AdWeek interviewed Dylan Lauren, daughter of Ralph Lauren and namesake of Dylan’s Candy Bar, and in addition to learning that she reads her horoscope out of her neighbor’s copy of the New York Post and is a Chelsea Handler devotee, we discover that the 39-year-old is so hooked on her BlackBerry, she wrote her entire book on it. While using something called a StairMill:

I love the BlackBerry. I’m on it all the time. I literally wrote my whole book, Unwrap Your Sweet Life, on the BlackBerry while I was working out on the StairMill. So many people tease me about having a BlackBerry, but I meet a lot of people who still use one. Obama has a BlackBerry!

Obama may have a BlackBerry, but does he have a StairMill? Should we have a StairMill?

(Photo credit: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Glamour)

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Meet Yenta. It’s a new Jewish dating service (could you guess?) that brings a little something different to the online dating scene. The New York Post reports:

Somewhat similar to the gay application Grindr, the free mobile dating service uses GPS technology to allow users to peruse the profiles of nearby Jews.

The profile asks questions like “How Jewish are you?” “What’s your shtick?” and “What will impress your mother?”

According to the Post, the site has 10,000 users so far. Will you be joining? They’re offing a free ‘gold membership’ while they test the site. I’m not so sure I trust a dating site that sells ‘Shtup the Chef’ aprons, but that’s just me.

(image via Shutterstock)

The post There’s a GPS-Enabled Jewish Dating Website and it’s Called Yenta appeared first on Jewcy.

But to place the Jewish Music Stream (JMS) on the same psychic or spiritual level as comfort food or television bingeing is to trivialize its higher significance and, indeed, its sheer awesomeness. The Stream plays solid, 24-hour blocks of contemporary Jewish religious music in stunning digital quality, and without the glitches or gaps in connectivity that are so common to small-cap internet radio stations. The website, which was created in 2009, has somewhere between 250 and 400 listeners at any given time, although that figure likely shortchanges the station’s actual reach through the Intersect World app.

After all, we’re Jews: Klezmer is our jazz, the Banai clan is something like our Rolling Stones (or maybe The Killers), and the Pro Musica Hebraica series, organized by the columnist Charles Krauthammer, even attempts to give us our own place in classical European art music. The music the JMS plays is our gospel; our soul music, even. As I’ve discovered, much modern-day yeshivish music comes from a place of emotional or spiritual jouissance. The semi-orchestral religious music played on the JMS reaches epic heights; it soars, tapers, and then soars even higher still. Musical cultures often have genres or modes of expression reserved for feelings, ideas or experiences that are too vast and too immediate for any other artistic form to contain (Robert Johnson and Brett Michaels both belong in this category). We Jews are no exception. Yeshivisha music is melodramatic and emotionally overstuffed, but even in its textures it is fundamentally, recognizably ours. It’s our people’s attempt at achieving something that, through pure feeling and sheer earnestness, aspires to a kind of musical transcendence.

So what does the Jewish Music Stream play, exactly? Female voices are regrettably assur, or prohibited, so a good amount of airtime is devoted to various boys choirs. The Yeshiva Boys Choir likes adding techno beats to traditional zmirot, although purists are sure to thrill to the Kol Noar or Shir Hadasha Boys Choirs, both of whom are in the JMS rotation. And then there’s the grandaddy of them all, the Miami Boys Choir. I’ve been somewhat disheartened but nevertheless fascinated to learn that AutoTune has made its way into even the most established choir-based acts in yeshivish music—as if the angelic counter-tenor of a nine-year-old cheder student can possibly be improved upon.

The JMS is delightfully Ashkenazi. There’s the occasional Sephardi tune but for the most part there is no Torah on the JMS. There is the Toyrah. Today is not hayom, it’s hayoim; this morning is haboyker. Melachto? Puh-leeze: Our King is Melachtoi. And so on. I don’t mean to mock—indeed, this antediluvianism (I’m a hard-tav pronouncing, largely assimilated American Jew, thank you very much) explains much of the JMS’s power over me. This is the music of a mythical and most-likely imaginary before-time; a time when dybbuks existed and Chelm was best known as a real place, and when Warsaw (or possibly Baghdad) was the center of the Jewish world. Some of the music the JMS plays is actually in Yiddish!

