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Neiman Marcus, to open in 2018, is the first retailer announced for the Hudson Yards complex on the Far West Side.

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This appositely named Tumblr blog collects screen shots of software before users have input their own data. Its goal is to encourage designers to “delight users by designing the empty states”—details matter. Here’s an example from Conjure.io. See more at Emptystat.es. +

Advertise on Subtraction.com.

Beautiful piece by Craig Mod:

Thoughtful decisions concerned with details marginal or marginalized conspire to affect greatness. (Hairline spacing after em dashes in online editing software — for example.) The creative process around these decisions being equal parts humility and diligence. The humility to try again and again, and the diligence to suffer your folly enough times to find the right solution. […]

A book with proper margins says a number of things. It says, we care about the page. It says, we care about the words. We care so much that we’re going to ensure the words and the page fall into harmony. We’re not going to squish the text to save money. Oh, no, we will not not rush and tuck words too far into the gutter.

A book with proper margins says, We respect you, Dear Reader, and also you, Dear Author, and you, too, Dear Book.

Filed under: Convertible, Performance, Mazda

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata. The highly anticipated fourth-generation (ND) model made its official debut in Monterey, CA this evening, and while details are slim (as in, we have practically none), there's one big thing to talk about: less weight.

Yes, Mazda has confirmed that the new Miata sheds some 220 pounds over the model it replaces, and is "the most compact of any generation MX-5 so far." For those keeping track, that means the new MX-5 should weigh in somewhere around 2,200 pounds.

Mazda's Kodo design language is obvious here, with a seriously wide and low demeanor, and a mix of flowing lines and sharp angles. We don't have any powertrain details to report as of this writing, but Mazda says the full suite of Skyactiv technologies are onboard, and the motto in creating this car was "Innovate in order to preserve."

Click the image above to see the new MX-5 Miata in high resolution, click below for the press release, and stay tuned to this space for more details as they break.

Continue reading 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata has arrived

2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata has arrived originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 03 Sep 2014 21:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Before the year is out, you will have yet another alternative to Google and Apple Maps. Nokia says that it will soon release a free-of-charge maps app on Android and iOS. Why? Because the company thinks that your current options are, well, stale.

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A nice idea from Australian startup Memobottle. The price is good stiff too though: just $5 $25.

Adam Santariano of Bloomberg Businessweek with a fascinating look at Apple's first responder program ahead of Tuesday's iWatch and iPhone 6 event:

"...first responders in Cupertino learn directly of a defective iPhone in New York, Paris, or Tokyo as soon as a Genius Bar staffer reports it. The phone goes on the next FedEx (FDX) plane to California. Using the serial numbers in each device, Apple can trace a problem down to individual workers on an assembly line."

Every company has launch issues and Apple is no exception. What makes Apple unique is its ability to quickly respond to, and often correct issues before they become the punchline for late-night comedians.

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Soon, Family Guy will invade The Simpsons — and now it's time for Futurama to do the same in a special episode airing November 9th, "Simpsorama." Entertainment Weekly has the first image and details:

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Lego has been a childhood institution for decades, but the business has been growing rapidly over the last decade — so much so that it has now surpassed Mattel as the biggest toymaker in the world in terms of both revenue and profit. That's only over the first six months of 2014, though, so Mattel has time to claw back this holiday season. The empire the company has built by licensing franchises like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, DC, and more has truly paid off — not to mention its recent successful foray into the movie theater.

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Gingerbread has had the "edible holiday house" market cornered forever, but this season ice cream is making a delicious debut. (Yes, I am aware it's just barely September. Stay with me here; desserts—even the festive ones—are news year-round.) Nendo teamed up with Häagen-Dazs to design these sweet little villages that link together with chocolate bridges. Yum.

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By now, you've likely read at least one of the many rumors surrounding what's become known as the iWatch. Well, according to The Wall Street Journal, you can add a few more details to the fray. That outlet is reporting that whenever Apple's...

The Bridge is over.

This year's major fall restaurant preview pieces are all in, and if you've spent any amount of time looking through them, you've probably noticed there's a serious dearth of upcoming Brooklyn restaurants. In turn, it might be time to ask: Has Kings County's upstart restaurant scene officially reached its peak?

There are restaurants opening in Brooklyn, but many of them don't feel like events. Two of the biggest names listed — Four & Twenty Blackbirds and Ganso Yaki — are spinoffs, while another opening is inside the Botanic Gardens. Then, there are mini-chains: Michael Psilakis's MP Taverna will open its fourth location overall, in Williamsburg, combined with a beer hall. There's nary a Blanca or Dover in sight.

