An article in The New York Times today highlights the increasing tendency of teenagers to greet each other by hugging, to the bewilderment of their parents, who are more accustomed to handshakes. Not just limited to family, good friends, and lovers, hugging has become a standard way to say hi in high school hallways. There are even distinct varieties of hug:
There is the basic friend hug, probably the most popular, and the bear hug, of course. But now there is also the bear claw, when a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows poking out. There is the hug [...]

Are your Google Alerts a little too subtle? Is Tweet Deck and your RSS feed not keeping you in the loop in a timely fashion? Then you may want to upgrade to a news alert system you’re not going to miss, like an 85 dB smoke alarm.
Jer Thorp has hacked together a smoke alarm hooked up to the news feed from the New York Times NewsWire API. If a pre-determined word or phrase comes through the service, the alarm will let out a screaming alarm, letting you know hot information is coming down the line. The “NewsAlarm” is also thankfully [...]

“Paper is dying, but it’s just a device.” So says Nick Bilton, editor in the New York Times research and development lab. Bilton talked with Wired about what he sees as the future of news delivery, and paper, in his view,  is not going to go away, but it will play a smaller role in how we take in news. One way paper may survive, is as output from “newspaper boxes” that print out a personalized paper with embedded QR and sms codes for each article, that will lead to more in-depth digital coverage.
Beyond hard copies, Bilton is working on  [...]

Eric Wilson writes an interesting piece in last week’s New York Times, “Change? It Wasn’t in Fashion” pointing out how in 2008, compared to the topsy turvy year in the American political arena, the fashion industry was decidedly more cautious (or in his words, stubborn). Marc Jacobs revived designs from earlier collaborations with Murakami and Steven Sprouse, even marketing them with tried and true imagery. Models from the 1990s are making a comeback. Trends which have been around for way too long (they are trends after all, meaning they’re supposed to shift and morph with significant timeliness) just won’t go [...]