An absolute must-see performance: comedian Robert Newman on the history of oil. A fantastic blend of history, politics and stand-up comedy that will open your eyes.
Today in “What have we learned from history?”: the Trojan Horse.
A gigantic archive of old-school hiphop flyers from the early eighties.
An interesting animated map showing who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history.
It’s been revealed that the Antikythera Mechanism, believed to be the world’s oldest analog computer, was even more advanced than originally thought.
Loads of old Belgian television archives viewable online, from Expo 58 reports to interviews with celebrities.
The history of electronic music’s Seventies pioneers and their influence up to our days.
Pirates of the Mediterranean, a fascinating op-ed piece from the New York Times recounting the attack by a loosely connected group of people on the Roman port at Ostia, followed by a massive deployment of forces, a near-draining of Roman coffers, a loss of personal freedoms and accusations of traitorship for those who didn’t toe the party line. Sounds familiar?
The interface at Paris:Invisible City takes a bit of getting used to but it's worth exploring.
The web time forgot. How Paul Otlet, a Belgian, envisioned a steampunk ancestor of today's hypertext.
The web time forgot. How Paul Otlet, a Belgian, envisioned a steampunk ancestor of today’s hypertext.
Project Cybersyn, the forgotten story of Chile’s “socialist internet”.
Project Cybersyn, the forgotten story of Chile's "socialist internet".
The Rise and Fall of the earliest “dot-com”. I feel old, I actually remember ClariNet.
The Rise and Fall of the earliest "dot-com". I feel old, I actually remember ClariNet.
The drugstore where time stands still.
The drugstore where time stands still.
Partisan Memorials in former Yugoslavia. Impressive modernist architecture.
Partisan Memorials in former Yugoslavia. Impressive modernist architecture.
I was there when acid house hit london and this is how it felt
It’s still not really talked about.
A piece of history I knew nothing about. Britain had a space program after the second world war. It actually succeeded before being mothballed.
In World War II, Britain invented the electronic computer. By the 1970s, its computing industry had collapsed—thanks to a labor shortage produced by sexism.
Barbie’s original design was based on a German adult gag-gift escort doll named Lilli that people would dangle from their car’s rearview mirror.
Photos of these modernist monuments are frequently shared without context or wrongly attributed to commissioning by Tito. Theirs is a story of historical erasure and lessons from the past we seem to be ignoring yet again.
Interesting take on the influence of previous pandemics over architecture and how the current coronavirus may do the same.
Art historian Alice Procter is on a mission to decolonise museums and galleries with her "Uncomfortable Art Tours". Interesting approach. I'd love to go on one of her tours if we can ever travel to the UK again. The British Museum is pretty much a giant fencing operation when you think about it.
MoMA just uploaded an amazingly clear film from 1902 showing the suspended railway in Wuppertal. It's still impressive today but it must have been something 118 years ago.
Genre was once a practical tool for organizing record shops and programming radio stations, but it seems unlikely to remain one in an era in which all music feels like a hybrid, and listeners are no longer encouraged (or incentivized) to choose a single area of interest.
An interesting take on the historical categorisation and the continuous flux of musical genres as well as the disappearance of group identification.
Fascinating look at the remnants of California’s hippie communes and the few hardcore idealists, now in their 70s or 80s, still living the dream.
The story of the Liverbirds, Liverpool's first female rock band that came up behind the beatles and had quite a run. Amazing and moving story. (via Kottke)
A fascinating look at the story of Susy Thunder, a phone phreaker, social engineer and many other things.
In the early ’80s, Susan and her friends pulled increasingly elaborate phone scams until they nearly shut down phone service for the entire city. As two of her friends, Kevin Mitnick and Lewis DePayne, were being convicted for cybercrime, she made an appearance on 20/20, demonstrating their tradecraft to Geraldo Rivera. Riding her celebrity, she went briefly legit, testifying before the US Senate and making appearances at security conventions, spouting technobabble in cowboy boots and tie-dye. Then, without a trace, she left the world behind.
The ubiquitous blinking cursor that we all see without seeing has a long history. It's probably one of the oldest remnants of historical computing that's still there today.
Two women reminisce about their teenage years in the 1890s. They were obviously better off than many of their counterparts of the day but it's still quite fascinating to get first-person accounts that go so far back. I'm also impressed by one woman's cycling endurance. London to Brighton and back on what was effectively a fixed-gear bike is quite something.
An interesting history of palm oil and its presence in an obnoxious amount of processed products, not just food.
Campaigners tend to be more hostile towards palm oil than towards other tropical products such as cocoa and soy which also pose threats to ecosystems. He suggests that this hostility comes down to the fact that ‘palm oil is perceived as being in things, rather than a thing in its own right.’
I knew the Channel Islands had been occupied during the second world war. I had no idea there were concentration camps on one of them. The UK government originally tried to suppress knowledge of it, but there's now a heated debate going on about how many people died there and if the reality of it all should be more openly visible.
An interesting theory on the Sapient Paradox, the question of why civilization came to be so late in the human species' evolution. We're about 200.000 years old but civilization is closer to 20.000.
The author posits that reputation/gossip control in small groups was the limiter to growth and that the structure of civilization helped dampen this need. However, social media has brought this "gossip trap" back on a worldwide level, risking a return to government by reputation.
I doubt things can be attributed to single causes like this but it's a compelling (and long) read.
An amazing-looking contraption built for the Soviet space program with a mechanical spinning globe and more cogs than an Enigma device.
A great write-up on the Bleep sound of Sheffield that had an important place in the history of dance music. I still remember the first time I heard LFO, I was blown away. Luckily, my speakers were not.
Rob Gordon, Warp co-founder and a supremely talented and important producer and engineer in the bleep story, remixed The Theme for its Virgin rerelease as his “bass statement” but no mastering engineers would touch it. One did, Geoff Pesche, but in order to fully capture the sheer depth of sub-bass on the record, he crawled under the mixing desk to remove its limiters. Letters of complaint flooded to Virgin, as ill-prepared speaker systems were blown and destroyed across the UK.
Greyhound buses, emblematic of a bygone era in American travel, have left an indelible mark on the collective imagination, gracing the frames of classic films and the pages of literary works. In this article, Joanna Pocock follows in the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir as she crosses the country by bus, only to encounter a transport network that's now a mere spectre of its former glory.
Reading this, I was surprised to learn that Greyhound now belongs to cheap German bus company Flixbus. That's quite a fall.
A great little documentary about the history of breakdancing. It's in multiple parts, check out the channel for the full playlist.
