In honor of the fifth season of Mad Men, here’s George Segal’s unforgettable graveyard soliloquy from Bye Bye Braverman. Segal waxes rhapsodic about life in New York in the late ’60s — and it’s a pretty good primer.

If you aren’t familiar with Sidney Lumet’s masterful 1968 flop about four Jews who squeeze into a Beetle and drive all around Brooklyn trying to find their friend’s funeral, check it out now. It’s finally available on DVD.

I learned something fascinating from this video of Chuck Jones drawing Bugs Bunny: the studio’s budget for each film sometimes caused Bugs Bunny to wear two whiskers on each side of his face, instead of three.

(via kottke)

I know it’s been a while, but I’ve been utterly consumed with Block Factory since Thanksgiving. (We’re hiring!)

As thanks for your patience, I’m super excited to introduce you to a thing we’ve made. Say hello to your new best friend, Considerating! Considerating is a quick, simple and effective way to get some peer review of your questionable human instincts. With Considerating, you can finally find out whether it’s okay to adjust someone else’s exposed sweater tag (spoiler alert: it’s not), comment on your roommate’s undergarments (nope), or roll into someone’s rural driveway with your headlights off (apparently okay!). You can even ping the universe about missionaries and grown adults in dog costumes.

Considerating was designed and developed in collaboration with my indescribable sister, Danielle Sucher, hot on the heels of her popular Chrome extension Jailbreak the Patriarchy.

We hope you love it!

Inspired by Gothamist’s recent visit to the secret railway platform beneath the Waldorf Astoria, I thought it might be a good time for a bit of a follow-up to my last post.

New York has always enjoyed a unique fascination with the underground. There’s a lot of infrastructure down there, and over time more and more of it has become forgotten or obsolete.

Much of the mystique of the underground is focused on New York’s subterranean transportation, naturally. (Once you spend enough time waiting in a subway tunnel, your mind inevitably begins to wander.) The explosive early growth of the subway system would probably never have occurred without private investment and competition. Before the system was unified in the 1940s, three separate companies (the IRT, BMT and IND — acronyms still in use by most grizzled New Yorkers) developed distinct networks. (Sometimes, it seems, they even built tunnels out of spite: rumor has it that the abandoned lower level of the IND’s 42nd Street station, seen below, was built only to prevent the 7 train from extending further west.)

One neat thing you can do with abandoned subway stations is turn them into art! Frequent riders of the B/Q trains in Brooklyn will be familiar with Bill Brand’s Masstransiscope, a sort of inverted zoetrope installed along the northbound platform of the erstwhile Myrtle Avenue station between DeKalb Avenue and the Manhattan Bridge. With a traditional zoetrope, a user sees the illusion of motion by looking through the slits of a spinning cylinder at individual frames on the cylinder’s interior walls. With the Masstransiscope, the subway car does all the work, while the static frames are plastered on the platform walls and the slits are cut out of a wall installed at the platform’s edge. It makes for a stunning effect.

You can also turn abandoned stations into parks, apparently. A group of “urbanist entrepreneurs” is trying to develop an abandoned trolley terminal below Delancey Street into a cavernous park, which has been nicknamed the “Low Line.”

If you don’t care to wait for projects like this to come to fruition, you can always take a self-guided tour of the incredible original 1904 City Hall station by staying on the 6 train after its final downtown stop at the current Brooklyn Bridge — City Hall station:

If you’d like a more in-depth look, do not miss the New York Transit Museum, which is housed in the IND’s abandoned Court Street station. It showcases vintage subway rolling stock (seen below), turnstiles, tokens, porcelain signage and more. (If you’re more into buses, check out the New York Bus Festival, which accompanies the annual Atlantic Antic every September.)

Until recently, you could join a group of railfans, pop a manhole cover and descend into the long-lost Atlantic Avenue rail tunnel, completed circa 1844 and sealed off in 1861. Long abandoned and even considered apocryphal, the tunnel was finally rediscovered by Bob Diamond in 1980. Sadly, access to the tunnel was shut down by order of the NYC DOT last year.

For now, if you’d like to see most of New York’s hidden delights, your best bet is to flirt with the PATRIOT Act and take advantage of some good old-fashioned late-night B&E, like Andrew Wonder and Steve Duncan did in their urban spelunking video “UNDERCITY”:

The Times peeked behind the curtain of a hidden New York institution this weekend, publishing a great essay about the firm of Day & Meyer, Murray & Young, which has spent about eighty years storing the weighty ephemera of urban socialites using an ingenious 11′-long steel container known as the Portovault:

An unassuming tower on Second Avenue acts as a warehouse for the Portovaults. The building can store over 500 of the one-ton units, which travel on rails via an elevator for on-location loading / unloading or for private inspection in the building’s basement. Better yet, the cost of entry is a mere $300 a month, enabling you to join the storied ranks of Upper East Side socialites and art collectors whose families have utilized the Portovault since the warehouse’s 1928 debut.

I have always had a soft spot for buildings that don’t quite do what you’d expect them to.

