a necessarily incomplete list of things that enthrall me right now
The Manhattan Project
Area 51
Lockheed’s Skunk Works
The SR-71 Blackbird stealth bomber
Aurignacian cave painting
French archaeology
The urbanization of China
John Maynard Keynes
Cambridge Spies
The history of thalidomide
Delia Derbyshire
The plays of Alan Bennett
The plays of Michael Frayn
Ecotopias
Tony Judt’s Postwar
#riotwombles
I guess the linking theme is the long 20th Century. The cave paintings are older, obviously, but they were properly *noticed* at the end of the 19thC and have been fetishized ever since.
More specifically I seem to be picking at something about the way our tools transform and deform us. The limits of our imagination and the unintended consequences of ideology. Also: hope.