Looking to promote a new product online? Study the Orabrush marketing machine. Image: Courtesy Orabrush We’ve all spent a sleepless night channel surfing at 3a.m. Flicking around at that hour, you’re sure to come across an infomercial for a Revolutionary Floor Cleaner or an Abs-of-Steel Machine urging you to be one of the first 500 callers and get a free set of steak knives. Bolstered by breathless, off-their-meds hosts, these feature-length commercials are wildly profitable. (Americans bought more than $91 billion worth of products hawked on TV in 2011). Now Orabrush, a 20-person company based in Utah, is using that formula to become the QVC of YouTube. The Orabrush, as you might have guessed from the picture, is a tongue scraper. Invented by Dr. Bob ... Continue reading →
A diagram of visitor movement in the American Art and Furniture gallery at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Drawings by Andrew Oriani What happens when we walk through a museum? In a class I’m teaching on American art in the age of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, this question came up. As a speculative exercise, we are designing an exhibition that involves trying to lay out a group of varied objects—including some that require close attention, such as architectural drawings—in a pathway that will make sense to visitors of different ages and levels of art experience. To devise a good layout requires some understanding of what museum visitors do, and there’s surprisingly little literature on this topic. Most of the studies of museum-goers that I’ve ... Continue reading →
That business is The Atavist, which helps produce multimedia storytelling for digital devices. Last week I found out that the idea was appealing enough to have attracted $1 million of what will eventually be $1.5 million in seed money. But the real punch line? The backers include Eric E. Schmidt (of Google), Marc Andreessen (a founder of Netscape) and the Founders Fund, which has among its leaders Peter Thiel (a founder of PayPal) and Sean Parker (Facebook’s first president). We’re not talking about the next Facebook here, an idea that explodes into a $16 billion initial public offering in a few short years. But given the heft and the track record of the big-name investors, this is a story about journalism and digital technology that ... Continue reading →
The most badass way to open a beer ever. H/T to Hopulus on Reddit. via Youtube | Reborious. Continue reading →
Robert Caro’s “The Passage to Power,” the fourth volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography, just made its debut this week at No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list. The first three volumes, starting with “The Path to Power” 30 years ago, were best sellers too. Think people like power?If modern American political power has a Boswell, it’s Caro. As Charles McGrath wrote a few weeks ago in his cover story for the magazine, “Caro has spent virtually his whole adult life studying power and what can be done with it, first in the case of Robert Moses, the great developer and urban planner, and then in the case of Lyndon Johnson, whose biography he has been writing for close to 40 years.”Four decades ... Continue reading →
Where In Town: Giant, 1345 Park Road NW Price: $8.99/750 ml Legends of the Hidden Tripel Every beer geek has at least one secret spot: the corner liquor store whose rare brews lurk unnoticed, or the strip-mall megamart where vintage Belgian ales sit for years at bargain-basement prices. One of mine is the new craft beer section of the Columbia Heights Giant supermarket—yes, right near the boxed wine and appletini mixers. Although Giant will never trump d’vines, the neighborhood craft beer kingpin, it recently stepped up its game with a shelf of solid brews, including an array of Unibroue and Ommegang beers and strong offerings from Flying Dog and Dogfish Head. But the crown jewel is Duvel Tripel Hop—an exceptional limited-release beer that usually costs ... Continue reading →
dfromson 37 photos · 9 followers “A tour of Benton's with Allan Benton himself, a.k.a. Nicest Guy in Tennessee” Continue reading →
dfromson 36 photos · 8 followers “Cheerwine and BBQ, Lexington, NC” Continue reading →
