Today for the second time in less than a week Times Square had to be evacuated due to suspicious activity. Thankfully, this time it was a false alarm and the suspicious container in question was filled with books and a bottle of water. Probably one of the most interesting stories to develop from the false alarm, however, is the fact that the Wall Street Journal reported on the scare using Foursquare.
As The Next Web notes, this has to be “one of the most high-profile uses by a major media publication of a check-in service.” Like its distant cousin Twitter, not only does Foursquare have the potential to be a game changer in how news is reported and to whom, but thanks to its efficiency, it can also save lives. We suggest you use this logic on your friends the next time they’re bugging you about your obsessive check-in habit.
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a feature entitled “How Parents Became Cool: TV Finds Teens Like Their Moms And Attempts to Flatter Both” which went on to extoll the fact that mothers in television–and real life–are cooler, more understanding, and more attractive than ever before. Why? Because according to a study conducted by Experian Simmons, teens like their moms. A lot. Call us sticklers, but “mother” doesn’t always translate to “parents” right? Not to undermine the power and ability of the single mom , but there are lots of cool, understanding, attractive dads out there too. To prove our theory (because we like to be right), we at Flavorpill decided to use our deductive reasoning skills and donned our sleuthiest hat so we could figure out the case of the ignored-by-the-WSJ TV dad. Check out the findings of our research after the jump.
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We tend to love reading about how the governmental bodies view art — depressing when you consider the federal budget, heartwarming when you hear that the Obamas picked Alma Thomas for the White House collection — but little did we know how opinionated the Federal Reserve chairmen could be on the matter. (Well, let’s not forget the Feds were all schooled before Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy neglected the arts as core curriculum for K-12 education.) Today, Mary Anne Goley — former director of the fine arts program for the board of governors — penned a piece for the Wall Street Journal about the tastes of various Fed chairs, and let’s just say, it’s pretty revealing.
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With equal parts curiosity, shame, and schadenfreude, we’ve been poring over the Wall Street Journal‘s list of best and worst jobs in 2010. The rankings — based on “environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress” — are fairly straightforward, with a few seeming outliers thrown in for good measure. (Philosophers clock in at the 11th best career choice; whoulda thunk?) Peep all 200 professions on the full list, and find out whether you’re suffering in one of the 20 worst after the jump.
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On Monday night Moby and Wall Street Journal Personal Technologies columnist Walt Mossberg will discuss music and entertainment in the digital age in a special event at Lincoln Center. To help prep us for the discussion, the gadgets guru hopped on the phone to chat about why we’re obsessed with certain brands, where the music industry missed the tech boat, and who we can look to for innovation next.
Flavorpill: What do you think makes the tech consumer so prone to fetishizing certain brands or objects?
Walt Mossberg: That’s a fascinating question. I think it’s more than fetishizing. There’s something I call “tech theology” and I think there are a couple of things at work here. People do fall in love with tech products — could be something like Twitter, which is a service, or something physical like an iPhone or BlackBerry. They fall in love with these things because they enhance their life in some way. It feels like they give them both power and pleasure, which is after all why we fall in love with most things. Read More »
Today at Flavorpill, we drooled over Madge’s Upper East Side Double-Wide. (She’s come a long way from the girl who ate bags of popcorn in Alphabet City.) We discovered the modern-rock haters, PRE-DURST. We thought the world might be ending thanks to Amy Winehouse’s rider demands for Yorkshire tea and a sober crew (OK, and some tequila. Attagirl!). We couldn’t decide which new store is cooler: Nike, Puma or Adidas. We wondered where all of you fall on our Spectrum of Online Friendship. We wished we had a bike to take to get blessed. Do unicycles count? We examined the carbon foot print of printed books. We wished we had an iPhone so we could read the Wall Street Journal for free. We wondered who would spend 2K on Prince’s purple iPod. We booked our tickets to Cleveland, thanks to this compelling travel video. And finally, we watched the trailer for the new Harry Potter flick. Whaddayathink?
Less than a decade ago, at the dawn of our brave new century, the American newspaper was doing a robust business. Newsrooms at major publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post were brimming with reporters; advertising rates were healthy; and, despite the rapid rise of electronic media in the late ’90s, news websites, still in their infancy, were no match for a fully formed print publication. The future of the news would involve the Internet, an average editor might concede, but it seemed a long way off before the new medium would do battle with the old one. Read More »
When we saw this, it reminded us of something The Daily’s Beast’s Tina Brown said last night about the beauty of a headline interacting with an image. Although in this case, we’re not sure it was intentional — unless the WSJ has a better sense of humor than we realized. Or maybe Paul Greenwood really has a Travis-like relationship with this horse.
We’re kind of hoping for the latter; we were always big fans of Mister Ed reruns on Nick at Nite.
