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Over the years I’d read about Kenny’s Castaways on Bleecker Street and how Patti Smith and other music luminaries played there. I didn’t realize, until recently, that I’d been there. I’d seen Big Joe Williams, the blues great, play there in 1982. This was when I was working as a building super at 258 Broadway. It was a live-in job, and [...]
Friends who don’t live in New York City often ask me what’s the toughest thing about living here. My go to answer is always: Finding a place to live. I want enough space for all my ridiculous possessions and fabulous frocks. I want my bed to not be part of the kitchen. Though the thought of grabbing a beer out [...]
When I was five, I learned poker. At seven, blackjack. But one of the most useful skills that I learned in my youth, which happened during school trips into the city, was how to tell the fake watches from the stolen real ones in a suitcase on the sidewalk. Maybe it’s a New York thing. You look. You lift. You [...]
This week we are publishing Part II of “Titan,” an excerpt from Baye McNeils’ new memoir, You Couldn’t Tell Me Shit! Coming of Age in the County of Kings, 1980-1985 about growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Baye’s book, a serialized memoir, is available on his Substack. Part I was published on this site June 7th. CINCERE On the way [...]
"Perhaps @Icegov should go check this corner out." That’s how social media influencer and Turning Point USA contributor Savanah Hernandez captioned her October 19, 2025, video on X showing West African vendors selling counterfeit goods on Canal Street. The video has been viewed 5.1 million times. Several days after it went online, ICE agents raided the area and arrested nine [...]
This excerpt from John O'Connor's new book, A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon (pub date April 14, 2026), explores the peripatetic ways of both the author and his subject, the late American mystic and "psychonaut," Terence Mckenna (1946-2000). McKenna, a countercultural figure in the 1970s who [...]
