This week in The New Yorker, Michael Schulman writes about the Whatnot Workshop, a kiosk at F.A.O. Schwarz where shoppers can design their own Muppets. (Schulman accompanied Jason Segel, the actor who co-wrote and stars in the new Muppet movie and who opted to design his creation in Schulman’s likeness.) But don’t fret if you’re […]
Author Archives: Sally
‘Tis the Season
When “A Charlie Brown Christmas” debuted in 1965, CBS executives were nervous. The special used children, not adults playing children, for the voices; the soundtrack featured jazz; and Linus’s speech on the true meaning of Christmas was overtly religious. But these supposed liabilities were the things viewers loved most. The show immediately met with critical […]
Raise a Glass
On Saturday, November 5th, three friends arrived at Music Hack Day Boston—in which developers and designers meet to build proof-of-concept sites and apps in a short amount of time—with hangovers. Needing a hair-of-the-dog remedy, they decided their hack should be a drink-recommendation site, and thus Drinkify was born. Type in a musician or band’s name, […]
Main Stream
Say you’ve got a free evening, a good wi-fi signal, and a strong desire to watch the complete works of Martin Scorsese. CanIStream.It, a search engine recently created by the New York-based consulting firm Urban Pixels, scans the databases of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and Crackle to tell you which movies are available for streaming, with […]
New Again
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 […]
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 […]