Noah Davis
Most Recently: Oh Bituminous Blast! At Midtown's 'Magic' Gathering
Noah Davis lives in Brooklyn and writes about the US national team for MLSSoccer.com. He struggles to finish in front of the net.
Oh Bituminous Blast! At Midtown's 'Magic' Gathering
Remember Magic: The Gathering? It was a game very popular in the '90s, and if you were like me, you may have spent hours in your bedroom, the sounds of Nirvana or Soundgarden bouncing off the walls around you, flipping through your cards. But then it might have gotten too expensive (a pack of 15 cards went for something like five bucks then, which doesn't sound like much except you were 16, had virtually no income and always needed more, more, more cards to compete)—or maybe you just moved on. But if you didn't know, the game has been enjoying a recent resurgence, and if you need proof, you need only go to Citigroup Center, in Midtown, on a Monday night to see it. READ MORE
How They Got There: A Conversation With Chiropractor Bill Walsh
Bill Walsh will openly admit that his many former bosses were justified when they fired him. He was "arrogantly unfit," and is not shy about telling tales of his, shall we say, youthful misadventures. Eventually, Walsh righted himself, joined a recovery program, went to chiropractic school, and started a practice in Park Slope. He's been treating people there for the past 25 years. READ MORE
How They Got There: A Conversation With Poetry Teacher Marty Skoble
Marty Skoble sits in his office surrounded by the words of his students. Recently, one of his charges slipped a note under his door that read simply, "Waves look like white horses." That is not the most advanced of similes, but consider the context: The uncertainty of the pensmanship suggests that the anonymous writer was in his or her first decade. READ MORE
How They Got There: A Conversation With Author Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan is almost certainly the only man in the country with a holiday greeting card from Anna Wintour on his fridge and a bestseller about rats on his resume. The former exists because of his 20-year gig as a contributing editor at Vogue; the latter comes as a result of the year he spent observing and chronicling the urban creatures as they lived their lives in an alley near Ground Zero. READ MORE
How They Got There: A Conversation With Artist Duke Riley
Duke Riley postponed our first interview because he was freight-train hopping across the country. The Rhode Island School of Design- and Pratt-trained artist needed to be in San Francisco for meetings so he and a friend worked their way west. They made it, eventually. READ MORE
How They Got There: A Q&A With Rooftop Farmer Annie Novak
It was raining when I met Annie Novak. One wave of the torrential stuff had already passed—although more would come later as part of a record-breaking 24-hour period—but a steady drizzle was still falling as she showed me around Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, a 6,000-square-foot space on top of a converted Greenpoint warehouse. The view of the East River and the Manhattan skyline was stunning. The peppers looked bright and plump as water dripped off them onto the dirt/gravel/compost mix that makes their beds. For the past three years, Novak has run the farm, growing vegetables, teaching kids through a partnership with Growing Chefs and refining her business model. In breaks between chatting with the visitors who'd braved the rain to purchase her efforts, Novak chatted about the challenges of urban farming in Gotham, why she chose this life, and how a Chicago girl who grew up paging through Vogue with designs of "being fabulous" in New York" ended up digging dirt out of her fingernails year round. READ MORE
How They Got There: A Q&A With Uber-Career Hopper Paul Hoffman
Paul Hoffman's career is long and varied. He ran Discover when he was 30, published a bestseller when he was 44 and opened a restaurant, Rucola Brooklyn, ten years later, which is where I met him recently for a drink. For the past decade, Paul's bounced from project to project, writing, consulting, editing, moviemaking and more. At one point, Michael Douglas called him and asked if he would fly to Los Angeles to help make a movie character "smarter." Yet while the details of his story are unique, the unexpected turns of his career path are not. In the new world, smart people find themselves bouncing from job to job, following unexpected and decidedly non-traditional trails. In this interview series, they'll chat about how they ended up where they are and where they are going. As the OG of job-jumping, Hoffman seemed the perfect person to kick off these conversations. READ MORE
Can Women's Soccer Survive In America?
On June 23, Landon Donovan paused America with his 91st minute goal against Algeria. The strike sent the United States national team into the second round of the 2010 World Cup, landed the midfielder on the back page of the New York Post, and spawned wild celebrations in bars across the nation. It launched the men's team into the spotlight. READ MORE
