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Today I took a hard hat tour of Ellis Island’s hospital complex, a special, rare look at the unrenovated laundry building and the contagious disease wing. (The other hospital wing isn’t accessible — apparently it’s so unstable you could fall through the floor.) French artist JR installed life-size historic photographs of Ellis Island immigrants as part of his “Unframed” exhibition, which you can see in various rooms throughout the complex. Fascinating and incredibly moving tour.

#Ellis island #jr #art #history #New York history #photography

Gendered criticism has a silencing effect, not just on the women criticized, but on all women who come into contact with it. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, 'I’m so glad I’m not published, that my writing is a hobby, so I don’t have to deal with this.' Every time something like this happens, some women’s ambitions get curtailed and quashed and discouraged, by both the thing itself and the culture’s reaction to it. And that’s the thing that keeps me up at night, not that one crazy man thinks I shouldn’t be writing.

Emily Gould in Andi Zeisler's Salon story, Stop telling women not to “take things personally”: Ed Champion and the plague of gendered criticism.

#writing #Emily Gould #Salon #media

The heyday of CBGB's, captured by house photographer David Godlis.

"CBGB is where I landed when I arrived in New York in the winter of 1976. I was curious about these bands with odd sounding names like Blondie, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Richard Hell and Television, so I went down to the Bowery to find out what was happening. It didn’t take long before I began to photograph what I saw and heard there. Shooting with available light under the Bowery street lamps using a handheld Leica and Tri-X film to give everything a look that felt like you were there, these photographs document those nights between 1976 and 1979. During the pre-MTV, pre-digital era of rock 'n' roll — once upon a time on the Bowery."

Mashable hiring Retronaut was a brilliant move. More posts like this, please.

#photography #music #CBGB's #blondie #retronaut #mashable #journalism #The Ramones #Patti Smith

The New Yorker's first GIF cover

Françoise Mouly, art director at The New Yorker:

"We wouldn’t have done it if it was just a technical gimmick. It had to be a good image. The rain one has the graphic quality and the aesthetic quality that meant it was a modern version of a very old fashioned New Yorker cover."

#news #media #gifs #New Yorker #journalism

How Iowa's Des Moines Register is using Oculus Rift for ambitious journalism:

The interactive project debuting today is called "Harvest Of Change," a five-part story focused on five different forces driving big changes in the state of Iowa. Each topic, which will appear as separate feature articles in the paper this week, is illustrated from the point of view of a farming family. For example, “Cultural Changes” tells the story of Matt Russell and Pat Stanley, “a same-sex couple at the forefront of the local food movement.” The "Technology" part of the package is about a farm family switching from traditional to organic farming practices, and the challenges they are currently facing.

Enter the Oculus Rift, which is being used to help tell the "aging" part of the package. While the overlap between Des Moines Register's readers and the VR headset's 200,000+ early adopters is probably tiny, the team at Gannett--which owns the newspaper--saw an opportunity to serve its audience with real, difficult, and ambitious journalism refracted through the prism of a 3-D lens. (For everyone who doesn't own a Rift, you can download "Harvest Of Change" as a free app to your desktop, or play a stripped-down version of it in your browser.)

When you put on the Rift, you are beamed into a helicopter hovering over a lush green field. Then, you're dropped into a digital replication of the Dammann family's farm, replete with animals, tractors, and buildings. All of it is built on top of the Unity 3D gaming engine. (When Gannett showed an early version of the game to the family, their initial reaction was: “Those hay bales are too big!”) Actuating different items around the farm (the baby calf, hidden photographs, etc.) unlocks a different part of the Dammann family’s story. It feels like a documentary with a non-linear narrative. You are encouraged to explore.

Not super impressed with the graphics included in the FastCo story but interesting to see how Oculus Rift can be used to support journalism.

#news #journalism #media #design #interactive design