On Friday night, the authors and graphic designers of the latest book from the deadpan satirists at The Onion walked the one whole block from their office to the Apple store in Soho, to promote Our Dumb World: The Onion’s Atlas of the Planet Earth (73rd Edition) — now with "fewer clouds on maps," "better-veiled Read More
Will Oldham has always been fascinated with pop icons (check out this video for Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me”). He’ll take on R. Kelly, Danzig, and Bjork with his Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy outfit release Ask Forgiveness. It will include eight covers in all.
New York Mag inspires us to finish The Brothers Read More
The day Steve Jobs announces the release of yet another breakthrough mobile wireless gadget that everyone is going to own within a year, it seems reasonable to look at New York City’s wireless internet structure — or lack of it.
The new iPhone lets callers surf the net, access iTunes, and do other fun Read More
It must be nice to be Eliot Spitzer right now.
At an appearance this morning in midtown at the Personal Democracy Forum, he gave a lengthy policy speech without once referring to the fact that he’s not technically governor yet.
Nor did that fact come up in a subsequent question-and-answer session with ABC News Read More
On the never-ending frontier of newspaper self-criticism, The Washington Post has launched a project in which individual staffers take turns reading the previous day’s paper and writing an internal memo commenting on it. Today, Style section scribe Hank Stuever took the opportunity to deliver an extended riff of meta-criticism—second-guessing not merely page-one placement decisions but Read More
A young woman named Lucy Diamonds, a rapper, claims that she’s being persecuted by Oprah Winfrey. (The Transom sometimes feels that way as well!) Ms. Diamonds’ claim, as reported by Radar, is that Oprah even went so far as to squelch a distribution deal between the rapper and iTunes, because Ms. Winfrey was offended Read More
The latest version of iTunes, released late last month, features a podcast hub, organizing hundreds of streaming audio programs by genre and content. The browser includes a real-time Top 100 chart–heavily populated by podcasts about Apple computers and/or sex, but with an assortment of other subjects. Ten selected highlights from the list, as of Read More
Poker is the new Tribeca: prime media real estate. It is on TV at least three nights a week, and prominently featured in the slicks, where articles trumpeting the poker craze seem to be mandatory front-of-the-book content. (At this rate, Regis should be hosting his own poker show by year’s end.)
I first played poker Read More
Musical style and technology have always been in conversation, each one pushing the other along. The development of well-tempered piano tuning with its fuller dynamic range, for example, made it possible for the great body of 18th- and 19th-century piano music to be written-or, more precisely, created the medium through which certain composers found their Read More
