Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

52 in 52 is a project to read a book a week in 2010

Sometime in the early 2000s karaoke, a fringe activity that was firmly in the domain of Asian people and pseudo-exhibitionists, went mainstream. I always had some idea as to why this happened but culture writer Bryan Raftery has done a better job of telling this story.

To him it was the great confluence of reality TV (especially American Idol), the rise of teenybopper pop such as the Backstreet Boys, faux nostalgia and a growing comfort around amateur performance. Don’t Stop Believin‘, is part personal memoir and part cultural history. He talks about a long-gone and once beloved karaoke bar in New York’s Lower East Side, binging on karaoke and more. Yes, I got jealous that he got to fly to Japan and sing karaoke with his  best friend as “research” for this book.

For me, a self-confessed karaoke junkie, parts of Raftery’s book are very familiar. Don’t Stop Believin’ is not unlike hearing a stranger at a karaoke night belt out a song that you love. You can’t help but sing along and you sure as hell applaud at the end of the song.

As an aside, check out this great blog post from Flickr, what else, karaoke.

Photo by George Silk, 1951. From the Life Archive

I was going to do a round-up of magazine apps on the iPhone but I got lazy. I still might, but for now, you’re going to have to just read this post on apps that don’t currently exist but probably should. Note that they focus on men’s magazines. I did get  a chance to download both the GQ and Esquire apps and was pretty unimpressed by both of them. Both apps are essentially straight lifts of their magazines with a few multimedia frills thrown in. Yawn.  Here’s their preview:

If you’re curious, journalism instructor and online editor Kat Tancock reviews the GQ app.

1) the Esquire drinks app

What Esquire is good at are drinks, they’ve done whole books about them. They even have a databse on their website. As a bonus, the ad guys at the mag could very easily sell ads on this. Some of their high-end drink clients would undoubtedly bank-roll a drinks/bartending application

2) Esquire/GQ girl of the day

Hey, if newspapers can run photos of a sunshine girl, why can’t Esquire and GQ? The magazine already runs features like these in the magazine. It’d be easy to repurpose. It would also be a good way to upsell the full-mag. Preview a photo from a spread and point to your website or your mag.

3) A shopping app for men

Women have the app from shopping mag Lucky, but the boys are screwed. Hey, we like stuff too. And it doesn’t have to be all clothes. You know. Wired’s got one, but everyone knows Wired is for nerds. You guys are cool.

The BBC airs a documentary series which looks at stuff…

From Fast Company:

What makes us human? It’s our stuff.

A truly incredible radio series from the BBC traces the history of human civilization through 100 objects from the British Museum. It kicked off last week with an Egyptian mummyfrom the third century BC (the series apparently isn’t purely chronological–object number 2 was a 1.8-million-year-old carved stone chopping tool). The show runs through September, ending with modern marvels like the credit card, Soviet propaganda, and Hokusai’s famous Wave. Object 100 is still a secret though–any guesses?

Esquire’s Charles Pierce has good things to say about the State of the Union.

TMN’s Robert Birnbaum looks at a new anthology of European fiction edited by personal favourite Aleksandar Hemon.

Finally, because those nights are still cold… the Amateur Gourmet’s Soup Battle of 2010. FYI Vesalka’s Cabbage Soup is hella delicious.