New York (CNN) — In a windowless room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Antonio Ratti Textile Center, several swaths of lace hundreds of years old are spread out on a giant expanse of black paper.

In the modern era, where phone numbers are portable and geography is less tied to a person’s culture, area codes still hold a surprising amount of social weight. While the seven digits following an ...

Tom Bowen is a senior editor who loves adventure games and RPGs. He's been playing video games for several decades now and writing about them professionally since 2020. Although he dabbles in news and ...