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journalismism
NYT Blog Tries to Unpublish 'One of the Best Kept Secrets in Brooklyn.' Fails.
Yesterday, the New York Times' blog about the Fort Greene neighborhood published a post on a "secret underground climbing gym" in Brooklyn. Today, they took the post down. For a preposterous reason! Now it's getting way more attention. More » -
pic of the night
But Where Do They Get the Giant Tubs of Stale Popcorn?
Hundreds gathered in the grass of Brooklyn Bridge Park last night to watch Raising Arizona, part of the 'Movies With a View' series hosted by the Brookyln Bridge Park Conservatory, one of many NYC summer outdoor film screenings. (Chris Hondros/Getty) -
terrorists
Lefty Brooklyn Coffee Shop's Lady Liberty Replica Beheaded, Al Qaeda Style
Last month a replica of the Statue of Liberty outside of Vox Pop in Ditmas Park was stolen. On the fourth of July it turned up on YouTube getting the Daniel Pearl treatment. None of us are safe anymore. More » -
breaking
Woah: Building Collapse In Writer-Populated Brooklyn
A building collapsed around 2PM Clinton Hill/Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It's right down the street from Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. It's a full collapse, authorities have no idea what caused it. Full picture of the collapse after the jump. More » -
brooklyn
If you read one profanity-laced diatribe about labradoodle owners today, let it be this one.
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gawker stalker
Paul Dano: 130 Court Street
June 15 @ 1 pm Saw Paul Dano at the Trader Joe's in Brooklyn. I followed him into the snack aisle and then he left without buying anything. [Submit your own Gawker Stalker sightings to stalker@gawker.com] -
memorials
No Gypsies, Tramps, Thieves Allowed at Brooklyn Holocaust Memorial
Everyone knows (many people don't know) that the Nazis also exterminated homosexuals, gypsies, and Jehovah's Witnesses, so there is no reason to include that information on a Brooklyn Holocaust Memorial. Assemblyman Dov Hikind is fighting to keep the memorial pure! More » -
real estate
Unsold NYC Luxury Condos Turned Into Homeless Shelters
The developer of a luxury building in Brooklyn was having difficulty selling off his condos in an economic downturn, so he's partnered with the city to turn his vacancies into homeless shelters, leaving residents who actually bought their units livid. More » -
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activities
Bisexual Furry Hipster Lap Dance Available
Attention, our target demographic: do not miss your opportunity for a Free Bouncy Ride from someone in a plush Bluebird Furry outfit, on the Lorimer L train platform at 11 pm tonight. Clean, affordable fun!: More » -
Kari ferrell
Where in the World is the Hipster Grifter?
It's been 12 days since the story of hipster grifter Kari Ferrell swept the world, and here's an amazing thing: she's vanished! Here's a more amazing thing: she's still in NYC!
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Kari ferrell
The Hipster Grifter's Charm in Action
How did hipster grifter and fugitive from justice Kari Ferrell take advantage of so many people in two separate states? With charm! We have two charming emails from her, as proof. She's sorry, okay?
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hipster grifter
Kari Ferrell: Celebulies and Craiglist Hookups
It turns out there is no news in New York City currently that does not relate to hipster grifter Kari Ferrell! Semi-celebrities and prospective hookups are sending us her ridiculous lies! We're programmed to care. More » -
field guide
Meet Kari Ferrell: Criminally Hipster
It's a crazy new hipster character fond of criminal and sexual hijinks! Let's meet Kari Ferrell, the 22 year-old tattooed Utah girl who scammed her way through hipster Brooklyn. Sex, lies, cancer, and bands, yea! More » -
image file
A Snow Falls in Brooklyn
[A Brooklyn street is buried in snow as a big storm sweeps through the Northeast this morning; image via AP] -
it girls
Why Did the Peaches-at-Home Photoshoot Disappear?
Wonders a tipster, "I know that Gawker posted about The Selby covering [Williamsburg Brit-It girl] Peaches Geldof's apartment... but did you guys notice how it's no longer there? Think it has anything to do with lovely husband Max [Drummey] not being anywhere in the photos/any trace of him in the apartment? Or is it just due to the fact that no bone can stand Peaches?" Hmm! (Come visit our rabbit warren, Mr. Selby—we promise we'll have plenty of boy-toys on hand.) -
trends
What is a True Brooklyn Girl?
