Browse 64 Years of RadioShack Catalogs Free Online … and Revisit the History of American Consumer Electronics

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“I bet RadioShack was great once,” writes for­mer employ­ee Jon Bois in a much-cir­cu­lat­ed 2014 piece for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old cat­a­logs and come away with any oth­er impres­sion. They sold giant wal­nut-wood speak­ers I’d kill to have today. They sold com­put­ers back when peo­ple were try­ing to…

Maurice Sendak’s First Published Illustrations: Discover His Drawings for a 1947 Popular Science Book

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McGraw-Hill/pub­lic domain; copy from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives

Once upon a time, long before Mau­rice Sendak illus­trat­ed Where The Wild Things Are (1963), he pub­lished, notes Ars Tech­ni­ca, “his first pro­fes­sion­al illus­tra­tions in a 1947 pop­u­lar sci­ence book about nuclear physics, Atom­ics for the Mil­lions.” Only 18 years…

Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code

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If you find your­self grap­pling with an intel­lec­tu­al prob­lem that’s gone unsolved for mil­len­nia, try tak­ing a few months off and spend­ing them on activ­i­ties like swim­ming and med­i­tat­ing. That very strat­e­gy worked for a Cam­bridge PhD stu­dent named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a sum­mer of non-research-relat­ed activ­i­ties, returned to a text by…

Frank Lloyd Wright Thought About Making the Guggenheim Museum Pink

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Image via The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion Archives

Seen today, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, seems to occu­py sev­er­al time peri­ods at once, look­ing both mod­ern and some­how ancient. The lat­ter qual­i­ty sure­ly has to do with its bright white col­or, which we asso­ciate (espe­cial­ly in such…

Is Andrew Huberman Ruining Your Morning Coffee Routine?

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Andrew Huberman–the host of the influ­en­tial Huber­man Lab pod­cast–has got­ten a lot of mileage out of his rec­om­mend­ed morn­ing rou­tine. His rou­tine empha­sizes the impor­tance of get­ting sun­light with­in 30–60 min­utes of wak­ing; also engag­ing in light phys­i­cal activ­i­ty; hydrat­ing well; and avoid­ing cof­fee for the first 90–120 min­utes. In his words:

I…