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A standardized test and a pencil, with answers bubbled in.

The Rotting of the College Board

Testing is necessary. The SAT’s creator is not.
by Naomi Schaefer Riley via Commentary on November 13, 2024
Three men using the large UNIVAC computer to predict the 1952 election, with two reading a printed readout and one using a phone.

The Year Election Night First Became a TV Event

In 1952, news stations combined two new technologies—the TV and the computer—to forever transform how voters experience election night.
by Jordan Friedman via HISTORY on October 28, 2024
Illustration of a faceless Virgin Mary and Elizabeth, holding sonograms of the unborn Christ and John the Baptist.

How an American Film in 1984 Shaped the ‘Fetal Personhood’ Movement

The success of the movie ‘The Silent Scream,’ made by onetime abortionist Bernard Nathanson, continues to influence the pro-life narrative.
by Diane de Vignemont via New Lines on October 25, 2024
A view of Wall Street and Federal Hall in the Financial District in New York City.

In the 1970s, the Left Put a Good Crisis to Waste

In "Counterrevolution," Melinda Cooper reads the 1970s economic crisis as an elite revolt rather than proof of the New Deal order’s unsustainability.
by Scott Aquanno, Stephen Maher via Jacobin on October 24, 2024
Photo by Ralph Ellison of men standing by a street in New York City.

Ralph Ellison’s Alchemical Camera

The novelist's aestheticizing impulse contrasts with the relentless seriousness of his observations and critiques of American society.
by Jed Perl via New York Review of Books on October 17, 2024
Soldiers in combat gear stand by an advertisement for "America's Army," a military strategy game from 2002.

Video Games Are a Key Battleground in the Propaganda War

When video games went mainstream, the Pentagon realized their potential as a promotional tool, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on war-based games.
by Marijam Did via Jacobin on October 13, 2024
Cover of the 1973 report "Computers, Records, and the Rights of Citizens."

60 Years Ago, Congress Warned Us About the Surveillance State. What Happened?

The same legal and cultural struggles will await the next critical infrastructural technology, and the next.
by Jennifer Holt via The MIT Press Reader on September 27, 2024
A screenshot from "Red Dead Redemption 2" of cowboy protagonist Arthur Morgan riding a horse in a western landscape.

What Red Dead Redemption II Reveals About Our Myths of the American West

On the making of a centuries-old obsession at the heart of American national identity.
by Tore C. Olsson via Literary Hub on August 28, 2024
A klaxon car horn.

A Loud Warning From the Past About Living With Cars

Klaxon horns, once standard safety equipment, disappeared from the roads after World War I. But the tensions they exposed about urban noise still echo.
by David Zipper, Matthew F. Jordan via CityLab on August 26, 2024
Karl Stoltzfus in front of the first Air Force One.

One Man’s Quest to Restore the First-Ever Air Force One

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s plane is starting to look like itself again.
by Eric J. Wallace via Atlas Obscura on August 1, 2024
An oil well at Signal Hill near Long Beach.

It’s Oil That Makes LA Boil

I never knew I lived in an oil town until I went looking for the concealed infrastructure of fossil fuel production.
by Jonathan S. Blake via Noema on July 30, 2024
Chalkboard in a classroom.

What Are You Going to Do With That?

The future of college in the asset economy.
by Erik Baker via Harper’s on July 23, 2024
Tornado near Turkey, Texas, in 2009.
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The Real History Behind 'Twisters'

For as long as scientists have studied tornadoes, researchers have dreamed of controlling them.
by Kate Carpenter via Made By History on July 19, 2024
WTO protestors in 1999.

How Activists Across the Pacific Northwest Planned the 1999 Seattle WTO Protests

Looking back on the environmentalist and anti-globalization movements of the 1990s.
by D. W. Gibson via Literary Hub on June 21, 2024
Oil painting by Samuel F. B. Morse titled "The Muse: Susan Walker Morse."

