Doubling up on the tabloids, we have an issue of the low-rent Candid Press, published yesterday in 1968. The centerpiece story about “Marlene” tells how she got pregnant after a year of having sex with her brother. Incest was a popular subject in the tabs around this time, but we’ve learned that there’s an inverse relationship between the number of exclamation marks in a story and its level of truthfulness. This sentence alone tells us Marlene is pure fiction: “Incest has reached a point where a pregnant girl does not know who fathered her baby—her boyfriend or her dad!” That’s journalism, people.
1935—Parker Brothers Buys Monopoly
The board game company Parker Brothers acquires the forerunner patents for Monopoly from Elizabeth Magie, who had designed the game (originally called The Landlord’s Game) to demonstrate the economic ill effects of land monopolism and the use of land value tax as a remedy for them. Parker Brothers quickly turns Monopoly into the biggest selling board game in America.