as 10 summary options available through channels like Amazon Kindle and Google Play.

15. THE COMPANY DOESN’T MAKE MUCH OFF ITS LITERATURE GUIDES ANYMORE.

CliffsNotes, like its competitors, has tried to stay relevant with literature guides (all now available online for free) to contemporary classics like All the Pretty Horses, The Kite Runner, and The Poisonwood Bible. But the growth side of the business these days lies with the company’s study guides, test prep guides, and subscription content. Earlier this year, publisher Houghton Harcourt Mifflin announced a subscription service that would offer personalized feedback for students using its test prep and subject learning guides. CliffsNotes’s famed literature guides, though, weren’t right for the service, a company rep told Education Week. “We’re not going to write your paper for you,” he said.

Holiday feast season is here—but if your food processor is made by Cuisinart, think twice before using it to whip up your tasty treats. This week, the company announced that it’s voluntarily recalling around 8 million units, after 69 people reported finding broken pieces of its riveted blade in processed food.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, “the food processor’s riveted blade can crack over time and small metal pieces of the blade can break off into the processed food. This poses a laceration hazard to consumers.” Already, they’ve received 30 reports of mouth lacerations or tooth injuries.

Wondering if you own one of the problematic models? Flip your food processor over, and look at the model number on the bottom. According to CNET, you’re good if the model number starts with FP or ends in Y, or is a DLC-6 model.

If your food processor contains any of the following numbers, stop using it immediately, and contact Cuisinart for a free replacement blade:

CFP-9
CFP-11
DFP-7
DFP-11
DFP-14
DLC-5
DLC-7
DLC-8
DLC-10
DLC-XP
DLC-2007
DLC-2009
DLC-2011
DLC-2014
DLC-3011
DLC-3014
EV-7
EV-10
EV-11
EV-14
KFP-7
MP-14.

Need additional reassurance? Check the food processor’s blade. If it has four rivets and a beige center, it’s getting recalled—but if it doesn’t have rivets, it’s fine.

To get a replacement blade, contact Cuisinart at 877-339-2534, or visit the company’s website and fill out a replacement form. Nobody wants to book it to the emergency room or dentist’s office when they should be relaxing in front of a fire with family and friends.

[h/t CNET]

All images courtesy of Cuisinart. 

In 1860, an ailing East Coast hat maker named John Batterson Stetson headed west to mine for gold. He didn’t strike it rich, but he ended up with something much more valuable: the design for the first commercially successful cowboy hat. In the decades that followed, the John B. Stetson Company defined the look of the American cowboy. And as the country’s sartorial tastes evolved from ten-gallon hats to homburgs and fedoras, the company evolved along with it. Hard times followed, but the company rebounded, and today is experiencing a most unlikely resurgence. Here are a few facts about Stetson worth keeping under your hat.

1. IT ALL STARTED IN NEW JERSEY.

The man who pioneered the cowboy hat wasn’t a cowpoke or a former farmhand. Up until adulthood, he’d never traveled west of Ohio. Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1830, John Batterson Stetson [PDF] was the seventh of 12 children born to Stephen Stetson, a well-known hat maker (the family reportedly made hats for George Washington). After spending his teenage years working for his father, John Stetson developed tuberculosis and decided to head west to recuperate—and while he was at it, try his hand mining for gold.

While mining and hunting around Pike’s Peak in Colorado, Stetson used the felting technique his father had taught him to make waterproof blankets. He also made a hat with a high crown and a broad brim that could protect the wearer from the sun and rain, probably inspired by the hats of the Mexican vaqueros. After Stetson sold the hat for $5 to a passing rider, he got the idea to turn his utilitarian design into a business.

2. STETSON TURNED $60 INTO AN EMPIRE.

Stetson returned east in 1865 penniless but determined to make money off the hat he’d created. He borrowed $60 from his sister Louisa, rented a small workshop in Philadelphia, and hired two workers to turn out more prototypes of the hat, which he called “Boss of the Plains.” Stetson then sent letters, along with a sample hat, to dealers in the West, asking for an order of a dozen. The savvy move roped in droves of customers, many of them ranchers fanning out across the west during the postwar cattle boom. By 1915, Stetson had become the world’s largest hat company, with 5400 workers turning out more than 3 million lids annually.

