Check out this breathtaking concept video from Bonnier Group, the Swedish media company. It demonstrates an elegant, highly developed magazine interface for the sort of tablet computer that Apple and other companies are said to be working on:

I’ll be first in line when Apple releases a device that can accommodate this sort of interface, which is close to what I’ve been dreaming about for the last couple of years.

[via Peter Kafka of All Things Digital.]

This tablet fantasy from Time Warner is pretty good too, although too busy and multimedia-ish for my magazine tastes.

Here are my latest magazine covers for Vanity Fair. They appeared in the September issue under the hed and dek “Annals of Our Endangered Medium: Some Shotgun Magazine Mergers You Might Soon See (Second in a Series).” I’m especially amused by how perfectly the Out and Car and Driver logos fit together.

The first installment of “Annals of Our Endangered Medium” appeared in the March 2009 issue.

[Visit the magazine covers page for more stuff like this.]

A British production house called Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories created this fantastic video of a scientific experiment in which disembodied heads are used as musical instruments. Incredible compositing work.

The Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories website has more info, including some production stills.

[via my colleague Chino, via my colleague Sam.]

I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland. For several years earlier this decade, I had an extra reason to make a trip: Bobby Fischer, who moved to Iceland in 2005 after a series of international incidents. As I mentioned in a post a couple of years ago, Fischer and my father were friends and colleagues on the U.S. chess circuit in the 1950s and ’60s.

Bobby wasn’t exactly known for being a friendly guy. But I still imagined visiting Reykjavik, spotting him on a park bench, and walking up to him to say, “Bobby, I’m Eliot Hearst’s son.” He’s a major figure in the mythology of my family, so of course I always wanted to meet him.

It was not to be: Fischer died in Reykjavik on January 17, 2008.

Fischer is buried in Selfoss, a small town about 40 miles from Reyjavik. I have an Internet pal in Reykjavik named Halldor, and he passed along these photos of Bobby’s grave. They were taken by an American friend of his named Judith Gans, a singer and Icelandic music expert:

Ever since I got my new iPhone with video capabilities a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to do this: upload a video from my phone to YouTube and then immediately post the video to Panopticist using Movable Type’s mobile interface. I’m sitting in the upper tier at Giants Stadium, where AC/DC has just begun its set. It’s my first stadium show since I saw Pink Floyd at the Hoosierdome in 1987. It’s 9:30pm. Here’s a clip from their first song:

Well, crap, it appears to be impossible to copy and paste a YouTube embed code on an iPhone—the code won’t select. So here’s a direct link to the video on YouTube—I’ll fix this later:

http://bit.ly/4wlAz

UPDATE, Saturday morning: I’m not the first person to discover that YouTube’s embed codes aren’t selectable on an iPhone. As this guy points out, it’s because the iPhone doesn’t allow you to select form-field text that isn’t editable—and YouTube’s embed codes aren’t editable on YouTube. Luckily, there’s a workaround: On tools4noobs.com, you can paste in the URL of a YouTube video and it’ll spit out a valid XHTML embed code that you can then copy. So, here’s another video from last night—it’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” in its entirety. The sound quality is really bad—I wasn’t surprised to discover that the iPhone’s microphone can’t handle high volumes.

I love technology. And I also love to rock. Viva the Young brothers! It was a great show.

These covers of mine appeared in the March 2009 issue of Vanity Fair under the hed and dek “Annals of Our Endangered Medium: Some shotgun magazine mergers you might soon see (first in a series).” I was excited to finally get a chance to deploy Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed for a Cosmopolitan parody:

The first one is a slightly different version than the one that actually ran. And there was a third cover, which I haven’t posted here.

I’ll be doing more of these for V.F. in the near future.

[Visit the magazine covers page for more stuff like this.]

As I mentioned late last year, my father, Eliot Hearst, recently published a book called Blindfold Chess: History, Psychology, Techniques, Champions, World Records, and Important Games. He spent many years writing the book with help from a co-author, John Knott, and it now stands as the definitive work about the topic. Blindfold chess is the art of playing without sight of the board or pieces—an extraordinary intellectual feat that has a long, colorful history.

I recently designed a full-fledged website for the book; this new site superseded the placeholder site I created last fall. You can now read the entire introduction, which gives a great overview of the psychology and history of blindfold chess, including the record-setting simultaneous exhibition performed by the legendary Miguel Najdorf in 1947. In that astonishing performance, Najdorf played 45 games at once without ever looking at a board.

My father just posted a blog item about Bobby Fischer’s skill at playing blindfolded. As I explained in a post of my own in 2007, Bobby and my father were friends on the professional chess circuit in the ’50s and ’60s. My father’s blog post about Bobby begins like this:

In our book Bobby Fischer is only rarely mentioned and, strangely enough, never in any direct connection with blindfold chess. This omission was mainly due to Bobby’s failure to play any serious, formal blindfold games or exhibitions. However, friends were familiar with his playing without sight of any board and pieces in all kinds of informal settings: taking a walk, riding on a train or plane, having dinner, partying, or relaxing on a day off in a tournament. His master opponents often had no chess set available, either. Virtually none of the scores of those many games were recorded for posterity. But, to no one’s surprise, Bobby was a formidable blindfold player.

For more about my father’s book, visit blindfoldchess.net.

In November, I roped my pal Clive Thompson into joining me for one of the two AC/DC shows at Madison Square Garden. Though I wasn’t a huge AC/DC fan back when I was a guitar-playing, classic-rocking adolescent, I’ve become sort of obsessed with them in the last few years. Their rhythm section is one of the tightest, most rocking ever—viva Malcolm Young!—and their devotion to pure rock form hasn’t wavered in 35 years. Their new album, Black Ice, is pretty fine, and the lead track, “Rock ’n’ Roll Train,” is one of their best since the early-’80s glory years with producer Mutt Lange, who focused the band’s raw power and shaped the rhythm section into an incredibly tight, earth-shaking combo.

Clive and I didn’t have tickets to the show, which was sold out, and neither of us wanted to pay face value, about $90 each. So we planned to try our luck with the scalpers outside. If we failed, we’d just go drink beer somewhere in the neighborhood. We showed up outside the arena an hour after the doors opened, figuring that scalpers would be eager to get rid of any unsold tickets by then. Our price goal: $60 each. We didn’t know if this was realistic, but we weren’t too worried about it, because drinking beer was a pretty good backup option.

And that’s how we came to buy two counterfeit tickets. First I’ll tell the story of how and why we bought them, and then I’ll show you the ticket.

Neither Clive nor I had been to an arena-rock show in years. We knew we’d have to be on the lookout for ripoffs and scams, but we weren’t sure we’d be able to detect a professionally forged ticket. For all we knew, recent advances in printing technologies had led to a mishmash of ticket styles, with different appearances generated by different printing systems: at the arena, at a record store, at Ticketmaster outlets, and so forth. Had increased computerization led to greater standardization of ticket appearance, or less? We didn’t know. We also wondered whether scalpers had enough design talent to forge tickets convincingly.

[Continue reading "The Unbearable Lightness of a Counterfeit AC/DC Ticket"...]