For instance! In the years before the Roosevelt Island Tram opened just north of the 59th Street Bridge, and prior to the opening of the Roosevelt Island subway station on the F line, and before direct access was established from Queens via the Roosevelt Island Bridge, the only way to get to Roosevelt Island was via the Storehouse Elevator:

The intrepid smallpox victim would get off the trolley at the middle of the bridge, and take the elevator down to ground level. Delightful! But the elevator was decommissioned after the trolley was discontinued in 1955, and the building was ultimately demolished in 1970.

And! In scenic Brooklyn Heights, you might notice a strange row house with dark windows, well-maintained but seemingly abandoned:

Turns out it’s owned by the MTA. The well-known but unconfirmed story is that this empty façade hides an emergency exit for various East River subway lines — but, for security reasons, the MTA refuses to acknowledge the building’s existence.

Shhh. It is a secret.

Tony Fadell, one of the progenitors of the iPod, left Apple in 2008. This week he introduced his new venture’s first product: Nest.

It is a thermostat.

A $249, iOS/Android-controllable, learning thermostat.

And it is gorgeous.

In Fadell’s first blog entry introducing Nest, he writes of the seeming ridiculousness in transitioning from consumer electronics to thermostats — but uses that as proof of how deviously obvious this market is: “‘Think about it,’ I say. ‘I bet your thermostat is ugly and impossible to program. And I bet it drives you crazy.’”

Of course, he’s right. All you have to do is take a look at the thermostat section of the Home Depot website to see how incredibly ripe this market is for a product like Nest:

The post-Steveness of it all indicates a sea change in the development and presentation of consumer products on all different levels. The launch of Nest resembles the introduction of the Square reader last year: Square, developed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, took the complex and fee-laden universe of credit card payment processing and distilled it into an approachable product for the masses. Square built its business on giving away its ingenious, gorgeous, portable card readers — simply insert your reader into the headphone port on your iOS or Android device, and accept payment by swiping or keying in a credit card. Square deducts its very competitive fee and deposits the rest in your bank account.

It can be that simple. (But try telling that to Square competitor VeriFone, which built an entire website devoted to terrifying consumers about the ridiculous threat of the Square reader being used as a mobile credit card skimming device. We’ll see if other thermostat manufacturers try the same futile approach instead of actually building a worthwhile competitor to Nest!)

Whether a $249 thermostat has the potential to be a runaway hit like the Square reader remains to be seen, but I suspect it will be very successful.

We’re aching for things to love. We’re craving a world in which we can interact with things that an iota of care has been applied to.

If the infectiousness of good design can successfully be applied to the world of thermostats, we’ll soon be seeing it far beyond the traditional boundaries of tech gadgetry.

It’s an exciting moment.

Today, Macworld published a detailed look at the October 23, 2001 launch of the original iPod. 
It’s fascinating to watch the launch video, especially juxtaposed with the launch of the original iPhone in January 2007. Presenting in Apple’s limited-capacity Town Hall, rather than the larger expo venue at the Moscone Center, Steve seemed somewhat more subdued than usual. I don’t blame him: Apple was diving headfirst into a totally new consumer market, with angry pundits far from convinced that the purchasing public would be interested in investing $399 in an MP3 player.

They were wrong. (Okay, it’s easy to report that now.)

In 2001, the portable MP3 playing industry was dominated by cheaper, low-capacity units, like Diamond Multimedia’s Rio 500:

The Rio 500 was a solid device. I snagged one with 64MB of onboard memory, at a list price of $269, and spent most of 2000 listening to The Eagles’ Greatest Hits 1971-1975, since it would only really hold one album. Totally worth it.

Then everything changed.

Over a period of 30 years (from its 1979 unveiling through its discontinuation a year ago), Sony sold 220 million Walkman units. Not a bad record. But: in ten years, Apple has sold 300 million iPods. That’s a lot of stocking stuffers.

Of course, the iPod does lack two socializing features unique to the original Walkman, both introduced at the behest of Sony CEO Akio Morita: dual mini headphone jacks (labeled “GUYS” and “DOLLS”, so you and your moll can listen to Luck Be A Lady together) and a “HOT LINE” button that lowered the volume if someone was trying to communicate with the user.

When the iPod’s popularity skyrocketed after the 2003 introduction of the iTunes Music Store, witty op-ed columnists bemoaned the proliferation of pod people: with loud, tinny music leaking from their white earbuds distracting you as you try to suffer through your subway commute, pod people turned a deaf ear to the world — especially to the audiophiles kvetching about lossy, highly compressed MP3 files and the disappearance of the album format.

Things are better now, of course.

Now we’re deaf and blind, as we walk in front of city buses tweeting from our iPhones.

But! At least we’re listening to higher-fidelity audio files now, thanks to iTunes Plus.

William Gibson knows it.

“Good interface design is as transparent as possible, because I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on.” – William Gibson, describing his gadget choices on The Setup.

Dieter Rams knows it.

“Good design is as little design as possible.“ – Dieter Rams, chief designer at Braun from 1961 through 1995. (See: 15 classic Dieter Rams designs.)

The designers at Apple know it.

“The iPad becomes the app you’re using. The hardware is so understated – it’s just a screen, really – and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app.” – Adam Engst, TidBITS.

