In an era when e-mail is essentially free and on-line bill payment can only increase, the notion of "PC postage" bears a distinct whiff of futility.
In a sense, Montgomery Ward was a version of an e-commerce emporium in an era when everything went by mail.
Admiring the scrappy design tactics of some signs, I recognize the sensibility of peers who were raised on zines and who arrived in New York in an era when a host might mail out a photocopied collage by way of inviting friends to a basic beer-in-the-fridge apartment party.
Even so, in an era when airplanes, telephones, e-mail and fax machines have transformed the lives of prosperous emigrants, economists say that the linear idea of a one-way brain drain is giving way to a different paradigm of brains that circulate between native and adopted countries.
"In an era when even the Daily Telegraph was doing podcasts, the Mail wasn't doing anything," said one panellist.
He suggested that in an era when people swap music over the Internet, forward e-mail messages and send texts to each other with a single keystroke, the lines between collaboration and theft have blurred.
In an era when all your subscriptions pay themselves, having to stamp and mail a physical check on time is a pain.
"Strictly feminist scholars," she wrote in an e-mail, "posit a Joan calculating enough to costume herself as a visionary during an era when mystical revelation was one of the few routes a woman might take to political power.
My parents lived in an era when norms mattered more.
At least to people who came of age in an era when the wholesale destruction of the artifacts of a relationship required fire, it is jarring to find — wedged among updates on voice-mail upgrades and Halloween stickers — a notice entitled "How to: Disconnect & reconnect your relationship".
I GREW up in an era when nobody went anywhere.
