Today we’re looking at two classic American magazines: TIME and LIFE. Published weekly for most of the 20th century, these sister periodicals offer complementary perspectives on the biggest stories of the era, with LIFE’s vivid photojournalism bringing immediacy and emotional resonance to TIME’s in-depth reporting. They’ve always been popular items at the shop, but while past collectors sought out issues that commemorated special events or milestone dates from their own lives, a younger generation of readers are embracing these magazines for the design language they helped define—as archives of iconic mid-century modern fashion, architecture, typography, and consumer goods. Explore the way that objects slip from personal nostalgia into cultural history as time and life march irrevocably forward on this new-for-now #brattlecast.
Brattlecast #220 - Books About Computers
Want to feel old? People are collecting vintage books about computers. These futuristic-feeling technologies have become such an ubiquitous part of our daily lives that it can feel counterintuitive to step back and take a look at their history, but there’s a growing interest in computer science classics that date back to the 1940s and ‘50s. In this episode, we’ll talk about books like Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines; Giant Brains, or Machines That Think; and The Age of Intelligent Machines, as well as some science fiction novels that turned out to be uncannily prescient about the internet age. Log on and join us in cyberspace for this organically intelligent new #brattlecast.
Brattlecast #127 - Travels in Space
In the studio with us today we have a somewhat surprising volume: Travels in Space: A History of Aerial Navigation, published in 1902, a year before the Wright Brothers’ historic flight. Although it may seem that the history of aviation had yet to be written at the time, people had already been taking to the skies for over 100 years, in hot air balloons, zeppelins, gliders, and a host of other more dubious—and sometimes fatal—contraptions. In this aeronautical episode we’ll talk about Travels in Space, early works of science fiction, a rare pamphlet by the Wright Brothers themselves, and much more.