Earlier this month, Shaun Usher—a freelance copywriter and the man behind Letters of Note and Letterheady—launched Scaffoldage, a site devoted to the beauty of scaffolding. Photographs of construction and restoration sites as varied as the New York World’s Fair, an ancient Chinese palace, and a water tower in England feature latticeworks of scaffolding that, in […]
Category Archives: Quick Picks
Lessons
On September 2, 2001, I arrived in Rome for a semester abroad. My pensione’s lone TV didn’t get any English stations, and my Italian wasn’t good enough for me to make sense of the newspapers. As a result, I spent most of that fall in a state of hyper self-awareness, intuiting the season’s events in […]
Texas Ranger
“I can’t imagine a music-related event on earth that requires more advance planning and preparation than South by Southwest in Austin, Texas,” writes NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson, outlining the wide-ranging schedule of the new-music festival—running through Saturday—which features some two thousand acts appearing on more than eighty stages. In an effort to sort out the […]
Women’s Work
After Ann Friedman, a contributing editor and columnist at The American Prospect, saw Vida’s statistics on women in publishing last month, she launched Lady Journos, “a one-stop shop for lazy editors who claim there aren’t many women journalists,” as she wrote on her personal site. Lady Journos highlights the work of lesser-known women from publications […]
Story Time
On Monday, Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum—the duo behind the new-media short-story venture Electric Lit—launched the public beta site of Broadcastr, a location-based storytelling project that allows users to record, index, listen to, and share stories about the places that inspired them, online or on a mobile device. So far, Hunter says, Broadcastr has partnerships […]
Bunnies and Bullets
When I was five years old, my parents left my brothers and me with a babysitter and went to a church auction. They returned–fantastically, inexplicably, unprecedentedly–with a secondhand ColecoVision and a box of games, and I hopped from foot to foot as my dad delicately connected the console’s wires to the back of the TV […]
Jazz Hands
What are the one hundred quintessential jazz songs? Listeners of NPR Music and Jazz24, a radio station with offices in Seattle and Tacoma, have voted for their all-time favorites, and the results—which lead with songs by Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane—are now available for live streaming on NPR.org. Read […]
Josh Ritter: “Galahad”
A few years ago, Michael Arthur—an illustrator whose music-video work was included in the recent New York Times series “All-Nighters”—met the musician Josh Ritter at a downtown bar. Ritter had seen Arthur’s video for his own band, Balthrop, Alabama, and the two discussed a possible collaboration. Read more at newyorker.com… Tweet
Power Up the Mr. Fusion
When YouTube Time Machine débuted last fall, it was as a beta site that its creators, Justin Johnson and Delbert Shoopman III, conceived after a few rounds of beers and Johnson’s recollection of a recent night in which he’d spent hours captivated by videos from 1996—Michael Jordan highlight reels, Primal Rage videos—until other related content […]
Teen Dream
The Los Angeles-based Star–a magazine dedicated to aspiring teen-age groupies–only lasted for five issues, in 1973, folding due to pressure from “concerned citizens.” Fortunately, the Internet knows no parental advisory board, and all of the original issues of Star have been scanned and put online. Read more at newyorker.com… Tweet