Has a Jimmy Fallon-hosted Late Night reality sunk in yet? Well, it's happening, and the ex-SNL cast member will be getting a head start by popping up at a URL near you sometime soon. The NY Times reports that "Lorne Michaels has decided to try to get a jump on things by starting NBC’s next edition of Late Night, with its new host Jimmy Fallon, as a nightly entry on the Internet." The web performances......

Photo of Dutch fans in Basel, Switzerland, by Matt Dunham, AP The European Cup soccer tournament heads into the quarterfinals this weekend and it's shaping up to be one of the most exciting and highest-rated international tournaments in some time. For those who contend that soccer is too boring to watch, one should try watching it surrounded by football fanatics who can not only clue you in on the finer parts of the game,......

A Westchester woman who had her laptop stolen didn’t even bother with old fashioned signs like the one pictured here – instead she remotely used the camera in her computer to photograph the culprits. The laptop was stolen from her apartment on April 27th along with $5,000 worth of other electronics. The Journal News has it that the unnamed woman got a call from a friend on Tuesday asking her if she was online; she......

Last week Governor Paterson signed off on a new tax law requiring out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax from consumers in New York State. Like other states, New York requires residents to pay tax on out-of-state purchases for which sales tax wasn’t collected. The big argument is over who’s responsible for collecting; the new law puts that onus vendors like Amazon, which is now fighting the bill in State Supreme Court. What’s interesting is that......

For the first time, tickets for the Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in Central Park shows will be made available online. While most tickets will still be given to those who wait for hours (pictured) in Central Park, a limited number will be available to theatergoers who log on to the Public theater website at midnight before each day’s show and submit a request for up to two tickets. The online tickets will then be allocated......

Momofuku Ko, the trendy new 12 seat restaurant by acclaimed chef David Chang, is getting more attention for its maddening reservation system than for its food. That’s partly due to the fact that no critic has been able to get into the place and review it, not even the top dog in town, Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni. The problem is that Chang refuses to give anyone preferential treatment, and all who would dine at......

Online dating is never easy, no matter what culture you're in. At least that's what is suggested by a woman's $50 million lawsuit against a Brooklyn imam involving name calling, damaged laptops and a relative in al Qaeda. The Post reports stockbroker Cherine Allaithy met Tarek Youssoff Hasson Saleh, an imam at Oulel-Albab, on the Muslim Matrimonials Network (it's like MDate) last year. Allaithy says the pair dated for month until she refused his marriage......

There's been talk of what will happen to the Hotel Pennsylvania for a while now, and today the NY Observer reports that the skyscraper planned to take over the 401 Seventh Avenue address could be stopped by preservationists. Since the demolition project needs to be met with public approval it might not bode well that the construction "would entail building over the railroad tracks that run beneath the hotel and pose engineering and security challenges."......

Jonathan Lethem Selects BAM Cinématek Starting next Monday and running through the middle of November, Brooklyn author and Friends of BAM chairperson Jonathan Lethem will be programming the cinématek with some of his favorite movies. Fans of his writing know that Lethem loves pop culture but this series doesn't really have more of an over arching theme than that it features some of the author's most beloved films and plain ol' good movies. There are......

Students of all ages are headed back to classes this morning. The NYC public school system is opening its doors this morning all over the city. Insideschools reminds us there are 1.1 million students and 150,000 educators in the system - and that quite a few charter schools have been open since last week! Reforming the education system has been a cornerstone of Mayor Bloomberg's platform, and this school year starts with, per the......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a DOA/Fall Victim at 1 Hogan Place in Manhattan (that's the Manhattan DA's office), a double stabbing on East 171st St. in the Bronx, and an overturned ambulance at Broadway and Delafield Ave. on Staten Island. Opening day sales for tickets to The Metropolitan Opera set a record this Sunday after increasing 25% year over year, to $2.08 million. Online sales to performances were 50% higher than 2006's opening.......

With New York adding Wi-Fi access to the Internet in city parks recently, some New Yorkers must be making use of the coverage in more than the usual way of checking one's email or what's new on Gothamist while one is in the park on a lunch break. The Wall Street Journal Online recently added a video podcast called "Tech Diary" to its site that has journalist Andy Jordan exploring the sometimes-odd intersection of......

British tabloid mainstay, fashion icon, and fabled footballer David Beckham will make his first appearance in New York City today since the former captain of England's national team started playing with the Los Angeles Galaxy. He is spending the afternoon in Harlem coaching the 33 teenage members of the FC Harlem Lions, intending to highlight the need for more soccer fields in the neighborhood. Tomorrow the captain of the Galaxy will take the field......

THEATER: Continuing through the 29th, the East to Edinburgh Festival is showcasing some of the most adventurous American theater productions before they blast off for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Tonight’s your chance to witness one of the more colorful and timely selections: LA FEMME EST MORTE or Why I Should Not F%!# My Son. It’s a contemporary Phaedra adaptation that satirizes America’s celebrity obsession in the midst of war, featuring live music, “frenetic dance, fierce......

