August 19, 2026

FIFTY CAMERAS IN THE DARK: How the First Atomic Bomb Was Photographed.

At 5:29:45 in the morning on July 16, 1945, in a stretch of New Mexico desert the Spanish called the Jornada del Muerto, the sky turned brighter than the noon sun. Aimed at that flash, tucked into steel-and-lead bunkers and buried instrument boxes ringing a 100-foot tower, sat roughly fifty cameras. Most of the cameras were unmanned and triggered automatically, although Brixner personally occupied a tracking-camera position at North 10,000. Every one had been focused, loaded, and left in the dark hours earlier, wired to fire on a countdown, because no human eye could be trusted to catch what was about to happen and no photographer could survive standing close enough to try. The world has entered the nuclear age.

Those cameras had a job no camera had ever been asked to do. They had to record an event that had never been photographed, that was calculated to outshine the sun many times over, and that would be finished, in its most important moments, in a few thousandths of a second. The team that built the rig had no exposure to copy, no reference frame to trust, and exactly one chance. What they captured became some of the most reproduced photographs of the twentieth century, and, in a twist almost no one expects, the raw material a British physicist would later use to reverse-engineer the bomb’s secret yield from published pictures alone.

If you’re a photography buff, read the whole thing — unless you’re Tucker Carlson, of course: ‘Nuclear weapons were not created by human forces:’ Tucker Carlson faces ridicule over ‘demonic’ claims.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Progressives Really Struggling With the Idea the Right Got This Right.

It really is maddening over time to be part of this never ending game of media Calvinball. Sure, the right said Joe Biden was slipping for years, but even when it turns out they were absolutely right almost no one will admit that or remember it for next time. No one wants to talk about why the rest of the media dropped the ball either. And no matter how many cycles of this game we go through, right up to Jason Arday, the Left never can credit the right for just speaking the truth.

Needless to say, this is not a healthy media landscape. It’s a recipe for failure that always harms one side more than another. And that’s exactly the point. If they can’t have resistance journalism that demonizes the right and favors the left, many people would rather have no journalism at all.

If you think I’m overstating that, watch this clip.

Update: Another hot take suggesting the Guardian in particular should have just shut up and maybe never covered this at all.

When the Arday story breached the containment field of conservative-adjacent British media (the London Times and Telegraph, the Spectator, and Spiked) and crossed over to the Grauniad and American left-leaning publications such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, it was obvious it had serious legs. So no wonder the British left are having yet another case of autophagy:

Related:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Amazon to expand drone service to nearly 500 cities after targeting 1 million deliveries this year. “Amazon in 2024 received a critical greenlight from regulators to conduct long-range drone deliveries, and over the past year has expanded beyond initial markets near Dallas and Phoenix to 11 metro areas, with six other locations coming online soon. Residents in some of those markets continue to raise concerns about drone noise and privacy and how those issues could hurt property values.”

Very cool, but someday I’ll miss the nice driver who always brings treats for my dogs and asks how they’re doing.

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

BEEGE WELBORN: Totally Into the Way the Trump Cabinet Dogs Each Other, Even Over Cats.

I am absolutely bonkers for the way the Trump cabinet, every last one of them, is so comfortable in their own accomplished skins, and are such naturally good-humored, confident people that they can bang away at each other in public like long-lost brothers, yet no one dissolves into a snit fit, or leaks enraged texts to Nicholas Kristof about abuse.

They are flat-out hilarious in their own right.

Witness Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent (WOOF – gimme a moment here) as he effortlessly bodies churlish imp Robert Reich on X the other day.

Beege is having way too much fun today.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

PARTNERING 4-YEAR DEGREES AND WORKFORCE ED IN FLORIDA: “The broader policy lesson is that technical education should not be treated as a fallback for students who are not ‘college material.’” A thousand times yes, especially as we have made college increasingly intolerable for (and intolerant of) more and more people. Moreover, it seems to me that making Ivy Leaguers figure out how to fix a broken air conditioner as a condition of graduation would be doing them an enormous favor.

Posted at 1:42 pm by Robert Shibley

“CIVILIZATIONAL SEPPUKU VIA SUICIDAL EMPATHY,” INDEED:

Posted at 1:39 pm by Stephen Green

NOW, WE’VE LOST THOSE COMPUTERS WITH ALL OF THE 13TH CENTURY IN THEM. NOT MUCH IN THE CENTURY, JUST DANTE AND A FEW CORRUPT POPES, BUT IT’S SO DISTRACTING AND ANNOYING! TV Station in a Fight to Retrieve Its Archive After Cloud Company Went Bust.

A local TV station is in a messy situation after the cloud company it was using to store 70 years’ worth of archival material vanished.

Gizmodo reports that Nine PBS in St. Louis had a rolling annual contract with Open Source Storage (OSS), a cloud storage provider, but when the station went to renew the deal earlier this year, OSS didn’t respond.

On the day the contract expired, Nine PBS suddenly lost access to its data without any warning. That’s when staff there realized that OSS’s website was inactive and the state of Colorado listed the company as delinquent.

The station lost access to 50 terabytes of archival materials, which included all of its footage of historical events that have taken place in St. Louis.

Note that below the article are two news articles on “Sabrent’s New Thunderbolt Dock [Which] Features a 16TB SSD and Tons of Ports.” Three of those and the PBS station would have been pretty much set with their own in-house backup.

(Classical reference in headline.)

UPDATE: “A judge has ruled that St. Louis public television station Nine PBS can regain access to more than 50 terabytes of its archival material dating back to the 1950s.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

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