What dish soap can teach you about collaboration

I’ve always loved the anthropology of everyday objects, the ways a mundane thing, when you look closely enough, turns out to be a repository of invisible intelligence. So when I was listening to a recent episode of The Wirecutter podcast and learned that plain dish soap mixed with water is often more effective than a cabinet full of specialized cleaners, I went down a rabbit hole that ended somewhere unexpected: a 1959 chemistry concept that reframes everything I believe about human collab...