editor's note

This week marked a major milestone, as recess stepped into the exciting digital future of media 2003 with the launch of The Playground (the place to go for your daily dose of recessT!), our new blog. After weeks of haranguing The Chronicle's online team and four days of panic after they called our bluff and got the site ready, we're off the ground and blogging.

You can check it out at playground.chronicleblogs.com. And you should, obvi.

Why, you ask?

First, go to the blog to see our standard content each week. We've had technical difficulties getting stories on The Chronicle site in the past, and it's buried anyway. You can read all of our content and check out a PDF of our centerspread on the blog. And don't forget to check here for special extended versions of interviews, reviews and more.

Second, we will soon begin shifting some of our usual content to the blog in order to ease a space crunch on our pages. We'd like to be able to focus more on some the lifestyle-related stories we haven't had space for yet this year.

Third, check out some of the great blog content our regular crack team of writers is posting. Current highlights: paeans to Lester Bangs and Levi Stubbs from Sam Schlinkert, hipster ruminations on the Hood Internet from Baishi Wu and a list of the songs Jordan Axt would cover if he weren't a square white boy.

Fourth, not content to just highlight a few of the goings-on at Duke and across the Triangle, recess now offers you a full(er) schedule of events from every area of the arts world at playground.chronicleblogs.com/calendar/, all in convenient and easy-to-use Google Calendar format. Looking for something to do this weekend? Check out The Playground.

Finally, we'll be offering other special content on the site, including record and film reviews that didn't make the print section and concert reviews, like Andrew Hibbard's write-up of the Magnetic Fields' Saturday set in Raleigh.