Meanwhile, ambitious high-end venues, like Enrique Olvera's Cosme, and anticipated high-low mash-ups like Sarah Simmons's Champagne- and fried-chicken-based Birds & Bubbles or Alex Stupak's Empellón al Pastor, are opening in Flatiron, the East Village, and the Lower East Side. Even the new Brooklyn Fare Chef's Table is opening in … Hell's Kitchen. Manhattan has always been the city's power center for restaurants, of course, but the dynamic feels far more out of balance than it has in recent years.

So what's going on? A look at the evidence reveals a number of factors that could be contributing to the borough's decreased appeal among restaurateurs.

Brooklyn's rents aren't as enviable as they once were. Manhattan's restaurant economy continues to weather an era of insane rents combined with intermittent bouts of course correction, but the truth is there are still great deals in Manhattan. The median rent for a Williamsburg one-bedroom has now surpassed the same in the Upper East Side and the East Village, and the equalization will continue. Manhattan is still central, dense with potential customers. For many owners, most of Brooklyn continues to seem decentralized and speculative. "The only place restaurants can go anymore is the perimeter of Manhattan," a broker told us in July, but the same can't be said for much of Brooklyn, and Manhattan's fringes are still relatively more appealing than neighborhoods like Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, where chef-centered, destination places have an almost nonexistent track record.

Bars are better bets. It's no coincidence that 10 of the 20 forthcoming nightlife spots in New York's roundup are in Brooklyn — ambitious bars have supplanted innovative restaurants, or at least come first, especially in gentrifying areas, where the odds of making it as a neighborhood bar are far greater than the chances you'll succeed with a twenty-course tasting menu counter and needle-nose tweezer food.

Williamsburg has become a repository for chains. Bedford Avenue's freak flag is long gone and the area is now safe for multi-unit players: Starbucks has infiltrated Williamsburg and is working on a second location. Meanwhile, chainlets like Parm, Umami Burger, and Sweetgreen are gobbling up pre-portioned retail spaces in new mixed-use conversions. They may be great places to eat, but the days when it wasn't unusual to stumble upon an unknown vegan prix fixe place decorated with severed doll's heads are all but extinct. In other words: The frontier has diminished, and there's no longer the same competitive cultural cachet to be had by opening in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan.

Some of the biggest openings are happening in boutique hotels — and most of the high-powered ones happen to be in Manhattan. Josh Pickard, Luke Ostrom, and Andrew Carmellini will open Little Park at the redesigned Smyth this fall, while team Torrisi's Dirty French officially opens today in the Ludlow Hotel. Even Danny Meyer's next big restaurant, Marta, is in a hotel. In-demand chefs and owners are naturally going to be the first choice of hotels that view name-brand restaurants as must-have amenities. Since the business deals tend to be far more preferable for restaurant owners than stand-alone spots, it's a no-brainer that lots of big names now gravitate toward hotels. In fact, the era of the above-par chef-centric hotel restaurant appears poised to begin anew, in full, this year.

Manhattan is still ... Manhattan. This fall, in addition to Olvera flying in from Mexico City to make "single-origin" tortillas, Korean chain Baekjeong is setting up its U.S. flagship in K-Town, and an ambitious British chain is coming with hamburgers and lobster, presumably with more on the way. Some of the most heavily praised chefs in the country will also be hanging out for few weeks at a clip in a deluxe kitchen inside the Puck Building, perhaps because even if they're not opening there, out-of-town chefs are always going to gravitate toward Manhattan.

Related: 36 Restaurants Opening This Fall

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: where brooklyn at?, brooklyn, fall preview 2014, manhattan

The new live-action Destiny trailer is a case-study in video game trailer excess. They licensed Zeppelin, for crying out loud! I can't quite tell whether it's perversely great, or just plain ridiculous. Both, I suppose. None of us will ever look this cool while actually playing Destiny.

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I went to the newish Barcade in Chelsea last night to get some dinner and play Star Wars (and Ms. Pac-Man and Tetris and Donkey Kong) and discovered their tater tots are shaped like Tetris pieces:

ИOM ИOM ИOM. You can get these tots from a company called US Foods; they call them Puzzle Potatoes. Their sell sheet for the product is a wonder of corporate wishful thinking masquerading as marketing.

Here's a menu item that will encourage kids to play with their food.

Yes! This is exactly what all parents want. Huge parental issue in America right now is that kids don't play with their food enough.

When baked, these innovative Puzzle Potatoes are a fun and healthier alternative to regular fries...

Tater tots are not a health food. That's the whole point. Also, aren't regular fries also healthier when baked?

