The St. Mark's Bookshop has been the beneficiary of a much-Twittered petition to its landlord this last week. Just a little over two years ago, the bookstore signed a new ten-year lease for $20,000 a month. ($240,000 a year; that's 9,234 full-price hardback copies of The Art of Fielding, or, 36% of Chad Harbach's advance for The Art of Fielding.) That lease expires in a bit under eight years. Now the owners say it's onerous (so what were they thinking!?) and they have a meeting with their landlord, Cooper Union, this week. (Their last meeting was ineffectual, the owners said; since, a City Councilmember and others have gone to Cooper Union asking for a reduction. READ MORE

Recently a news organization published a photograph of a rather recently dead body. The former person in question photographed had been murdered and presumably the news outfit felt that a murder on its local turf had some news value. The victim's family and friends were about ten kinds of furious. Meanwhile, written coverage of the murder and its circumstances was vigorous and regular on a number of New York City-based websites, including Gothamist and the Times, in large part because it took place in the East Village. Year-to-date, there have been four murders in the East Village's Ninth Precinct, though I couldn't tell you what the other three were. It's reasonable that this is an item of news. The other publications' stories include neighbors bad-mouthing the victim and their accounts of seeing the body and also praise for the character of the alleged killer. But it's the picture that's enraged people and sent the family's friends and social networks into a campaign of furious mail. Eventually, the publication apparently reasoned it just wasn't worth the harassment and they took down the photo. READ MORE