Walks downstairs, alone or in pairs

An inflection point, an icon, a toy. Plus, 7 other things worth your time.

It looked like a bad gamble—out $500, what can you do? Win some, lose some.

The gamblers — I guess we’ll call them that, at this point in the story — were named Richard and Betty James, and the time we’re talking about was just after World War II.

I was trying to figure out how big a deal losing $500 would have been was to them; it was the equivalent of m…