Knock Down The House is a must-watch.

This episode of Open Source with Christopher Lydon featuring Joshua Cohen is a really good listen.

The first full-service gambling palace has been built in Boston, that old American cultural capital. It’s a giant leap for the very idea of gambling, where, as George Bernard Shaw said, “the many must lose in order that the few may win.” It’s not just a casino but a “world above,” it advertises: 600 5-star hotel rooms over thousands of card games and slot machines.  It’s the biggest single private development in 400 years of Massachusetts; with $77 million tossed in to clean up a stinking old Monsanto chemical dump. 

 

Americans weren’t the only ones with dreams of going to the moon. In 1970, two years after NASA achieved that goal (no, I don’t think Stanley Kubrick directed it all from a film set), a book was published in the Soviet Union showing cosmonauts on a trip that was never to be realised.

 

From JF Ptak Science Books:

This cover (above) from Popular Science (February 1949) speaks to those early television times to me, the screen hosted in multiple layers of framing that gives it an appearance of a piece of art, which it was.

This pamphlet was delivered by Allen Du Mont Labs (1946) with the popular dictum that color television was not only possible but a probable near-term you-can-have-it-now reality.  The unfolded pamphlet cover also forms an interesting imaginary green-sky citiscape with a very stubby tv antenna foreground:

See JF Ptak Science Books for more.