Nerdy Needs

Seattle is a young city, young enough that most of its history can be traced through photographs. Until recently though, most of those photos have been

Proof that Lego was already helping us imagine a better world four decades ago.

Though we're pretty sure that time travelers don't exist, people were working on hypertext -- used by web browsers to retrieve connected information --

In the climactic scenes of the film Quadrophenia, based on The Who’s concept album, Jimmy (Phil Daniels) rides a prized Mod scooter along the cliffs at Beachy Head, East Sussex, before hurling it over the cliff on to the sea-lashed rocks below. It’s a symbolic end to Jimmy’s life as a Mod, as a follower believing in false idols, like his hero Ace Face (Sting) (whose scooter he stole), a local Mod leader, who turns out be nothing more than a bell-boy lackey. Jimmy’s fall is central to the film, and to Pete Townhend’s album. But Jimmy’s symbolic crash may have actually been inspired by the death of Mod teenager, Barry Prior in 1964.

Students are often disappointed by the mark they receive for their History essay. Not always. Sometimes they get a grade above what they were expecting - underestimating the nuance of their own wor...

Before the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop existed, a small group of engineers and producers inside the BBC pioneered ‘synthetic music’ with the simplest of home-made electronic tools and analogue...

“I would say every artist is, in effect, trying to figure how the human race can be saved from itself. So in those days when we sang for the union workers, and today when I go around and sing on a picket line, I’m not really being all that different. Artists who say ‘We’re only interested in art for art’s sake’ are fooling themselves, I think.”

In 1902, a poet attempts to stage the world’s first “perfume concert.”

In 1836, three Scottish boys discovered a strange cache of miniature coffins concealed on a hillside above Edinburgh. Who put them there—and why?