October 6th was a busy day for New Directions. Tomas Tranströmer, who has been with the press since the nineteen-sixties, won the Nobel Prize for literature; amid the press frenzy that followed, the publisher pushed ahead with the scheduled launch of its revamped Web site and new literary blog, “Now That It’s Now.” The site […]
Category Archives: Quick Picks
Growing Up
In the October 24th issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert commented on the world’s population, which the U.N. predicted would reach seven billion this week. “The question of how many people the earth can support over the long or even medium term remains, at this point, open,” she wrote. “7 Billion: How Your World […]
Food Networked
Jamie Oliver, as Michael Specter wrote in June, is the kind of celebrity chef who deserves his fame. An advocate of healthy eating, Oliver took his campaign to America television in 2010, and this summer got the Los Angeles Unified School District to stop serving “flavored milk” to its students. Recently, he launched the Jamie […]
Radio Days
The New York classical-music station WQXR, on the air since 1939, has become an indispensable part of the city’s soundtrack. Now the station increases its reach with an app—download it for free for your iPhone or iPad—that features live streams of WQXR and its more contemporary sister, Q2, as well as information on past and […]
Dear Diary
Is reading another person’s diary an invasion of privacy? Not when you pay for the privilege. Frequent New Yorker contributor David Sedaris recently made his innermost thoughts available in the form of an app. The project, called “David’s Diary,” is a collaboration with the cartoonist Laurie Rosenwald and features six short animated installments. March 4, […]
Bard Drive
Shakespeare was intended to be watched, not read—and yet millions of students still slog through paperback copies of “Hamlet.” Enter the Irish educational company Shakespeare in Bits, and its iPad and iPhone apps for “Romeo and Juliet,” “Macbeth,” and, just released September 7th, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (available for iPad only). Each app features animations […]
Thought for Food
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]