Retronaut has a bunch of great National Archive photos of Wonderland, a pre-digital arcade in Kansas City.
“In 1948, the week before Election Day, [George Gallup] said, ‘We have never claimed infallibility, but next Tuesday the whole world will be able to see down to the last percentage point how good we are.’ He predicted that Dewey would beat Truman. He was quite entirely wrong.
Gallup liked to say that pollsters take the ‘pulse of democracy.’ ‘Although you can take a nation’s pulse,’ E. B. White wrote after the election, ‘you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.’”
Jill Lepore in The New Yorker on opinion polls as “a form of disenfranchisement”.
Listen to .wav goodbye, a new collection of home recordings fresh from Richie Egan's hard drive.
Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever, 1963 vs 1991 editions. Father has taken up his rightful place at the stove.
Watch Aran Quinn and Damien Bastelica's title sequence for Offset London, which is taking place today and tomorrow in Shoreditch Town Hall: