Nobody reads books anymore. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve probably heard it expressed fairly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiquity. During that time, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video […]

In 2020, David Gallagher, who runs SF Memory, opened a cabinet found abandoned in San Francisco’s Mission District, somewhere around Tiffany and Duncan streets. Inside were 920 Kodachrome slides by a then unknown photographer capturing life in the city throughout the 1960s. They show us the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) … Continue reading "The Mystery Remains: Found Kodachrome Photos From 1960s San Francisco" The post The Mystery Remains: Found Kodachrome Photos From 1960s San Francisco appeared first on Flashbak.

Early Modern Millers’ Tales JamesHoare Thu, 04/03/2025 - 09:05

The Making of Modern Corporate Finance: A History of the Ideas and How They Help Build the Wealth of Nations (quotes below), by Donald Chew, persuaded me that for-profit-firm capitalism has varied quite a lot over space and time, and that the U.S.

Here’s a remarkable short film of the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, violinist Stéphane Grappelli and their band the Quintette du Hot Club de France performing on a movie set in 1938. The film was hastily organized by the band’s British agent Lew Grade as a way to introduce the band’s unique style of guitar- […]