The talented Jason Schwartzman, who knows his way around a descending chromatic tetrachord (at 1:09), explicates the New Yorker's iPad app, which, as of today, is finally accessible to U.S. and Canadian print subscribers. (Overseas subscribers will have to wait a little longer, alas.) Since the app materialized last year, several of my pieces have included audio and/or video extras, and there will be more of that kind of thing in the future.
Although I've been a loyal Apple user since 1987, I resisted getting an iPad until recently. I prefer reading old-fashioned print, and ritualistically take my morning New York Times with coffee. (On my last vacation, I drove for five miles each morning to pick up the Times, even though we had Internet where we were staying.) Nonetheless, I see the appeal of these gizmos, and the iPad has almost immediately become indispensable for my research on Wagnerism: I have dozens of late-nineteenth-century books and magazine volumes stored up on Google e-Books, and it's quite satisfying to sit on the couch with the iPad and page through them. There's nothing like unwinding at the end of a long day with an issue of The Meister.
