Mitch Wagner

Betty White in 1954, age 32. Da-yum. via

joan trumpauer mulholland, american civil rights activist and a freedom rider, 1961 via

Buying men’s shorts in the Crowley-Milner department store, Detroit, Michigan, July 1941. via

San Francisco Chinatown - 1969 and 2019 via

Three young women enjoying coffee and hamburgers at the counter of an unidentified White Castle restaurant in the 1930s via

via

i heard you say zoom meeting so i zoom. reddit.com

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshani says it’ll probably have to shut down in California for a few months if it’s forced to classify drivers as employees. [TechMeme].

if your business doesn't work when your employees are classified as employees, boy, I don't know https://t.co/hIr16uQEdi

— Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) August 12, 2020

The magic bottle set from I Dream of Jeannie (1965) via

The RMS Queen Elizabeth pulling into New York with servicemen returning home after the end of World War II, 1945.⁣ via

An open air barber shop during the 1918 flu pandemic at the University of California, Berkley via

Caption?

Criminal: How to sell a haunted house: Helen Ackley decided to sell her old Victorian house in Nyack, NY, in 1989. The ensuing court decision is called “the Ghostbusters ruling.” According to the judicial opinion, “as a matter of law, the house is haunted.”

The Memory Palace: The Wheel: “What if they just took the boat? They could do it. It would be dangerous, but what if they just took the boat?”

How Satchel Paige Helped Integrate Baseball: Satchel Paige was one of the greatest baseball players of all time, a flamboyant showman and he integrated the game before Jackie Robinson.

Fresh Air:

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro Leagues and today we remember one of baseball’s greatest pitchers, Satchel Paige. We hear from Larry Tye, author of ‘Satchel: The Life and Times of An American Legend.’ Paige began his career pitching in the Negro leagues and later became a Major League star. In the 1930s, he made his way across the country amazing audiences with his blazing fastball and pinpoint accuracy.

Voice of San Diego: San Diego police are punishing speech using a 1918 law barring “seditious language.”

Jim Henson with Bert, c. 1971 https://reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/i7499j/jim_henson_with_bert_c_1971/

Paul Reubens with Debi Mazar, 1980s via

The dog’s face. He can’t figure out what’s going on.

Axios: “Unless Americans use the dwindling weeks between now and the onset of ‘indoor weather’ to tamp down transmission in the country, this winter could be Dickensianly bleak.”

Beloved billionaire Warren Buffet is the face of the monopoly trend that’s making America miserable.

Cory Doctorow:

What kinds of monopolies does Buffett love? Well, if you can’t afford dialysis or if you lost a loved one to opioids, chances are Buffett made a buck. A classic Buffett moat is health/pharma, which are easy to monopolize thanks to the captive audience and/or addiction.

If your town only has one newspaper, that might be Buffet’s doing – and if not, it was the doing of one of his buffettistas, using his playbook to buy one paper and then crush its rivals with anticompetitive tactics.

If you own a mobile home and lost money the instant you bought it and get worse off every year in a trailer park, that’s probably Buffett, who understands that when someone is desperately clinging on at the brink of homelessness, you can really squeeze ‘em.

Powerful Tammany Hall Judge Joseph Force Crater disappeared one night in 1930 after having dinner and heading for a Broadway show.He was never seen again, and his case has been a magnet for conspiracy theories since.

Two theories advanced in this podcast: Insurance scam, or he visited a brothel, died of a heart attack or suchlike, and the brothel disposed of his body.

Judge Crater was well known in popular culture when I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s. He’s been virtually forgotten today.

Throughline: America’s Caste System: Caste is a better way than race to think about the differences between US Blacks and Whites, argues journalist and historian Isabel Wilkerson. Racism implies knowing what’s in a White person’s mind and heart, whereas the caste system is structural. A White person can benefit from the caste system even if that person is not themselves racist.