Anti-Suburbia Books from the 1950s

Mary and John are the unfortunate (fictional) protagonists of The Crack in the Picture Window, published in 1957 by John Keats, a journalist at the now defunct Washington Daily News. A lacerating (and very funny) indictment of postwar suburbs as "fresh-air slums," Keats’s polemic sold millions of copies in paperback. It revolves around the tragicomic story of the Drones, a nice young couple gulled, first, into buying a box at Rolling Knolls Estates, and then into thinking a larger, more e...

 Cool Science Facts

"There are a million points of light in the universe traveling a million miles an hour away from us, yet they are so far away they appear to be standing still." "Estimate for # of planets in visible universe: 10^25, which = # molecules in a cup of water" Robert Garisto, PRL "I'm is Juliet Retenford and my favorite science fact is that marmoset siblings are all genetic chimeras of each other because they all share a single placenta so a single circulation." "Hi Dr. Jim Macena, University o...

 Digital Culture Turns Everything into One Book

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book, just as Kevin suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, ther...

 Evidence of Global Warming in Just the Past 12 Months

Is the climate crisis real? Yes, of course it is. Pause for a moment to consider these events of just the past 12 months: • Heat. According to NASA, 2010 was tied with 2005 as the hottest year measured since instruments were first used systematically in the 1880s. Nineteen countries set all-time high temperature records. One city in Pakistan, Mohenjo-Daro, reached 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest temperature ever measured in an Asian city. Nine of the 10 hottest years in history h...