80s News Today

(The wind howls outside, a mournful, hungry sound. It rattles the windowpanes of this old house, sounding like the ghost of a thousand drowned men. And tonight, friends, tonight it brings to mind a story, a true story, of two ships, too much ambition, and the unforgiving maw of the Bering Sea. Pull up a chair, won't you? It gets cold out there, and some stories are best told with the chill of dread pressing at your back.) In the winter of '83, a cold, hard year that felt like the earth itself was holding its breath, two ships vanished. Not just any ships, mind you. These weren't rickety old trawlers held together with spit and baling wire. These were the Americus and the Altair , twin sisters, state-of-the-art beauties, the pride of Anacortes, Washington. Steel behemoths, designed to conquer the brutal, bottomless pockets of the Bering Sea and bring home the king's ransom in crab. They were strong, they were fast, and they were, everyone thought, damn near unsinkable. ...

The morning of January 28th, 1986, was cold. Too cold. A bone-biting, rivet-popping cold that had no business lingering on the Florida coast. But there it was, a grim, unwelcome guest, making the breath steam in front of your face and frosting the windshields of every car from Cocoa Beach to Orlando. You could feel it in your teeth, that cold, a deep ache that seemed to hint at something wrong. Down at Cape Canaveral, the space shuttle Challenger sat on the pad, a gleaming white needle against a sky that was too blue, too clear, too innocent. Inside, seven souls were strapped in, ready to punch a hole in that perfect sky and ride a controlled explosion into the heavens. Among them was Christa McAuliffe, the teacher. The everywoman. The smiling face that made it all seem so close, so real, so possible. America watched. We always did, back then. We gathered around our televisions, in classrooms and living rooms, sipping coffee or juice, a collective gasp of anticipation held tight in our...

BOOM! It wasn't just a sound; it was the crack of a decade, the rupture in the fabric of the Eighties, a singular, searing moment in the supernova life of the greatest pop star the world had ever known. We were talking Michael Jackson , folks, and the stage was set, not for another moonwalk, but for a blaze that would forever scar the King of Pop and, in a strange, twisted way, brand the very soul of an era.  The date? January 27, 1984. The locale? That venerable temple of tinsel, the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, where the air shimmered with ambition and the scent of hairspray. This wasn’t just another gig; this was Pepsi, the other cola, the upstart, the challenger to that venerable brown baron, Coca-Cola. And Michael? He wasn't just endorsing; he was embodying the brand. He was the bolt of lightning in a bottle, the pure, uncut sugar rush that Pepsi needed to go toe-to-toe with the behemoth. Remember the "Choice of a New Generation"? Nonsense! It was the Choice...

It was January 15, 1986, and the sky over America had been open for a long time—too long, some said. The big white dishes in backyards from Maine to Malibu had been drinking in the signals like thirsty men at an open bar, pulling down movies and boxing matches and late-night specials from satellites that didn't care who was watching. HBO and Cinemax had been up there, naked and unashamed, beaming their treasures to anyone with a dish and a dream. No locks. No keys. Just the cold beauty of open transmission. Then came the day the locks turned. HBO and Cinemax, you see, they weren't happy about all those freeloaders. They’d been bleeding money, like a wound that won’t quite close, every time a dish owner snagged their programming without subscribing. For years, the sky had been an open buffet. If you had a satellite dish in your backyard, you were a god. You reached up and plucked Ghostbusters or Gremlins right out of the ether, free as a summer breeze. HBO and Cinemax were t...

One must pause, occasionally, in the relentless, illogical march of human history, to appreciate moments of truly splendid absurdity. And few moments in the mid-1980s achieved such a perfectly poised balance of brilliance, frustration, and sheer, delightful pointlessness as the saga of Kit Williams' Masquerade . And so, on January 13, 1987, the peculiar, tantalizing aroma of a mystery—already famously solved, mind you, but more on that later—wafted across the Atlantic to the unsuspecting shores of America. This was the day Schocken Books released the American special edition of Masquerade. Now, Masquerade was not a normal book. Most books are content to sit on a shelf and be read, occasionally serving as a coaster or a way to level a wobbly table. Masquerade was different. It was a book that actively encouraged you to leave your house, buy a shovel, and dig up large portions of the English countryside in search of an 18-carat golden hare. The American edition, published years after...

