A fight broke out seven hours into the new year.

“You’re my fucking brother,” shouted a man on Houston Street. “I’ve known you for, oh, how many fucking years, and you know, on our mother, I would never hit somebody.”

The stomping and tears echoed four floors below our apartment. From out our window, where we were smoking, the two men ended a long night—stretched into daylight—with an argument kicked up along the shuttered storefronts of the Lower East Side. Read More

Last Sunday night, Rob, a hulking Hamptons cab driver with two bum knees, barreled his van down the Montauk Parkway toward Amagansett running through a pack of reservation cigarettes and talking about his drug habits.

“If I’m on a heavy narcotic, do you want me coming in?” he yelled to The Observer, who fastened his Read More