Personal trainers like to incentivize. The promise of a glass of wine, the mention of a bikini—all work to keep you moving when you’d rather drop. Foodzy, a new health Web site and app, claims to motivate in similarly rewarding ways. Users enter the foods they eat, and Foodzy turns that data into weight and […]
Author Archives: Sally
Dumpster Dive
For decades, the Brooklyn-based artist Mac Premo has collected objects—old cell phones, baseball-ticket stubs, a friend’s extracted wisdom teeth—for use in his collages. When a move to a smaller studio required him to thin out his collection, Premo incorporated the four hundred downsized items into a piece called “The Dumpster Project,” which will debut at […]
Altered States
When Macy introduced this month’s Book Club selection, “Stone Arabia,” she mentioned its focus on the ideas of memory, time, and art. For me, the thread stringing these themes together was authenticity (a sentiment shared by Alex Shephard over at Full Stop, who has a great Q. & A. with Dana Spiotta). Nik is a […]
Spot On
On July 14th, music went further into the cloud with the U.S. launch of Spotify, a music-streaming service that has enjoyed success in Europe—it launched in Sweden in 2008—and seems, after signing up more than seventy thousand paying American subscribers in its first week, poised to do the same here. The application is available for […]
Kitchen Aid
Is your kitchen less than fully stocked? Do you have a particular craving? Enter Gojee, a newly launched recipe site that takes your limited specifications—a taste for basil, or an inventory of the few ingredients you have on hand—and gives you the recipes, along with beautiful photographs, from the food blogs that supply Gojee with […]
Reading List
Yesterday I stopped at a bookstore and found myself completely unable to remember the name of “The Curfew,” a novel reviewed in last week’s Brieflier Noted. “There’s a puppet? Or, like, maybe a kid? On the cover?” My awesome clues didn’t get the salespeople very far, and I walked out instead with “The Tiger’s Wife.” […]
Sky’s the Limit
The Internet has no shortage of ways to report the status of the elements, including The Fucking Weather and Is It Iced Coffee Weather? Recently, New York City residents were introduced to an aesthetically pleasing option: N SKY C uploads a photograph of the city’s sky every five minutes, as taken from outside the office […]
Road Work
In 1947, Jack Kerouac took the first of three trips that would inform “On the Road,” the 1957 novel that defined the Beat movement. Recently, Penguin reissued the book as an “amplified edition,” and the app includes pages from Kerouac’s travel journals, letters between Kerouac and his editors, interactive maps of the 1947, 1949, and […]
British Reserves
Recently, the British Library announced its 19th Century Historical Collection app for the iPad, which features scanned copies of more than a thousand nineteenth-century books—all of which are in the public domain—and includes classic novels as well as works on philosophy, science, and history. Original maps and illustrations are highlighted, as are marginalia and inscriptions […]
First Words
Earlier this month, the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute announced the completion of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the result of ninety years of research on the language and dialects of ancient Mesopotamia. The work’s basic language, Akkadian, dates to the twenty-fourth century B.C., and the twenty-one volumes—the first of which was published in 1956—function more […]