Do you see them? These are the new wizards, the digital alchemists of Access Software out in the suburban sprawl of Salt Lake City. And what have they conjured up for the winter of 1984? They call it Raid Over Moscow. Picture the scene: It is January. The sky is the color of a bruised plum. In every split-level ranch from Levittown to Palo Alto, the Commodore 64—that beige breadbox of destiny, that 64-kilobyte marvel of the New Era—groans with the weight of the Apocalypse. And there it is on the screen! The Great Bear itself! The USSR! Only they aren't playing fair, are they? The storyline tells us the U.S. has dismantled its nukes—The Great Disarmament!—and now the Soviets, those "deceitful aggressors," have launched a sneak attack! Your mission? Not just to defend, but to STRIKE BACK!  You aren't just a boy in a striped velour shirt anymore. You are a Stealth Pilot! You guide your craft out of the hangar—taps, nudges, frantic stick-wiggling—trying not to scrape the ...

Managua, January 10, 1985 The tropical sun dipping low over the Plaza de la Revolución, that vast concrete expanse named for the very upheavals that birthed it, now thrumming with the electric hum of a new era. There he was, Daniel Ortega Saavedra , all of 39 years old, stepping up to the podium like a matador in olive drab, the guerrilla turned statesman, the former bank-robbing revolutionary now draped in the blue-and-white presidential sash over his fatigues—yes, fatigues!—as if to say, "Comrades, the fight goes on, but now with ballots and briefcases!" He sports those signature oversized spectacles—thick, dark frames that give him the look of a militant librarian who has just finished shelving the works of Marx and is now ready to seize the means of production. Around him, the plaza is a sea of red and black—the colors of the FSLN—waving, snapping, popping in the heat. It is a tableau of the New Left’s wildest dreams. You can practically smell the mixture of diesel exhaus...

Let us journey back to January 8, 1981, to a place in France so delightfully obscure it practically begged for something utterly out of the ordinary to happen: Trans-en-Provence. Now, Trans-en-Provence is, by all accounts, a perfectly normal, entirely un-interstellar sort of village. The kind of place where the biggest excitement is probably a well-baked baguette or a spirited debate about the correct ripeness of cheese. So, you can imagine the sheer, unadulterated bafflement that must have descended upon Monsieur Renato Nicolai, a gentleman of a robust seventy-five years, when his otherwise unremarkable day took a turn for the cosmically peculiar. Mr Nicolai, being a practical sort, was not the type to gaze at the stars pondering the meaning of life; he was more concerned with whether the pump would survive another Provençal winter. Life, for him, was straightforward: earth, sky, cheese, occasional glass of rosé. Then came the whistle. Not a particularly dramatic whistle, mind you...

On the eve of 1985—December 31, 1984, to be precise—the guardians of law and order across this great land of the free were clutching their mimeographed bulletins like talismans against the darkness, warning of impending "occult activity" and "blood rituals" beneath the turning of the calendar. Police departments, those bastions of pragmatic authority, circulated dire memos about gatherings in remote woods, animal mutilations, and the ever-popular human sacrifice, all supposedly timed to the infernal clock of some fabricated Satanic calendar. New Year's Eve, they claimed, was a night of "revels," "blood rites," and high witchcraft—perfect for luring the unsuspecting into the flames. The bulletins started quiet, a murmur in the police scanner's static, then louder, typed out on cheap paper in police stations from Des Moines to Eureka, tacked up next to lost dog posters. Beware, they whispered. Beware of unusual activity. Beware of gathering...