“'Brooklyn girls know where they are going and how to get there — we have drive, ability, creativity and a toughness that is ultimately true inner strength rather than false bravado,' said Monica Byrne, co-owner of Tini wine bar and Home/made Bklyn, both in Red Hook." That's according to the Brooklyn Paper—whenever we want to know about trends, there's nobody we trust more than the owner of a gentrifo-winebar and a store selling "unique antique, artisan crafted and new contemporary items to adorn your home and your body." Meanwhile, elsewhere in Brooklyn, some girls are late to their pants-optional "home offices" because maybe half a bottle of beer was spilled on the keyboard the night before and quite possibly they spent the morning prying out the keys with a flathead screwdriver. -
open caption
["Dawson's Creek" actress Michelle Williams with her daughter in Brooklyn yesterday; image via Bauer-Griffin]
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reality tv
Watch Your Backs In Brooklyn, Real World Wimps
The Times deployed its investigative resources to dig into the very important rumors that Real World: Brooklyn would be shot downtown rather than in, say, Williamsburg or Park Slope, and nudged the story a bit closer to confirmation. The owner of the downtown BellTel lofts seconded show producer MTV's earlier confirmation of negotiations, and this time there was no mention of other, white borough neighborhoods as alternatives to downtown. PR genius Ronn [sic] Torossian, who represents the developer of BellTel, tried to spin MTV's interest as a big validation for the neighborhood. But then the Times went talking to some of the locals, and they started asking why the cable network wants its fresh young stars getting mugged and so forth: More » -
shut up, brooklyn
Real World: Brooklyn Could Be in Boring Old Downtown
Last week we posited that the new Real World: Brooklyn would be filmed in Williamsburg, but suggested that the infamous hipster paradise that is the McKibbin "dorms" in Bushwick would be a better environment. Well, it looks like MTV is, in fact, not listening to us. The Brooklyn Paper is reporting that the show is going to be filmed in downtown Brooklyn. Well, allegedly. The producers admitted to looking at a large apartment building called the BellTell Lofts (ooo, lofts! hip!) in the decidedly ho hum Brooklyn business and fancy courtroom district. More » -
stroller derby
Park Slope Hate Reaching Critical Mass
So yesterday the Times weighed in on everyone's most detested yuppie mecca, Park Slope. Today, the new issue of Time Out New York piles on! "Websites like Gawker and Curbed crackle with anti-Slope invective, hurled at the twin bugaboos of the 'Stroller Mafia' (pushy, indulgent yuppie parents) and the bleeding-heart 'People’s Republic of Park Slope' (headquartered at the Food Co-op)." Update: Via email from Maureen Shelly: "Hi Ian. I'm the EIC of Time Out Kids. Just wanted to point out that the Park Slope piece you turned up is from last year — not the upcoming June issue. Our piece was also by Lynne Harris, who penned the Times story. I guess she felt she had more to say on the subject." More » -
Magical Brooklyn
'NYT' Explores Park Slope Hell
"To its detractors, Park Slope is both haunt and hatchery of New York’s smuggest limousine-liberal yuppies. It is, if I may further summarize the bad publicity, overrated and hypocritical. Its glorious brownstone blocks and jaunty cafes are awash in carpetbagger entitlement, ruled by snarling 'Stroller Nazis.' The neighborhood is a ground zero of all that is twee and lame. It is, God forbid, the suburbs." Well done. But what do the anonymous blog commenters have to say, New York Times? More » -
fights
Foxy Brown Pleads Guilty to Cell-Phone Menacing
How does one go about "menacing a neighbor with [a] cell phone," as the AP reports of Brooklyn rapper Foxy Brown? The AP does not explain. The fight started with Foxy "blasting her car stereo" outside the building. (This scuffle is not to be confused with last year's fight with a manicurist.) -
goodbye, brooklyn
Are Celebrities Done With Brooklyn?
