Thread by @rebecca_altman

Time Capsules, a thread & a rabbit hole --

So many wonderful pieces on time capsules were companions while writing about the Westinghouse time capsules for @aeonmag -- wanted to share them here, beginning w/ @MatthewBattles piece, also for Aeon, The Ache for Immortality [next]

Here, @MatthewBattles describes time capsules as "a compound of the Quixotic and Ozymandian" -- and also lays out the fascination w/ the "message in the bottle" when often it is the bottle that is the message:
aeon.co/essays/voyager…

Don't miss this minidoc about love, humanity and the twin Voyager missions and their Golden Records --

The Voyagers by @lennypane featured via @aeonmag
aeon.co/videos/a-film-…

(Also h/t @brainpicker) See write-up here: brainpickings.org/2011/12/27/the…

Over the years, @TheAtlantic has pub'd some thoughtful pieces on time capsules, too:

This one (from 1987) by the sociologist Albert Bergesen:
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

And another by Erik Rangno (215) The Paradox of Time Capsules:
theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

I learned a lot about de facto time capsules from @rznagle -- who taught me about Robert Moses & how the site of the 1939/40 + 1964/5 New York World's Fairs (Flushing Meadows) -- into which Westinghouse interred its 2 capsules -- is a time capsule itself. #discardstudies

Flushing Meadows was the former “Valley of Ashes,” described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby as “where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.” The fairgrounds were further backfilled w/ landfill (see: Benjamin Miller 2000. Fat of the Land).

“Trash was his first choice material for fill,” the NYU anthropologist @rznagle told me. One can bore into the Meadows just about anywhere and perhaps dig up as rich a narrative history of early 20th century New York as Westinghouse could ever have curated.

In fact, the Queens Museum once displayed bottles and doll heads and dish fragments surfaced through a hybrid art-archaeology project by the artist #MarkDion queensmuseum.org/2012/05/from-t… / END

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