Puzzle potatoes are new innovative and interactive potatoes for kids.

Imagine the meeting. "Bob, what can we do about these smartphone? Kids just aren't spending enough time with their potatoes anymore. Instead they're Facebooking and Flappy Birding. Wait, I know... interactive potatoes!" [Cut to Bob being paraded around the office on his coworkers' shoulders]

Our proprietary puzzle-piece shapes...

Well, someone else's proprietary puzzle piece shapes, but why quibble with details?

Features & Benefits... 2D or 3D

I don't. I can't. What does that even mean? The sell sheet for these should be super simple: a photo of the tots and this caption in all-caps 120-point type: THEY'RE TATER TOTS SHAPED LIKE TETRIS PIECES! BUY THEM, YOU FOOL! (thx, kathryn)

Tags: Barcade   food   restaurants   Tetris   video games

A new study shows that researchers are 99.999 certain human activity is responsible for catastrophic climate change. But just as that fifth dentist threatens to undermine Trident gum's ability to keep your teeth clean, feel free to hold out for that 0.001 percent chance that the melting polar ice caps are just the sun's natural way of giving polar bears bigger swimming pools. ¯\(ツ)/¯ [ more › ]

Attention bargain hunters, price check on Whole Foods! A shocking new report by Bloomberg discovered that identical baskets of groceries from the Austin-based chain rang up lower than most of its competitors in Manhattan. Whole Foods: The Second Least Worst Supermarket For Yuppies. [ more › ]

Five years after the ribbon was cut on the first section of the High Line, the project is now coming to completion. The third and final phase will open on September 21st. Friends of the High Line sent out the announcement this morning: [ more › ]

I wonder how the viewership numbers for these events compares to major TV shows?

A Louisiana federal court has found that the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the result of "gross negligence" on the part of BP, a decision that will potentially have the company paying billions of dollars more in fines. Under the Clean Water Act, a company can be charged up to $1,100 per barrel of oil spilled in the absence of gross negligence. But with gross negligence, as has been found here, that fine can potentially quadruple. The court didn't decide damages in today's ruling, but Bloomberg estimates that they could be as high as $18 billion.

BP first pled guilty to criminal charges over the spill, which is among the largest in US history, back in 2014, then agreeing $4.5 billion in fines. That didn't...

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Google has an unusually high interest in strapping small computers to people's bodies in the name of bettering the spread of information. The latest example? Something called Cartographer, which — as the name suggests — is a project to map things. But for Cartographer, it's not just any things, but the insides of buildings. Where the company's Trekker backpack was designed to map and capture Street View imagery, this backpack is purely for mapping interiors of buildings, with humans doing the legwork.

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Unless you're a close follower of chess, you're probably missing out on one of the most impressive feats the game has ever seen. Fabiano Caruana, an Italian born in the US and currently ranked #3 in the world, has won seven straight games in the "strongest ever chess tournament", the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, MO. No losses, no draws, just 7 straight wins.

In terms of comparison, Magnus Carlsen, the world's current #1 and owner of the highest ranking ever, is 2-1-4 at the same tournament. Which is pretty typical; the best players draw a lot. Over his career, Carlsen has drawn almost 50% of the time and Caruana about 40%.

The modern times of chess have a new king, king Fabiano Caruana. One has to look back to 1968 where in Wijk Aan Zee the legendary Korchnoi started with 8,0/8. The times now are so different and the competition so fierce that already Fabiano's success can be proclaimed as the most memorable streak in the history of chess.

Along the way, Caruana has beaten Carlsen (#1), Levon Aronian (#2), Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (#9) twice, Hikaru Nakamura (#7), and Veselin Topalov (#6) twice. If you look at the unofficial live chess ratings, you'll see he has moved into the #2 position in the world, jumping a whopping 34.1 points in rating. He also owns the fourth highest rating in history, behind Carlsen, Kasparov, and Aronian. Caruana plays Carlsen again today, starting from the more advantageous white position. (via @tylercowen)

Update: In his eighth match, Caruana drew against Carlsen but clinched first place overall with two matches remaining.

Tags: chess   Fabiano Caruana   games   Magnus Carlsen

At age 30, Alexander Wang has emerged as the most successful fashion designer of his generation, producing collections for both his own house and that of Balenciaga. Can Mr. Wang prove the skeptics wrong?

Woah. That's just...woah. But as the little Colonel Sanders character notes, it seems hard to use.

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This fall, Sangmyung University in Seoul, South Korea will begin teaching a course on PlayStation. Just check out the classroom.

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Pour some sugar on me.

