An eraser has one job: to correct your mistakes cleanly, without leaving any residue on the page. If it fails at that, what’s the point?That’s why Ralph Nader, the legendary consumer advocate, whom we previously enlisted for pen testing, is peeved about what he considers the “planned obsolescence” of pencil erasers.Nader’s main beef is that pencil erasers quickly dry out and become useless, dessicated nubs. He also insists that erasers have gotten worse over the years.“Before you use a third of it, over time the eraser goes hard on you. Not only is it useless, it smudges and backfires,” Nader told me way back in a 2023 interview.Nader and I first began communicating when I investigated why his beloved Paper Mate pens were drying out. His eraser gripe at the time was almost an aside. But now, he’s back to ask why I haven’t solved his eraser problem.“Where you can make a difference, I think, is on the pencil erasers,” he instructed me via email a few months ago. “You know, I have a cup full of pencils that I don’t use because the erasers are gone and you don’t want to use a pencil without an eraser. Or even worse, the erasers smudge and do not erase well.”“We’ve talked about this issue before,” he lightly admonished me.