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Nikola Tesla Accurately Predicted the Rise of Wireless Technology & the Smartphone in 1926, Celebrate Halloween with Michael Jackson’s Horrifically Entertaining “Thriller” Music Video—and a Behind-the-Scenes Documentary
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In 1957, the BBC program Panorama aired one of the first televised April Fools’ Day hoaxes. Above, you can watch a faux news report from Switzerland narrated by respected BBC journalist Richard Dimbleby. Here’s the basic premise: After a mild winter and the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil,” the residents of Ticoni…
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Certain cult historical figures have served as prescient avatars for the techno-visionaries of the digital age. Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier and Wired editor Kevin Kelly), later entrepreneurs have…
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Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the best-selling album of all time, and not by a particularly slim margin. The most recent figures have it registered at 51.3 million copies, as against the 31.2 million notched by the runner up, AC/DC’s Back in Black. But it would surely be a closer call without the title song’s celebrated…
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Of the many readings and adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic moody-broody poem “The Raven,” none is more fun than The Simpsons’, in which Lisa Simpson’s intro transitions into the reading voice of James Earl Jones and the slapstick interjections of Homer as Poe’s avatar and Bart as the titular bird. Jones’…
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Apart from certain stretches of absence, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa has been on display at the Louvre for 228 years and counting. Though created by an Italian in Italy, the painting has long since been a part of French culture. At some point, the reverence for La Joconde, as the Mona Lisa is locally known, reached…
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