The cupholder

Two circular depressions, one nested inside the other by way of a removable insert, sized to accommodate the standard beverage container and, less successfully, anything else. The larger of the two fits a bottle if the bottle is willing to lean. The smaller fits nothing reliably, though it is where the insert goes when the larger cup is in use, a kind of furniture for furniture. Measured across forty vehicles, diameters ranged from two point four to three point six inches, depths from one to three inches, with no apparent standard and no apparent shame about that. Coffee sits in it and cools. Water sits in it and sweats a ring onto the console that nobody wipes until the car is sold. Some models heat the holder. Some cool it. Most simply hold, which is, after all, the entire brief. Of twelve beverages tested for stability under braking, nine survived. The other three were coffee, and coffee, it turns out, does not respect a cupholder's authority. This is not a design flaw so much as a jurisdictional dispute between liquid and vessel, one the vessel was never going to win. Function, unadorned. Nothing more was promised.

Doreen Fitch