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Anthony Acevedo, a most amazing man, has passed. As a 20-year-old Army medic, Acevedo kept a diary (of events but also sketches) of his time in a Nazi slave labor camp, part of Buchenwald, which can be seen in its entirety online thanks to the United States Holocaust Memorial museum.
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I was skeptical of the host, but World Map: The Literal Translation of Country Names is pretty cool. And they shared their research links and sources || Pairs obliquely with Terrapattern, a “visual search tool for satellite imagery.”
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NITCH is compulsively browsable collection of (mostly) portraits and brief, powerful quotes.
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Ehrmagerd! The Internet Archive has an online handheld History archive with playable games from the 70s and 80s. I literally wore out the keys on a Speak & Spell when I was a kid. And back to it almost 40 years later…I was transported. || Related retro: will 2018 be the (next) year of HyperCard? See (and submit to) HyperCard Zine.
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Let’s whiplash back to the world of very contemporary technology in our lives… → 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech
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On the thriving world of chess as “eSport,” featuring a few of my favorite things (and people) → I Want My ChessTV
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Flat-Earther blasts off into California sky in homemade steam-powered rocket
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Today in 1957, U.S. Customs confiscates more than 500 copies of Allan Ginsberg’s book Howl and Other Poems. You know the one, the title poem begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” (listen to a 1956 recording of Ginsberg reading the poem || view the complete original manuscript and typescript). Two months later, the U.S. Attorney’s office chose not to prosecute. Then, on June 3 of the same year, undercover police with the San Francisco Police bought a copy from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s now famed City Lights bookstore and then arrested Ferlinghetti for publication of obscene materials. Heard before a judge who had recently achieved notoriety by sentencing five women convicted of shoplifting to watching the film The Ten Commandments, Felinghetti (and his business partner Shigeyosi Murao) was supported by a cadre of poets and critics. In the end the judge, Clayton Horn, ruled in Felinghetti’s favor, noting that the book was of “redeeming social importance” and was unlikely to “deprave or corrupt readers by exciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire.”