At the same time, it is the JMS’s modernity—its connection to a real and thriving and even Yiddish-speaking now-time—that makes it so consistently surprising. The studio version of Yoely Greenfeld’s “Zemer” ends in a New Orleans jazz breakdown; Dovid Gabay’s “Berum Olam” begins with a pretty mind-wrecking (although obviously synthetic) blast of bagpipes. Ya’akov Shweky’s infectious “Ten Lo” has a slow-building, almost dub-like lead-in, complete with a meandering and virtuosic oud solo. Even in the famously internet-averse ultra-Orthodox community, Yisroel Werdyger has won over 1,000 Twitter followers. And why shouldn’t he, considering the presence, the subtlety of feeling—the kavana, for lack of a superior English equivalent—with which he sings?

The JMS showcases musical eclecticism, and, the heck with it, cultural modernity within an ultra-orthodox Jewish context. My intrigue at such a harmony of apparent opposites might simply be the result of false preconceptions. I can’t say that my pre-JMS world allowed for the possibility of zmirot capped with power ballad-worthy electric guitar solos.

When I reached out to the man responsible for the JMS—an IT professional and sometimes computer-programmer who runs the site anonymously and asked not to be named—he was somewhere between winding down from work and preparing for a night at the Beit Midrash. He created the site, he said, because “I saw what was out there in terms of Jewish music streams and saw that I would be able to build a better system.”

“I’ve met a lot of these artists,” he continued. “They’re regular people who happen to be blessed with these talents and are happy to have others enjoy it.”

The clash between the ultra-Orthodox and modern technology has been in the news lately, and the mere existence of the JMS suggested to me that this relationship is more complicated than many have given it credit for. The JMS founder and proprietor actually attended the recent Ichud HaKehillos asifa against the Internet, which packed Citi Field and nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium with nearly 50,000 ultra-orthodox Jewish men, who had come to hear their teachers’ concerns over the web’s effects on religious practice and communal life. After the speech, more than a few attendees took to the web to share their reactions. Some argued that the Internet could be helpful so long as it could be controlled. Others insisted that the technology itself was irredeemably evil.

Unsurprisingly, the JMS’s founder sits on the more liberal side of this simmering communal debate. “Personally, I do computer work most of the day, and from a general background perspective I use the Internet all the time,” he told me. “But I’m always pushing myself to make sure everything’s filtered.”

For him, having a “Jewish listening experience” is one way the Internet can foster and celebrate Jewish culture. “If you try to take all these types of sites offline, people aren’t going to listen to Jewish music,” he said. And people like me will likely never hear a techno version of Kol Hamispalel.

The post Streaming Jewish Music on My iPhone appeared first on Jewcy.

We’re torn, because goop’s ubiquity stems from us loving to hate its groomed, glossy existence and its espousal of a lifestyle that, for pretty much everyone in the world except for Paltrow herself, is not only financially unreasonable but logistically impossible. One can only detox so often.

We do, however, have to give Gwyneth credit for correctly identifying Greenfield’s New Girl character, Schmidt, as “the kind of guy you lusted after at your cousin’s Bar Mitzvah.” And, full disclosure: my gynecologist delivered Gwyneth’s son Moses, which I know because I spent $3.99 on the goop city guide app, but which I haven’t found a way to casually bring up mid-exam.

So does the awesomeness of Greenfield finding yet another medium through which to entertain us outweigh the annoyingness of his Schmidt-like endorsement of goop’s cultural value? Should Greenfield have to contribute to Schmidt’s douchebag jar for this one? You be the judge.

Pro: Of HBO’s Girls, he says, “Lena Dunham is Jewish Punk Rock.”

