Who would have thought a small piece of wood used for picking food out of people's teeth could be art? Burlingame resident Steven Backman saw the possibilities when he was 5 years old. Backman's love ...

A satirist once described a fictitious journal, titled "History's Splendid Splinter," which was devoted to scholarly essays on the wooden toothpick's "role in social history, patterns of forestry, and ...