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September 6, 2022 Miss Rosen

📷: ART IS THE WORD by ALIVE 5 (1981) © Martha Cooper For some, the prestige of working at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History might be a lifelong goal, but Martha Cooper felt cooped up working behind a desk cataloging artifacts day in, day out. She yearned for freedom, action, and adventure — the […]

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August 22, 2022 Chris FREEDOM Pape

RIFF 170 expanding the boundaries of what piecing could be in 1973. 📷: Erik Calonius “Everything is connected to everything else. Urban clutter is connected to air pollution, to noise, to foul water. Agri-business is connected to the use of pesticides. Lifestyles are connected to solid wastes. And, so on.” Those were the guidelines the […]

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August 15, 2022 Bucky Turco

Above: Tony Hawk’s first skateboard. (📷: National Museum of American History) In the newish Tony Hawk documentary, the often-spotted but identity-mistaken skater casually mentions how he donated his first skateboard to the Smithsonian. It was a “Bahne skateboard with red Stoker urethane wheels on metal trucks” according to its listing in the government’s colossal collection […]

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August 1, 2022 Bucky Turco

📷: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Decades ago, when American kids started engaging in wildly interesting and fun new activities such as skateboarding, graffiti, rapping, breakdancing and gaming, the media struggled in its attempt to define these emerging subcultures. Many of the vintage articles on these subjects share some common threads: they’re typically condescending, alarmist, and […]

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June 13, 2022 Bucky Turco

It’s been over a year and a half since recreational weed was officially legalized in New York and there are still lots of things being ironed out and regulations being written, but here’s where we stand as of summer 2022:  Who Can Use It and How Much Can They Possess? Lawmakers wrote in a few […]

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