What a remarkable day it was today! All the beauty of autumn without any of its accompanying regrets, because as it's still "technically" summer you haven't had time to accrue fall's failures yet. But make no mistake, summer is over. And with the end of the season, it comes time for us to say farewell to our summer reporters. It seems like only yesterday that we first bid them hello. Time passes so quickly! Let us all applaud them for the excellent work they've done. Here are a couple of pieces you'll want to read again (or perhaps for the first time). Keep an eye out for [...]

Food porn is one of the Internet's veritable viral cornerstones. Pictures of wacky cupcakes, fusion fried chicken or an incredible, competitive array of deviled eggs get reblogged viciously by legions of salivating fans. In an attempt to tap into the zeitgeist and assess what's to be the next "hot thing all the young, hip and/or upwardly mobile people are doing," I filmed my first amateur food porn.

The food porn party creates two works of art at once: the edibles, and the documentation of that which is eaten. The dishes are chosen for their potential attractiveness. The food, after it is created, must be styled—and then it must be [...]

At yesterday's opening of Duane Reade's new store at 40 Wall Street, three men in suits sat under a rolling stock ticker and had what seemed to be the first ever power lunch held in a drug store. I gravitated towards the someone who I thought was the manager of the store: I wanted to understand why this Duane Reade was so lush.

She sent me to talk to one of the power lunchers, Joe Magnacca, the—wait for it—President for Daily Living Products & Solutions at Walgreens Duane Reade Inc. With a little soulpatch and nice pinstripe suit, he is clearly the most baller Walgreens exec.

On the roofdeck at 230 Fifth Avenue last night, a man was taking pictures of La Toya Jackson with an iPad. "I saw Spike Lee take Obama's pic with that thing!" said a photographer. Apart from press, the crowd tended towards rejected Real Housewives. (One partygoer named Cheri aspired toward both a singing career and a gay sidekick.)

"Is this the closest you've ever been to a Jackson?" someone asked.

"Well, my brother was in a hot tub with Michael in 1983, so that's got to count for something," someone else said.

La Toya entered her book party—she is the author, as of today, of Starting Over, a memoir [...]

The moon over Prospect Park last night was exceptionally nice. Justin Vernon, the lead singer of Bon Iver, took careful notice of this. “Take a look at the moon, it’s really awesome," he told a crowd. Everyone erupted in cheers for the moon because Justin said so.

Bon Iver fans are a unique group of people. There was the girl switching off taking hits of a joint and covering up her coughing with bites of carrot and humus. There was the group of “bro” friends who are clearly only friends during the summer months. They spoke about the definition of “rompers” and placed bets on how many people in [...]

New Yorkers with self-respect try to avoid the Murray Hill scene at all costs. It's been universally branded as a Manhattan's frattiest neighborhood, a place where the newly graduated roam free in backwards hats and do keg stands and attempt to avoid being Iced. But is this really the case? Are the residents up on Murray Hill really the frattiest of the fratty, or is it all just an exaggeration borne out of the casual disdain with which more established citizens view the kids today?

Tonight at midnight, the three-year contract at the Village Voice expires, so Voice workers held a strike benefit at Williamsburg's Public Assembly last night. The bands were really loud and the crowd drank a lot.

The crowd was heavy with, yes, Village Voice staffers and their friends, as well as a handful of former-Voice employees there to show their support. Ex-employees in attendance included: Zach Baron (who left The Voice for The Daily back in March), Foster Kamer (of the New York Observer), and Tom Robbins (the influential writer who left the paper after the departure of long time columnist Wayne Barrett). Robbins' appearance was perhaps the biggest [...]

Last summer's "Ground Zero Mosque" brouhaha was the most annoying summer controversy of all time. With any luck, New Yorkers won't have to deal with another nation-wide xenophobic freakout again this summer, but anything is possible! We spoke to a bunch of New Yorkers—both well-known and known to only a few—to try to predict what this summer's big baloney story would be. Aliens! Scrotums! And more aliens!