Good Cause: Donate To Streetsblog This Week For A Chance To Win A Shiny New Schwinn

 

Bike Month is winding down, so hopefully you hit up some of the awesome events listed on BikeNYC.org and witnessed a few wild rides at the City Reliquary's Bike Fetish Day (check out these great photos). To wrap things up, we'll leave you with one more way to participate without even stepping away from your screen.

All month long nonprofit cycling and sustainable transportation website Streetsblog has been raising money to support the invaluable daily content that they've been delivering since 2006. In addition to a steady stream of news and information on their NYC, LA, SF, DC and national blogs, Streetsblog also runs Streetfilms, a site "dedicated to documenting livable streets worldwide." As of Wednesday they were just $3,500 shy of their $30,000 goal, and you have until Friday at midnight to help bridge the gap. 

In addition to supporting a great cause, your donation will get you a chance to win a set of Yehuda Moon comics, and if you chip in $50 or more to Streetsblog NYC or Streetfilms, you'll be entered to win a Schwinn city bike from Ride Brooklyn.

While you're preparing to pledge your support, check out one of Streetfilms' many biketastic videos:

-- John Ruscher

Wheels Up: BikeNYC.org Helps You Celebrate Bike Month

May is Bike Month, and while it might be more than half over, there's still plenty of cycling goodness left to go around. We recommend Transportation Alternative's BikeNYC.org, which is brimming with useful information about city cycling, including a daily calendar of bike-related events.

Today, for example was Bike to Work Day, and this weekend you can check out the NYC Bike Expo at Penn Pavilion, the Brooklyn Bike Jumble in Park Slop and lots more. The site also offers some handy tips and tempting deals for NYC's bike-lovers, as well as an interactive map to help you safely pedal your way around the city and a link to Transportation Alternative's directory of bike-friendly businesses.

Of course you can also get your Bike Month fix right here at 3rd Ward. Sign up for our Basic Bicycle Mechanics class to get to know your ride, then get to know it even better in Intermediate Bicycle Mechanics. Or learn to build your own Badass Bike Light!

-- John Ruscher

Go Here Now: Brooklyn's CharitySub Reimagines Philanthropy

We're always on the lookout for new initiatives and ideas that fit into the Future of Money infographic that we shared back in December. In February, for instance, we told you about Carrotmob's "buycotts." Now we're thrilled to highlight a new website that's based right here in Brooklyn.

Straight out of Carroll Gardens, CharitySub makes supporting good causes simple and easy. Each month the website picks three worthy nonprofits that are working toward similar goals. Then its subscribers, who chip in a modest $5 per month, get to choose which of those organizations receive their money. This month's "Working Dogs" theme, for instance, offers the option of supporting Angel On A Leash's therapy dogs, Canine Partners for Life's service dogs or Connecticut Canine Search and Rescue.

To make sure that its subscribers' money will be put to good use, CharitySub carefully selects its charities based on their impact, fiscal responsibility and transparency. It also provides subscribers with statistics on their giving and shareable illustrated reports on how charities have used their donations.

By automating the giving process, taking care of the research and footwork and pooling funds to make a bigger impact, CharitySub is an exciting and inspiring example of how the power of emerging economic systems can be harnessed for good. The only hard part will be deciding which of those cute and heroic pups to support.

-- John Ruscher

Go Here Now: The New York Times Brings Its Image Archive Back To Life On Tumblr

Photos from around the world being sorted in the New York Times' archive, a.k.a. the "morgue." (via The Lively Morgue)

"Oh super, another photo blog," you might be thinking as we (strongly) urge you to check out The Lively Morgue, which debuted last month. But hold up—this is not your run-of-the-mill, kaleidoscopic-oveload of information-style-Tumblr blog. The Lively Morgue was just aunched by the New York Times and it's a extraordinary glimpse into the newspaper's century-spanning pictorial archive.

The "morgue" comes from the long-standing nickname for that archive. "Explanations differ as to the origins of that name, but it's safe to say that the clippings were originally biographical and kept close at hand in case a subject dropped dead around deadline, requiring an instant obituary," the Times explains. The "lively," we imagine, refers to the cavalcade of exciting images that they are bringing back to life.

