Top row: Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Shirley Jackson, Gael Greene. Bottom row: Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, Tama Janowitz, Kate Christensen.

In 1967, Patti Smith wrote in Just Kids, she was considering a move to New York City. "I had enough money for a one-way ticket. I planned to hit all the bookstores in the city. This seemed ideal work to me." Twenty-seven years before her, in 1940, Shirley Jackson and her soon-to-be husband Stanley Hyman graduated from Syracuse and moved to New York. According to this biography, "For quite some time they had known exactly what they were going to do: move to New York [...]

You know how you know you've written a good song? I mean, besides the fact that it spends seven weeks at the number one spot on the pop charts, and the 2.6 million albums you've sold because of it? And besides Billboard declaring it, "the biggest crossover song of the past 25 years?" When Patti Smith covers it in concert. And when she says she wishes she could remember the words better, but that, "I love this fuckin' song, even though I can't/And I'm here to testify: Adele, she's great!" Adele must be psyched.

i am at the National Book Awards at the Cipriani on Wall Street and i am standing fifteen feet away from Tina Brown. Tina Brown is sitting at her table and she just finished her dinner and i am waiting with my friends Mike and Nate to interview her to ask her how many times she has presented Tom Wolfe with an award, but right now she looks like she's having a pretty intense conversation with some old dude and if i interrupted her conversation she probably wouldn't do my interview. a cater waiter just walked by carrying some plates with slices of pie on them and the pie [...]

If you read about Pratt's commencement throw-down in the New Yorker, you may enjoy this video of the divine Patti Smith's speech that day on the importance of dental care. There's a few more videos online of her musical performance that day too.

"There is no way to accurately or adequately laud Bob Dylan. He is the Homer of our time. The next Bob Dylan will not come around for another millennium or two, making it highly unlikely that it will happen at all."—T-Bone Burnett, foreword to Rolling Thunder Logbook


Critics have always been quick to proclaim someone as the Next Dylan. "No sooner was Dylan Dylan," says Gene Santoro in Highway 61 Revisited, "than the search was on for the Next Dylan, the New Dylan—a list that, over the decades, accumulated dozens." Pity the poor soul who writes intelligent lyrics, sings a bit off-kilter, strums a guitar, and—hoist the millstone!—plays harmonica. [...]

Late afternoon, what is that smell? We just had the quarrel that sent you away. I was looking for you, are you gone gone?

And because we were listening to her biggest hit just yesterday. Congratulations to Patti Smith, who wrote the best nonfiction book of the year!

A literate, anthem-prone punk band from New Jersey, Titus Andronicus put out their fantastic second album, The Monitor, in 2010. Shortly after its release, multi-instrumentalist Amy Klein joined the group to play guitar and violin; she also brought along a fierce and charismatic personality that plays a big role in making Titus' live shows some of the most riveting in contemporary music.

Between shows for another project of hers, Hilly Eye, I sat down with Klein at Cafe Lafayette in Brooklyn to discuss climbing on top of speakers, Patti Smith, Joanna Newsom, why everyone should read Rat Girl, and Girls Rock Camp, where she volunteers as a counselor.

What is the most challenging song to cover in the history pop music? Prince's "When Doves Cry" might get my vote.

When Caroline Giuliani allegedly slipped those five beauty products into her purse and allegedly attempted to walk out of the Sephora this week, she (allegedly!) joined the fine ranks of the shoplifters of New York. And it's a rich history-the compulsive thief Joseph Rosen once called New York "a shoplifter's paradise," in a 1997 Times profile . Not every shoplifter can be the progeny of America's Mayor, but any storeowner with missing inventory knows the city has no shortage of hands with sticky fingers. Here's a selection of New York-related instances of shoplifting, some from the past and a few incidences from local fiction.