The Awl

50 Years Ago Today: 'Time' Mag's "Population Explosion"!

Choire Sicha — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:10:57 +0000

Pretty amazing, right? Inside the issue: an excellent dishy gossip report from Hollywood headlined Moses and the Money Changers (yikes) and this actually very spectacular report on Ray Ryan's Mount Kenya Safari Club. (Ray Ryan, you will remember, blew up in a pretty spectacular unsolved car-bombing in 1977.) Simpler times! Sort of!

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More Germany stuff

Alex Balk — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:35:28 +0000

If you want to enjoy even more fall-of-the-Wall nostalgia, Der Spiegel's got a pretty good collection of material. Also, Kristallnacht happened 71 years ago. So kind of a mixed bag.

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Where Were You When the Berlin Wall Fell?

Choire Sicha — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:25:58 +0000

Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell on this fine day in November of 1989? I remember it vividly. That was the year they were playing "Nothing Compares 2 U" all the time. I lived in a one bedroom apartment two blocks off Hollywood Boulevard, in the city of golden dreams, with a nice young former waitress named Dawn, who right around that time received a free roundtrip ticket to Hawaii from the apartment building manager/hooker who lived with his wife and child and sometimes his male lover across the courtyard.

I knew Dawn because we'd been waitrons in Chicago together, before we'd driven out west. I was working at Euro Coffee on Melrose Boulevard, where Nic Cage would send his dames in to have me make him a latte while he sat in a convertible outside. Dawn is kind of a whorey name, which, well, that worked. Eventually Dawn called from Hawaii; she had promptly lost the return ticket and couldn't ever get back and therefore I lost the lease.

This building was just like Melrose Place, except no one ever swam in the courtyard pool and cars had a tendency to be lit on fire outside and apparently all our neighbors were trannie hookers, except that one girl downstairs who claimed she'd gone to middle school with me, but who remembered middle school? So yeah, I guess it was exactly like Melrose Place.

Anyway, we didn't have a TV (or, like, beds or anything, though Dawn had a mattress on the floor and I had a nice foam chair that I'd found in the street) and it wasn't like the newspapers got delivered to the neighborhood-to get groceries, you had to go down to look for the roaming van that sold milk and fruit and stuff to all the old Mexican women-so it was probably a few months before I heard about the whole Berlin Wall thing, and by then, I was like, big deal. If we'd had Twitter back then, or even AOL chatrooms, I bet I would have 1. known about it and 2. had something to say about it for sure!

I guess at the time I was so happy that Ronald Reagan was out of office-well, with hindsight, out of the frying pan and into the presidential fire, am I right?-that I kind of missed the other politics of that year altogether. I wonder whatever happened to Dawn? No one names their baby Dawn any more, for all the obvious reasons.

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July 16: This Day In History

Alex Balk — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:00:38 +0000

In our fast-paced society we are always keeping one eye on the present and the other on the future, so it's important to occasionally step back and look at where we've been. It's particularly appropriate to do so today, which marks a milestone that changed the way we live forever. That's right, on this day back in 2003 Amanda and Dave became "the first couple in the American editions of 'Big Brother' to publicly engage in sex on the program." I vividly remember the President's emergency address to a joint session of Congress immediately after, and the feelings of uncertainty that bound us, however briefly, together as a nation. We've grown a lot since then: wiser, more resilient, and perhaps a bit more wistful, but there's no denying the significance of this very, very historic day. It's hard to believe we were ever that young.

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This Day In History: The 'Wall Street Journal' in 1930

Choire Sicha — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:30:36 +0000

The Wall Street Journal, in 1930, in a front-page editorial: "This is America. Piffling talkers would turn back the calendar to the nineties and destroy the economic progress of thirty years. Vicious rumors spread for selfish purposes; flippant predictions of a five-year slump in business; wholesale demands for the cutting of wages are unworthy of American intelligence. Credit is super-abundant. Business is no worse than three months ago. Twelve months of declining volume is behind us. Many adjustments have been all but completed. Engineering and marketing brains are as fertile as ever. Problems there have always been. To proclaim their insurmountability is childish." LOL, 1930! "Flippant predictions"!

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This Day In History: June 18, 2009

Choire Sicha — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:19:09 +0000

From the Penny Illustrated Paper, deep in the archives of The British Library's newspaper collection, we learn that not much has changed in 100 years: angry suffragettes and ill-tempered husbands!

From the paper's "Humour" column:

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