Are you feeling confident about the future? No? We understand. Would you like to know what it was like to feel a deep certainty that the decades to come were going to be filled with wonder and the fantastic? Well then, gaze upon this clip from the BBC Archive YouTube channel of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke predicting the future in 1964.

Although we best know him for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1964 television viewing public would have known him for his futurism and his talent for calmly explaining all the great things to come. In the late 1940s, he had already predicted telecommunication satellites. In 1962 he published his collected essays, Profiles of the Future, which contains many of the ideas in this clip.

Here he correctly predicts the ease with which we can be contacted wherever in the world we choose to, where we can contact our friends “anywhere on earth even if we don’t know their location.” What Clarke doesn’t predict here is how “location” isn’t a thing when we’re on the internet. He imagines […]

“America has only three great cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” This quotation has been repeated for decades — not least, unsurprisingly, in New Orleans. I saw and heard it often on my last trip there, and though attributions varied, most credited the remark to either Mark Twain or Tennessee Williams. According to Quote Investigator, no historical evidence points to either man as the line’s originator, though “the notion that only three cities in the U.S. were commendable or distinctive has a very long history.”

In 1895, for instance, the then-popular comedienne Vernona Jarbeau said that “there are only three cities in the United States that I would care to live in, and one of them is San Francisco.” But she said it, one should note, to a San Francisco newspaper; who’s to say the crowd-pleasing instinct wouldn’t have motivated a transposition of her preference elsewhere in America? New Orleans, then in existence for more than half a century, possessed an even longer-established distinctiveness. The embellished galleries of the French Colonial buildings in the […]

Millvinia Dean, the last surviving passenger of the RMS Titanic, died in 2009. She’d lived a full life of 97 years, but that meant that she’d been only two months old when the famously luxurious and innovative ship hit the iceberg that sent it to the bottom of the Atlantic in the middle of its maiden voyage. Despite being humanity’s last direct link to the Titanic, she would have retained no memory of the ship or its sinking. That’s very much not the case with the survivors interviewed in the 1970 British Pathé documentary footage above. One of them, Edith Russell, remembers the Titanic as having been “so very formal.” The “coziness” of other ocean liners, the “get-together feeling — it didn’t exist.”

A celebrity stylist and Paris correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily, Russell was traveling first-class: one stateroom for her, and another for her luggage. Not so Gurshon Cohen, who’d been “sleeping six in a bunk” down below. Unlike many of the Titanic‘s third-class passengers, prohibited as they were from entering the upper decks, Cohen managed to find a place on a lifeboat (after jumping […]

Prophecies are really about now. In science fiction it’s always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many possibilities, but we do not know which one we are going to have.

— Margaret Atwood

There is no need to explain why Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has gone from reading like a warning of the near-future to an allegory of the present after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Atwood’s story revolves around the fictional Republic of Gilead, which takes over the U.S. after a fertility crisis decimates the population. Overnight, the fundamentalist Christian theocracy divides women into two broad classes – Handmaids: chattel who perform the labor of forced birth through forced conception; and the infertile who prop up the patriarchal ruling class as wives, overseers, or slave labor in the polluted “colonies.”

It’s a bleak tale, a story far less about heroism than the TV series based on the book would have viewers–who haven’t read it–believe. (The 5th season, slated for this July, seems to have […]

On your first day in architecture school, you have to design a doghouse. Having never set foot inside an architecture school, I concede that the previous sentence may well be false, but you have to admit that it sounds plausible. As the simplest form of shelter in common use across the world, the humble doghouse presents to an aspiring architect the most basic possible test. If you can’t build one, what business do you have building anything else? Yet it was with characteristic idiosyncrasy that Frank Lloyd Wright, that most famous of all American architects, took on the project of a doghouse only toward the end of his long life and career.

Images courtesy of the Marin County Civic Center

“‘Eddie’s House’ is a doghouse designed gratis by Wright in 1956 to complement a Usonian-style house he built on commission for Robert and Gloria Berger between 1950 and 1951, in the Marin County town of San Anselmo, California,” writes Hyperallergic’s Sarah Rose Sharp. The commission, such as it was, came from […]