The first time I met Bernie Kerik was in his giant office at 1 Police Plaza. Bernie is a showy guy who makes an instant impression with his barrel chest and massive arms. But the thing he most wanted to show me was the Koran he had been given on a visit he’d made to a Read More
The Thermals are touring behind their excellent new record Desperate Ground and bring their too-much-sound-for-a-trio to the Bowery Ballroom. Billed by their new label as “post-pop-punk trio from pre-Portlandia-Portland, Oregon,” the Thermals are manically enjoyable and the new LP features the distorto-voiced energizer single “Born to Kill” as the intro to a kind of upbeat Read More
Michael Pollan’s new book, Cooked, has just been published, and to celebrate, the rangy, brilliant food writer hosted 100 friends at the Morgan Lehmann Gallery underneath the High Line on West 22nd Street. Why there? So that his guests could be surrounded by the stunning paintings of Judith Belzer—his wife—whose electrifying depictions of Read More
As The Observer—and every other news outlet—has been scrambling to report in detail, the city is abuzz over the high-profile indictment and arrests of figures in an art-world money laundering scheme involving seven-figure card games, international sports betting rings and mixed martial arts fighters who played the Rocky Balboa role of Read More
You know how you’re supposed to be suicidal when someone refers to Robert De Niro as “Bobby” because you know you’ll never be that intimate with someone so vitally important to the cultural life of the city? Well, the same is true of Robert Redford, who was called to the stage by Sony Pictures honcho Tom Read More
Tim Ferriss is the kind of guy who’d be easy to hate—speaks five languages, won a national kickboxing title, ranked seventh on Newsweek’s Digital 100 Power Index for 2012, everything he touches sells a million copies, does it all working just a few hours a week, and he’s great-looking to boot—if he weren’t so damn Read More
VICE debuts a new documentary produced by Erin Carr about the way 3D printing—and specifically its potential to create firearms and other weapons—is changing the nature of the debate about gun control and even about intellectual property and creativity. With a great title—Click. Print. Gun.—and a red-hot subject matter, the film is certain to be a Read More
The story of Passover includes four children, one who is wise, one wicked, one foolish, and one who does not even know how to ask questions. Any large family is bound to have a few of each, but a couple weeks ago, the Bronfman family came together to celebrate a truly lovely new Haggadah, the Read More
I’ve been a fan of this newspaper for more than 20 years and its editor for less than three months. One of the things that people keep asking from me—demanding, actually—is that most noxious of modern conventions, “the elevator pitch.” Any idea that requires more than 30 seconds to explain is anathema in our 140-character Read More
