Have you ever seen those viral images on Twitter or Facebook that show Time magazine covers warning of global cooling ? I see them at least a few times a month, but I’m never sure whether they’re r...

If you came across the photo above, you probably wouldn’t think it was too consequential in the grand scheme of world events. But this photo is indeed historic. That man, sitting in the back of a wood...

Physical media is an endangered species, with laserdiscs, DVDs, and even Blu-Rays joining the ranks of once-futuristic technology we don’t see much anymore. But the idea of playing a physical disk to ...

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of futuristic newspaper comics from the 20th century. Strips like Our New Age by Athelstan Spilhaus and Closer Than We Think by Arthur Radebaugh are absolute...

Will Iran obtain a nuclear weapon? That's the hot-button question for the U.S. government as the United Nations General Assembly  meets in New York  this week. No one knows for sure, (except...

At the turn of the 20th century, one-third of all cars produced in the U.S. were electric. By the 1920s, gasoline-powered cars had grown to dominate the market because they offered greater range and s...

Back in 1975, life expectancy in the U.S. was just 63.6 years for men and 72.3 for women, according to government statistics . The country has made significant progress since then, with the latest fi...

What will the future look like in the year 2025? It was a question about the distant future for those of us who were alive to remember the 20th century. But now that we’re a few weeks into that year, ...

Back in 2014, I gave a talk at UCLA about the future of money that’s funny to think about now. Well, technically it was about the paleo -future of money. But the topic was particularly relevant in th...

The future can be presented in a lot of ways. Sometimes we imagine it in the darkest of terms, a dystopian hellscape that shocks our sense of safety, making us fearful about what’s to come. Other time...

Elon Musk spent at least $250 million to help re-elect Donald Trump as president this year, making him one of the most powerful oligarchs the U.S. has ever seen. Trump is a fascist and Musk unabashe...

On the morning of July 18, 1889, Professor Edward D. Hogan went up in what can only be described for the time as a futuristic piece of airship technology, launching from Brooklyn, New York. Hogan had ...

The U.S. and Canada both have long histories of forced sterilizations for people deemed “undesirable.” Roughly 70,000 Americans were sterilized in the 20th century, according to official figures , wi...

Old futures are filled with ridiculous contraptions for getting around. You’ve got the automobile-powered yacht , the enormous four-legged mech-pedicab , and the gyroscopic rocket car , just to nam...

Many Americans celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow will have a meal centered around  Ben Franklin’s favorite bird  — the turkey. But if this cartoon from the September 19, 1926  Ogden Sta...

The February 17, 1962 issue of the Sunday comic strip Our New Age envisioned the fantastic advancements that the introduction of satellites would allow.

Time capsules are fascinating to me. They can be incredibly boring, as people often stuff them with rather mundane items like coins, American flags, and bibles. But every once in a while they can be t...

Time capsules are fascinating to me. They can be incredibly boring, as people often stuff them with rather mundane items like coins, American flags, and bibles. But every once in a while they can be t...

Soaring through the clouds in 1925, passengers on an Imperial Airways flight traveling over Germany were treated to a brand new novelty—one of the first in-flight movies. Even more astounding? The fil...

We often think of the internet as a piece of infrastructure that cannot be changed. But people built the internet and all the devices we use to connect ourselves to it. People made conscious choices a...

The year 2006 wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things. But when you look back at the predictions of that time, it’s an interesting year, if only because it was just before the mainstream ex...

U.S. senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was asked on the radio program “Who Said That?” in 1949 what she’d do if she woke up in the White House one day. The senator replied: “Well, I’d go straig...

When I look back at the The Jetsons, a show that debuted in 1962 and lasted just one season during its first run, it’s easy to see how it inspired so many visions of the future that would occur in t...

Last week OpenAI rolled out its new virtual assistant, dubbed Advanced Voice Mode, that allows users to have a conversation with an AI bot. There’s some controversy about the technology, not least b...

