‘I love to twirl the cord’: the young people pushing for a landline renaissance

Corded phones are hard to find these days. But for some gen Z diehards, they offer nostalgia and real connection

Landlines are nearing obsolescence. For many young people, they've gone the way of CD-Roms, cassette tapes and the humble printer. On TikTok, parents film their children holding wall phones like archival pieces, unsure of how to place a call. Payphones are long gone, too. But not everyone's ready to hang up the curly-corded receiver.

Nicole Randone, a 24-year-old from Westchester, New York, takes calls from her bedroom using a purple Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen-branded landline first sold in 2003, when she was three years old. One of my first memories is the tan landline that my parents had mounted to the kitchen wall," Randone said. I always fantasized about the day I'd have one in my own room."