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Alexis Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal - Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
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The New York Observer calls him, "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." Madrigal co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.

He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).

Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.
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Old, Weird Tech: Plastic Snowstorm Face Protectors

By Alexis Madrigal

Aug 24 2010, 7:31 PM ET Comment

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While trolling the Internet for photos to illustrate an upcoming story, I came across this particular failed experiment in headgear. We have little information about what's going on other than what's provided in the Netherlands Nationaal Archief's bibliographic record. It indicates that we're looking at "Plastic face protection from snowstorms. Canada, Montreal, 1939." In Dutch, these things have a name: Plastic sneeuwstormbeschermer.

The triangular plastic snouts also make the young ladies appear to be fans of the Manichean main characters from that staple of Mad Magazine, Spy vs Spy.


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