On December 3, 1994, Sony launched the most technologically advanced home console yet made – a machine built to throw textured 3D polygons around at a speed nothing in a living room had managed... Read More →
Nintendo shipped 300,000 Game Boys to Japanese shops in April 1989 and had sold every one of them inside a fortnight. What those buyers could actually put in the slot was a Mario platformer,... Read More →
Microsoft released the Xbox at midnight on November 15, 2001, at a Toys R Us in Times Square. Bill Gates personally handed the first console to a twenty-year-old named Edward Glucksman, who had been... Read More →
The number everyone quotes for Poets’ Corner is wrong. So is the assumption that everyone there is a poet. The south transept of Westminster Abbey is not primarily a literary cemetery and was not... Read More →
Early on the morning of October 18, 1985, several Nintendo employees were hiding behind pillars inside FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue, watching their first American customer approach the cash register. The display had been... Read More →
The Pulitzer Prizes began in 1917 with four awards – two in journalism, one in history, one in biography – and now run to twenty-three categories handed out every spring. The pressure to take... Read More →
Hogwarts is, on the authority of J.K. Rowling herself, the most heavily haunted dwelling place in Britain. Given the competition on these islands, that is saying something. Most of its ghosts are never named.... Read More →
For most of American history, presidents did not have Secret Service code names. They didn’t need them. There was no radio chatter to encrypt, no transcontinental motorcade calls to obscure, no telephone network through... Read More →
The first CIA plot against the Castro brothers was not aimed at Fidel. In July 1960, a Cubana Airlines pilot named José Raúl Martínez, secretly working for the CIA, was assigned to fly Raúl... Read More →
When Dick and Mac McDonald reopened their little barbecue drive-in, the entire operation had been rebuilt around a single sandwich. They had spent the previous three months tearing the place apart – firing twenty... Read More →
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