Today's New York magazine cover story on artisanal Brooklyn is absolutely killing it. It's the best thing ever: It’s easy to be seduced by the vision: a world, or at least a borough, where thousands of salvaged-teak schooners ply the oceans, or at least the Gowanus Canal, bearing Mason jars full of marmalade made from windfall kumquats. It’s like a child’s dream. The supermarket aisles are lit by Edison bulbs, staffed by scruffy men in butcher’s aprons, and stocked with cruelty-free dog food and hand-pulped toilet paper. But wait: Should the TP come from new-growth forests (more environmentally correct) or old-growth (more authentic)? Those lightbulbs are beautiful, but [...]

This roundup of 18 New York blogs by the Village Voice is pretty excellent. I knew most of them obviously, as I am a professional Internet-dwelling moron, but you may not regularly visit some Awl long-time faves like Emdashes and Art Fag City and Jeremiah's Vanishing New York and New York Shitty-and obviously those crazies at Animal. There are also blogs I've never even heard of, like the Lo-Down, which is a newspaper for the Lower East Side run by a former CNN executive producer. (I'd probably never heard of it since it seems to get about 2000 unique visitors a [...]

ATTN New Yorkers: "Subway and bus riders who buy unlimited-ride MetroCards before fares go up on May 31 must use them by June 8 to receive the full present value of the cards." Of course that assumes the state legislature won't come up with a plan to bail out the MTA and make fare hikes unnecessary. And we all know there's no way they'd fail to do that, right? Right? Where are you going?