If a seventy-fifth anniversary is honored with diamonds, how to mark the hundred and fiftieth? The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s answer: with a blog celebrating the ways in which the institution has shaped the art scene in Brooklyn and beyond since it was founded, in 1861. The blog, which has been in beta until this […]
Category Archives: Quick Picks
Pintsize Presidential
At the Political Scene, The New Yorker’s new hub for campaign coverage, the magazine’s staff writers follow the day-to-day drama of the 2012 Presidential election. It’s educational, to be sure, but budding political junkies might want to start with a new app from Encyclopedia Britannica: “Britannica Kids: U.S. Presidents” nicely fills the knowledge void for […]
The Write Stuff
Digital devices are usually used for consuming information, not creating it. But as apps evolve, that dynamic is shifting, and Phraseology, which was released for the iPad in late December, is one such example. The app bills itself as “part text editor, part word processor,” which means that the documents you type also are supported […]
At Your Service
The British hit series “Downton Abbey,” as Nancy Franklin wrote in the April 18, 2011, issue, “is set in an enormous English country house, combines romance, suspense, and comedy, and has sumptuous production values and several juicy performances…. [It’s] a savory Sunday dinner of a series, an Anglophilic roast in a sea of Austenish manners-and-mores […]
Resolved
This year was a rough one. Morale went missing somewhere between the U.S. government’s near-default and Europe’s near-collapse, and, as 2011 comes to a close, the usual New Year’s resolutions seem a little frivolous. What’s needed is planning, action, and maybe even some austerity measures—which is why the Unstuck iPad app, offered for free, is […]
Dream On
Last year, Adam Gopnik wrote about Vincent van Gogh and the mythology surrounding his severed ear, including the claim that it was Gauguin, not van Gogh, who made the infamous cut. This October, a book titled “Van Gogh: The Life,” by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, challenged the idea that van Gogh took his […]
No Strings Attached
This week in The New Yorker, Michael Schulman writes about the Whatnot Workshop, a kiosk at F.A.O. Schwarz where shoppers can design their own Muppets. (Schulman accompanied Jason Segel, the actor who co-wrote and stars in the new Muppet movie and who opted to design his creation in Schulman’s likeness.) But don’t fret if you’re […]
‘Tis the Season
When “A Charlie Brown Christmas” debuted in 1965, CBS executives were nervous. The special used children, not adults playing children, for the voices; the soundtrack featured jazz; and Linus’s speech on the true meaning of Christmas was overtly religious. But these supposed liabilities were the things viewers loved most. The show immediately met with critical […]
Raise a Glass
On Saturday, November 5th, three friends arrived at Music Hack Day Boston—in which developers and designers meet to build proof-of-concept sites and apps in a short amount of time—with hangovers. Needing a hair-of-the-dog remedy, they decided their hack should be a drink-recommendation site, and thus Drinkify was born. Type in a musician or band’s name, […]
Main Stream
Say you’ve got a free evening, a good wi-fi signal, and a strong desire to watch the complete works of Martin Scorsese. CanIStream.It, a search engine recently created by the New York-based consulting firm Urban Pixels, scans the databases of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and Crackle to tell you which movies are available for streaming, with […]