"I lived in L.A. for 15 years, had great friends, but I never felt at home. It's a constant feeling of 'I have to keep moving or I'm going to get stuck.' And here I want to stop moving so I can get stuck." READ MORE

"Marlene Dietrich once said that if she heard an American man rave about a meal, she knew he must have eaten a steak," says A Treasury of Great Recipes. Published in 1965, the book was written by Vincent and Mary Price (yes, that Vincent Price, or that one, maybe you remember). Price drops the quote in a section on great New York restaurants. And it’s not just the American men who thought this (though more on that below): restaurant critic Ruth Reichl in a 1994 steakhouse round-up wrote, “But there is one thing I have no doubt about: steak is a New York tradition, and when I go out to eat meat, I like to be reminded of that.” At Marlene, Vincent and Ruth's behest, let's talk about the steak dinner—specifically, the steak dinner in New York. READ MORE

Outside Denny’s Steak Pub, in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, steps from the Church Avenue F stop, a would-be customer, wearing a Yankees T-shirt and a bit of a haunted look, shuffled back and forth, focused on the scratch-off lottery tickets that trailed behind him like exhaust. He ducked his head in every once in a while: “Six dollars!” His buddy called out, “Don’t come in,” and Scratcher nodded sadly, and waited for his pal on the sidewalk. “You’re still 86ed,” the bartender added, not unkindly. Scratcher was still a regular; he just wasn’t allowed to come in to this particular old man bar this particular afternoon. READ MORE

At the beginning of this month I spent about a week and a half of improbably beautiful, sunny, breezy, vacationing-in-New-York days huddled over my laptop in a borrowed apartment, hitting “refresh” over and over again. I would wake up in the mornings and instinctively reach for the phone (kept next to my pillow) and check my email to see whether anything had changed. I often didn’t shower until 3 or 4 p.m. I survived, largely, on coffee, and I slept at most a few hours a night. I didn’t read the news or even watch television except for that one night the stupor was so thick that I managed to get through four episodes of "True Blood" without actually suffering a brain hemorrhage brought on by excruciating dialogue. This, if I recall correctly, was what having a full-time, soul-destroying corporate lawyer job was like. But this past month I was not working. I was not getting paid. I was just trying to find a place to live in New York this September, in a rising market where the vacancy rate in July was well under 1%. READ MORE

Tonight, at PowerHouse Arena, it is the Brooklyn Launch Party for Tom Scocca's Beijing Welcomes You, a nonfiction chronicle of what Beijing has so recently become. As China is now (well, as usual) so much in the news, we asked him some questions! READ MORE

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New Yorkers argue about pizza a lot. New Yorkers argue about a lot of things a lot, I suppose. But being that pizza is near and dear to New Yorker’s hearts (and that the very first pizza sold in America was sold at Lombardi’s, on Spring Street, in 1905), New Yorkers take special pleasure in arguing about pizza. Mostly: What place sells the very best pizza today? I have some thoughts about this myself. Though not ones that I’d wish to argue extremely vociferously about. I like to eat, and I like pizza (who doesn’t? Is there anyone who doesn’t like pizza?) but finding the perfect one is not a sacred Holy Grail thing to me. I have not traveled to every pizzeria in the city with a Vernier caliper to measure crust thickness and a score-card to document the all-important cheese-to-sauce ratio. READ MORE

Apart from being terrifying and horrific, serial killers are oddly fascinating. Why do we find ourselves so obsessed over them? Is it just the fear and revulsion, or is something else at play? And it's not just us. Songwriters are often inspired by serial killers. Here are thirteen songs with extremely sinister origins. READ MORE