After returning from World War II, William Levitt, the son of an upscale real estate developer, set out to build affordable homes for the millions of veterans that needed one. Using mass production methods innovated at the beginning of the century by the Ford Motor Company and taught to him during his tour as a Navy Seabee—and by cutting out union workers and middlemen—Levitt did exactly that…
Collecting costly and obsessively detailed miniatures has long been a pastime of the wealthy, but the first known model village in Britain—and, if its claims are to be believed, in the world—was located in the verdant “stockbroker belt” populated by affluent upper-middle-class London commuters…
I don’t want to get all “in a world” here, and yet, in a world where most chain store seasonal decor comes branded in corporate colors and with a strict guide specifying exactly how each individual bauble is to be displayed, there’s something very human about a herd of fiberglass cows in awkwardly drooping Santa hats…
Between 1955 and 1991, Disneyland ran a Tobacco Shop on Main Street U.S.A. A model of the wider American society outside the groomed insularity of the Anaheim theme park, Main Street boasted an assortment of shops that mirrored the small towns that would vanish over the course of the twentieth century…
The funny thing is, I don’t remember exactly where I was when the Challenger disaster happened. I don’t think we watched the launch in school or even heard about it there, because the first time I clearly remember seeing the footage was at my friend’s house after school…
Yes, Star Wars is a children’s movie—and as both of you have pointed out, one that opened the sluice gates for the interminable slick of trash which continues to pollute the cultural waters of the world—but it’s a children’s movie as made by Antonioni: like Red Desert, it’s a study of surface whose intensity makes it profound…
The Western mentality during the Cold War was that since all the frontiers were conquered on Earth, our eyes now needed to be pointed to the heavens, to a “new frontier” that would give humanity’s great triumphs and tragedies some sort of meaning in a new postwar world in which God’s existence was, if not outright denied, then highly indeterminate…
Whitley’s Strieber’s Communion is another formative object for me. Well, maybe “formative” is a bad choice of words. After all, I was 12 when the shelves of every bookstore I frequented groaned with the weight of the uncanny Grey staring out at me from the book’s cover. But Communion distilled and reflected a deep-seated childhood fear of UFOs and aliens that I’d had since a very early age…
The 1968 Futuro House—a flying-saucer-shaped prefabricated dwelling originally intended as a skiing cabin—was the brainchild of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen. Made of pre-cast fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic elements that could be assembled on site, the Futuro was designed to be easy to construct and heat in rugged environments…
Two of the most famed alien abduction narratives of the Cold War period were explored through first-person accounts in popular books: John C. Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer (1965), about the abduction experience of Betty and Barney Hill, and Raymond E. Fowler’s The Andreasson Affair (1979), about the experiences of Betty Andreasson…
We Are the Mutants 