Jilted: Samuel F. B. Morse at Art’s End

The rejection that ended Morse's art career eventually led to the invention of the telegraph.
by Paul Staiti via Panorama on June 18, 2024
At nighttime, the levels inside the Milton S. Eisenhower Library light up the windows, showing stacks of books and the silhouettes of students working at tables and lounging at chairs, from A Level to B Level and M Level at the top, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1965.

The Education Factory

By looking at the labor history of academia, you can see the roots of a crisis in higher education that has been decades in the making.
by Erik Baker via The Nation on April 22, 2024
A advertisement for the BankAmericard depicting it as a card for the American family.

How Did America Become the Nation of Credit Cards?

Americans have always borrowed, but how exactly did their lives become so entangled with the power of plastic cards?
by Sean H. Vannatta via Aeon on April 22, 2024
Nurses with babies

Legacies of Eugenics: An Introduction

Despite assumptions about its demise, it is still enmeshed in the foundations of how some professions think about the world.
by Osagie K Obasogie via Los Angeles Review of Books on April 17, 2024

How American Intelligence Was Born in the Trenches of World War I

The Great War forced the US to create a modern spying and analysis apparatus.
by Derek Leebaert via SpyTalk on March 6, 2024
Law and Political Economy Project logo

What Centuries of Common Law Can Teach Us About Regulating Social Media

Today, tech platforms, including social media, are the new common carriers.
by Ganesh Sitaraman, Morgan Ricks via LPE Project on February 26, 2024
At the New York Public Library, 15 December 2004.

The Birth of Our System for Describing Web Content

Over a weekend in 1995, a small group gathered in Ohio to unleash the power of the internet by making it navigable.
by Monica Westin via Aeon on February 22, 2024
Photo of a blue bin filled with recyclable garbage.

Petrochemical Companies Have Known for 40 Years that Plastics Recycling Wouldn't Work

Despite knowing that plastic recycling wouldn't work, new documents show how petrochemical companies promoted it anyway.
by Joseph Winters via Grist on February 20, 2024
Painting of babies sitting at a table, holding spoons, with a can of condensed milk in the middle
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The Sweet Story of Condensed Milk

This nineteenth-century industrial product became a military staple and a critical part of local food culture around the world.
by Katrina Gulliver, Joe B. Frantz, Khairudin Aljunied, Yavuz Koese via JSTOR Daily on February 20, 2024
Shopper looking through a large bar code as if peering behind a curtain

How We Almost Ended Up with a Bull’s-eye Bar Code

If history had taken another path, bar codes would look dramatically different today.
by Jordan Frith via The Conversation on January 10, 2024
Elon Musk.

How Corporate America’s Obsession With Creativity Wrecked the World and Brought Us Elon Musk

Samuel W. Franklin’s latest book explains how we sold ourselves out to a fake virtue.
by Timothy Noah via The New Republic on December 30, 2023
A group of men in a mailroom pose next to tube equipment

When a Labyrinth of Pneumatic Tubes Shuttled Mail Beneath the Streets of New York City

Powered by compressed air, the system transported millions of letters between 1897 and 1953.
by Vanessa Armstrong via Smithsonian on December 22, 2023
Chickens and eggs.

The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

Maybe what we need is not just a new form of poultry farming but a complete revolution in how we relate to meat.
by Boyce Upholt via Noema on December 19, 2023
Lined-paper illustration of Tom Watson Jr. and Sr.

The Rise and Fall of the ‘IBM Way’

What the tech pioneer can, and can’t, teach us.
by Deborah Cohen via The Atlantic on December 13, 2023
The cult-like aesthetic of technocracy, 1942.

Margaret Mead, Technocracy, and the Origins of AI's Ideological Divide

The anthropologist helped popularize both techno-optimism and the concept of existential risk.
by Benjamin Breen via Res Obscura on November 21, 2023
A photograph of the back of a woman's head, superimposed over a photograph of a body of water as if looking out over it.

What if Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be?

As our faith in the future plummets and the present blends with the past, we feel certain that we’ve reached the point where history has fallen apart.
by Thomas Mallon via The New Yorker on November 20, 2023
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