Good design is learning how to murder your darlings.

It is learning subtraction. It is learning to delete.

(Above, various dele marks as used in copyediting. From the Latin deleatur, which roughly translates as ”dear lord, this is so pat I think I just vomited.”)

Design is not adding more buttons (as with Sony’s Google TV remote control). Design is not removing all buttons (as with a much-maligned and promptly-reversed recent iteration of the iPod shuffle).

Start here and all else will fall into place: “Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.” – Dieter Rams.

This weekend was the 9th annual Open House New York, where scores of unusual sites across the city which are typically off-limits to the public throw their doors open for curious and nosy architecture fans who are too mild-mannered for trespassing.

So my sister and I took a trip out to JFK to check out the head house of the TWA Flight Center, which has been inaccessible since TWA merged with American Airlines in 2001.

Designed by Eero Saarinen, the landmarked Flight Center (more popularly known as Terminal 5) is an incredible example of Jetsons-era modernism. It was completed in 1962, a year after Saarinen’s death. (During his last visit, he proclaimed: “TWA is beginning to look marvelous. If anything happened and they had to stop work right now and just leave it in this state, I think it would make a beautiful ruin, like the Baths of Caracalla.”)

Fortunately, Terminal 5 is still with us (unlike its next-door neighbor, the former National Airlines “Sundrome” designed by I.M. Pei, which was demolished this month despite cries from preservationists). It features a gorgeous, flowing interior, reminding me of the Enterprise, Esquivel!, and great atomic-era hollowware.

With its space-age contours and precise attention to detail, today’s visit to Terminal 5 allowed us to enjoy a brief simulacrum of what jet travel was apparently like long before my time. How glorious to pilot my car to the airport, park swiftly, cross the street and enter this majestic example of modernist architecture! No lines, no baggage, no security, no pat-downs that only stop when the TSA agent “meets resistance.”

I would describe the general mood of the room as palpably giddy. Above, Danielle sketches Terminal 5′s ridiculously aerodynamic curves.

Terminal 5 was supposed to be open to the public for a brief site-specific art exhibition in the fall of 2004. Sadly, the Port Authority cancelled the show on opening night due to security concerns. Below, Jenny Holzer’s contribution:

When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPod in 2001, he didn’t show the audience the front at first — he began by presenting the gleaming, shimmering rear side, gloating that it was more attractive than the front of other available MP3 players. I can’t help but feel the same way about Terminal 5′s departures board:

I’m looking forward to Open House New York next year! Maybe I’ll finally be able to tour the automated vacuum garbage system on Roosevelt Island.

See? Palpably giddy.

Brought to you by Brian Lam (yes, he of Gizmodo’s infamous lost iPhone 4 prototype scandal), The Wirecutter is a new tech blog that understands something incredibly basic, and yet always ignored:

You already know what you’re looking for.

No, not what product. Not how many pixels, or what type of connector, or what brand. I’m talking about what you’re trying to accomplish.

When you’re looking for a new gadget, you don’t need to know how many foot-lamberts it can throw. You don’t want to have to figure out which 42″ LED TV will give you the deepest blacks or the brightest whites. You aren’t interested in how the sausage is made — you just want it to get the job done.

So what does The Wirecutter do? It organizes its tech recommendations by problem solved.

“Best Pocket Camera Ever.” (Canon PowerShot S95)

“Best Gaming Laptop.” (Alienware M17X)

“Good Enough Receiver.” (Onkyo TX-NR509)

If you’ve ever tried to do even the smallest bit of research for a tech gadget, you know just how vital a resource this could potentially be.

For a poignant example of the pain and suffering you’re typically in for, let’s take a look at Projector Central’s “Find Projectors By Feature” page:

Here you’ve got a staggering array of options to choose from. Clicking on any of thee dropdown menus reveals a new and exciting headache: under the “Technology” option, you can choose between DLP (any), DLP (1-chip), DLP (3-chip), LCD, LCoS, SXRD, and D-ILA. Joy!

Still awake? You don’t care about that. I don’t care about that, and I often install A/V equipment for my tech consulting clients.

The Wirecutter is a revelation. It is manna from heaven. It strips all the unnecessary jargon from its reviews, and it isn’t humble about it. That Onkyo receiver above? The title of the review is “The Cheap Receiver That Has Everything I Need.” Brian and his crew tell you what they’d get if they were in your shoes. It’s the kind of advice you always ask your nerd friends for. You don’t want your advisor to saddle you with more things to think about; you want your problem solved.

Make no mistake, I’m not recommending a website that talks down to you, or one that whitewashes important information about your new investment. The Wirecutter isn’t extolling the virtues of soft Corinthian leather. It’s all about the difference between “Does this projector feature true 1920×1080 progressive output, project 3000 lumens, and not suffer from the screen-door effect?” and “Will this projector give us the best possible image at the best possible value, factoring in the needs of our specific space?”

The Wirecutter strives to humanize technology. We invest a lot of money in our tech purchases, and more often than not we still come home from the store worried that we’ve failed, even after days of research. The answer is not more information, it’s better information. When it comes to cutting out anything that might get in the way of actually using what you buy, this is a great arrow to have in your quiver.