I joke with my wife that, once you’re immersed as deeply as I am, everything leads back to Polaroid. And how on earth does the Republicans’ new vice-presidential candidate connect to the inventor of instant film?
Paul Ryan is, of course, a fierce small-government-lower-taxes advocate, backed and promoted by groups like Grover Norquist’s
My father reported this story over the weekend: A friend was traveling by car, pulled out her iPad while in the passenger seat, and switched it on. Black screen. Flicked it off and on again. No display. Kept fiddling, and eventually resigned herself to a busted device. Until she knocked her sunglasses ajar, and the […]
Looks like nothing special: a small octavo volume containing annual reports of the Chemical Society, based in London. Any big university library is likely to have it, probably in deep storage.
And then you open it, and it turns out to be special after all:
It’s Edwin Land’s 103rd birthday, and here he is, in a couple of Polaroid portraits. The distance shot is outside the Osborn Street laboratories in Cambridge; as for the closeup, I’m not sure who the other guy is, but I really hope he doesn’t have that tie anymore.
The dates are educated guesses. I put […]
No, really. Ayn Rand (selfishness enthusiast, anti- collectivist, Alan Greenspan mentor) thought Edwin Land (defender of PBS, coiner of the phrase “the bottom line is in heaven”) was as great as they come.
In a 1963 magazine article called “The Money-Making Personality,” Rand proposed a distinction between people who were real creators of money from […]
Polaroid got its start in a few places—briefly an apartment in New York, then a couple of buildings in Cambridge and Connecticut—but it really got rolling in a former furniture factory near the MIT campus. The building at 2 Osborn Street was a dilapidated old industrial brick thing back then—Edwin Land once called it “wretched”–but […]
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