Tag Archives: history

Remembering Prince

By Paul | Published April 21, 2018

Two years ago today, we lost Prince. The New Yorker’s piece from two years ago is still one of the best “memorials”: Miles Davis, in his autobiography, compared Prince to Duke Ellington; one might be tempted to add Miles himself to that comparison. When we discuss artists so transcendently brilliant and impossibly prolific, their rarities […]

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No Criminal Charges in Prince’s Death

By Paul | Published April 19, 2018

Variety: Carver County attorney Mark Metz said in a press conference on Thursday that Prince died of an accidental fentanyl overdose, and that charges won’t be filed in the investigation into the musician’s death.

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Vintage EPA photos reveal what America looked like before pollution was regulated

By Paul | Published October 10, 2017

  The Trump administration plans to kill the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s main initiative to fight climate change by lowering emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, said Monday. […] Pruitt has reportedly spent much of his term meeting with executives and lobbyists from companies and industries regulated by the EPA. Many […]

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Steve Jobs knew what the fuck he was doing…

By Paul | Published October 5, 2017

Six years ago today, The Onion: CUPERTINO, CA—Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56. Usually people say, “it doesn’t seem like __x__ years,” but in this case, I have to say […]

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Speaking of collusion (and treason)…

By Paul | Published September 30, 2017

The Vietnam War, Episode 7: The Veneer of Civilization (June 1968 – May 1969) at 51:55-55:42, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (2017): NARRATOR: But on October 31st [1968], just five days before the election, the president himself made a surprise announcement.  He was stopping all bombing of North Vietnam.  There had been real progress in Paris, […]

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Donald Trump: The “I” of any storm

By Paul | Published August 30, 2017

Dave Pell nails it at NextDraft: President Trump doesn’t get to be graded on a curve. The Texas visit was a complete failure. No mention of the victims. No empathy for the survivors. More silly asides about crowd size and cable-TV fame. Once again, Trump proved that he will always be the “I” of the […]

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Genetic evidence suggests the Canaanites weren’t destroyed after all

By Paul | Published July 28, 2017

Annalee Newitz, writing at ARSTechnica: The Canaanites are famous as the bad guys of the Book of Joshua in the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible. First, God orders the Hebrews to destroy the Canaanites along with several other groups, and later we hear that the Canaanites have actually been wiped out. Among archaeologists, however, the […]

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Aging Soviet Space Vehicles Still Impress

By Paul | Published July 10, 2017

Eric Berger, writing at Wired: The Soviet Union’s Buran space shuttle program stands as one of the saddest episodes in aerospace history. After NASA began working on its space shuttle program in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union conceived of its own orbiter program, the eerily similar looking Buran shuttle. Ultimately, the vehicle made just […]

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Star Wars at 40

By Paul | Published May 25, 2017

Star Wars, a film which has unfortunately come to be known as Episode IV: A New Hope, was released 40 years ago today. Although I didn’t see it on opening night, or even opening weekend, I did see it soon thereafter (you have to be able to get a ride when you’re eleven…), and I […]

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Masterpiece restored: Stolen Stradivarius will sing again

By Paul | Published March 10, 2017

Ah!, some non-depressing news from Yahoo News Digest: After a meticulous restoration that took more than a year, a Stradivarius violin that was stolen from the violinist Roman Totenberg and missing for decades is about to return to the stage. Mira Wang, a violinist who immigrated to the United States from China 30 years ago […]

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