Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
The MacBook Neo’s Price, Looking to the Past and Future
Ethan W. Anderson, on Twitter/X:
I’ve plotted the most expensive McDonald’s burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. This analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081.
Looking to the past, if you plug $599 in today’s money into an inflation calculator, that’s just ~$190 in 1984, the year the original Macintosh launched with a price of $2,495 (which works out to ~$7,800 today.)
‘Never the Same Game Twice’
John McCoy:
From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and components that reflected the most current techniques of printing and plastics molding. They were witty, silly, and weird. The other main players in American games at the time were Milton-Bradley, whose art tended towards cartoony, corny, and flat designs, and Ideal, whose games (like Mousetrap) were mostly showcases for their novel plastic components.
Parker Brothers design stood out for its style and sophistication, and even as a young nerd I could see that it was special. In fact, I believe they were my introduction, at the age of seven, to the whole concept of graphic design. This isn’t to say that the games were good in the sense of being fun or engaging to play; a lot of them were re-skinned versions of the basic race-around-the-board type that had been popular since the Uncle Wiggly Game. But they looked amazing and they were different.
These games mostly sucked but they looked cool as shit. Lot of memories for me in this post.
Jill Scott’s Break From Music is Part of a Growing Trend of Black Women Pausing With Purpose
Jill Scott, Beyoncé, Teyana Taylor and Simone Biles are part of a growing wave of Black women who have embraced the idea of stepping back.
Creators of Netflix's Dark have a new HBO Max thriller coming
Selma Was Not Just History, It Was a Warning
Opinion: Sixty-one years after "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, we are once again watching the machinery of state violence turn toward Black and Brown communities.