The Hurry Up and Wait Startup

I’ve gone on record with my general lack of enthusiasm for magazines on the iPad, at least the way they’ve been imagined so far, but I think the self-described “social magazine” Flipboard shows a lot of promise. It’s a smart idea but like a lot of the smartest ideas it’s not a particularly ingenious one on its face: the app aggregates recommendations and links to content made by people within your social network. The beauty is in its execution, which happens to be gorgeous and an example of truly superior user experience design (from what I’ve seen so far). Flipboard’s developers have built an impressive mechanism for automated layout intelligence, and the pages within the app winningly transcend the paradigm of digital templates as aesthetically unremarkable, one-size-fits-all showcases for content.

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Boarding Pass/Fail

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

This project has been up for quite a while but I’m only coming across it now: Tyler Thompson undertakes a hypothetical redesign of flight boarding passes. His original proposal is quite interesting, but what’s even better is the round-robin of alternative designs proposed by readers. Some of them are quite smart. My favorite is this “human boarding pass” from Graphicology.

See the whole lot of them here.

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NYT: Revamping Before-the-Movie Ads at Cinemas

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

There’s bad news for those of you who like to actually have conversations with your movie-going companions. At least one company is looking to monetize your free time, especially if you get to the theater early to secure good seats.

“Screenvision, which sells and programs in-cinema advertising, wants to spice up the preshow experience. Last week, the company unveiled its plans for a redesigned 20-minute ‘advertainment’ block to marketers in a private presentation in New York. Consumers — Screenvision says it reaches 45 million moviegoers a month — will start to see it at local cinemas in September.”

For me, the central lesson of this age of modern media is that anything can be advertised anywhere, and it’s no use fighting it. Still, the pre-show advertising reel — the ads that come before the trailers — have always struck me as an invasion of privacy. The time that I spend before the trailers belongs to me; the only reason I get to the theater early is because I have to work around the theater’s inability to guarantee me a good seat. To have that time intruded upon by loud, obnoxious advertising is infuriating.

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Settling Scores with MLB At Bat

MLB At BatOne of my favorite uses for my increasingly useful iPad is to keep current with The New York Yankees, an activity made possible — and enjoyable — with the outstanding MLB At Bat app. For baseball fans like myself who have canceled their cable service and therefore have little access to regular gameday broadcasts, paying just a fraction of the cost of a ballpark ticket once for an app that gives this kind of access for the full season is a bargain: it offers of course a full box score, an excellent complement of statistics, play-by-play summaries, radio simulcasting and, most importantly for me, a healthy trove of after-the-fact video.

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This One Goes to Eleven (and Up)

The surprise announcement that I posted last week about bringing my career at The New York Times to an end took forever to write. I’m generally a slower writer than I’d like to be, and with something as tricky as that, it takes me at least a dozen drafts to even get the tone right.

There was a lot to fit in too, and in the end I edited out some thoughts that I originally would have liked to include. Mostly, I wanted to discuss why I felt it was time for me to leave. That’s a fairly big subject with several different facets, but I wanted to touch on one of those facets today, maybe the biggest motivation in my departure: my daughter Thuy is rapidly approaching her first birthday. In fact, yesterday she hit the eleven-month mark.

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“Look Around You” Released on DVD in US

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Every once in a while, as if to tauntingly remind us that America still suffers from a dearth of truly brilliant comedic television, the BBC releases on these shores DVD versions of one of its seemingly endless supply of genius-grade television comedies. The last one I recall was the engagingly unhinged “The Mighty Boosh.” This time it’s the thoroughly uncanny, bone-dry and deadpan wit of “Look Around You.” Modeled after the educational films that prepared my generation for, er, taking tests about the films we watched in class, these pitch perfect fake documentaries are gems of absurdist humor. Read about the release here or buy the DVDs here.

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Where A-Rod’s 600th Home Run Ball Is Likely to Land

Ratings

1 of 5 stars
What’s this?

New York Yankees third basemen Alex Rodriguez is just three long balls away from hitting a milestone of six hundred career home runs. SeatGeek, which forecasts the value of seats at sporting events and concerts, used trajectory data from A-Rod’s previous home runs to calculate the probable landing area of no. 600 — not just the seating section within Yankee Stadium where the ball is likely to fall, but the actual seat that gives some lucky fan the best possible chance for catching the ball. See all the gory detail behind their math here.

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Origins of “Inception”

Among the many interesting things about Christopher Nolan’s superb new movie “Inception” is the fact that it borrows so clearly from so many genres and yet seems to belong to none of them in particular. Its premise of dream-surfing pyrotechnics is heavily sci-fi and yet the movie is conspicuously absent of any specific technology (as cannily observed by Jeremy Keith). In many ways it’s a modernized espionage thriller of the sort perfected in recent years by Tony Gilroy, including of course the “Bourne” trilogy he wrote as well as the corporate cloak and dagger of “Duplicity,” the underrated romantic spy comedy he directed. It clearly owes a debt to heist films as well, but feels less like a romping caper like “The Italian Job” (in either of its two incarnations) than the comparatively quiet and primitive choreography of “Le cercle rouge.”

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