Good heavens. December in the U.K. A time for mince pies, questionable knitwear, and the perennial British tradition of watching ghost stories and The Great Escape on the BBC. But in December 1980, something rather less traditional decided to drop in on the proceedings. Not a forgotten Christmas present, you understand, but a rather large, presumably confused, and altogether unidentifiable flying object. The setting, naturally, was Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. Because where else would a genuinely baffling extraterrestrial encounter take place but in a rather damp, entirely unremarkable patch of woodland adjacent to two highly secret NATO airbases? It's like finding a sentient trug in your garden shed; utterly illogical, yet somehow, perfectly British. Chapter 1: The Torchlight Tour of Utter Bewilderment The whole thing kicked off, as these things often do, with a peculiar light. Not a car headlight, nor the distant glint of a particularly enthusiastic disco ball, but something......

My dear readers, let us cast our minds back, if you will, to that frigid Saturday in December, the twenty-second of the month, 1984. The very air of Manhattan, crisp and brittle as a dried leaf, crackled with that peculiar, electric tension—a subterranean thrum, really—that only a city teetering on the precipice of its own magnificent chaos can truly generate. Ah, New York! A symphony of grime and glitter, a dazzling, dangerous carnival where every denizen, from the haughty Beekman Place dowager to the denizen of the deepest, graffiti-scarred subway car, played their part in the grand, cacophonous opera of urban life. On this particular day, our stage was set in the very bowels of Gotham, a downtown No. 2 express rumbling south, rattling its way from Fourteenth Street to Chambers. And who, pray tell, was our unlikely protagonist? Not some gilded titan of Wall Street, nor a strutting denizen of Studio 54, but a small, bespectacled engineer, a man of modest means and—it would soon become...

December 19, 1986. In the mall cineplex, the air was thick with the smell of butter-drenched popcorn and the looming dread of the Reagan era’s shiny, plastic patriotism. Then the lights died, the screen flickered to life, and suddenly we weren't in a cinema anymore. We were in the Green Inferno. We were in the mud. We were in the absolute, gibbering madness of Vietnam. Oliver Stone—a man who actually crawled through the tall grass with a rifle in his hand and the smell of cordite in his lungs—decided to drop a napalm canister right on the doorstep of the American Dream. He gave us Platoon . This wasn't Top Gun . There were no gleaming white teeth or volleyball montages here. No, man. This was a high-octane descent into the soul of a generation that got chewed up and spat out by the military-industrial complex. It was a war between two fathers: Barnes, the scarred, psychotic god of death, and Elias, the pot-smoking, Christ-like ghost of a conscience that never had a chance. Char...

A decade of neon and pastel got off to a much darker start when America failed to get out of its first year without the shocking loss of John Lennon . The creative giant and political activist was gunned down outside his New York City apartment building on the evening of December 8, 1980, in an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a government conspiracy, complete with an unconvincing patsy pulling the trigger. Lennon had been hounded by the FBI, and illegally by the CIA, since moving to the United States. The powers-that-be feared his potential influence on elections, particularly among younger voters. Gunman Mark David Chapman remains in prison, serving a 20-years-to-life sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman, New York. He has been denied parole all fourteen times he has been eligible for it. His explanation for killing Lennon, who was only 40 at the time, doesn't add up. He claimed on the one hand that he was obsessed with what he thought was Lennon...

One of the greatest moments of the 1980s came to pass on a Sunday, November 22, 1987. It was the kind of evening where the wind off Lake Michigan could slice right through you, promising a bitter winter. Inside, folks were tucked in, probably nursing a last cup of coffee or a beer, watching the flickering blue light of the television. Television, you see, is a comfort. A numbing hum. It tells you stories you expect, sells you things you don’t need, and keeps the darkness at bay. A familiar voice telling you the news or a beloved alien doctor battling some rubber-suited menace. It's a guardian, a promise of order in a chaotic world. That night, the promise broke. Channel 9, WGN, was running its nine o’clock news. Then the picture stuttered. Just a hiccup. Snow for half a heartbeat. You’ve seen that a thousand times, right? Bad antenna, Russian satellite, whatever. You reach for the vertical hold. But this time, the picture didn’t come back right. It came back wrong. A face filled th...

