"Now comes plutocratisation: the middle classes and small companies are falling victim to class-cleansing. Global cities are becoming patrician ghettos. In 2009, says [Columbia University's Saskia] Sassen, the top 1 per cent of New York City’s earners got 44 per cent of the compensation paid to its workers. The 'super-prime housing market' keeps rising even when the national economy collapses. After Manhattan, New York’s upper-middle classes are being priced out of Brooklyn. Sassen diagnoses 'gradual destruction.' Global cities are turning into vast gated communities where the one per cent reproduces itself."

Cory Booker's PR campaign at the 92Y (barf), Mary Harron talks filmmaking, some animated movies to see, a "queer ladies" reading, and the Indigo Girls play in Central Park. All here and more. READ MORE

Hey, tomorrow it's going to actually be summer, instead of... whatever this is. Most important: Calexico is playing Saturday at the Prospect Park bandshell, and Solange is playing Sunday in McCarren Park. There, your weekend is perfection! READ MORE

Julie Klausner and Marc Maron want to entertain you at your lunch break, at the Bryant Park Reading Room at 12:30 p.m. Then, later: well, Macaulay Culkin's not a fella but a dinosaur DJ, tonight at Le Poisson Rouge, with "Macaulay Culkin's iPod presents Hulk Hogan's Slutty New Year's Eve in June Dinosaur Prom Night." There are other things to do as well, not like you'd need them.

Oh my God, these queens are absolutely crushing it on the matters of color palette ramifications in "Mad Men." This report will change your life in how you watch the show.

I went with "Respect my trendsetting" but I'm also considering "I believe luxury is to be able to go into a store and be able to afford something." Really you can't go wrong. #LAMPS

Today: Big Daddy Kane at the Highline Ballroom! And that highwire tightrope-walking French dude does a lunchtime chat at the Bryant Park Reading Room. Tig Notaro is on WNYC Soundcheck, Devendra Banhart is at Town Hall, J. Courtney Sullivan's book party is at Greenlight Books, and Future Bible Heroes plays the Chickfactor 21 party at The Bell House.

Tonight in NYC: my alternate timeline secret boyfriend Chris Adrian appears at McNally Jackson. Emily Cooke, Sarah Leonard and Elizabeth Gumport talk Mary McCarthy at Word Brooklyn. And tonight's the City Parks Foundation gala!

"What happened was this: there was a great newspaper strike in New York in the autumn of 1962, and my friend Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, had the inspiration — which he imparted to the poet Robert Lowell and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick — that this was the one time in history that you could start a book review without a penny, since all the publishing houses had no place to advertise their new books. No New York Times Book Review. Jason and I knew that, if we started a plausible book review, then all the publishers would simply have to take a page. They had to show their authors that they were publishing books." READ MORE

"Iain's more conventional literary works were generally delightful, edgy and fully engaged with the world in which he set them: his palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity shone through the page. But in his science fiction he achieved something more: something, I think, that the genre rarely manages to do. He was intensely political, and he infused his science fiction with a conviction that a future was possible in which people could live better — he brought to the task an an angry, compassionate, humane voice that single-handedly drowned out the privileged nerd chorus of the technocrat/libertarian fringe and in doing so managed to write a far-future space operatic universe that sane human beings would actually want to live in (if only it existed)." READ MORE