Entertainment

December 2012 - Posts

  • RED Hearts: Entertainment: Snapchat Judgment

    By Charlotte Steinway, 24, reporting from New York, NY, on an amusing new app that has improved her sense of selfies

    I first heard about Snapchat the same way I hear about most other important things in my life—events in the Middle East, album releases, my friends’ lunches—on Twitter. In fact I even remember the exact wording of the tweet that mentioned the once-unknown phenom: “Oh, so Snapchat is the app for sexting,” it read.

    Obviously, I had to Google it. I found humor in the fact that the 21-year-old founder refuted all claims that Snapchat was intended to be a “sexting app." The way it works is you take a photo (presumably of yourself), and then set the amount of time that the recipient can view it before it disappears from their phone "forever." Plus, with a 12+ age rating on iTunes (for “mature/sexual themes & mild sexual content or nudity") and app images portraying girls in bikinis, it hardly seemed to be built just for sending funny selfies to friends.

    But boy was I wrong. As someone who grew up when the selfie was in its incubation period (i.e., the MySpace era), I’ve come to appreciate the camera on my iPhone 4 almost as much as the next middle school tween. So I didn't need much convincing to download the free app, which Forbes deemed “the biggest no-revenue mobile app since Instagram.” Now, a week and a half later, I've found myself sending friends photos of my half-asleep visage in the middle of my open office plan, birthday cake scrawled with rainbow stars and hearts (in addition to being able to draw over the photo in Kid Pix-like colors, you're also able to add up to 36 characters of text), and even letting out the occasional LOL at my friends' photos. (These have included a checkered outfit choice emblazoned with the words "Gingham Style.") But by far the funniest part of the app is the fact that you receive a notification when the recipient takes a screenshot of the photo—and then there's nothing you can do to rescind it from their archive. Now that, my friends, is why I don't sext. Even if it is on Snapchat.

  • RED Hearts: Entertainment: Gifts that Give to Girls

    By RED editor Amy Goldwasser, reporting from NYC on one-of-a-kind, handpainted gifts—cookies and cards—that help an awesome organization in her neighborhood after a brutal storm

    There are few things in this world closer to my heart than cookies and the Lower Eastside Girls Club. To think of them together brings me great joy. To know that they were both compromised by Hurricane Sandy makes me want to help. And eat cookies.

    Now, for the holidays, all these sweet things come together, in a couple of entirely special, entirely handcrafted, entirely girl-made items: a Holiday Cookie Tin ($30 includes shipping to anywhere in the U.S.) and a collection of Celebrating Women Greeting Cards ($20 for a collection of 12).

    These are gifts that benefit everyone involved—with original art and baked goods, yes, but also with post-storm relief and life-changing cultural and job programs for an amazing group of New York City girls, age 8 to 18, whose neighborhood and homes were hit hard. And the organization’s Sweet Things Bake Shop on Avenue C was flooded, just when high-season was about to bring mother-daughter baking teams employment for the holidays, their ovens fired up to meet demand. But our dedicated pastry chefs persevere! From donated kitchens around town, they’re making their worth-waiting-for-every-year gingerbread brownstone cookies (and even something called a pfeffernüsse), as exquisite and delicious as ever.

    Less edible, though equally beautiful and arguably more educational, are the greeting cards (printed on recycled paper with earth-friendly inks) that include women worth telling the world about, Eleanor Roosevelt to Rosa Parks to Comandante Ramona. No two revolutionaries—like no two hand-painted snowflake butter cookies—are alike, and every one will spread cheer to the lucky person who receives it and the lucky girls of the Lower Eastside Girls Club.