Booking, 29 June 2026

Booking, 19 June 2026

Every so often a book title joke floats by…

The Crack in the Sidewalk by Ava Neiss-Tripp (illustrated by C. U. Nicks-Fall)

But now this fastidious brain demands a plot, so let’s cook one up.

Joe dragged his feet, or anyway didn’t lift them enough. He was inventive enough to imagine a device that would help him avoid sidewalk cracks, and before he knew it he had had shoes made with toe cameras and imminent-crack-detection AI, and so he heard an alarm-sound when a crack candidate was two steps away. At the same time, in the same city, an equally inventive Molly Siefer Coddle, similarly crack-trip-prone, solved the problem with compressed-air footlifting-assist tech, and a geneticist named Noh Pronouns published a paper describing a modification to the human genome that would make humanity more graceful. Then a materials engineer perfected “the sidewalk of the future,” which had self-healing cracks. Two months later there was an extinction event, so there was no one around to trip over sidewalk cracks, which evolved sentience, and the wise cracks lived happily ever after, cracking each other up with stupid-human jokes.

Next time you stroll on a sidewalk, remember: if you step on them, you won’t trip on them.