Uptown is Upside Down: Remembering Harlem, when a sense of community trumped corporate greed. Keep reading …
In honor of the 15th anniversary of the release of Tamagotchi, Japanese company Bandai has produced a special edition model of the digital pet. The Tamagotchi ID L 15th Anniversary features a color screenand a range of different environments through which the creatures can travel. The device can connect wirelessly to other Tamagotchis to swap items or even date and marry each other. (via Designboom)
Fizzy Business
While the phrase “soda fountain” may conjure up a midcentury malt shop tableau—part Archie comic, part Happy Days—the roots of the American soda fountain run much deeper, and much darker. Carbonated water has been prized for its curative power for millennia, but commercial fountains, which claimed to artificially reproduce the benefits of spring waters, didn’t become widespread until the first quarter of the 19th century—and then were marketed primarily for their medicinal, not pleasure-giving, properties. In fact, it was because of soda water’s perceived therapeutic benefits that fountains ended up in drugstores.
It would be almost impossible to overstate the popularity of the soda fountain during its turn-of-the-century heyday: By the end of the 1800s, most U.S. towns contained at least one soda fountain (New York City alone is estimated to have had more than 670), and by 1920 their ranks had swelled to 125,000.
Can an industry so defined by the past have an innovative future? If Darcy O’Neil, the bartender and blogger behind the website Art of Drink, has a say, phosphates, lactarts, and other fountain drinks may soon enjoy a revival.
We never thought we would see it, but the world has birthed a retro-paving company. Miss the rustic look of small-town cobblestone streets? Now they can be mass-produced and laid out in an afternoon. Next up: nanobots that consume latent carbon dioxide to add flying buttresses to every building.
