By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 11:13am

Shindigger

Rachel Fershleiser, Nick Douglas and Molly McArdle

Getting Lit: Brooklyn Book Festival Kicks Off

We have reached a stage in the life of New York or the life of literature (or both) where a glance at the bio of most contemporary authors inevitably ends with the words “lives in Brooklyn.” Not surprisingly, a literary festival exists to celebrate the borough’s bibliophiles. The Brooklyn Book Festival, which will take place this Sunday, means that many writers won’t even have to get on the subway in order to read aloud and sit on panels in front of enthusiastic readers.

To kick off the literary festivities prior to the literary Festival, Tumblr, Electric Literature, The New Inquiry and the Los Angeles Review of Books threw a party. (Book people love parties.) Shindigger, being notionally bookish ourselves, followed the parade of tote bags until we reached the Williamsburg event space Public Assembly. After getting a temporary tattoo stamped on our inner wrist, we entered the darkened hall. Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 9/20/11 9:07pm

daily

Sasha Frere-Jones Backs Away from Duties at The Daily

Sasha Frere-Jones, The Daily’s bold-face culture editor and New Yorker pop music critic, has relinquished his full-time editing duties at the iPad tabloid, a source familiar with the operations told The Observer.

Mr. Frere-Jones’s deputy, Claire Howorth, formerly of The Daily Beast and Vanity Fair (and powerfully linked to The Daily‘s news editor Mike Nizza), will Read More

By Matt Haber 5/05/08 3:55pm

Whither Twitter?

Who will ensure Twitter tweets uninterrupted? That’s the question posed by Silicon Alley Insider’s Hank Williams about the popular wireless and Web-based application that allows users to share their brain farts on the Web in real time. Everyone from Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody ("I’m smoking Virginia Slims today. I’ve come a long way, Read More

By Staff 5/10/06 11:45pm

Rum and Stumpy and the Lash


Stephin Merritt, in a Magnetic Fields publicity shot

Runt, the party for short men and the men who enjoy them, is observed on Wednesday nights in a low-ceilinged half-basement on East Fourteenth Street, between First and Second Avenues, not far from the firehouse and the bike shop. It is a project of the pop Read More

By Tom Scocca 1/24/05 12:00am

Off the Record

When he was getting started as a reporter, Jack Patrick O’Gilfoil Healy didn’t think much about his byline. He signed his work “Pat Healy,” the name he went by; sometimes, he went with the more formal “Patrick Healy.”

“I think Patrick and Pat are more or less the same,” said Mr. Healy, who is now Read More