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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.

The First Frankenstein Film (1910)

By Alexis Madrigal
Nov 18 2010, 10:30 AM ET Comment

Open Culture dug up this wonderful gem from the Internet Archive's massive film collection. It's the very first adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and it happens to have been filmed at Edison's studios. Silent, grainy, and twelve-minutes long, this is certainly old and weird, so it's comforting that Frankenstein's monster looks like one of the Geico cavemen Walking Dead zombies.

100 years ago, J. Searle Dawley wrote and directed Frankenstein. It took him three days to shoot the short, 12-minute film (when most films were actually shot in just one day). It marked the first time that Mary Shelley's literary creation was adapted to film. And, somewhat notably, Thomas Edison had a hand (albeit it an indirect one) in making the film. The first Frankenstein was shot at Edison Studios, the production company owned by the famous inventor.

Read the full story at Open Culture.

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