Apple Gentrifies the Internet

The Web is a teeming commercial city. It’s haphazardly planned. Its public spaces are mobbed, and signs of urban decay abound in broken links and abandoned projects. Malware and spam have turned living conditions in many quarters unsafe and unsanitary. Bullies and hucksters roam the streets. An entrenched population of rowdy, polyglot rabble seems to dominate major sites.

People who find the Web distasteful — ugly, uncivilized — have nonetheless been forced to live there: it’s the place to go for jobs, resources, services, social life, the future. But now, with the purchase of an iPhone or an iPad, there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff. This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates. In the migration of dissenters from the “open” Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization and the online equivalent of white flight.

Spike Jonze – I’m Here

Stream it here.

BKoffie

I’ve tried the clover, single pot Melitas and fresh brewed cups, but this disposable French press cup with a plunger lid is the most fun. BKoffie freshly grinds an array of high-grade African single-origin coffees to order and serves up a tasty coffee to go in Midtown. Not cheap, but you get 16oz.

BKoffie, 370 West 51st Street @ 9th Avenue.

Das Racist – Shut Up, Dude

Download the mixtape. These dudes are funny and have something of a Greenpoint flow going.

Arthur Kill Ship Graveyard

Check out the map of the ship graveyard in Staten Island right by the dump.

Christopher Nolan’s Inception

The 2010 Vendy Awards @ Governors Island

 

The Vendys are perhaps the greatest eating event in New York City. The top street food carts from NYC x all you can drink x Governors Island. Get your tickets now as it will sell out.

Seltzer Home School

Thinking about this DIY Seltzer kit  or the old school version for the summertime….

Spike Jonze X LCD Soundsystem = Drunk Girls

Secret Subway Brownstone

Apparently, there is a secret brownstone in my neighborhood that leads into the subway system. I have found my new life mission. I will not rest until I have opened this Pandora’s box. Tip of the hat to the Legal Situation.

The tidy, three-story brownstone looks like any other on the cobblestone block in Brooklyn, but it isn’t. It’s a fake, leading directly to the belly of the nation’s largest subway system.

The unmarked emergency exit behind the facade is one of many posts protected by beat cops defending the city against bombings or other terror attacks in the city’s intricate underground mass transit network.