Con: He uses the word ‘trousers.’

Pro: He makes a strong argument for throws (“a throw is not to be confused with a blanket”), particularly the Jonathan Adler variety.

Con: He’s guest editing a Goop newsletter.

Pro: He’s really cute about his daughter.

Con: He panders to Clooney.

Pro: He asks the real questions: “How am I supposed to be ‘Ready for Summer’ when I was never ‘Ready for Spring’?”

Con: He might wear high neck sweaters. What would Schmidt say?

Pro: He and I have the same tortoise shell iPhone cover, which redeems his potential collaborative misstep and basically makes us best friends.

Previously: Network Jews: Schmidt from ‘New Girl’

(Photo credit: Imeh Akpanudosen/Getty Images)

The post ‘New Girl’s Max Greenfield Guest Edits Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Newsletter appeared first on Jewcy.

Hopefully today we will have our answer.

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This month, Maggie Gyllenhaal began filming what IMDB calls “a romantic comedy about the invention of the vibrator.” Tracking the progress of the little bullet that could, we’ve come a long way from treating horny women thought to have hysteria with vibrators in doctor’s offices (Can I make an appointment for next Thursday?) to late 2010 when, as with most things, there’s an app for that.

So slip on your iRubbers for some valuable consumer reportage as we review what iTunes has to offer in the way of vibe apps.

As Liel Liebovitz observes of the single servant featured in this week’s torah portion, “his method of selecting a spouse amounts to little more than a raffle, a random manner of picking one candidate from a pool of many, irrespective of her qualities or qualifications.” Meeting your app-match is no easier; with dozens of options, ratings that rarely inch above two stars, and cryptic pricing ranging from FREE to $2.99, here’s some divine, critical intervention.

Personalization

As with any vibe, it’s all about you and yours. How you like it can be most accommodated in most of the free and pay apps by way of control of rhythm and speed. MyVibe, the first vibe app on the market features a cool scroll from 0 to 100 delineating intervals between beats, with 3 savable settings.

Mood

The vibes do not lack in unique user interfaces, from cherry blossom wallpaper to zen soundscapes to various illustrations of funny looking insertables.

Unfortunately, when it comes to putting to use the multimedia capabilities of your iPhone, it is hard to let the randy multitasker indulge. The most expensive app, Relax Hub 5 in 1 AppBox, is the only one that comes close: aside from other feel good yoga-like features, it has a “Sex Engine” of ambient sounds said to up sex drive, and that sounded like Brian Eno on ecstacy. Paired with the four massage settings, it makes for a little more interactivity. Many of the vibe apps interrupt mood music rather than working in tandem, and some even strangely mimic the pesky buzz of physical toys. Ideally, the lookout for the free app little sister of Ohmibod’s vibe that hooks up to iPod technology and grooves to the beat–ohmigod. However, this does not yet exist, and programmers would be wise to fill that niche quick (and write to bambi@jewcy.com stat).

Intensity

This is the fatal flaw of vibe app technology. Despite pulsations personalization, when it gets down to it, the vibraphone would slip under the Princess and the Peas’ radar. Even apps boasting G-rated neck and shoulder massages are lost to the limitations of the hardware itself.

The Verdict

After draining your iPhone’s batteries in record speed, answering a call from ma unintentionally, and feeling overall like Steve Jobs doesn’t size up when it comes to fireworks, one can hypothesize that free apps won’t replace all our future needs optimally. Like the failed NudeRunner Girl Edition app where a censored girl runs around your screen chased by mall security, vibe apps make for great theory but end up being pretty lame when put into practice.

The fix? Unless you live in a place like Alabama, when you can’t get it for free, you can pay to get off. Shell out the cash and plug in OhMiBod’s Naughtibod all-powerful music-sync vibe, complemented with the raunch of hot-minded Stephen Elliot found in his sexier-than-an-iPhone-vibe Adderall Diaries app with audio extras probably as fun to sync to as this song.

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