Of course the photographs are amazing to look at, but our favorite element is actually being able to flip each image over and see the reserve side; where photographers, journalists and editors jotted, typed, pasted and stamped each print with relevant information, before the days of computers and digital files.

The Times' collection is so vast that they've been unable to zero in on an exact number: 

How many? We don’t know. Our best guess is five million to six million prints and contact sheets (each sheet, of course, representing many discrete images) and 300,000 sacks of negatives, ranging in format size from 35 millimeter to 5 by 7 inches — at least 10 million frames in all. The picture archive also includes 13,500 DVDs, each storing about 4.7 gigabytes worth of imagery.

The Lively Morgue will feature a few photographs each week, since posting the entire Times archive would be quite a task. Even at 10 posts a day, they estimate that the print collection alone wouldn't be finished until the year 3935.

-- John Ruscher

Go Here Now // Carrotmob Chooses Carrots Over Sticks, "Buycotts" Over Boycotts

If you were excited by the infographic about The Future of Money that we posted back in December, you'll likely also share our enthusiasm for Carrotmob, an idea that fits right into that chart's "new lenses of wealth." Before you go any further, hit play on the video above for a quick and entertaining look at what it's all about.

Carrotmob takes the age-old concept of a boycott and flips it on its head. Rather than gathering together a group of people who promise to withhold money from a business to bring about change, Carrotmob proposes having a group pledge positive financial support for a business to achieve the same end. "We are called Carrotmob because we use the 'carrot' instead of the 'stick,'" the Carrotmob website explains. The reasoning? "In a boycott, everyone loses. In a Carrotmob, everyone wins."

In a recent feature on food and consumer choice, BBC 4 highlighted Carrotmob's "buycotts" as an example of a "growing attitude about technology and the desire to make things happen." Founder Brent Schulkin described how he started Carrotmob after noticing that boycotts don't really connect with how businesses make decisions. "What really matters to a business is money, spending, new customers, marketing and that sort of thing," he says.

On the Carrotmob website you can explore past campaigns that people have successfully organized across the globe. Focusing on convincing businesses to make environmentally friendly and sustainable changes, they range from asking a Bangkok grocer to stop using plastic bags to a Park Slope hardware store that agreed to use 22% of the money spent by Carrotmob shoppers on energy improvements. 

You can log into the Carrotmob website and share your own completed campaign, and soon you'll also be able to create and promote new ones. Start thinking of the carrots you and your network can dangle.

-- John Ruscher

GO HERE NOW // Visual Melt

Sometimes you just need to stop what you're doing and stare blankly at some hypnotic visual art. We're sure this week has you running around like asylum escapees, so take a second, pause and mosey on over to Visual Melt.

As Visual Melt's co-curated by premier creative directors James Lake and Leif Podhajsky (who, for you music aficianados out there, you may recognize from album covers for artists like Tame Impala, Peaking Lights and Lykke Li) we thought it wrong to heist their gallery. So like we said: Just go there. If it doesn't grant you momentary technological solace, you'll at least score some excellent new desktop wallpaper.

GO HERE NOW // Test Your Typeface Anatomy IQ With Shape Type

You encounter lots of different typefaces over the course of the day, from the custom Cheltenham of the New York Times' headlines to the Helvetica that graces all of the MTA's subway signs. But how well do you really know your letters? We're not talking your basic ABCs here, but the subtle curves and proportions of typeface anatomy.

Find out by heading over to Shape Type, an interactive letter shaping game from the peer to peer education website Method of Action. Presented with mis-shaped characters from ten different typefaces, you can adjust their shape and see how good your eye is for balanced and beautiful type. It even supports multi-touch if you've got a tablet handy. Surprising word of warning: ITC Edwardian Script is tough.

-- John Ruscher

HAPPENING TONIGHT // Vol.1 Brooklyn Serves Up Savory Bites Of Literary Culture

If you're into the Brooklyn literary scene, there's a good chance that you're already familiar with Vol.1 Brooklyn, a local blog that's picked up quite a following since it began in 2009. Vol.1 features everything from daily literature and culture links to book reviews and fiction. We particularly love Sunday Stories, an ongoing series of fiction and nonfiction pieces, and the Band Booking series, in which bands field questions about what they've been reading.