Brooklyn "power couple" Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany are leaving the neighborhood. Their beautiful Prospect Park West mansion (see pic, above) is on the market for $8.5m (they paid $3.5 for it back in 2003). They'll be fleeing to a fancypants penthouse in TriBeCa. So, is everyone going to just abandon Brooklyn? First it was Michelle Williams and the late Heath Ledger (though she kept their Boerum Hill brownstone, she spends most of her downtime in LA, he spent it in Manhattan), and now these well-respected "boho" "artists." Thank God we've still got Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, and Keri Russell. And I think M.I.A. lives somewhere in Bed-Stuy. But, they'll probably leave too. More » -
everyone is friends
Rick Moody Pies Dale Peck
Dale Peck has become so much less angry since he scored that $3 million book deal! The novelist and critic—whose Friendster profile was once described as "incredibly anti-corporate and anti-consumer," who famously hated things much more than most reviewers do these dark days, and who was slugged by Stanley Crouch because of it—recently allowed himself to be pied by Rick Moody. Moody was once described by Peck as the worst writer of his generation. But at a fundraiser the Montauk Club last night, it was all fun and games and pieing. [NYT] -
shut up, brooklyn
Gawker Stalker For The Ultra-Literary Set
Even if the Brooklyn Literary Scene is dead, or as Colson Whitehead put it, annoying and irrelevant, there still are a lot of writers kicking it in the borough of churches. In today's New York Observer, Fort Greene's own Doree Shafrir made an extensive list of the Brooklyn literarati, including neighborhood listings. Not to sound like an asshole, but even I didn't know about some of the writers and editors on the list. The Observer's non-college educated readership will be totally lost. More » -
deep questions
Is 'Home Buying For Hipsters' Actually Just For Tools?
Like "cool," "hipster" is a multivalent word with no set definition but many different meanings. But from a real estate developers' perspective, if you live in Brooklyn, have read a Jonathan Lethem book or have gone to Studio B, you qualify. Sorry! Even so, no real hipster admits to being one. That's worse than saying you want to be cool. Which makes Home Buying For Hipsters — a monthly real estate advising meet-up with ties to the Corcoran Group — so perplexing. What tool would show up to their event tonight, which is aimed at a demographic no one would acknowledge being a part of?
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In Brief
Brooklyn: Naughty
Is it possible that Brooklyn is really "the naughtiest place in the country"? A porn site called Naughty America says it is, mainly because the majority of its subscribers come from BK (kicking Chicago's ASS). So they're bringing five porn stars to a bar in Williamsburg in order to congratulate the borough on its kinkiness. Obvious question: are total porn site subscriptions a good measure of how "naughty" an area is? You could argue the opposite. [Brooklyn Paper] -
maps
New York Is Full Of Poors (Like You)
The United Way and the Community Service Society have just released a slew of demographic maps of New York City, which handily answer the question: Are The Poors in your hood? Pictured, the household income map (click to enlarge), which is perhaps most surprising for revealing that Williamsburg, despite its yuppie influx, is still broke, along with HOT HOT NEXT BIG THING neighborhoods like Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, et al. After the jump, neighborhood-specific maps of the city showing unemployment rates, immigrant populations, and "disconnected youth" who aren't working, in school, or concerned about you very much. More » -
Literature?
We Are All Just Wittle Babies
"All the Sad, Young Literary Men has too many men, none of whom is particularly sad, literary or, for that matter, interesting." That's The L Magazine's Jonny Diamond on N+1 editor Keith Gessen's first novel. The interesting bit is how Gawker, you dear commenters, and the scribblers of Magical Brooklynism fit into the equation. "Gessen has rightly and eloquently lamented the impoverishment of intellectual discourse in 21st-century America, particularly in a New York literary scene that prefers whimsy to gravitas, adolescence to adulthood and typography to teleology." (Yeah, Gessen and his privileged band of bores are the answer. Okay, I'll stop.) "And if lit journal-cum-publishing house McSweeney’s has come to stand (albeit unfairly so) as shorthand for this particular style of whimsy-sotted, Brooklyn-born preciousness, then online media gossip Gawker has served as its natural enemy, employing snark and irony to interrupt the daydreams of thousands of Michel Gondrys and Miranda Julys." Sounds good. But it isn't! More » -
open caption
"He's Going to Introduce Me to Some Prostitutes!"
