By Jessica Roy 5/17/12 7:09am

Facebook Faceoff

Mr. Saverin (therichest.org)

Eduardo Saverin’s Move to Renounce Citizenship Was Totally Just a Coincidence

It may look like Eduardo Saverin, international playboy and man of very few public pursuits, renounced his American citizenship in favor of a lesser tax bill, but that’s just a coincidence, you guys. A very unfortunate coincidence. Mr. Saverin actually filed to renounce his citizenship way back in January 2011, because there’s no way he could have had the slightest inkling that Facebook might go public soon, being a cofounder and all.

“I’m not a tax expert,” he told the New York Times, while refusing to offer any other explanation for why he’d agree to a move that could mean he is never allowed back into the U.S. again. “This had nothing to do with taxes,” he insisted.

Okay then. Read More

By Steve Huff 5/11/12 4:15pm

ALL YOUR MEME BELONG TO US

ragecomicTimes

The New York Times Covers Rage Comics; Goodbye, Rage Comics

The Times has published a definitive Internet Culture Piece a Year Too Late.

The victim: Reddit’s infamous Rage Comic meme. Though you can still find Rage Comics posted daily on Reddit, the joke was probably on the downswing popularity-wise a year ago. The following is the paper of record unwittingly sealing Rage Comics inside vast and unquiet catacombs in the bowels of the Internet where the ghosts of all past memes roam, to float sadly in the ether alongside the howling phantasm of Rick Astley and his 80s bouffant: Read More

By Jessica Roy 4/27/12 2:32pm

When Copyright's Wrong

This 92-Year-Old WWII Vet is Hollywood's Most Reviled Bootlegger

This 92-Year-Old WWII Vet is Hollywood’s Most Reviled Bootlegger

When we think of bootleggers, most of us conjure images of shadowy Megaupload fanatics, or the shady characters lining Canal Street with their suitcases full of misspelled DVDs. Probably the absolute last person to come to mind would be a 92-year-old Jewish WWII vet from Long Island, but that’s what makes this story in today’s New York Times so spectacular.

For the last handful of years, Hyman Strachman has been bootlegging popular Hollywood films and sending them off free of charge to American troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the troops interviewed for the story, Mr. Strachman, known lovingly as “Big Hy,” has become somewhat of a folk hero to the thousands of soldiers who see the films he sends as a necessary link to back home. Read More

By Jessica Roy 4/04/12 12:08pm

The Internet Makes You Stupid

The Tim

Satisfy Your Repressed Desire to Destroy the New York Times With This ‘Stupid Game’

Oh, those New York Times Magazine folks–they’re so edgy these days. In a think piece about the rise of “Angry Birds, Farmville and other hyperaddictive ‘stupid games,’” the Times proves how truly addictive the Zynga canon is by embedding their own version of a “stupid” game as an illustrative complement to the story. The game allows you to destroy pieces of the website with your arrow keys and space bar–for example, we took the liberty of destroying the Style section, and automatically the Times became 10x less pretentious and assholey. If only every article offered this kind of catharsis. Read More

By Jessica Roy 4/03/12 2:18pm

The Future Will See You Now

The iBrain (neurovigil.com)

Soon, the iBrain May Read Your Thoughts

It’s probably obvious, but we feel the need to say this: every damned thing about famed physicist Stephen Hawking is inspirational. We cannot read an article about him and not feel emotionally impacted by the fact that he is 70 years old, suffering from Lou Gherig’s disease, and yet continues to serve as an integral figure in many of the most cutting edge scientific experiments out there. Mr. Hawking, who is finding it more difficult to speak as his disease progresses, is still at it with the iBrain, a device that the New York Times reports is learning to read thoughts, with Mr. Hawking as its first human test subject. Read More

By Jessica Roy 1/29/12 5:20pm

Apple in Your Eye

Mr. Cramer

BSR Tries to Distance Itself from the Foxconn Scandal

The nonprofit Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, is attempting to save face following a damning report in Wednesday’s New York Times condemning working conditions in Chinese Apple factories.

The article, which practically blew up the Internet, quotes a BSR consultant who claims BSR has repeatedly warned Apple of the dangers the factories pose to workers, but that the Cupertino company has refused to make changes. “We could have saved lives, and we asked Apple to pressure Foxconn, but they wouldn’t do it,” the consultant told the Times. Read More

By Foster Kamer 1/26/12 7:04pm

Funtimes at Foxconn

The man and his muse

NYT Tech Columnist David Pogue’s Silence on Foxconn Persists, Even After the Times’s Damning Expose

On the front page of today’s New York Times is a massive umbrella piece about China’s Foxconn—who manufactures, among other things, Apple iPhones—and the sub-humane, dangerous conditions their workers assemble these products under. It is, in many ways, as astonishing as it is unsurprising, and it’s as depressing a systemic problem as they come.

So what does the Apple fan’s Apple fan—the New York Times‘s own David Pogue, the (somewhat controversial) most widely-read technology columnist in the country—have to say about Apple’s relationship to Foxconn? Especially given the front page of today’s Times, do these sorts of revelations about their manufacturing processes change the way he feels and/or writes about Apple? Read More

By Foster Kamer 1/18/12 5:53pm

KICKSTARTER SUCCESS STORIES

Beware all ye mollusks who enter here.

Kickstarter-Funded Restaurant Gets Seal of Approval from New York Times

When the proprietors behind Brooklyn seafood shack Littleneck couldn’t come up with the cash to get their restaurant started through traditional outlets, they took to the people: a Kickstarter campaign to fund Littleneck helped get them to where they needed to be. The restaurant opened, and only a few months in, they now have what every chef and restauranteur—especially in this city—dreams of: a seal of approval from the New York Times dining critics. Read More