Agent Palmer

It took Marc Maron and his producer Brendan McDonald 3,478 days to amass 1,000 episodes of one of the most revered interview podcasts. That’s more than the twice a week release schedule that is now the norm for WTF with Marc Maron. Broken down that’s nine years, six months, and ten days, and more importantly, that’s 1,000 episodes of one of the mediums original pillars.

It’s easy to get caught up in the math.

“From the emergence of the first browser through the boom of social media, this fascinating history reveals how the internet changed everything we thought we knew about technologies–and ourselves.”

That first sentence from the inside cover flap explains in broad strokes what How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone is. But it is more than that.

Completing my read of Return to Earth by Buzz Aldrin and Wayne Warga also completed my own personal Apollo 11 trilogy of biographies/autobiographies of the three brave men who made that first trip.

What sets Aldrin’s book apart from the other two, is that while it tells his story it focuses more on feelings and his eventual spiral into, and battle with, depression. It overall is just as candid as Collin’s Carrying the Fire albeit more personal.

“The history of technology that you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers. But from the first computer programmer in the nineteenth century through the cyberpunk era of the 1990s, female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of tech and innovation. They’ve just been erased from the story—until now.”

In Claire L. Evans brilliant words “This book is about women,” but it also raises more questions about the marginalized and forgotten heroes of every revolution, not just the digital one that brought about the Internet.