“I hope they like each other,” someone says behind me.

“They’ll like each other by the end,” says another.

“They’d better, or there won’t be a repeat.” says the first.

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I am not the best skateboarder, have not been the best skateboarder. I mean that literally—there are loads of tricks I cannot do—but I also mean I've also never felt an obligation to the culture of skateboarding. I've never loved the scene. Some kids, you name a spot and they will tell you every famous trick landed there, by which famous skater, in which video, and, if you have the time, list all the skater's sponsors. Not me. Most of the time I was not interested. The culture I saw—both the one invented for TV ads and the one in Thrasher and Transworld, all gossip and buying and striving—never felt like it had much to do with the way skateboarding felt. Read More

On the bed of the Moldau, the stones are churning.
The days of our rulers are ending fast.
                             —"The Song of the Moldau"

This is a Christmas card from Midtown Manhattan. It wasn't easy to get here from Brooklyn today. The F train wasn't running. "Police action on Church Street," the subway man in the red vest explained. At Prime Burger on 51st Street it was hard to get the attention of the old imperious waiters. They elbowed through the crowd, men of the Pullman Porters Union called back into service when they should have been collecting pensions at home. The crowd was thick, the toilet in the men's room had overflowed. Maybe this was the last Christmas before a new Depression, but Prime Burger bustled and a throng moved outside. Read More

Fighting over street space is nothing new. Before the Model T made driving an everyman's game, New York police had little tolerance for the automobile crowd, viewing them as arrogant, wealthy scofflaws who treated the city like their private playground. Now we've entered a different era—a neo-Gilded one in which the wealthy scofflaws ride road bikes, and working-class cops are willing to go outside the law to protect the working-class driver's exclusive ownership of the right of way.

"Whitney Biennial 2008"

Whitney Museum of American Art

March 6 - June 1

If you want to know how we ended up getting seduced by a woman in a plastic Viking hat chatting away through an already-encrusted bloody nose while holding a piece of Styrofoam cheese in an emergency room parking lot, or if you're wondering why we fell in love as she cheese-guitared Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" on a mountaintop perch—well, that part is pretty hard to explain. But if you're curious just when shaky, hand-held, low-res video became our absolute favorite artistic medium, we can tell you precisely: about three minutes into Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn's "Can't Swallow it, Can't Spit it Out," at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Read More

How much money does a writer need? In New York, a young writer can get by on $25,000, give or take $5,000, depending on thriftiness. A slightly older younger writer—a 30-year-old—will need another $10,000 to keep up appearances. But that's New York. There are parts of this country where a person can live on twelve or thirteen thousand a year—figures so small they can be written out. Of course it depends. Read More

America has a dark secret, one it's unwilling to face: Errol Morris's films are boring. His "interrotron" technique is supposed to be penetrating but it makes everybody look like they're on a job interview.

Maybe he's auditioning people to find out if they're worthy of being in one of his important works of non-fiction. But no one is worthy of the form he's devised—he wants to expose the banality of evil but insists banality prove its humanity, and vice versa. Read More

In New York, they saved.

They saved on orange juice, sliced bread, they saved on coffee. On movies, magazines, museum admission (on Friday nights). Train fare, subway fare, their apartment out in Queens. It was a principle, of sorts, and they stuck to it. Mark and Sasha lived on the 7 train that year and when they got out, out in Queens, Mark would follow Sasha like a little boy as she checked the prices at the Korean grocers, and cross-checked them, so they could save on fruits and vegetables and little Korean treats. They saved on clothes. Read More

New York gossip website Gawker was launched in 2002 by an internet entrepreneur and a naïf new to the city—Professor Henry Higgins and his Eliza Doolittle. Founder Nick Denton, a former Financial Times reporter, had helped start the early social networking site First Tuesday, which arranged for web and media entrepreneurs to go for drinks together. Elizabeth Spiers, the 25-year-old writer he hired, was a recent New York arrival who had kept a blog about her life in finance. It's hard to believe that at first Gawker, which we now know for "knowing everything" about local media and celebrity culture, didn't even know what to read. But in her very first posts (from March 2002), Spiers writes blurbs to herself about what she's read or should be reading. Read More

To get to Jones Beach via public transport, you have to do one of those dances whose fancy footwork is peculiar to New York: a train to a train to a bus. For a single passenger, this three-step mambo is crazy enough; and so imagine adding to it beach chairs, towels, coolers, blankets, umbrellas, swimmies, toys—to say nothing of children—for a party of caravan length that is something out of One Thousand and One Nights.

Why, one might ask, would anyone do such a thing? Especially when, at the end of the day, you have to turn around and do it all over again?

The short answer is because Jones Beach is as close as one can get to "making it" in three hours' travel. Sure, the place is beautiful, its vistas the sort that would have been snapped up by private developers had the land not been placed in the public trust. But it is not only the beach's beauty that distinguishes it. Unlike most public projects, the State of New York—thanks to the lobbying of Robert Moses—spared no expense building the 2,400-acre spread of beach. The result is intentionally grand: Art Deco bathhouses built from Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick, pristine dunes hand-planted with beach grass to prevent erosion, and, most dramatically, the water tower, an Italianate obelisk that rises majestically from the beach's infinite flatness, for an effect that, even from miles away, imparts upon visitors a sense of arrival. Read More