Just when we thought we couldn't possibly hear about more troubles for Busta Rhymes, he's now facing four separate trials in New York for past incidents. E Online recaps the rapper's rap sheet: "The first assault complaint was filed last summer by a 19-year-old man, who claims he was roughed up by the entertainer after spitting on Rhymes' SUV. The second complaint came from a 39-year-old man, reportedly Busta's former driver, who says he was......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a bank robbery on Canal St. between Baxter and Perry Sts. in Manhattan, a separate bank robbery on West 6th St. and Neptune Ave. in Brooklyn, and yet another amputation (that's the third reported this week!) on Gardener Ave. in Brooklyn. The Queens man, who drove his known-suicidal wife to the edge of an upstate cliff and then watched as she drove the minivan containing their two children over......

Everyday at 5 PM EST, Peabody award winning journalist Gary Baumgarten sits down with the likes of Arianna Huffington, Dr. Keith Ablow, and Mia Farrow for a one on one discussion. But this isn't for TV or the Radio, it's for Paltalk's News Talk Online , a web based talk show that allows listeners from all over the world to get the answers they want by asking the questions themselves. How did you get involved......

Do you know the Latin root of the word 'solipsism'? Well, Robert Marsland from Madison, Wisconsin did. Marsland, who is 18, won the inaugural National Vocabulary Championship yesterday when he beat 49 other word-whizzes (warning, we got a headache reading the linked article) and had the correct answer for the word's root. For his mastery of the vocabulary universe, Marsland won $40,000 towards his college tuition. That isn't even enough for one year at Princeton,......

Judge Larry Seidlin wept when he gave custody of Anna Nicole Smith's body would go to her baby Danielynn Smith. Well, make that Danielynn's legal guardian, Richard Milstein. Five-month-old Danielynn was practically the only person who wasn't fighting for her mother's body, and the AP called it a "surprise middle course" decision. However, Newsday's Star Struck blog called Seidiln's sobbing "possibly the most embarrassing thing on television since 'The Magic Hour.'" E! Online has......

Although we haven't heard the old "urban jungle" metaphor applied to New York lately, preservationists continue to churn out new lists of "endangered" architectural species. The newest, Ten to Save: Endangered NYC comes from an editor at amNewYork, Rolando Pujol. It is derived in part from the New York Landmark Conservancy's Endangered Buildings Online, which was unveiled last summer July. The driving concept behind the new list sounds by now quite familiar: "The soaring......

Ever since the Saturday police shooting outside a Queens club that killed one man and injured two others, there has been talk of a fourth man in the group. Police have claimed that the undercover officers shot at them because they feared the men were armed, but no weapons were found on the men or in their car. The officers on the scene have insisted a fourth man in a beige jacket was near......

Tired of reading Pride & Prejudice? Instead of placing the book on a shelf, the book can be turned into a shelf itself. The creatively designed bookshelves for sale only at the Park Slope art, accessories, and gift store Cog and Pearl and soon-to-be launched retailer Curiosity Shoppe Online, can hold approximately five pounds. Have a favorite book you would like converted? As long as you provide the book that is a minimum of......

You might envy the charm of brownstone life, but apparently one pitfall is that the some mail carriers don't like to deliver the mail to them. The NY Sun examines the situation after some Brooklyn residents realized their mail wasn't coming. Mail carriers feel stoops are dangerous especially in winter weather, and lately some residents' mail has been "rained upon, blown away, and destroyed." You'd think the mail would have to be delivered at the......

M.J. Rose, Author, The Delilah Complex, Book Blogger...

Thanks to everyone who sent us the link to this Times Online article about global warning-- you guys just luuuurve freaking us the buck out: DOZENS of the world’s cities, including London and New York, could be flooded by the end of the century, according to research which suggests that global warming will increase sea levels more rapidly than was previously thought... The first study to combine computer models of rising temperatures with records......

Last year Gothamist headed down to Austin for SXSW to help launch Austinist amongst other things. This year we're headed back down to throw our own Austinist + Gothamist day party. We'll have a pretty flyer and more details to post on that soon, but for now we're going to tell you about the afterparty... Austinist and Gothamist have helped put together a big big afterparty, called Absolute Debauchery. The full roster of who we......

Oh, Osama. You think you can release a new audiotape proving you're alive - and send our intelligence agencies into overdrive - and threaten to attack to the U.S. again as well as offer us a truce. Those are some mighty mixed signals! To paraphrase Jon Stewart on the Daily Show last night, while it's nice that Bin Laden acknowledges the fact that many Americans are against the war, people are still pissed off at......

Gothamist doesn't know what's sadder: The fact that the standardized tests city 7th graders are taking doesn't quite match up with their bubble sheets to fill in the answers or that this isn't the first time that it's happened. You'd think that if the state is testing kids' English with an exam, there would be answer sheets that correlate to the test, but five of the twenty-six questions offers answers as A, B, C, or......

You've got to stop whatever you are doing and check out the urban exploration galleries at Netherworld Online. We don't know who these guys are, but they've assembled an amazing gallery of over 2000 images-- and it's top-notch breaking-an-entering type stuff. For instance, the footage from inside the new World Trade Center #7, taken over the summer-- check out the guy sitting in the bottom right corner of the photo above. Don't stop there,......

Online, the Post's cover headline for the terrible West Virginia mining accident is "CHAOS" to mark the tragedy of twelve of the thirteen miners being found dead. But on our subway commute, we were momentarily confused when we saw a Post with the headline "ALIVE!" Clearly, at least some of the print run was printed after the original, mistaken announcement that the miners were found alive. UPDATE: It seems the Daily News made the same......