The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “technology”

High Times: An Illustrated History of Aviation
High Times: An Illustrated History of Aviation

From Icarus to the Wright Brothers, by way of hot air balloons and dirigibles.

read article

Love in the Age of Data: How One Woman Hacked Her Way to Happily Ever After
Love in the Age of Data: How One Woman Hacked Her Way to Happily Ever After

Reverse-engineering the algorithms of romance, one picky data point at a time.

read article

How Lantern Slides Revolutionized Education: A Protein Story
How Lantern Slides Revolutionized Education: A Protein Story

When an old entertainment technology brought the world to the lecture hall, bridging science and art.

read article

The Machine That Made Us: Stephen Fry and the BBC Explore Gutenberg’s Legacy
The Machine That Made Us: Stephen Fry and the BBC Explore Gutenberg’s Legacy

A hands-on history of the most important milestone of technology since the invention of the wheel.

read article

How the Gutenberg Press Embodies Combinatorial Creativity
How the Gutenberg Press Embodies Combinatorial Creativity

From metallurgy to the division of labor, or why Gutenberg was a typesetting despot.

read article

Thomas Edison, Power-Napper: The Great Inventor on Sleep and Success
Thomas Edison, Power-Napper: The Great Inventor on Sleep and Success

“Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application.”

read article

An Illustrated Chronicle of the Space Race
An Illustrated Chronicle of the Space Race

Astronauts vs. cosmonauts, Apollo vs. Sputnik, and what Gagarin had to do with JFK.

read article

100 Diagrams That Changed the World
100 Diagrams That Changed the World

A visual history of human sensemaking, from cave paintings to the world wide web.

read article

Henry Miller on Art, War, and the Future of Humanity
Henry Miller on Art, War, and the Future of Humanity

“It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.”

read article

100 Ideas That Changed Photography
100 Ideas That Changed Photography

From the camera obscura to the iPhone, or why photography is an art of continuous reinvention.

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)