Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By, from Mix Tapes and Modesty to Typewriters and Truly Blind Dates
Anna Jane Grossman
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0810978490
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
forty-five minutes a day on their penmanship; today they recommend just fifteen minutes, although surveys suggest that most grammar schools devote far less time than that. Then again, is there really a point to devoting much more than that to a skill that’s almost never required in daily life beyond 4th grade? We might not be able to render the kind of beautiful handwritten pen-and-ink love letters that our grandparents exchanged, but if they’d had Gmail, they would’ve likely made do with
flipping randomly through those featherweight pages. It also deprived you of artillery should your studying be interrupted by a rat. As information steadily becomes decreasingly tangible, encyclopedias are enriching little more than landfill soil. The Internet is largely quashing the need for multivolume print encyclopedias, but this has led to a new question converse to the one posed by encyclopedia usage: Instead of asking if it’s wise to rely on just one source, you instead find yourself
Madeleine Albright: “Network nightly news broadcasts were a source of common information and national unity. Opinions differed, but Americans began thinking with the same images and facts in mind, brought to them by experienced journalists. If you cared about national or world affairs, you scheduled dinner before or after the nightly serving of Cronkite, Rather, Brokaw, or Jennings.” EXECUTIVE CHAIRS Status symbols on wheels. • • • Kings sat on big thrones, so why shouldn’t the head of
one favorite song without immediately recalling what the next one should be. Those dying to cram in as many songs as possible (filling up that last minute with one of the standard quicky songs: The Violent Femme’s “Old Mother Reagan,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bookends,” The Beatles’ “Her Majesty”…) would sometimes use a 120-minute tape instead of the typical, sixty-minute one; it was a move that only betrayed a kind of greenness, since any savvy mixtape-maker knew that the ribbon in longer
effect in modern pop songs. College radio DJs and the non-mainstream music aficionados broadcasting on the FM airwaves shirked the tight formulas that had become de rigueur on the AM band—the Top 40 countdowns and the same songs in rotation every hour, each one bookended by ten-minute commercials. Instead, they used the stations to play experimental music and embraced offbeat talk programs. The content could afford to be esoteric, if only because the people who owned FM receivers were few and