Swimming in the East River could happen sooner than you think
Curbed, 2/3/20

On a warm July morning about 15 years ago, Ellen Weinberg climbed a metal fence in lower Manhattan wearing a bathing suit, goggles, and swim cap, walked up to the banks of the East River, and plunged in. About 30 minutes later, passersby on the Brooklyn side of the river, near what is now part of Brooklyn Bridge Park, gaped as Weinberg and four other swimmers emerged from the water.

"Everyone looked at us like we were crazy," says Weinberg. "It was so fun—I really felt like Kramer."

Read the full story at Curbed.

Ona warm July morning about 15 years ago, Ellen Weinberg climbed a metal fence in lower Manhattan wearing a bathing suit, goggles, and swim cap, walked up to the banks of the East River, and plunged in. About 30 minutes later, passersby on the Brooklyn side of the river, near what is now part of Brooklyn Bridge Park, gaped as Weinberg and four other swimmers emerged from the water.

___________________________________________________________________________

 
Americans Are Stiffing The IRS To Protest Trump
Village Voice, 3/13/17 

The week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Abby, a 37-year-old filmmaker, was sitting at home with her young son in Portland, Oregon, growing increasingly frustrated watching the news. As executive orders started flying out of the White House, Abby felt something more drastic was called for than her family’s regular donations to Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

She pulled out her phone and fired off a text message to her tax preparer in Brooklyn: “Hey, what if we don’t pay our federal taxes? Are other people considering this?”

  

Read the full story at The Village Voice.

___________________________________________________________________________

Tourists for Trump
The Outline, 5/18/17 

Phil Stein, a New York sightseeing tour guide who works with visiting student groups, usually gives his spectators a two-hour break to go shopping on Fifth Avenue. During one outing in March, a group of middle school girls from Texas returned to the tour holding black bags full of Make America Great Again hats from the Trump Store in Trump Tower. To purchase the hats, they told Stein, they had to do something he found startling: fill out forms affirming they were United States citizens and hand over other personal information including their address and email.

“My gut feeling was, this was not right,” Stein said.

   

Read the full story at The Outline.
 ___________________________________________________________________________

NYC’s famous Music Row is about to be a ghost town
NY Post, 8/1/15 

At age 11, Rudy Pensa sat at home in Argentina, flipping through music magazines and wishing he could shop at New York’s famous Music Row.
A guitar player, he saw it as a mecca: the block of 48th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues that, since the 1930s, had been home to dozens of guitar sellers, studios and repair shops.

“It wasn’t America I wanted to come to,” he says. “It was 48th Street, which happened to be in America.”

  

Read the full story at NY Post.

___________________________________________________________________________

Did the alt-right shut down this BK comedy club?
Brokelyn, 12/16/16

Williamsburg’s eclectic comedy venue the Experiment Comedy Gallery was permanently shut down for safety reasons by the New York Fire Department last night, displacing dozens of performers in a move supporters worry is tied to an alt-right campaign to shutter left-leaning venues.

The surprise inspection came from a tip to the fire department that led to the discovery of a lack of proper fire exits. But fans and regulars point to a campaign on sites like 4chan to shut down “radical left” and DIY spaces in the wake of the deadly Ghost Ship fire in Oakland.

Read the full story at Brokelyn.

 _____________________________________________________________________

Life under the Thunderbolt 
NY Post, 7/27/2013

Joan Finkelstein expected the nervous shakes. She had agreed to marry Edwin Howard just after meeting him in March 1952. By July of that year, she was headed to his aunt’s house in Coney Island to meet his family for the first time.

When she got there, she noticed it wasn’t she that had the shakes. It was the walls. She looked frantically around the house and, while the china hanging on the walls was rumbling, nothing was crashing to the ground and no one else was batting an eye. Either this is an earthquake, she thought, or I’m losing my mind.

Read the full story at NY Post. 

___________________________________________________________________________

Romancing the storm
NY Post, 11/7/2012

Emanuel Boseman was panicked. He was stranded in a tiny 50-square-foot second-floor storage unit in Coney Island as Sandy pushed ocean waters into the building, completely flooding the first floor. He stared at his cellphone, which was getting spotty service, and nervously debated dialing his ex-girlfriend Fernanda Meier.

He didn’t know who else to call, but they hadn’t spoken in months. Would she even take his call?

Read the full story at NY Post.

___________________________________________________________________________

No charred bones or animal fat: The search for a vegan tattoo
The Atlantic, 11/13/2011

As I accidentally discovered online a few days later, getting a tattoo can be about as vegan as having a rib-eye sewn to your arm. The ink and processes at your average shop contain a veritable buffet of animal detritus: charred bones of dead animals in the ink, fat from once-living things in the glycerin that serves as a carrying agent, enzymes taken from caged sheep that go into making the care products.

Read the full story at The Atlantic.

___________________________________________________________________________

How to open a business in Brooklyn
Inc. Magazine, 6/28/2010 

For Alexis Miesen, Atlantic Avenue had all the makings of the quintessential Brooklyn thoroughfare that combines the charm of a small town with the pace of city life. With its colorful boutique storefronts, diverse dining options, smattering of coffee shops, and antique stores, she expected to see happy families strolling along the street sharing ice cream cones.

There was one problem: There was no ice cream anywhere around.

Read the full story at Inc. Magazine.

___________________________________________________________________________

How much can you make recycling cans and bottles?
Brokelyn,  11/2/2010

If you’ve ever spent your working hours navigating a gray cubicle maze or strangling yourself with clothing hangars at a retail job, just about anything seems like a valid career alternative. Even, we’ll admit to daydreaming, joining those guys who pick bottles and cans out of your apartment trash every morning. Fresh air! Exercise! The thrill of the hunt! Maybe it’s a little messy, but we had to look at dead bodies at our last newspaper job, and you can’t turn corpses into nickels. Walking to work one day, the two of us wondered whether those humble trash pickers are really laughing their way back to McMansions in Jersey. So we decided to find out for ourselves.

Read the full story at Brokelyn.

___________________________________________________________________________