THE LAST CASSETTE PLAYER STANDING:

As with the playback equipment, many tape recipes have been lost. A piece of inexpensive consumer-grade technology, so recently manufactured cheaply and at scale, is proving difficult to reinvent. This may all amount to an interesting story about a nostalgia-inducing product. But it also illustrates the workings of the economy the world has built—or, perhaps more accurately, that nobody in particular has built. No man can make a pencil. And, it turns out, no man can make a cassette player either.

It’s a fascinating article on a technology once ubiquitous, that’s now on its last legs, propped up by manufacturing in “China’s Guangdong province, [which] takes hold of dead technologies and reanimates them in a cheap but serviceable manner.” If you transferred your vinyl LPs to cassette to avoid scratches, and/or made mix tapes in the ’70s and pre-CD ’80s, read the whole thing.