We caught up with the site's founder, Jason Diamond to ask him about Vol.1. "It was honestly just supposed to be a blog where myself and a few of my friends could talk about things we liked," he says. "Those things usually tend to be books and records, or things having to do with books and records. For some reason a lot of people started reading it, and I was also setting up reading events for the heck of it, and I thought, 'We should combine these things.'"

At Vol.1's readings, which have taken place at venues such as WORD, Brooklyn Winery and Bar Matchless, there's a good chance you'll catch a writer's work before it hits the big time. "It's awesome to watch a writer read for us from a manuscript they're working on, and then a year later they end up selling it," Diamond says. "Or when somebody tells me they wrote something for a Vol. 1 event that later ended up getting published for a really big magazine or journal. That's always really awesome." Vol.1 has also presented unique events such as The Greatest Three-Minute Food Stories and The Future of What?: A Panel on Punk in the 1990s.

It doesn't sound like Vol.1 is looking to turn a profit with its literary and culture explorations, but they wouldn't mind a little free caffeine. "If somebody would please foot the bill for all the coffee we drink to make Vol. 1 work, we'd gladly mention your product in our posts," Diamond says.

Tonight you can catch Vol.1 Brooklyn's latest literary throwdown, The Greatest 3-Minute Stories About The 90s, at Bar Matchless in Greenpoint. It will feature writers such as the Village Voice's Maura Johnston, Fluxblog's Matthew Perpetua, the Paris Review's Sadie Stein and Rob Tannenbaum, co-author of the acclaimed I Want My MTV.

-- John Ruscher

GO HERE NOW // Unconsumption, Your Daily Dose Of Creative Reuse And Mindful Consumption

A few years ago author and journalist Rob Walker coined the term "unconsumption," first writing about it in his Times Magazine column:

Getting new stuff can feel really good. Most everybody knows that. Most everybody also knows — particularly in the aftermath of the consumption-frenzy holiday season — that utility can fade, pleasure can be fleeting and the whole thought-that-counts thing is especially ephemeral. Apart from the usual solution to this problem (more new stuff!), it's worth pondering whether getting rid of stuff can ever feel as good as getting it.

Half a decade later, that idea has blossomed into much more. The Unconsumption Tumblr blog is daily proof that, when you can find a new purpose or home for something, "getting rid" of it can indeed feel wonderful. And so can exploring the countless ways that people around the world reuse and repurpose things.

Walker and a handful of other contributors populate the Unconsumption Tumblr with inspiring examples of creative repurposing, recycling, upcycling, mindful consumption and more. They can be pretty much anything, from a world map made from recycled computer parts to Brooklyn's own Dekalb Market to a plan to recycle decommissioned satellites to resources like Hipcycle.com and ManualsOnline.com. A couple of our favs are the iMacquarium, an iMac repurposed as an aquarium and a chair made out of 10,000 plastic drinking straws.

In addition to its Tumblr, Unconsumption has a wiki, which provides helpful info and tips on the best way to get rid of things you don't want. Walker and company also recently started The Uncollection, which features recycled creations that incorporate Unconsumption's logo, from patches and earrings to dinner plates and stationery.

-- John Ruscher

GO HERE NOW // PBS's "Off Book" Shows You The Fringe

 We've loved us some PBS since back in the after-school-special days. But if you haven't been watching web series "Off Book" by PBS Arts, we highly recommend getting on it. The series does short documenteries about a wide spectrum of contemporary artists; from steampunks to hackers to typeface designers and beyond.

This most recent episode, focusing mainly on street art, is a must-see.

Watch the full episode. See more Off Book.

It opens with Olek, a Brooklyn-based crocheter ("Knitting is for pussies," she says) who creates sculptures that have been shown in galleries world-wide. Olek's done interactive exhibits at both the Brooklyn Museum and the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. You've probably seen her work around the city, and her cover of the bull sculpture on Wall Street is particularly resonant these days.

The second half of the segment is devoted to Swoon, whomyou may recognize from Exit Through the Gift Shop. Her multimedia murals are inspired by the layered texture of New York itself, giving even her gallery shows a pleasantly gritty feel, even though her portrait subjects are often happy and smiling. It's hard not to do the same at this New York I Love You redux. 

--Layla Schlack