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- A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Yearsby Colin Marshall on June 30, 2025 at 8:00 am
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” originally articulated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first published in the late nineteen-sixties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any resident of the developed world, surrounded by and
- Listen to Never-Before-Heard Works by Erik Satie, Performed 100 Years After His Deathby Colin Marshall on June 30, 2025 at 5:19 am
If asked to name our favorite French composer of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, most of us would reach straight for Erik Satie, being able to bring to mind only his most famous pieces, the Gymnopédies and perhaps the Gnossiennes. We may not know that those works all date from the same few
- Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Yearsby OC on June 27, 2025 at 9:00 am
Several years ago, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely performed on an instrument resembling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hurrian Cult Song” or “Hurrian Hymn
- Watch the Very First YouTube Video, a Defining Moment in Internet Historyby Colin Marshall on June 26, 2025 at 9:00 am
Given the dominance YouTube has achieved over large swaths of world culture, we’d all expect to remember the first video we watched there. Yet many or most of us don’t: rather, we simply realized, one day in the mid-to-late two-thousands, that we’d developed a daily YouTube habit. Like as not, your own introduction to the
- Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Prediction That Automation Will Necessitate a Universal Basic Incomeby OC on June 26, 2025 at 8:00 am
One of the most propulsive forces in our social and economic lives is the rate at which emerging technology transforms every sphere of human labor. Despite the political leverage obtained by fearmongering about immigrants and foreigners, it’s the robots who are actually taking our jobs. It is happening, as former SEIU president Andy Stern warns in his book
- Why Bob Dylan’s Unreleased “Blind Willie McTell” Is Now Considered a Masterpieceby Colin Marshall on June 25, 2025 at 9:00 am
Most Dylanologists disagree about which is the single greatest song in Bob Dylan’s catalog, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the running. It may come as a surprise — or, to those with a certain idea of Dylan and his fan base, the exact opposite of a surprise — to
- The Very First Coloring Book, The Little Folks’ Painting Book (Circa 1879)by OC on June 25, 2025 at 8:00 am
Funny how not that long ago coloring books were considered the exclusive domain of children. How times have changed. If you are the sort of adult who unwinds with a big box of Crayolas and pages of mandalas or outlines of Ryan Gosling, you owe a debt of gratitude to the McLoughlin Brothers and illustrator Kate
- How Scientists Recreated Ancient Egypt’s Long-Lost Pigment, “Egyptian Blue”by Colin Marshall on June 24, 2025 at 9:00 am
Photo courtesy of Washington State University. It’s become fashionable, in recent years, to observe that we live in an increasingly beige-and-gray world from which all color is being drained. Whether or not that’s really the case, all of us still enjoy easy access to a range of colors that nobody in the ancient world could
- “The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Printed Circa 1652by OC on June 24, 2025 at 8:00 am
The story of coffee goes back to the 13th century, when it came out of Ethiopia, then spread to Egypt and Yemen. It reached the Middle East, Turkey, and Persia during the 16th century, and then Europe during the early 17th, though not without controversy. In Venice, some called it the ‘bitter invention of Satan,’
- How Art Conservators Restore Old Paintings & Revive Their Original Colorsby Colin Marshall on June 23, 2025 at 9:00 am
We tend to imagine old paintings as having a muted, yellow-brown cast, and not without reason. Many of the examples we’ve seen in life really do look that way, though usually not because the artist intended it. As Julian Baumgartner of Chicago’s Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration explains in the video above, these paintings’ colors have