Jennifer 8. Lee is a New York Times reporter, blogger and author best known for her writing about technology, immigrants and contemporary culture. She talks about how a lot of food that we think of as ‘Chinese’ is actually thoroughly American in origin.
Lee’s first book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles — which quickly climbed to [...]
…with Cory Kelley’s “Ars Magna”, a 7-minute short film about the beauty of obsessive anagramming with anagrammer Cory Calhoun. Check back for more short films in the near future.
In the years following 1991’s Tailhook scandal, Frontline did an extensive doc on the Navy’s position; it included this interview with Sen. John McCain about his take on Tailhook and how the Navy handled it. More…
The Medal of Honor has been awarded to 3,440 individuals who went above and beyond the call of duty. In honor of New York City’s Fleet Week and Memorial Day, read the stories of a few naval heroes…
What does it feel like when your submarine launches a ballistic missile? When you finally earn your Dolphins, the submariner’s equivalent of pilot’s wings? When you find yourself heading to Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis? When your sub accidentally dives below its maximum test depth? Hear nine tales of former submariners about life underwater.
All ten episodes of Carrier, a reality/documentary about life aboard the USS Nimitz, are watchable online. Read descriptions of each episode here, and watch them online here.
Brooklyn Bridge was Ken Burn’s first film to be broadcast on PBS (1981) and it received an Academy Award nomination in 1982–it hasn’t been rebroadcast in years, but you can see two clips online.
At the time it was built, the 3,460-foot Brooklyn Bridge was crowned the longest suspension bridge in the world. Although it’s considered a brilliant feat of 19th-century engineering, problems plagued the Brooklyn Bridge before construction even began. Learn more.
Although he had been a member of the German SS and had used slave labor at Mittelwerk, the Nazi underground rocket facility, Wernher von Braun and his colleagues were embraced by the United States government and began working for the Army on rocket technology. Trace von Braun’s career in this interactive timeline.
New York City is the source for the quintessentially American traits of capitalism, ethnic tolerance, free speech, and reliance on lawyers and lawsuits. Yet the New York legacy generally goes unrecognized. How did New York come to have such a formative influence on the United States? And how did it manage to do so without [...]