When Mike Kurtz, a 32-year-old Brooklyn resident, was traveling in Brazil several years ago, he stumbled upon a tiny pizzeria and found chile-infused honey on each table. It was his holy shit moment. "I've long been a lover of all things spicy, as well as pizza," Kurtz says. "So when I tasted it, I thought it was incredible." He became obsessed — and like someone who's returned from Italy wanting to re-create a perfect cacio e pepe, Kurtz set about making his own ultimate spicy honey. He spent eight years experimenting, and it appears that was time well spent. His product, Mike's Hot Honey, has been a hit since he debuted it four years ago. Now hot honey looks like it could be the next sriracha, and as interest has grown, so has Kurtz's competition.

If you've seen hot honey at a restaurant, you were probably at Paulie Gee's. In 2010, Kurtz began an apprenticeship at the Greenpoint pizza joint and presented owner Paul Giannone with a bottle of his homemade hot honey. Giannone loved it and decided to serve it atop his Sopressata pies. When customers started requesting to-go ramekins of the condiment, Kurtz knew he had made something special, and began producing, bottling, and selling his hot honey out of the Paulie Gee's kitchen — which is still his home base.

The key to hot honey's appeal is its versatility. Like all the great condiments — Heinz ketchup, sriracha — you can drizzle hot honey on all sorts of things. Pizza (of course), fried chicken, fresh ricotta, hot biscuits, Brussels sprouts. The sweet-heat combo is universally appealing, but hot honey also had an added layer of depth thanks to the floral qualities of both the honey and the peppers used to infuse it. (Kurtz keeps his exact recipe a secret.)

It was only a matter of time until somebody else saw the appeal and entered the hot-honey fray. Kurtz's biggest rival is MixedMade's Bees Knees, a start-up company launched in late January by entrepreneur Morgen Newman and his friend, Casey Elsass. Theirs is different than your typical artisan origin story: "Our business started in a funny way," Elsass says. "Morgen came to me with the idea of starting a business in 30 days, and I wanted to do something with food. Hot sauce is such a crowded market already, and spicy honey is much less crowded. When we started, we weren't even aware that there were other brands on the market.” While Kurtz spent eight years working on his recipe, Elass only took two nights to develop his hot honey, which is spicier than its predecessor. The 30-day challenge for Bees Knees was totally self-imposed: Elsass and Newman set a time limit so that they could "avoid falling into inactivity." Time is of the essence when you’re vying to become a category leader.

Bee Knees is growing exponentially, which is interesting because it’s the more expensive product: An 8-ounce bottle costs $14, while a 12-ounce bottle of Mike’s Hot Honey costs $10. (Kurtz's version does include vinegar, while Bee's Knees doesn't.) Newman and Elsass started their company because they saw an opening in the marketplace, and their tech-start-up approach is paying off: Demand is so high that Elsass recently quit his job at the Metropolitan Opera. He makes no secret of his ambitions, either: "We want to be in every city, and in as many states as possible," Elsass says. "Retail is our big focus.” Bees Knees is already available at shops in Iowa, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, and the company has wisely partnered with fellow start-ups like Good Eggs and Mouth.

This is just the beginning of the expansion, too. Whole Foods will soon carry both brands, which is perhaps the biggest prize in the race to become America's premier hot honey. Success on the national stage could mean sriracha-like awareness and appeal — a bottle of hot honey in every food snob's pantry around the country.

For his part, Kurtz — essentially the godfather of hot honey — doesn't seem too concerned about his competition. "You can't patent a food recipe, so I assumed that at some point, someone else would start making it," he says. "They released a very similar product, but all I can do is focus on my own business.” One of the dueling businesses could end up dominating, the VHS to the other products' Betamax. In reality, though, the two companies could end up both being successful, like the Coke and Pepsi of the hot-honey trade. For the moment, having two groups vying to become the leader only ends up exposing the condiment to more people — which will help both businesses. It seems it only takes one taste to catch potential customers off guard and get them hooked on a great new idea.

Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: condiment talk, bees knees, condiments, hot honey, mike's hot honey, mixedmade, spicy honey

The single-worst piece I’ve seen regarding last week’s iCloud celebrity photo leak is, by far, this one from David Auerbach at Slate. To see where Auerbach is coming from, let’s skip ahead to his conclusion first:

But whether or not any of these problems were directly responsible for the leak, Apple users, from Jennifer Lawrence to corporate executives to laptop musicians to you, should be out for blood, and other companies should use this as a lesson to double- and triple-check their own security stories. Apple will probably survive though. IPhones [sic] are so cool and pretty.

The old “Apple customers are shallow fools drawn to shiny things, and easily swayed by popular opinion” angle.