When the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles featured a new “coffee robot” in October 1967, the newspapers covering it sounded both excited and terrified.

The astronauts who are currently stuck in space thanks to Boeing's little mishaps will soon be voting in the upcoming U.S. presidential election between vice president Kamala Harris and convicted fe...

When companies rolled out their latest technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2010, the most exciting new product on offer was the 3D-TV. Sony showed off the 3D-TV like it was the...

The state of Illinois’ mobile crime lab was a 16-ton law enforcement vehicle that traveled the state in the 1940s, showing off the latest technology to police that was supposedly going to help them ...

The world of organ transplants has come so far since the year 1954 when a kidney was transplanted between twins. But if you take a look at the predictions of the late 20th century, we’re not nearly ...

Back in 1995, astronomer Carl Sagan wrote a book called Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, about rational thinking and his fears for the future of the U.S. and the world. One of S...

It can be easy to forget just how popular the monorail was as an idea long before the 1950s and 60s. The second half of the 19th century saw plenty of experiments with single-track mass transportati...

From the perspective of the 2020s, it’s easy to believe the internet was the most revolutionary technology ever invented. But I’d argue that the tech being developed 100 years ago was just as exciti...

It’s a weird feeling to suddenly have hope. And given the incredible vibe shift in American politics during the past week, it’s helping me better understand visions of the future. Hope is a strange ...

It was a chilly winter’s day on January 14, 2004 when President George W. Bush gave a speech at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC to lay out his administration’s latest goals for the future of spa...

Humans have loved their dogs ever since they were first domesticated roughly 18,000 years ago. But that incredibly long journey through time has given us a wide variety of dog breeds, from enormous ...

What will the legal system of the future look like? That was the question tackled in a 1950s article about the future. And while they didn’t predict just how extreme America’s legal landscape would ...

The fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a very odd event for Americans who had grown up spending all or most of their lives worried about the Communist threat. Suddenly ma...

G. Gordon Liddy is best remembered today as an architect of the Watergate break-in who, after a few years in prison, turned his infamy into a lucrative conservative media career. But Liddy seemed to...

I was recently doing some quick searches through Newspapers.com in an effort to track down information about an old newspaper comic. And then I found myself distracted by what seemed like an odd con...

Going to the right college is the surest shot at American success. The group most likely to be making America’s decisions in the year 2024 are the freshmen entering Harvard, Yale and a few other sch...

What will the world look like 50 years into the future? That was the question posed in 1930 to 25 faculty members at Long Island University, along with five student leaders. Their responses were an ...

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of futuristic newspaper comics from the 20th century. Strips like Our New Age by Athelstan Spilhaus and Closer Than We Think by Arthur Radebaugh are absolutely fas...

I’ve long been interested in utopian societies and the way that cults often develop as people try to build a more perfect way to organize their lives. Back in 2014, I wrote two articles about Synano...

There’s a scene early in the new film Civil War that probably won’t strike many people as weird, but it stuck out to me like a sore thumb. Journalists are sitting in the lobby of a New York hotel ta...

The January 5, 1941 issue of American Weekly magazine, which was included with the Sunday edition of many newspapers across the U.S., made a pretty bold promise about how people of the 21st century ...

From the perspective of 2024, The Case Against Brooklyn (1958) isn’t a particularly scandalous movie. But it was so hated by American politicians that they wanted to make sure people outside the U.S...

Vernor Vinge, a sci-fi author and former math professor at San Diego State University, died on Wednesday at the age of 79. Vinge will be remembered for his sci-fi novels, including Fire Upon the Dee...

What will TV technology look like in 20 years? That was the question tackled by TV Guide in 1964, when it imagined enormous flat-screen monitors, up-to-the-minute “instant news,” and user-created me...

Thomas Edison was a celebrated inventor who was constantly asked by members of the press about his thoughts on technology and the future. And while Edison was often filled with predictions that turn...