Pinned NYC

I AM NOT HIM - JIM JOE

Redesigning ‘Service’: Why I Started a Design Group That Gives Away Half Its Work for Free - Matthew Manos wrote in Service, Design and Volunteerism

I started verynice in my apartment as an undergrad at UCLA by staying up late every night to design all kinds of things for non-profit organizations that I would find on craigslist and on campus, at no cost to them. At the time, I had a difficult time seeing verynice as a business, and I never bothered to ask myself the question: “How do I scale the impact I am making?”

The Reconstructionists: Celebrating Badass Women

What do Buddhist artist Agnes Martin, Hollywood inventor Hedy Lamarr, and French-Cuban author Anaïs Nin have in common? Their names may not conjure popular recognition, and yet, for Lisa Congdon and Maria Popova, these women represent a particular breed of cultural trailblazer: female, under-appreciated, badass. They are “Reconstructionists,” as the writer-illustrator duo call them — and for the next year, they’ll be celebrated on a blog of the same name. Every Monday for 12 months, The Reconstructionists will debut a hand-painted illustration and short essay highlighting a woman from fields such as art, science, and literature. The subject needn’t be famous, but she will, as Popova, the creator of Brain Pickings, puts it, “have changed the way we define ourselves as a culture.” We spoke with Popova, and illustrator Congdon, about the inspiration behind their project.

How’d you come up with the name ‘Reconstructionist’?

Maria Popova: It’s very challenging to celebrate women without pigeonholing the project into some stereotypical and alienating feminist corner, the most dangerous part of which is the preaching-to-the-choir quality that many such projects tend to have. So when it was time to come up with a title for the project, it couldn’t be something too literal or too obvious. After sifting through hundreds of letters, diaries, autobiographies, and other writing, I suddenly remembered something Anaïs Nin had written in a 1944 diary entry — about “woman’s role in the reconstruction of the world.” It was perfect. It was the only common denominator between those women – they aren’t all artists, or all writers, or all to be expected in the pages of a tenth-grade history book. They are simply all reconstructionists.

The dramatically dilapidated Loews King Theatre, on Flatbush Avenue, is set for a resurrection.

The place was built in 1929. A young Barbra Streisand once worked here. So did Sylvester Stallone.

It’s been closed since 1977, but it’s still the largest indoor theater in Brooklyn, with 3,200 seats. I got to walk around inside yesterday, and despite all the dust and decay, it’s pretty spectacular.

The plan is to restore its former grandeur, and turn it into a major performing arts center. Opening set for 2015.

The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame)

During a time when computing power was so scarce that it required a government-defense budget to finance it, a young man used a $238 million military computer, the largest such machine ever built, to render an image of a curvy woman on a glowing cathode ray tube screen. The year was 1956, and the creation was a landmark moment in computer graphics and cultural history that has gone unnoticed until now.

Using equipment designed to guard against the apocalypse, a pin-up girl had been drawn. 

She was quite probably the first human likeness to ever appear on a computer screen. 

WARNING: PAPER IS DANGEROUS