It's a great joy to bring Archivist King @andylanset.bsky.social to my newsletter this week. He describes how people made radio documentaries/newsreels with 1000-pound rigs, multiple discs, and the most arduous sound-editing process you can imagine: continuous-wave.beehiiv.com/p/a-difficul...

Poetry Month special part 2: Verse on Air 1950-1995 www.archives.nyc/blog/2026/4/...

Poetry Month special - Verse on Air 1927-1950 www.archives.nyc/blog/2026/4/...

Black History Month Special - The first 25 years of African American issues and programming on WNYC (1924-1949) parts 1 and 2 www.archives.nyc/blog?author=...

If you have not yet read @adamserwer.bsky.social on Minnesotans' heroics, you are going to feel way better when you do. He went there. He talked to the people doing the work. Then he thought about it and produced something rare. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0... [gift link]

Merry Christmas from the Murrows! (Judging from the address, this would be Janet and Ed Murrow’s first Christmas in London, 1937. Notice how the artwork shows radio, phone lines, and airplanes tying Europe together, less than two years before WWII tore it apart.) 🗃️

What kind of heartless ghouls would cut healthcare insurance for destitute Americans by $930 billion AND starve them AND take vital services from their children So they can make a bunch of billionaires richer That’s exactly what Trump and the MAGA Republicans want to do in their Big Ugly Bill

Wow. I cannot imagine a documentary that would be of greater interest to me. The timing is... insanely right. Premiere is 6/27/2025 at 9pm ET www.pbs.org/wnet/america... via Maddow

“It was always a too little noted hallmark of fascist propaganda that it was not satisfied with lying but deliberately proposed to transform its lies into reality” Hannah Arendt, 1945

A sign of the times at Washington D.C.’s Union Station.

As DOGE cuts staff at the National Archives, you can rest assured the Commander in Chief is front and center at the NARA gift shop. “Please refrain from playing with the bobblehead display.”

I've not done much in the way of posting, yet I suspect that as much as 98% of my 279 followers are soliciting my attention for their OnlyFans or similar sites. Sorry folks, it's not the way I plan to dispose of my limited disposable income. Curious, I don't recall this happening on Twitter or X.

Welcome to our post-human town. Don't get run over by a driverless car. Billboard South of Market.

It seems Hitler isn’t the only dictator Trump has been borrowing language from. Before MAGA there was MIGA, ‘Make Italy Great Again’ during Mussolini’s tenure. Il Duce also had his version of DOGE which was more PR than reality. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

RT = endorsement

Drone footage coming out of New Jersey is becoming increasingly dubious. 😳

The job of media commentators is to respond thoughtfully to how people feel, not to tell them how to feel. Which is why the editorials deploring the reaction to the healthcare CEO slaying are such failures of curiosity and understanding, such triumphs of obliviousness and elite panic.

History repeats. In late February 1921, 2 weeks before taking office as POTUS, Warren Harding writes a letter to the richest man in America, William Randolph Hearst, thanking him for helping him win the presidency with favorable coverage in major newspapers he owned & begging for his advice.

From the William Gropper show at the Phillips Collection -- from back when they were comfortable calling a fascist a fascist.

Australia’s oldest dictionary of Australian English has chosen “enshittification” – a slang term referring to the deterioration of products and services online – as the word of 2024.

I suspect all of Trump’s recent cabinet announcements are being made in consultation with The Onion.