I WANT TO have sex,” she announced politely but firmly, like a little girl demanding a new doll. “Where can we go to do that?” Not anywhere around here, I thought as I looked around the barren park where we were lunching. There was a devastating lack of shrubbery; surely we would be spotted fornicating like the wild dogs we were from every conceivable spot in this obstruction-free landscape. Read more Read it in print

THE BIGGEST FOOD-RELATED uproar in New York this past summer had to be the daring invasion of Manhattan by Canadian donut chain Tim Hortons. NYC residents were taken aback by the almost overnight appearance of multiple maple-leafed breakfast stations throughout the city in July, ramping up fears that our northern borders are not entirely secure. As a tireless Hortons supporter, it warmed my cockles to see Tim flex his sugar n’ coffee muscle through the city that never sleeps. However, I was far more excited to learn a Checkers had quietly snuck its way into Brooklyn a month earlier. Read more

BALTIMORE HAS THE Poe Toaster. Punxsutawney, a groundhog that predicts the weather. In Brooklyn, the piece of modern folklore that peaks local interest isn’t animal but electronic—specifically, an outmoded telephone that occasionally pops up across the street from Pinchik Hardware on Bergen Street in Park Slope.This ancient and partially wooden crank phone is humanity’s only link to an otherworldly entity known as “The Pinchik Oracle,” an all-knowing being that has decided to periodically field our questions and answer them on an electronic sign above the hardware store in question. Read more Read it in print