If New York is your chosen J1 visa destination it is a good idea to have a look at the city on the web before you go. Luckily, due to the size of the city and to its web-savvy population, finding information on the Internet is easy.
Your first port of call should be the New York Times (www.newyorktimes.com). A serious newspaper, it one of the finest newspapers in the world.
The city section, which you can link to throughout the site, will be of most use to first-time visitors, while the arts section is excellent to help in planning what you want to get up to in New York once you get there.
The news sections are put into a paid-for archive after a day, but the weekly sections and a lot of the features can be got for free. The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper that can be picked up at street-boxes anywhere in New York. It is one of America's strongest voices of liberal politics and has in-depth arts coverage. Its website (www.villagevoice.com) has nearly everything you need from the paper, saving you the tiresome task of wading through its heavy advertising content.
It is a rare thing in the US that a weekly paper manages to be hugely respected for both its political and arts writing, but the Voice manages that easily, week in, week out. Its recent coverage of the Timothy McVeigh execution was earnest and thought-provoking, while the same issue also had a brilliant feature on the Whitney Museum. The event guide section is a must-see for anybody visiting the city. A wonderful paper and website, just be thankful that it exists.
Coney Island, Brooklyn, is about an hour from uptown Manhattan by train and is well worth a visit at some stage of your J1 sojourn. This seaside resort seems like a million miles away though, so different is it from the rest of the city. Wonderful sights like the Cyclone rollercoaster, the world's last remaining "freak show" and the famous Nathan's take-away have to be experienced to be believed. You can get a flavour of all of these at www.coneyisland.com, but going there is even better.
Most of you student-types probably know all about The Onion (www.onion.com), the funniest satire site on the web by a long chalk. Nothing is sacred - with US politicians in general, and Dubya in particular, coming in for a weekly pasting. A new issue appears most Wednesdays and it rarely fails to hit. By punching a hole in many of America's ideals and ideas about itself it can help in understanding the culture better . . . but mostly it is just funny.
If you find headlines like "More states shifting welfare control to McDonald's", "British parliament accused of plagiarizing US Senate Bill S.576" and "Area woman judges everything by whether it's cute" funny, then this is the site for you. Its arts coverage is also excellent, so don't just visit the site for the laughs. Rolling Stone magazine (www. rollingstone.com) has gone from being a venerated counter-culture, antiestablishment magazine in the 1960s and 1970s to one that is now full of ads for alcohol, tobacco and the US army. Nevertheless, it is still the primary source of information on what is happening in the American music scene.
More than most other publications it really only makes sense when you are in the US. The website, though, is a good place to check out what concerts are coming up this summer in various US cities, download new music (including the current REM single), watch videos and read the latest reviews. It is also good for movie reviews and occasionally has superb political articles.
