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 […]
Category Archives: Quick Picks
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 […]
High Times
New York’s High Line doubled its size last week, expanding ten blocks north to West Thirtieth Street. During the expansion, the park’s staff shared videos, updates, and event information via the High Line Blog—including this video, featuring Organized C.H.A.O.S., a step team that performed June 16th, as part of the Step to the High Line […]
Power to the People
Years ago, before it was glutted with reality shows, MTV was the arbiter of pop music. But the channel abandoned music videos around the time the Internet fragmented the music industry, creating niches within niches—and listeners who found themselves increasingly isolated. Recently, YouTube rolled out its YouTube 100, a weekly top-100 chart of music videos […]
G-Force
Last week, Google announced its much-anticipated music service, Music Beta by Google, which allows users to upload their personal music collections to the cloud and listen to them on any computer or enabled Android device. Because the songs are stored online, they don’t take up space on a device or hard drive; when users are […]
Secret Life
Anne Frank lived in hiding in Amsterdam for more than two years, and last April, the Secret Annex Online, a site devoted to the exploration of Prinsengracht 263, launched to show what the house looked like during the time that the Frank family lived there. “I wander from room to room, climb up and down […]
Lit Bits
Two weeks ago marked the launch of the Los Angeles Review of Books, an online cultural magazine founded on the belief that literary criticism can flourish on the Internet. “Contrary to the notion that the literary arts are dying off, we believe a reading renaissance is underway in America,” says the founding editor Tom Lutz, […]
Short Order
Every few years, fiction readers are warned about the death of the short story. But there are loyalists to the genre—this magazine among them—and work continues to be published for those who know where to look. Storyville, an app available for iPhone and iPad, joins the push on the electronic literary front by giving its […]