Photos of Silicon Valley before it became Silicon Valley. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/jul/14/silicon-valley-hawkeye-in-pictures

DO NOT press play. This cannot be unheard. You’ve been warned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ6bli9Xir4

Need an escapist novel? This is what helped me through the past few weeks.

https://amzn.to/3xuWB02

"Leominster had become a plastics capital by accident and by means of a decidedly unremarkable product: the comb." https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/plastic-town

Technicolor film was not color film, and it did not produce anything like lifelike colors. But how did it produce color movies? And why did those colors glow? And why did all of it lead to Dorothy getting ruby slippers? https://gizmodo.com/how-technicolor-created-ruby-slippers-without-using-col-5904930

"Simply use your smartphone camera to take a picture of your feline friend and the app will use machine learning to decode its mood."
https://petapixel.com/2021/08/02/tably-is-an-ai-camera-app-that-reveals-your-cats-mood/

Hey, writer friends! My company Transmission is hiring -- and this job would report to me. https://transmission.recruitee.com/o/b2b-content-writer

America's forgotten favourite sport https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210723-the-strange-19th-century-sport-that-was-cooler-than-football

On the role of food in fantasy fiction. https://vittles.substack.com/p/always-coming-home-the-pleasures

Gilbert, a 59-year-old professor at Oxford University and co-developer of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, is one of six women in the Covid-19 fight who have new Barbies modeled after them.
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/sarah-gilbert-vaccine-barbie/index.html

It was considered unseemly to have (largely male) display managers man-handling nude women in store windows, even if the women were made of plaster. Many cities passed ordinances to deal with such improprieties. https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/07/the-making-of-mid-century-mannequins/

An incredible pencil shop in Tehran’s indoor market http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/mr-rafiehs-pencil-shop-tehran

As the culture of the Ozarks changed during the Civil War, both Union and Confederate troops occupied and mined the caves for saltpeter, a key component of gunpowder. It wasn’t until after that terrible war that Americans began to see them as places for leisure and fun. https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/bluegrass-underground-missouri-show-caves

I do NOT agree with this sentiment. I can't wait to get together with my book club friends in person. With wine and cheese, dammit.

"I read a lot, and I love the low pressure engagement of a virtual book club....Now that the meetups are returning to apartments and bars, scheduling is once again more difficult and, honestly, I don't want to participate in them anymore."

https://mashable.com/article/book-clubs-are-better-on-zoom

“It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.”
—JOAN DIDION
in her 1961 essay “On Self-Respect”

Grains, legumes, vegetables, eggs and cheeses were the base of the diet, with fruit and honey for sweetness. Meat (mostly pork), and fish were used sparingly, and as the empire expanded beginning in the 3rd Century BC, Romans welcomed new flavours – be it pepper from India or lemons from Persia. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210719-what-did-the-ancient-romans-eat

"When the French government launched a smartphone app that gives 300 euros to every 18-year-old in the country for cultural purchases like books and music, or exhibition and performance tickets, most young people's impulse wasn't to buy Proust's greatest works or to line up and see Molière." What did they buy? Manga, and lots of it. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/arts/france-culture-pass.html

Remember Windows Sysinternals Tools? Of course you do. @lseltzer caught up with the guy behind it: Mark Russinovich, now chief technology officer at Microsoft Azure. https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/candid-talk-from-the-man-behind-your-favorite-windows-tools-2107.html

The Minneapolis Institute of Art recently made their extensive digital collection of woodblock prints by Hiroshige available to view and even download via their website.
https://mymodernmet.com/hiroshige-woodblock-prints/