The blog of Manhattan!

Check out Gawker — a very cool new blog, devoted to chatty, catty gossip about Manhattan! I love this stuff … more proof of the interesting small publishing-biz possibilities that flow out of blogging. They find tons of excellent tidbits of New York life, such as this bit from the New York Observer:

Drunken Shopping
The gift shop at the Times Square W has developed an ingenious new retail strategy: ensure that your shoppers are drunk when they enter the store by putting it next to the bar. Then allow—even encourage—your customers to continue downing cocktails once inside, as the inhibition leads to promiscuous AmEx Centurion Card use. Most of the customers are male and tend to buy things for women—the ones they’re dating, the ones they’re sleeping with, the cocktail waitresses, the sales associates. Anyone, really. But women do it, too. “We have a Fabien Baron snowboard,” says sales associate Caitlin Sheehan, “and a drunk woman came stumbling out of the bathroom one night and asked if it’s a belt—and it’s so totally not.”

(This item courtesy Boing Boing!)


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

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a bunch of stuff

May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson