“President-elect Obama has made a very clear commitment to changing the way government works with its citizens. To this end, we offer these three principles to guide the transition in its objective to build upon the very best of the Internet to produce the very best for government.”

“Former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York is refusing to sit for a portrait to be displayed in the Hall of Governors in Albany, prompting a Statehouse official to threaten to have the state select an image of him without his consent. Thomas Fuchs, an illustrator, offers his own portraits in the style of Andy Warhol, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso and R. Crumb.”

“Before and after each debate, the audience is asked to vote on the motion. At the start of the evening, 65 percent of the audience was in favor of the proposition that George W. Bush is the worst American president of the past 50 years; 17 percent were against the motion; and 18 percent were undecided. By the end of the debate, 68 percent were for the motion; 27 percent were against it; and 5 percent were still undecided.”

“Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View. 

“On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more… “

Comical animal prints

“I’m fascinated by dead technology, and I’ve recently become enamored by Zenith Phonevision, an early, primitive experiment in pay-per-view television that got its start in Chicago in the 1950s. In 1951, after two decades of research, Zenith rolled out 300 TV sets to Lincoln Park and Lakeview, modified with a descrambler and a dedicated phone line. The 300 families watched 1.73 first-run movies a week, without commercial interruption, at $1 per. 

“What’s fun about the story is how much it reflects everything that always happens when a new entertainment technology is introduced. Seriously, not that much has changed.”

“The Toronto Zine Library is run by a collective of zine readers, zine makers and librarians who are
looking to make zines more accessible in Toronto. We believe that zines are still an important
medium of communication, and that they should be cherished, protected, and promoted. Our
aim to do this through our public collection of zines, conducting related workshops at our physical
library and abroad, and by holding events that promote zines as a method of open communication
and free expression.”

“It was a logistical nightmare to administrate. I had to go back to all the people who had taken the song without permission, and ask their permission . . . to use their version of my song! This is the main reason we have not put out “Tom’s Albums” 2 and 3, which we certainly could, as now we are up to almost 30 remixes including (really good) ones from Danger Mouse and Tupac.”

“It always struck me that in this picture I look like I am not only of a different race, but of a different century, as though I were Emily Dickinson and had somehow wandered into the Bronx in the 1970’s.”

“The importance of the census cannot be overstated. Among other uses, it determines the number of congressional representatives from each state, the boundaries of congressional districts and the allocation of hundreds of billions of dollars in annual federal aid to states and localities. The census also tells us who we are as a nation and how we’ve changed — information we need to build a strong society and a strong democracy.”

“The problem is that a voting system that is based on physically recounting chits of paper is inherently error-prone, and in a close election like this, the errors are too large for the process to determine a winner. Even though, at the end of the recount, it will seem as if one candidate has won by a hair, the outcome will really be a statistical tie.”

“By bringing our prosthetics into the outside world we are starting to consume that outside world. Digitizing our reality, digesting it into relational sets, indexing those sets, being able to query and do operations on those sets, somehow compressing away and making shallow that reality. There’s something happening with the rate and quality of information; that as it exceeds our ability to comprehend it – it effectively becomes infinite… and in that infinity banal.”

“Whether the economy is robust or recessive, New York’s restaurant scene expands and contracts according to its own gastronomic rhythms. The New & Notable Grub Map measures those rhythms by tracking new openings across the city. Bookmark it and check back regularly to see constant updates on which restaurants are coming soon, which have just opened, and what’s been recently reviewed by critics at New York Magazine and elsewhere. Just click and drag on the map to see what’s new in your neighborhood and beyond; clicking on a restaurant will guide you to a listing, a preview, or a review. It’s the ultimate tool for finding someplace new to eat.”

‘Having been popular in the disco ’70s, the cocktail is, in the words of Mr. Doudoroff, “a relic of an era that was the absolute nadir of the American bar.”’

Photos accompanying Jennifer 8 Lee’s story on NYC subway typography.

“The Helevetica J, on the other hand, had quite a firm curve, which made it the J of choice for an updated subway maps.”