3. THE BOSS OF THE PLAINS WAS THE COWBOY HAT.

Cowboys didn’t always wear broad-brimmed hats. Before Stetson’s design came along, Westerners donned a motley assortment of headwear, “from formal top hats and derbies to leftover remnants of Civil War headgear to tams and sailor hats,” according to Ritch Rand and William Reynolds, authors of The Cowboy Hat Book. With its sun-blocking, rain-repelling capabilities, the Boss of the Plains was a useful accessory that quickly became the de facto work wear. Every morning, legions of cowpokes put on their Stetsons, and didn’t take them off until they went to bed.

4. EARLY CELEBRITY WEARERS INCLUDED ANNIE OAKLEY AND “BUFFALO BILL” CODY.

From film stars like Tom Mix and John Wayne to crooners like Bing Crosby and Bob Dylan, Stetson has long relied on celebrities to sell its image. This extends back to the company’s early days, when the likes of Annie Oakley, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and Calamity Jane donned Stetsons. Buffalo Bill, who did more than anyone to fashion the image of the Wild West, wore a broad-brimmed Stetson while sharp-shooter Oakley wore a ribbon-trimmed Stetson purchased by her brother-in-law in Wyoming. In 2012, Oakley’s iconic hat sold at auction for nearly $18,000.

5. BACK THEN, AS NOW, THE HATS WEREN’T CHEAP.

Stetson’s cowboy hats today range from around $50 for basic models to just shy of $400 for the intricately made Boss Raw Edge. More than 150 years ago, Stetsons were a not-insignificant investment, as well. The original Boss of the Plains sold for $5 in 1865, while a beaver fur version sold for as much as $30—more than most people made in a month. Today, you can get a Boss of the Plains hat for $135.

6. THEY WERE MORE THAN JUST HEADWEAR.

A big reason for the Boss of the Plains’s popularity was its versatility. Indeed, users found that the hat doubled as a fan, as a place for stashing valuables, and even as a bucket. Early advertisements showed a cowboy using his hat to water his horse. As the Texas State Historical Association notes, “Texas Rangers adopted the hat and found that it could be used to drink from, to fan a campfire, to blindfold a stubborn horse, to slap a steer, to smother grass fires and to serve as a target in gunfights. It could also be brushed for dress wear.”

7. CREASES AND BRIMS TOLD A WEARER’S IDENTITY.

As Stetson hats spread across the country, people began altering them in ways that became indicative of wearers’ occupations, where they were from, and so on. Various bends in the brim and creases in the crown gained creative names, like the Carlsbad Crease (a back-to-front crease started by cowboys from Carlsbad, New Mexico), the Montana Peak (four creases in the crown that created a point) and the Bar Room Floor (a front crease large enough to have been created by a drunken tumble). As Rand and Reynolds note: “With a subtle adjustment to the brim and a couple extra dents in the crown, a man could indicate he was from the northern regions of Nevada or the rough plains of Texas, the wind-whipped ranges of the Rockies or the low deserts of New Mexico.”

8. STETSON TURNED HAT MAKING INTO A RESPECTABLE TRADE.

The phrase “mad as a hatter,” which referred to the unstable personalities of haberdashers supposedly brought on by the use of mercury nitrite in their trade, was in its heyday in the mid-19^th century (although the precise etymology is up for debate). Not all hat makers were thus afflicted, of course, but the profession had a reputation for inefficiency, and for attracting unreliable eccentrics. Stetson did much to change that image by instituting a large-scale, assembly-line production facility that bested other industries for efficiency. Stetson paid his workers well, offered them lots of perks, and made sure they stayed on for years. Before Ford, GE, and other companies were employing ranks of loyal, long-serving workers, Stetson operated a self-sufficient community for his factory workers in Philadelphia, complete with a bank, restaurants, a library, and even a hospital.

