I wrote an article for the New Yorker about the evolution of web browsers, the impending demise of the infamous blink element, and Google Chrome’s new HTML rendering engine.

Chrome’s recent move to Blink undercuts the primary olive branch it promised to Web developers upon Chrome’s release in 2008; those developers now need to test their Web sites in an additional rendering engine. But there is an argument in favor of the change: WebKit is now very widely used, especially in mobile devices, in much the same way that Internet Explorer 6 dominated the market and brought a near-halt to real innovation in the look and feel of the Web a decade ago.

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It is very hard for me to bring myself to say this very silly phrase, but: I wrote a very short piece of fiction about pretzels for McSweeney’s. It’s part of their snarky reviews of new food series, to which I also contributed a Grape Nuts feature a few years ago.

When I bite into a Snyder’s of Hanover York Peppermint Pretzel Sandwich Dip, I get the sensation that I’m about to die in a ditch and my rotting corpse will be picked apart by raccoons before anybody finds me.
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I spent the past few days at the weekend-long competitive coding marathon that kicked off the 2013 edition of TechCrunch‘s annual Disrupt NY conference. Thanks to the mighty Niles Brooks and Kenneth Chen, we now have Dosi.io, an extension for Google Chrome which automatically adds additional tech industry intel to the professional networking profiles on LinkedIn — repositories on GitHub, history on AngelList, etc.

I think it’s pretty cool! But it’s not just me: TechCrunch wrote it up, and CrunchBase awarded it their big prize — they’ll be flying us out to Berlin in October to compete in the Disrupt Berlin hackathon. I can’t wait!

Head on over to Spin for a quick look at Panamah, an electronic pop trio who sound quite a lot like The xx.

Even fans of the xx would have to concede that there’s a strict formula in play in their music — sparse percussion, simple chord progressions implied more than stated, and most importantly the hypersexual whispered interplay between dueling vocalists. “Børn Af Natten” proceeds along at a tempo that’s just a hair too fast for the xx, and this has the effect of tempering the depressing sinking feeling that emerges from the spaces between the beats.

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Who’s up for a little time travel? I’ve been a little under the weather so this time we dig into the archives for my my busker recording project with the Village Voice — I recorded Monica Bethelwood and Juliet Biemiller ages ago but the segment never ran, and I’ve always felt guilty about letting such an excellent song get buried by our hassles on the editorial end.

Bethelwood told me she’d just returned from California, and given the hobo-folk vibe I was quite content to just assume that she hitched a ride on a rusty freight train. (One of her songs was called “Hubba Hubba Hobo,” actually.) She has since set up shop in North Carolina; “I moved to Asheville with 20 dollars in my pocket,” she told me recently, so I like to think she now travels between her gigs doing tarot card readings riding atop a rickety old mule.

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I reviewed the new album by Trent Reznor’s new band for Spin.

The aspirations here are lofty, as always, if less reflective than your average NIN lament; the songs swell, bobble, and even leak from the seams under the pressure. It’s not just that Maandig’s petite vocals always feel incidental; Reznor himself and his signature tortured whispering are dwarfed as well, because the real star is his production expertise, which reaches new heights of maturity here even when all else fails.

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Another round of my busker recording project with the Village Voice, this time featuring the delightful Stefan Fink:

He’s surprisingly young. This is a natural consequence, of course, of singing old-soul Appalachian folk; the MTA has up-to-the-minute arrival times posted on the LED signs overhead, and finally now also delivered via a new iPhone app, but songs like this emerged at a time when we were still dreaming up the concept of time zones to help with scheduling trains, none of which were underground at the time. Also, he is sporting a mean beard.

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Last night NBC aired the final episode of 30 Rock. The Awl and I would like to hit you with every spoiler in one efficient listicle.

Goodness, I can’t believe I’ve neglected to mention this for so long. We’re already four issues in, but I’m the main geek behind the web presence for Maura Magazine, a new digital weekly for iOS devices helmed by the amazing writer and editor Maura Johnston. She fielded my pitches at the Village Voice for a while, and you may have also read her work at a number of other wonderful publications.

This is her new experiment in small-scale direct journalism. Using an infrastructure provided by my fellow geeks at 29th Street Publishing, she publishes a handful of long-form stories each week which are pushed to a custom app loaded on the iPads and iPhones of her eager subscribers, each of whom pays a buck or less per issue, with payments automated via iTunes. Writers get paid, readers don’t have to deal with ads, everybody wins.

There’s been more coverage of this than I’d care to outdo here, so let me just refer you to some of the other guys:

• New York Times
• Columbia Journalism Review
• The Awl
• The Hairpin
• MediaBistro
• O Music Awards

As for the site, a lot of the heavy lifting is being effortlessly handled by WordPress, but I’m still really excited about a lot of the things happening in the custom functions I wrote — these are among the coolest WordPress ideas I’ve ever come up with. I don’t want to go into too much detail since we’re not openly sharing the plugins yet, but in a nutshell, the paywalls are dynamic, and you will start to see them move and react as we continue to charge along here. For example, this past weekend one of the articles was temporarily unlocked to match the HBO schedule.

And, as with my last attempt to merge tech with editorial, a hearty shout out to my good friend Buster Bylander, who jumped in with his amazing visual design sense once I was done fiddling around with the code for generating the content loops. We are both very proud of this. Please subscribe!