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Home Audio Episode 79: 1968 at 50

Episode 79: 1968 at 50

There’s a lot of looking back on 1968 this year, celebrating the 50th anniversary of everything from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Prague Spring to the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In remembering a year with so much upheaval, Michael says:

maybe it’s meant to be almost reassuring that certain things that seem unique and uniquely troubling in our current era are things that we’ve encountered and endured and moved beyond.

And Jessica adds:

I also think we didn’t realize then how the things that were happening then would affect us. 1968 was the first year that Yale admitted women, I later went to Yale as a woman right? I moved two years later to Paris with my family and the 1968 May riots in Paris had a huge impact

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By Michael Bierut & Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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