Utterly Right!

Most reasonably sized libraries have a shelf of “futuristic” books from the 1950s with titles such as “Into the Atomic Age” and “The World of Tomorrow.” If you leaf through a few of them, you quickly notice each of these books says more about the times in which it was written than about the times it was meant to foretell. Flip a few pages and you’ll find a drawing of a housewife with a Donna Reed hairdo and a poodle skirt flitting about her atomic kitchen, waiting for the sound of her husband’s rocket car before getting the tuna casserole on the table. Flip a few more and you’ll see a sketch of a modern city under a glass dome, complete with nuclear trains, antigravity cars, and well-dressed citizens gliding smoothly to work on conveyor-belted sidewalks. You will also notice that some things are missing. The men don’t carry babies, the women don’t carry briefcases, the children don’t have pierced eyebrows and tattoos, and the…