Stefany Anne Golberg wrote a great essay to mark the 30th anniversary of the Rubik's cube earlier this year.
Ernő Rubik has often been painted as a taciturn loner, a grudging genius who built a beautiful object he hoped would create an introspective space where individuals could consider the elegance of geometry, and who instead became an icon for one of the great marketing crazes of all time. Rubik developed the Cube inside 1970s Communist Hungary, in a milieu where individual pursuits were not just fun but often necessary for psychic survival. He didn’t entirely believe he could solve the Cube when he built it, and it took him a solitary month while living in his mother’s apartment to do so. In an interview in the mid-1980s, Rubik described the Golden Age of the Cube as the time before it went global, when ''it brought only delights to me." "One of the main characteristics of the Cube is that it has no national character,” he has said. “It’s about a human being trying to solve his or her problem.”
It has no national character. True. It's pain in the buttness transcends state borders
[Via]