Wish You Were Here, released in 1975, is Pink Floyd's ninth studio album. Its centrepiece, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, is a nine-part tribute to Syd Barrett, the band's co-founder who left after his mental health deteriorated. Barrett unexpectedly turned up at the studio during recording, and the band's own sense of loss runs through the record. Its lyrics are about longing, alienation and criticism of the music business, and the album used studio effects and synthesisers in the same way as The Dark Side of the Moon.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.