The city's most expensive hotel room got the kind of publicity money can't buy today thanks to the Times, which has paired the voyeuristic article with an addictive, 360-degree photo panorama of the bathroom. We've been virtually spinning around in it for the last ten minutes like Julie Andrews on a Bavarian mountaintop in The Sound of Music. The immaculate bathroom in the 52nd story "Ty Warner Penthouse" has a laser in the bathtub to......

Michael Wilson over at the Times wanders the boroughs to talk to working class types whose inability to afford gas or airplane tickets means they're stuck in town all summer. The article devotes over 1,400 to the phenomenon, which, as you no doubt know, is called a "staycation," in the parlance of our times. Wilson's crazy about the portmanteau, in a Seinfeldian sort of way: "...it’s a very fun word to say. Staycation. How was your staycation? My parents went on staycation, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. Our son-in-law threw his back out on staycation." (Salsa, anyone?)...

This week’s New York Magazine cover story drops over 5,500 words on the “slightly illicit-sounding” Brownstoner, a blog that for several years has chronicled the steamy vicissitudes of gentrifying Brooklyn. Or rather, the article looks at Brooklyn’s turbulence through the prism of the blog’s commenters – specifically a derisive doomsday prophet who calls himself The What. 5,500 words, one commenter. Up next, a sprawling New Yorker profile on Alex Balk’s Tumblr imitator. Adam Sternbergh, the......

Just in time for summer, the Times has brought the fear to the park, where an army of infectious organisms await anyone reckless enough to let the grass touch their bare feet. According to a number of very uptight dermatologists, taking off your shoes in the park is pretty much akin to soaking them in a bucket of bacteria. Dermatologist Judith Hellman gave the paper ten good reasons why Richard Gere should have used a......

Apparently, Mayor Bloomberg uses the word unconscionable so much that the Times poured 969 other words into analyzing the verbal tic. According to the article, Bloomberg’s U-bombing is definitely excessive; he drops the heavy pejorative in situations that don’t merit it, like when a reporter dared ask him if his trip to Israel was calculated to woo Jewish voters. (“That’s unconscionable. You should be ashamed to ask that question,” he reportedly snapped.) And when a......

A Wired reporter bemoaning the pizza backwater that is San Francisco rang up Mario Batali to find out why New York Pizza is so magnificent and got an intriguing theory out of the celebrity chef: New York’s old pizza ovens “capture the gestalt of beautifully cooked pizza.” A food development consultant believes Batali’s abstract ‘gestalt’ is, to scientists, vaporized ingredients that become “volatilized particles and attach themselves to the walls of the baking cavity. The......

Sure, it’s not as sexy as last week’s 11 page George Clooney spread (what is?), but the article on elevators by Nick Paumgarten in the current New Yorker makes for a fresh read. It begins with the story of one Nicholas White, a former production manager at Business Week who got stuck in an elevator at Rockefeller Center while at work one Friday night in October, 1999. White’s distressing tale is teased out as a......