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Where the web came from, and what it does to us
Where the web came from, what it does to language, and which odd corners are worth keeping. The first YouTube video, dead HTML tags, a 600-year-old manuscript nobody can read — same instinct, different century.
Electric lamps, rotating beacons, and remote monitoring removed keepers from the towers one by one over a century, turning a respected maritime job into a symbol of what automation erases.
A 15th-century book written in an unknown script and filled with botanical and astronomical illustrations has resisted linguists, cryptographers, and machine translation for well over a century.
A bronze geared computer recovered from an ancient Greek shipwreck predicted eclipses and tracked the calendar, showing how far ahead ancient science ran and how easily that knowledge was lost.
A look at obsolete snippets that reveal the messy, vendor-specific history of web development before modern standards took hold.
Dolly Parton earned $10 million in royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” and invested it in a Nashville office complex.
Gerard Butler reportedly landed the iconic 'This Is Sparta!' line in 300 after asking for one more take, changing it from a low growl into a thunderous command.