Cool Hunting
Any Francophile worth their salt should know about Radio Nova, the 27 year-old French station that broadcasts throughout much of the country. There are a lot of reasons to love it, not the least of which is if you find yourself driving a tiny car equipped with only a cassette deck to Le Lude, a renaissance castle in the Loire Valley — as Seth and I did recently.
The renowned station can be streamed from the Internet as well, offering a mellow mix of music that spans decades and genres in an egalitarian way that strikes us as quintessentially French. The eclectic mix is difficult to summarize but, like the name implies, it has the laid-back effect of Bossa Nova without any Northern Hemisphere melancholy. Where else can you hear "Bonita Applebum" alongside Boston's Westbound Train sampling "Love and Happiness" these days? Even if you don't like all the music (it can be a little heavy on electronic picks for my taste and doesn't venture much beyond that, world music and hip hop), the relaxed mood is difficult to resist.
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French label Aprill 77 emphasizes high quality construction and fabrics and in their first year they have already made an impact on the denim scene. A standout from their upcoming Fall/Winter 2009 line is their Japanese selvedge stretch denim pant and jacket. It's the first we've heard of stretch selvedge denim. There are only two factories in the world that can produce this type...
Touted as a threat to Google's search-engine dominance, Wolfram Alpha doesn't warrant the comparison. The site is a different beast altogether, considered a "computational knowledge engine" by British founder Stephen Wolfram. It's more of an answer-engine that relies on its curated knowledge base of data, rather than rounding up websites based on keywords. Boasting north of 10 trillion pieces of data and over 50,000...
With so many ways to stay socially connected these days it's difficult to keep track of it all. The new Adobe AIR application Skimmer sorts this problem out with its clean, minimal interface that conveniently aggregates Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Bebo activity in to a single list view while still allowing you expand each item to view the full details—all within the application. Skimmer...
The kings of the modern modular wall hanging, the Bouroullec Brothers, recently released their latest beautiful creation for Danish textile company Kvadrat. Entitled Cloud, a new hanging system allows endless variations of nebulous forms to be used in any way your imagination sees fit. Cloud comes in two fabrics and seven colour ways. Through the simple device of a customised elastic band, tiles can...
by Lynne Johnson Does driving a Vespa really reduce your carbon footprint? Yes, says Paolo Timoni, CEO and President of Piaggio Group USA. And that's why his company recently updated its website, to teach consumers about the benefits of driving a Vespa. "The site can offer solutions, sometimes proposing combined usage depending on the driving situation. It's ok to own both, the site just shows...
While most of us sit annoyed waiting for heavily coded Flash websites to load—or perhaps abandon them all together—Pretty Loaded has a different take on this pesky little time frame. Created by the Brooklyn-based digital creative agency Big Spaceship, Pretty Loaded is a curated archive of preloading screens and animations, proving that those few seconds, or minutes, can serve as what they call "short-attention-span-theater."...