9. STETSON DISCOURAGED ESPIONAGE.

During World War II, Stetson put out a series of ads telling people to keep America’s secrets safe. “Loose Talk Can Cost Lives,” exhorted one. “Keep It Under Your Stetson,” said another, Stetson’s riff on the older, well-known phrase “keep it under your hat.” In addition to its advertisements, Stetson also supplied Allied troops with parachutes, safety belts and, of course, hats.

10. SALES PEAKED IN THE ’40s.

As popular as Stetson’s cowboy hats were, the company had to eventually diversify. In the early 20th century, Stetson branched out and began making dress hats and caps. In the ’30s, the company began making women’s hats—pillboxes, tricornes, berets, and cloches. In the ’40s, the company’s fedoras, homburgs, and Panama hats were all the rage. In 1947 Stetson had its biggest sales year, bringing in $29 million, equal to $300 million today. For nearly a century, the company had kept pace with the changing tastes of hat-loving Americans.

11. …AND THEN TANKED IN THE ’60s.

Many Americans know the story: Beginning in the late ’50s, hats began to go out of style as an everyday accessory. Many, including Stetson, point to a single event that seemed to usher in this new lidless era: John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration, in which the newly minted president turned down the top hat that every president before him had worn during the ceremony. Others cite the rise of driving culture, the counter-culture movement, and a simple lack of good designs. Whatever the reason, Stetson’s sales plummeted, and in 1968 the company took in just $8 million—a 70 percent drop from the company’s peak 20 years prior.

That same year, Ira Guilden, a majority stockholder, wrested control of the company from the Stetson family and eventually shut down the hat maker’s manufacturing facilities. From that point forward, Stetson was a licensing company only.

12. INDIANA JONES AND URBAN COWBOY GAVE THE BRAND A MUCH-NEEDED BOOST.

After Urban Cowboy came out in 1980, lots of people wanted to emulate John Travolta’s Stetson-topped look (and ride mechanical bulls, naturally). Likewise with whip-cracking, sable-colored fedora-wearing Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones films. To coincide with the release of 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Stetson came out with an Indy-licensed hat that sold like hotcakes. It was a bright spot for a company struggling to stay relevant.

13. THEY’VE BRANCHED OUT INTO BOURBON AND BELTS.

Beginning in the ’80s, Stetson (known officially as Stetson Worldwide) licensed its name to accessory and apparel manufacturers keen on borrowing the brand’s image of Western cool. This included eyeglasses, luggage, and a popular cologne. These days, you can still buy Stetson cologne, along with Stetson wallets, belts, sunglasses, boots, jeans, and shirts. There’s also a Stetson brand bourbon that’s gotten some love from aficionados—”a pleasant combination of complexity, barrel expression, and approachability,” as Bourbonblog.com puts it.

14. THE COMPANY NOW HAS LESS THAN 10 EMPLOYEES.

One hundred years after Stetson employed nearly 6000 workers at its sprawling, 9-acre factory in Philadelphia, market forces have whittled the company down to a small staff that occupies a modest space in New York’s Garment District. The manufacturing of Stetson hats, meanwhile, has traded hands over the past few decades, and now resides with Hatco, an operation based in Garland, Texas that also makes hats for competing brands like Resistol, Dobbs, and Charlie 1 Horse.

15. THEIR TARGET MARKET THESE DAYS? HIPSTERS.

The company that began by outfitting cowboys now has its sights set on well-heeled urbanites. The fedoras, newsboy caps, homburgs, and porkpie hats that have recently come back into style are bestsellers for Stetson. In place of pricey advertising, the brand, now led by fashion industry veteran Izumi Kajimoto, gives out free hats to celebrities like Bradley Cooper and Madonna in exchange for a promise they’ll wear the lids in public. Stetson’s classic Western hats have also become quite fashionable of late. Vogue magazine, for one, recommends wearing a cowboy hat with high-waisted jeans, a sweater, and a bomber jacket.