[Vogue editrix Anna Wintour with fashion designer and former hooker-dater Marc Jacobs at an event at the Brooklyn (hey that's where I live!) museum; image via Queerty. Another image after the jump.] More » -
corrections
This is Not a Crack House
Last week, annoyingly one-named reporter for The New York Times, Toure, wrote about his middle class guilt and snitching to the cops about a crack house on his block. The article was illustrated with this photo of some handsome residences in Toure's neighborhood. But, oops! More » -
shut up brooklyn
Touré Has Lost Any Possible Street Cred
Fort Greene is not gentrifying fast enough! At least that's the experience of cultural critic and dude about town Touré. The single-named author was living right across from a crackhouse on South Oxford street in Fort Greene, only a block away South Portland, Time Out New York's most desirable place to live in 2006. But even with a sushi place on the next corner, there was still a crack house across from his apartment. After a bout of black liberal guilt, Touré tried to get the po-po to clear the streets, but they ignored his calls. We don't judge Touré's conflicted anti-neighborhood crack house stance—since the advent of Google Maps, Mole Edition, we are all snitches now. [NYT] -
atlantic yards
The Economic Downturn South Brooklynites Have Been Waiting For
Hey, so about the economy. It's not that good. And the overzealous real estate market is partially to blame. As consequence, overzealous realtor Bruce Ratner has admitted that the crisis will slow down his Atlantic Yards project. Go to any bar in south Brooklyn and start hating on Atlantic Yards and you'll be talking about developing, not destroying Brooklyn in the morning. Still, it must be said: the part of downtown Brooklyn that Ratner wants to destroy is a dump. Of course it's dubious that a Nets stadium, which Ratner wants to start construction on this year, will make the area any nicer. [NYT] -
red hook
Good News
"Red Hook Ballfield Vendors Get 6-Year Permit"—South Brooklyn hipsters and Mexican immigrants rejoice. [Curbed] -
a bridge too far
Moving To Brooklyn Won't Turn You Into Jonathan Safran Foer (Thank God)
No matter what borough you live in, how much you pay in rent or who your neighbors are, being a writer still sucks. Nouns and verbs are hard to come up with. Even Brooklyn, with all its just-as-good-as-Manhattan verve, can't change that for you. If anything, as Colson Whitehead, author of the revered Apex Hides the Hurt, reports in the Sunday Book Review, it's harder. All the shrinks are still in Manhattan and reading friends' unpublished books is boring. And even a dip in the Gowanus Canal can't cure writers block. Of course, Brooklyn writers hating the Brooklyn writers' scene is a trend as old as metrosexuals. More » -
the theatre
Broadway Bound
Good news for people who like theatre but refuse to cross the river into bustling Brooklyn. Brooklyn Academy of Music's acclaimed weirdo video bloody Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart is moving to Broadway at the end March. [Playbill] -
lawsuits
Jay-Z Kool With Herc; Voodoo Issue Still Unresolved
Yesterday, a man named Clive Campbell filed a wacky $5 billion lawsuit against rap star and partial New Jersey Nets owner Jay-Z, as well as others associated with the huge Atlantic Yards construction project in downtown Brooklyn (which includes a new stadium for the Nets). The charge was that because Barclay's bought naming rights to the stadium, and was possibly involved in the slave trade way back when, everyone involved was illegally profiting from slavery. So that will be dismissed quickly. More interesting: Clive Campbell is the real name of DJ Kool Herc, the old school master widely credited as the founder of hip hop. So outlets started reporting that Kool Herc was suing Jay-Z—intergenerational hip hop madness! But then it came out that this was a different Clive Campbell [Gothamist]. Too bad, cause that would have been crazy. Now Jay-Z can turn his attention to warding off this "Voodoo Priestest"!: More » -
creative underclass
Hipster Thief Of Williamsburg Wants Only Apple Products
"True story. My apartment in 'prime Williamsburg' was broken into. The thieves searched out my [Apple] iPod and [Mac] PowerBook, but the didn't touch my roommate's Dell that was sitting out in plain sight on our kitchen table. PS: A kitchen table - suck it Manhattan." [via email] (Photo: Everystockphoto) -
struggling writers
Ben Karlin: Bad Neighbor
Former Daily Show executive producer Ben Karlin seems like a decent fellow, right? He was responsible for some of the smartest comedy to air on American TV since basically ever, that Daily Show book was pretty funny, Deborah Solomon couldn't make him seem like as much of an asshole as she does most of her interviewees. And, as he said last August, when announcing his HBO production deal, he is a man of ideas. Hundreds of ideas. "At least initially, he said, he planned to revisit some of the half-formed notions in his notebook, which he likened to the aging Russian nuclear arsenal. 'Many of the weapons I have may still be good,' he said. 'Others may not go off.'" Apparently the idea which did go off was the one he borrowed from a guy in his building! More » -
politics
Brooklyn Votes
As usual, a Carroll Gardens elementary school bake sale (and Super Tuesday polling place!) accurately and succinctly sums up the important decision facing our nation today. Brownie or blondie? Choose wisely, America. [Wonkette]






















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