"The Ghost Dog lived in Prospect Park for four years, and we kind of let him live there. We felt that at that time in his life, he was happier in the park than he would have been in a cage or someone’s apartment. That’s not typical. He was 109 pounds when we caught him, so he wasn’t starving. He had routines. He’d come down for the off-leash hours and play with the other dogs. But he always kept his distance from people. Most people wouldn’t even realize that he was there. That’s why they called him Ghost Dog. If you didn’t look for him, you wouldn’t realize that [...]

Part of a month-long series on the people and peculiarities of where we're from.

List the twentieth century's most iconic television characters for children. Some obvious candidates off the top of your head: Fred Rogers as Mr. Rogers was a gentle and avuncular mainstay for generations, as was the more colorful and whiskered Captain Kangaroo, portrayed by Bob Keeshan. Both were televised nationally—the Captain on CBS (for the first 29 years) pre-school mornings, and Mr. Rogers syndicated to your local public television station—and as such they were something all children had in common. If you were a little kid in America sometime between the 60s and the 80s, there's [...]

The first in a month-long series on the people and peculiarities of where we're from.

If you live in Brooklyn and have any kind of affinity for animals, the odds are fair that you’ve heard about Sean Casey. He operates his shelter—Sean Casey Animal Rescue (or SCAR)—out of a cramped storefront in Windsor Terrace. The no-kill shelter takes in around 150 animals per month, providing a service that too often can’t be served by official agencies. Stop by the shop and you'll see gerbils, hamsters and domesticated rats, lizards of all possible description, as well as chattering parakeets, lonely-looking cats and, lumbering freely along the floor at comically low [...]