November 8, 1988. The very air itself, brothers and sisters, was thick with it! Not just the usual whiff of stale ambition and light beer that hangs over every American election, no sir. This was the culmination, the apotheosis, the very zing! of the Age of Reagan, now metastasizing, transforming, elevating itself into something else. Something…Bush! Yes, George Herbert Walker Bush ! The man, the myth, the scion of privilege with the patrician grin, the tennis whites, the entire gestalt of New England rectitude mixed with a Texas drawl as authentic as a Hollywood stagecoach. And what a stage it was! The nation, awash in the glow of Morning in America, flush with material prosperity, high on the sheer, unadulterated chutzpah of eight years of Reaganomics!  The stock market was roaring, the Soviets were…well, they were still the Soviets, but they seemed to be doing it with a little less conviction, a little more glasnost! America felt good, damn good! And into this fertile, ego-stro...

November 4, 1988. Mark that date in your calendars with a big red Sharpie, because that’s the day John Carpenter’s masterpiece THEY LIVE hit theaters and ripped the mask off the New World Order like a chainsaw through a copy of Das Kapital . The plot? Simple, and frankly, disturbing: A drifter named Nada, played by professional wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, a real guy in a fake world, finds a pair of sunglasses that expose the truth about who really runs the show. These aren't just any Ray-Bans, oh no. These are truth-seeing glasses. And when he puts them on, what does he see? He sees the world for what it truly is. He sees the subliminal messages plastered on billboards, on magazines, on television screens: "OBEY," "CONSUME," "DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY!" They're everywhere, folks, brainwashing you, programming you, turning you into compliant sheep. When Nada looks at the people in power with the glasses on, the ones pulling the strings,...

Bay Lake, Florida - October 1, 1982: It isn't a theme park, you understand. No, it's a prototype! A PROTOTYPE!!! That's the whole Big Idea, isn't it? That's the whole high-falutin' gambit, the whole, shimmering, fantastic notion of it all, that this is not some Mickey Mouse operation, not some tacky amusement park...it's EPCOT! EPCOT Center , the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a name so grandiose it sounds like it was cooked up in a Pentagon war room or a Silicon Valley fever dream. But no! This is Walt Disney’s brainchild, or at least the ghost of it, rising from the ashes of his 1966 blueprints, now spun into a $1 billion extravaganza of glass domes, monorails, and utopian promises. EPCOT, nestled in the swampy, alligator-adjacent sprawl of Walt Disney World, is not so much a theme park as it is an idea—a bold, slightly-unhinged vision of a future where technology, optimism, and overpriced churros can coexist in harmony.  The gates swing ope...

The city, she’s a greedy old sow, and she’s always hungry. You think she cares about your memories? Your first Christmas window display, your mother’s perfume counter? Forget it. The city just wants what’s next. Thirty-eight years ago, on a crisp fall day that promised nothing but the usual urban squalor, a great hole opened up in Herald Square. On September 28, 1986, the lights went out. The doors locked. The escalators froze. Gimbels , that sprawling giant at 33rd Street and Broadway, was dead. And if you listen close, on a foggy New York night, you might still hear the echoes of its final day, like a ghost rattling its chains in the dark. The liquidation sale had been a cruel, lingering wound. People, with that particular vulture-like hunger that comes from thinking you’re getting something for nothing, had picked the store’s bones clean. They’d walked out with cheap toasters and discount sweaters, like little parasites carrying away their last bits of carrion. But even in their tri...

ZAP! POW! WHAM! On this fine morning of September 15, 1982, the newsstands of America shuddered under the weight of a new beast, a Technicolor dream machine called USA Today , bursting forth like a firework blast against a gray flannel sky. A nation of movers and shakers, of transient souls in Holiday Inn suites and airport lounges, finally got its own paper, a paper of the HOTELS, the AIRPORTS and the INTERSTATES! A paper for THEM! The ones who didn’t have time to slog through the leaden, beige columns of the Gray Lady. The ones who wanted their news like their Big Macs, FAST and HOT! Forget the monocolor, the staid, the ponderous pronouncements of the Old Guard dailies, those venerable, ink-stained monuments to textual heft. This, this thing – this USA Today – it was different. It practically shouted its difference, not with stentorian tones but with a vibrant, audacious burst of COLOR! The cognoscenti, the old-guard newspaper boys from The Washington Post and The New York Times , t...