The NY Times' article about presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain's superclose relationship with a young, attractive female lobbyist (more about her here) has drawn a lot of criticism, especially from McCain himself. His campaign seized the moment to raise money for his campaign. Campaign manager Rick Davis' fundraising letter read, "With John McCain leading a number of general-election polls against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, The New York Times knew the time to attack......

After a turbulent couple of months at Gawker, the New York Times Style section is checking the media website’s pulse and wondering, with equal parts hope and desperation, if Gawker has finally jumped the “snark”. The Times’s uptick in Gawker stalking mirrors their aggressive game of catch-up with “teh internets” by increasingly emphasizing blogs on their website, and the article finds the Gray Lady digging a nice, cozy grave for Gawker owner and editor Nick......

On the heels of the NY Times' Alex Williams calling Brooklyn "over" -- Park Slope has been named one of the 10 best neighborhoods in the country! Take that Gray Lady. In fact, "the historic area, just steps from Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, is the only New York City neighborhood to make the first-ever list from the American Planning Association (APA)." Which would mean that a Brooklyn 'hood bested a Manhattan 'hood......

With Election Day in a little more than two weeks, candidates are pushing into the home stretch by rallying their supporters and looking for undecided voters. The NY Times made some more big endorsements. The Gray Lady threw support behind Eliot Spitzer for Governor and Andrew Cuomo for Attorney General. The Spitzer endorsement was enthusiastic and hopeful, while the Cuomo one...well, here's a bit from it which contrasts Cuomo with the embattled Republican Jeannine Pirro:The......

THEATER: The Mint Theater, which has earned a formidable reputation by yanking old, forgotten plays out of oblivion, has struck gold again with their latest production of John Ferguson, an intense melodrama about a poor Irishman who will lose his farm unless his daughter marries some creepy tool. A 1919 edition of The Times called it a “smashing play”; 87 years later the Gray Lady stays regular with “thoroughly engrossing”. 7:00 p.m. // The Mint......

Got time over the next week? Here's an interesting way to spend some of it: On June 30 Sothebys is going to be auctioning off reams of the personal documents of Martin Luther King, Jr. from between 1946 and 1968. Everything from report cards - he didn't get straight A's - to drafts of his "I Have a Dream" speech are on the block (as a collection only) and for the next week it......

Rockaway, Queens. Just hearing its name makes us smile. Some of our happiest high school memories involve sitting on its beaches looking out at the Atlantic, content in the knowledge that we were still in the City and that Manhattan was but an A train away. But will it always be? That's the question posed by today's News in a story that might as well have been written by Chicken Little. Short answer: For......

As World Cup fever slowly infects its way across the five boroughs (we can't be the only ones who've found ourselves standing for hours in bodegas staring at soccer matches when we've already bought the beer we came for) the city has announced its own new competition, and we're pretty pumped for it, too! Using one of the few remaining large vacant properties in the city's portfolio, the Bloomberg administration and an architects' group......

The sun sets in the middle of street! Thank you Gray Lady for reminding us, everybody mark your calendars, next Sunday is Manhattanhenge! Manhattan-what? Here, let's let the director of the Hayden Planetarium explain: "Next Sunday and on July 13, the sun will fully illuminate every Manhattan cross street (not the curved or angled ones) on the street grid during the last 15 minutes of daylight, and it will set on each street's center......

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today and the old Gray Lady takes three, but the Washington Post won four (criticism, beat reporting, explanatory writing, and investigative reporting). However, the real story might be the awards for Hurricane Katrina coverage, a public service award shared by the Sun-Herald in Biloxi and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, breaking news photography award for the Dallas Morning News and a breaking news reporting awards fro the Times-Picayune. The three......

This morning we woke up not at all surprised to see Jared Paul Stern still flagellating himself over at Gawker. But to be honest, we were getting kind of bored with the whole thing. The best part of JPS's first post was his last line and the first comment: "And, just in case you were wondering, yes I can tell who's really posting the Comments. I am, after all, the Editor." Followed by Nick Denton......

With obvious glee today's Times and Daily News went to task covering the Page Six payola scandal in greater detail. Both papers managed to get a fair amount of milage out of the story. The News includes some great excerpts, like this one of Page Sixer Jared Paul Stern:"You know, for whatever reasons, and it's not because there's any kind of agenda overriding or a conspiracy — I am saying you're not on the good......

"I love this dirty town." Oh, Page Six. Gothamist can't imagine why, but it seems like some people really just plain don't like Rupe Murdoch's gossip hounds. We mean, Nobody was surprised yesterday when the Daily News broke the Page Six payola scandal all over its front page. But crazy, either it was an incredibly slow news day yesterday, or the Times gave a very generous gift to Six Editor Richard Johnson on his......

As expected Darryl Littlejohn has been indicted for first-degree murder in the killing of Imette St. Guillen. On a CBS interview last night Littlejohn emphasized his innocence, saying that he had escorted St. Guillen from the Falls because it was closing time. He did not say what happened after that, but said that the police had focused on him because of his past. "I'm a likely suspect because I have a criminal background and......

If you ran the city, what would you do? That's basically what the Times asked a bunch of New Yorkers back in November. The Gray Lady then picked their favorite bits of advice and asked the city what could be done about them. Some of the ideas are plain silly (uhm, a high speed underground moving walkway instead of the the never-going-to-get-built 2nd Avenue Subway?) and some of them are highly controversial (hello, reserved residential......

The approximate timeline from Saturday Night Live video, no, wait, digital short, to being "above the fold" on the NYTimes.com website is nine days! We doubt The Lonely Island/SNL gang was up at 8AM to see the "Lazy Sunday" article, "Nerds in the Hood, Stars on the Web," take the prime position on the Gray Lady's Less Gray Website, but Gothamist did. And we love the internet. Apparently the Lonely Island guys, Andy Samberg, Akiva......

- Check out the sponsored link beneath our Braunstein coverage from yesterday... indeed (thanks Joe!). Did we mention that Peter Braunstein got busted? - And in the battle of "we're not an ATM" MTA VS "we're almost-striking" TWU: Surprising nobody, the transit negotiations are back on! - A female security guard at a middle-school dance in Brooklyn suffered a fatal heart attack after being punched by a 12-year-old girl. She is the second school......

On Sundays, Gothamist runs opinion pieces on issues relevant to life in New York. The views expressed below belong entirely to the author. "Let me preface this with some full-on full disclosure. I love Maureen Dowd. I love her not just for her columns and their brash, fearless intelligence. I also love her for being a woman in a man’s world, where even at her liberal Gray Lady’s office of eight columnists and one public......

Advertising Age asked some designers how they would give the Old Gray Lady a facelift and change the New York Times broadsheet, and the answers are practical, hilarious, and just wacky. The most common suggestion is to make the paper more compact and tabloid size for portability (gasp) to putting more gossipy stories in between hard news on the front page (GASP), to having a co-branded "Times Cafe" with a coffee house to hiring new......

What the heck is up with the middle name of New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee? Is that for real? Can anyone change their middle name to a number if they want? Steven 4 According to this Wikipedia entry, the 8 was added by Ms. Lee's parents to make her name a little less common. In the Gray Lady, her byline is always printed as "Jennifer 8. Lee," but apparently the number is......