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 diet recommendations; users also unlock badges, much like in Foursquare, to keep consumption competition high among friends (though some of the badges, like “Pizza Master,” seem contradictory to Foodzy’s mission). Read more at newyorker.com…
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 the DUMBO Arts Festival on September 23rd. A thirty-foot-long Dumpster serves as the items’ exhibition space; each will be numbered, and a mobile app will allow visitors to access their stories. Until then, Premo’s funny, and often surprisingly moving, eulogies are available on the project’s blog. Read more at newyorker.com…
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 musician who, depending on your view of art and the necessity of an audience, is either a failure or a genius, someone who creates for the sake of creation itself and who documents his life as it could have been—should have been?—in his Chronicles. Denise writes:
By 2004 Nick had thirty-odd volumes of the Chronicles (going back to 1978 officially; unofficially they were retrofitted back to 1973 with the rise of [Nik’s band] the Demonics). They were all written exclusively by him. They are the history of his music, his bands, his albums, his reviews, his interviews. He made his chronicles—scrapbooks, really—thick, clip-filled things. He wrote under so many different aliases, from his fan club president to his nemesis.…I am only tangentially part of the Chronicles. They are truly all about Nik. When I am mentioned, it is largely as part of events invented by Nik.
To present myself with a counterargument: in writing the Chronicles, is Nik really saying that they represent an unrealized and idealized version of his life? Does that mean they’re less authentic than reality, or more so? If I had stuck with ballet lessons when I was a kid, I might right now be the famous dancer I was meant to be (then again, I’m six feet tall, so probably not). But I could write about a life in which it happened. It could be fun. Read more at newyorker.com…
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 computers, smartphones, and Internet-enabled home-audio systems, though access is tied to its subscription model: paying $4.99 a month gets rid the advertisements that fuel the free version, and paying $9.99 a month allows for mobile play as well as offline listening. Read more at newyorker.com…
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 its data. Additionally, there are plans to incorporate grocery-store reward cards—currently, only D’Agostino, in New York, is on board—which will give shoppers recipes based on purchased items. Read more at newyorker.com…
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.” So basically, I still win.
But “The Curfew” is next on the list. I even wrote the title down on a scrap of paper and stuck it in my wallet, for I am old-fashioned like that.
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 of the site’s creator, Mike Bodge; a program then analyzes the image and converts it into its average color hex number. Read more at newyorker.com…
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 1950 trips, rare photos, documentary Beat footage, and reproductions of the the original draft. Read more at newyorker.com…
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 by the authors; users also can browse by subject and create reading lists, with books available for download for offline reading. Read more at newyorker.com…
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 as an encyclopedia than a dictionary, with extensive entries that reflect the advances in archeology over the decades since the project began, in 1921. Read more at newyorker.com…