"Obviously people kind of hate on Williamsburg a lot for, for being like kind of super-trendy and maybe looking a little bit like Urban Outfitters-y at times but I think that you do find a lot of people who kind of just have stuff going on like, or they really take a little bit of time to look fun. Like I think it's cool that nobody takes it too seriously. I mean, I think just saw a girl pass with like a raccoon hat." —What transit line do you take your fashion cues from?

Photo by Goosefriend.

"During Dr. Sexton’s tenure, N.Y.U. has earned a reputation for lavishly rewarding its star faculty members. It bought a $6.5 million Upper East Side apartment for the head of its medical center, and it paid more than $4 million to help a former Columbia law professor stay in her turreted Upper West Side home when she joined the N.Y.U. law faculty. It gave the dean of N.Y.U.'s law school a $5.7 million loan to buy an apartment." —Turns out that perks for New York University's star faculty are as ridiculous as the very worst fiction has suggested.

It runs 24 hours a day—a rarity, anywhere in the world—and it moves 1.6 billion riders a year across the five boroughs of New York City. And on Friday (update: the new fare will be going into effect Sunday, March 3), it will become more expensive. After a fare hike five years ago, the base fare of taking the subway (that is with no discounts) will rise a quarter to $2.50 a pop. And although some of the service cuts enacted in 2010 have since been restored, this hike is not attached to any improvements in service—alas. As with other mandated fare hikes, this one was met with [...]

Last weekend Mark Kamins died of a heart attack at age 57. The legendary DJ and producer—who worked with David Byrne, the Beastie Boys and Sinéad O'Connor—was best known for producing Madonna's first single, 1982's "Everybody," and helping sign her to Seymour Stein's Sire Records. Around that same time, Kamins produced another popular single, the dance-rap track "Jam Hot" by Johnny Dynell. (The song was featured in the iconic 1983 graffiti documentary Style Wars, and its lyrics—"Tank Fly Boss Walk Jam Nitty Gritty/You're listening to the boy from the big bad city"—were sampled in the #1 U.K. single "Dub Be Good To Me" by Beats International, the 1990s [...]

The new book by music critic Marc Spitz, Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York City in the '90s, out this week from Da Capo Press, is a wistful, candid recounting of Spitz's struggles with career, love and drugs as he made his way into adulthood. The memoir's also enjoyable for its many anecdotes of downtown New York during the 90s, the time when Chloë Sevigny was coming off Kids, the actress Adrienne Shelly was the reigning indie queen, and Bennington graduates seemed to be everywhere. Spitz's anecdotes about the actors and musicians he meets have a wayward namedropping charm—they also, all together, form a fascinating portrait of the [...]

What with the broad selection of items from which to choose it almost seems too easy to allow an artisanal Brooklyn-made heirloom pepper probiotic hot sauce that was produced via a Kickstarter campaign to cause one to consider just how awful the city can be, and yet the results of such a realization are difficult to argue with.

This weekend is The Armory Art Fair in New York City. It is not currently held in one of New York City's fine dilapidated armories—these days, we've used some of those to house the large numbers of people made homeless by Hurricane Sandy! Oh and also the one on Park Avenue serves in part as a shelter for mentally ill women, did you know?!—but over on piers 92 and 94, which is basically where West 53rd Street runs into the Hudson. Yes, brr.

In this art fair, a couple of hundred galleries have wedged wares into little booths. People walk around and look at these things. And run into [...]

Are you pregnant now, and in your second trimester? Then you are obviously the most selfish human in the world, and your terribleness will bring forth a child of great evil, who will shower devastation upon the country and usher in a new dark era of rising tides and a catastrophe of the climate.

Oh, wait, that was happening anyway? Cause and effect is so COMPLICATED. Sorry, no, your baby is fine! As you were! I'll buy it a nice cashmere blanket that it can barf on.

But apparently people were traipsing up and down stairs with buckets of water, people were watching their kitty cats float away, [...]

As the poet said: how many trains must pass a man by until they call him a cab?

Website proprietor Andrew Sullivan continues to have trouble with New York's service industries. He trusted Yelp with barber shop recommendations, and then the barber (allegedly) broke his iPad and trimmed his beard incorrectly!

