All posts tagged: Untold

The Untold Story of the Google Buses That Took Over San Francisco

The Untold Story of the Google Buses That Took Over San Francisco

Published by skeptic

Activists in San Francisco’s Mission District weren’t giving up easily. David Campos had taken the baton from Chris Daly as the city Supervisor leading the anti-gentrification advocates, who were anchored in a handful of nonprofit community groups. During the springtime festivities for Cinco de Mayo in 2015, Campos called for a moratorium on all new housing construction in the Mission, saying it was the only way to give the district “a fighting chance.” The idea that new apartment buildings would push rents higher was—and is—a source of endless exasperation for housing advocates. Scott Wiener, who’d taken a more centrist path than Campos, was now on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors and led the charge against the Mission moratorium, which was voted down twice. It was too drastic a step even for the progressive-leaning Board. But development in the district slowed dramatically in the face of all the political resistance: a proposed 10-story apartment building dubbed “the Monster in the Mission” by activists had become a symbol of the fight and was ultimately abandoned. (As of …

The Untold Story of the Birth of the iPhone

The Untold Story of the Birth of the iPhone

Published by skeptic

The invention that turned Apple into a world-beating, billion-selling, society-changing colossus was not a laptop or a music player; it was the iPhone. It seemed to appear in 2007, fully formed, beautifully conceived, self-assured, and conceptually obvious. But behind the scenes, the iPhone we know today was made possible by more than bold bets, fanatical attention to detail, brilliant design, and a vision for the future; there were also false starts, last-minute redesigns, and a few strokes of luck. For starters, the product Apple set out to build first was not a phone. It was a tablet. Interdisciplinary teams at Apple are always experimenting with fledgling technologies. “There’s hundreds of little startups that are just poking around, doing stuff,” says sensors VP Myra Haggerty. “Sometimes someone’s like, ‘Hey, come look at what we’re working on!’ Then you go into some random lab somewhere, and they’re doing this really cool thing. ‘What could we do with this?’” Take, for example, Duncan Kerr’s projector demo. In 1999, Kerr, a British designer with a polymath design background—engineering, technology, …

The untold story of our remarkable hands and how they made us human

The untold story of our remarkable hands and how they made us human

Published by skeptic

Playing a complex guitar solo ought to be impossible. To elicit the desired torrent of notes, the fingers of one hand must move nimbly around the fretboard, while the other hand plucks the strings, in a dexterous combination of speed and strength. Anyone who has watched an expert player and then picked up a guitar for themselves will understand the degree of skill required. What’s less obvious is that our hands have been shaped by evolution for tasks just like this. It might not feel like it the first time you try out this instrument, but hands with that special combination of precision and strength are a defining trait of our species. In fact, the evolution of the human hand is one of the most important stories in our origin, at least as central as that of our oversized brain. Yet for many decades, the evolution of the hand has been impossible to grasp: there were too few fossil hands and the story they told didn’t make much sense. Now, thanks to a string of …

The Untold Story of Bauhaus Women: The Avant-Garde Artists Who Helped Shape Modernism

The Untold Story of Bauhaus Women: The Avant-Garde Artists Who Helped Shape Modernism

Published by José Betancourt

It does­n’t take too long a look at the almost sur­re­al­is­ti­cal­ly clean-lined build­ings of Wal­ter Gropius to get the impres­sion that the man want­ed to ush­er in a new world, espe­cial­ly when you con­sid­er that many of them went up before World War II. Take the Bauhaus Dessau build­ing, which, though com­plet­ed exact­ly a cen­tu­ry ago, looks like a con­crete trans­mis­sion from the future that nev­er arrived, or one that may indeed still be on the way. It once housed the Ger­man art school turned polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al engine he found­ed in 1919, whose prin­ci­ples includ­ed absolute equal­i­ty between male and female par­tic­i­pants — or they did at first, at any rate. Soon decid­ing that the new insti­tu­tion would­n’t be tak­en seri­ous­ly with too high a pro­por­tion of women, Gropius lim­it­ed their enroll­ment to one-third of the stu­dent body. That episode, among oth­ers that under­score the ways in which Gropius and the Bauhaus’ osten­si­ble com­mit­ment to the advance­ment of women was­n’t all it could be, fig­ures into Susanne Radel­hof’s doc­u­men­tary The Untold Sto­ry of Bauhaus Women. …

How Elizabeth Short Lived: Black Dahlia’s Untold Journey

How Elizabeth Short Lived: Black Dahlia’s Untold Journey

Published by Daniella Wilson

Author William J. Mann’s 2014 true-crime tome, Tinseltown, interrogated the unsolved killing of director William Desmond Taylor and its impact on the early film colony. Now his midcentury-set sequel, Black Dahlia, seeks to recount the life of Elizabeth Short, which has long been eclipsed by her lurid death. “The topic has been ‘done’ many times, but it hasn’t been done correctly,” insists Mann, who’s also written biographies of Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand. “There’s more to the story than trying to crack the case. I wanted to find Elizabeth Short, not the killer. I was interested in her agency, her drive, her ambition. She’d been erased. This was about restoration.” Short’s 1947 homicide achieved its lasting place in American culture both because of its savagery — her face had been slashed ear to ear and her body bisected at the waist and left in a vacant lot in L.A.’s Leimert Park — as well as the memorable moniker the press gave to the dark-haired Short. It was in reference to The Blue Dahlia, a noir …