Here’s the problem with Auerbach’s piece:

Whether or not this particular vulnerability was used to gather some of the photos — Apple is not commenting, as usual, but the ubiquity and popularity of Apple’s products certainly point to the iCloud of being a likely source — its existence is reason enough for users to be deeply upset at their beloved company for not taking security seriously enough. Here are five reasons why you should not trust Apple with your nude photos or, really, with any of your data.

Don’t trust Apple “with any of your data” isn’t just wrong because it’s a hyperbolic overreaction, it’s wrong because it’s potentially dangerous. What has been mostly overlooked in the reaction to this photo leak scandal, and completely lost in Auerbach’s argument, is that backups are a form of security — in the same sense that life insurance is a form of security for your children and spouse.

Over the years I’ve received numerous emails from past and former Genius Bar support staff, telling similar stories of heartbreak. Customer comes in, their iPhone completely broken, or lost, or stolen, and they had precious photos and videos on it. The birth of a child. The last vacation they ever took with a beloved spouse who has since passed away. Did they ever back up their iPhone to a Mac or PC with iTunes? No. In many cases they don’t even know what “iTunes on a PC” even means. Or maybe they connected the iPhone to iTunes once, the day they bought it and needed to activate it, and then never again.

This happened to thousands of people. It’s why Apple made cloud-based backups one of the fundamental pillars of iCloud. It still happens, today, to people who haven’t signed up for iCloud and enabled iCloud backups. It’s heartbreaking in most cases, and downright devastating in some. I’ve heard from Genius Bar staffers who eventually left the job because of the stress of dealing with customers suffering data loss. Once it is determined that the photos and videos are irretrievable from the device and have never been backed up, the job of the Genius staffer turns from technician to grief counselor. Bereavement is not too strong a word.

iCloud backups have not eliminated this problem, but they have made it far less common. This is, like almost everything in tech, a trade-off:

• Your data is far safer from irretrievable loss if it is synced/backed up, regularly, to a cloud-based service.

• Your data is more at risk of being stolen if it is synced/backed up, regularly, to a cloud-based service.

Ideally, the companies that provide such services minimize the risk of your account being hijacked while maximizing the simplicity and ease of setting it up and using it. But clearly these two goals are in conflict. There’s no way around the fact that the proper balance is somewhere in between maximal security and minimal complexity.

Further, I would wager heavily that there are thousands and thousands more people who have been traumatized by irretrievable data loss (who would have been saved if they’d had cloud-based backups) than those who have been victimized by having their cloud-based accounts hijacked (who would have been saved if they had only stored their data locally on their devices).

It is thus, in my opinion, terribly irresponsible to advise people to blindly not trust Apple (or Google, or Dropbox, or Microsoft, etc.) with “any of your data” without emphasizing, clearly and adamantly, that by only storing their data on-device, they greatly increase the risk of losing everything.

The problems here are multifaceted and complicated; “don’t trust anything in the cloud” is simplistic and, in its own way, dangerous.

Postscript: And what about email and messaging? If one doesn’t trust Apple or other cloud-based providers with backups, how can you trust them with email or messages, both of which often contain photos? Further, as Charles Ying pointed out, Apple is set to improve on this very thing in iOS 8 with self-destructing attachments in iMessage.

David Chartier:

With official, system-wide extensions on the way, the potential for Mac and especially iOS apps to work together expands immeasurably. Actually, it explodes in an invigorating display of colors, delightful sounds, and hope. Apps like 1Password can fill information directly into Safari forms and all the other apps that add support. We can archive webpages in Evernote and Stache. Afterlight — really, any photo app — can edit photos right in the Camera Roll. Even better, I’m just barely scratching the surface of this potential.

Part of the genius of these extensions is the way they’re bundled with the apps. So if you have the app installed, you’ll see its extension in other apps automatically. And if you don’t, you won’t. And if you want to get rid of an app, you don’t have to do anything extra to remove its extensions — they get removed when the app gets removed.

Some people collect coins, others collect stamps, and then there’s a set of individuals who line up super early for the latest iPhone every year. That’s normally a few days before Apple’s latest smartphone is due to go on sale, but this year it’s happening already. Apple’s iPhone 6 unveiling isn’t expected until next Tuesday, but there’s already people lining up outside the flagship New York City store. That might sound insane, but the first couple were paid $1,250 by two others to secure the top spots weeks in advance. CNBC reports that at least one person has made around $7,000 waiting in line previously, a process that has clearly transformed from enthusiasm into a business for some.

While they wait: Samsung Galaxy Note Edge...

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