My starter was a Yelp-recommended, first come, first served joint. I put my name down and was told to come back in 30 minutes. Ok. Back 25 minutes later, I was told it could be done in ten minutes. A further half hour of Angry birds later, I asked when I could get my beard trimmed. 20 minutes. Half an hour later, when they started hedging again when I asked, I left. New York City: wait [...]

Unrealistic beauty expectations are nothing new: Julia Pastrana was known in life as the "world's ugliest woman," and her husband made money from this by taking her around to circuses and theaters as a curiosity. He even bought advertising in the New York Times calling his spouse a "link between mankind and the ourang-outang." After Julia Pastrana's death in 1860, he carted her corpse around the world for years, so people could see why he called the "bear woman." Her remains were eventually abandoned in Norway.

The story of her sad life and strange appearance—she was apparently born with the condition called hypertrichosis—is making the news again because what's [...]

From the inbox: BODEGA WALK SATURDAY, Saturday February 2nd @ Noon 11th Street and Avenue A. Join us!!!!

As part of our resistance against the incursion of 7-11s into the East Village we are inviting you to come with us on the first walking tour of our neighborhood bodegas. We love these corner stores and need them to stay open and intact. When a 7-11 opens the bodegas nearby always take a hit, often a lethal one. During Sandy bodegas remained open and gave their perishable food away. Whole Foods didn’t. Will 7-11? The existence of each of these unique bodegas supports the reality that our neighborhood is a [...]

First they came for the sodas—wait, actually, first they came for the black people. But after the City mounted a sophisticated campaign to harass and subjugate basically all non-white people, up to and including Forest Whitaker, then they came for the sodas.

Now, the New York City council is going to vote to forbid the possession of awls by minors and young adults of voting age. We are not even joking, somehow.

Peter Vallone, Jr., is the sponsor of this piece of legislation, which we think appears before the full City Council today at 1:30 p.m. (We say "we think" because the City Council published [...]

"An article on Feb. 17 about a decline in field trips for students because of the New York City school bus drivers’ strike referred incorrectly to the 280-pound albino Burmese python at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. The python, a favorite of schoolchildren, is a 'she' (Fantasia), not a 'he.'" —The NYT is taking this accountability thing very seriously, when it comes to enormous albino zoo animals that are a favorite of children.

Photo by edenpictures.

Silicon Valley people and home-office employees everywhere are very worked up about the new Yahoo policy, which says people can no longer screw around at home instead of going to their perfectly good corporate headquarters. What about the ladies, who have the babies the world so desperately doesn't need? Well, they will have to do what non-Silicon Valley $100K salaried ladies do, which is "try to find a spot in a day care where the TV isn't on all the time."

There are legitimate reasons for working at home, of course. You may be in an Iron Lung or full body cast, which would frighten the editorial assistants. You [...]

Long ago, before foreigners got the Internet, a real pleasure of foreign travel was picking up the International Herald Tribune and reading the Dave Barry column and some "Classic Peanuts" on the half page of comics. There was news, too, but you already knew the headlines from the BBC World Service or SkyNews or CNN International playing in the hotel lobby. Still, it was nice to sit in a cafe and not work and read a good newspaper, especially one with such a romantic name: The International Herald Tribune.

There were a handful of really good columnists and reporters (especially on the Arts, Fashion, Food and Architecture beats!) who were [...]

Let's look at the winners and losers of this week in the reality show that is New York City Mayoral Election 2013!

It was a quiet week in the mayoral campaign. Why is that? Because it's all already basically a done deal, pretty much. The Republicans are fighting it out towards a primary, instead of settling on a candidate, which is fine. We're all basically pretending that there's an active race and that anything could happen! Well, it could… maybe. There's the people with the money and there's the people without the money. Once again. Polls describe everyone as substantially lagging behind Quinn.

• Mike Bloomberg Mayor Mike [...]

Ugh. Terrible traffic on BQE. Definitely missing my flight to San Diego.

— John Carney (@carney) February 13, 2013

There's nothing I hate more than being stuck in traffic on the way to the airport, losing minutes and the probability of catching my flight.

— felix salmon (@felixsalmon) January 31, 2013

There's an epidemic of smart people messing up their travel plans. (To be fair, Felix was not in NYC during that tweet, but he did ask "Is there a good guide for how long it takes to drive from Manhattan to JFK at various times of day/week?" the other day.) Yes, New York City [...]