As ever-larger American cities jockey to be the next big municipal bankruptcy, it's tempting for city leaders to look for that "magic bullet" to lift their crumbling burgs back to prosperity.

As the huge (largest-ever in Brooklyn) and controversial Atlantic Yards development project, adjacent to some of Brooklyn's most bobo-filled enclaves, makes further progress, the level of hysteria rises and rises. The latest story has a group of Park Slope residents freaking out about a new bar opening in their…

Every year the Economist Intelligence Unit looks at all the cities in the world and ranks their livability based on stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. Which city came out on top?

Everyone in New York is sad because DC is so much cooler now, because we lost all the money and they have President Cool Guy. Well don't worry. DC still sucks.

We don't know what it says about our job—actually, we know exactly what it says about our job: It blows—that we were excited for jury duty, but there you have it. Three days without work where we could get up at the relatively late hour of eight and sit around reading the newspaper without thinking, "Oh, I have to…

I am an American, New York-born. John Lindsay's name is on my birth certificate (although not as a claim to paternity). I've spent the majority of my life in this area. And like so many of us here in town, I've never been to the top of the Empire State Building, because, you know, it's for tourists. Also, who gives…

At the end of last week the Financial Times ran an amusing "Dear Economist..." column. The premise of the feature is that it's a tongue-in-cheek advice piece from an economic perspective. Anyway, a gentlemen wrote that, as an immigrant in London, he always carries an umbrella with him, though the natives do not. When…