At the 2009 New Yorker Festival, Ariel Levy interviewed the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow about her career, her sexuality (she’s America’s first openly gay television anchor), and her ambition. “I like to win a lot,” she told Levy. Maddow is now leading the charge on the iPad: MSNBC has released a free app for “The […]
Category Archives: Quick Picks
Staff Meeting
Last week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art launched “Connections,” a weekly multimedia series featuring museum staffers—curators, conservators, librarians, designers—discussing works in the museum’s collection. Each episode has a theme: “Small Things,” “Virtuosity,” “Tennessee,” “Maps.” “I wonder why it is that we love maps so much,” muses the medieval art curator Melanie Holcomb. “I think, in […]
Tin Star
Earlier this week, the literary quarterly and publisher Tin House relaunched its website, which had remained largely unchanged since it launched, in 1999. “Our web concerns were primarily concentrated on whether or not we’d have enough munitions to fight off the post-apocalyptic hordes of cannibals that would inevitably follow the Y2K bug,” wrote associate editor […]
Tu Vuo’ Fa L’Italiano
Last week, my New Yorker Digital Pick was the New Year’s Resolution Generator, a nifty li’l site that spits out fun resolution ideas with a click. I suppose you could cycle through it for hours, finding the one that suits you best, but I got mine on the first try: And I had already intended […]
Wish You Were Here
The great American photographer Ansel Adams, who once said, “A photograph is usually looked at—seldom looked into,” would no doubt be happy to learn that the Ansel Adams Trust has partnered with Little, Brown and Company to release an app for the iPad. Read more at newyorker.com… Tweet
Juke Joint
YouTube has become a go-to music player, but its one-song-at-a-time format doesn’t make for a seamless listening experience. Tomas Isdal, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, has changed that with Tubeify, a mashup of YouTube, last.fm, and Billboard that acts like a jukebox. Read more at newyorker.com… Tweet
More Inconvenient Truth
On November 29th, the sixteenth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change began in Cancun. To mark the occasion, Google Earth Outreach—launched to give high-tech visualization tools to environmental non-profits and public-benefit organizations—released the latest installment of its educational videos: a sobering look at global warming, hosted by Kofi […]
Come Together
PBS Arts Online launched in August to “promote experimentation and exploration”; so far, this goal has taken the form of Flickr-group collaborations and, most recently, “Remembering Lennon,” in which fans can upload video testaments to their favorite memories of John Lennon. Read more at newyorker.com… Tweet
Watchdogs
Last week, Transparency International—an organization that aims to raise awareness of governmental abuses for private gain, including bribery, kickbacks, and embezzlement —released its 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index, a measurement of public-sector corruption in a hundred and seventy-eight countries worldwide. Read more at newyorker.com… Tweet
Guggenheim Mashup
This summer, just when it seemed that the art world was suffering from biennial overload, the Guggenheim Museum and YouTube announced a fresh approach. Their joint venture, “YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video” set out “to attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget,” and […]