The Independent Budget Office has done a study on that controversial topic--taxing Internet retailers for goods bought in NY State. The IBO suggests the city could earn tens of millions with an Internet sales tax, estimating that $29 million was "lost" between July 2006 and June 2007 on goods brought online. Further, the $2.2 billion of goods bought online last year is taxable, and the city could have made $82 million and the state $91......

Photo of peacock, by gmpicket at flickr Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a missing child on Union St. in Brooklyn, a shooting on Wyatt St. in the Bronx, and a fatal car fire on the Long Island Expressway near College Point in Queens. Colombian immigrants celebrate their roots with rolling parties aboard buses known as chivas. Is the person doing Amazon.com product reviews for ski masks under the screen name "Ninja Thief" Staten Island's......

We would like to take a moment to thank this week's advertisers on Gothamist. The 2009 Toyota Corolla, which encourages you to "Live the Dream for Less Coin." Campaign for New York's Future, encouraging you to send a letter in support of congestion pricing. Joe Jackson's Rain, available now on Amazon.com. Jeremy Fisher, performing at the Canal Room tonight. Other People's Love Letters, the book where you can see 150 love letters you were never......

We would like to take a moment to thank this week's advertisers on Gothamist. The 2009 Toyota Corolla, which encourages you to "Live the Dream for Less Coin." Other People's Love Letters, the book where you can see 150 love letters you were never meant to see. Joe Jackson's Rain, available now on Amazon.com. Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, the new album that's available now. Elsewares, where you can get a 10% off your order with the......

We would like to take a moment to thank this week's advertisers on Gothamist. The 2009 Toyota Corolla, which encourages you to "Live the Dream for Less Coin." Joe Jackson's Rain, available now on Amazon.com. Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, the new album that's available now. Elsewares, where you can get a 10% off your order with the discount code "ist". Busted Tees, selling a special shirt to honor the New England Patriots. If you're interested in......

We would like to take a moment to thank this week's advertisers on Gothamist. Joe Jackson's Rain, available now on Amazon.com. Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, the new album that's in stores February 5th. Elsewares, where you can get a 10% off your order with the discount code "ist". Busted Tees, giving you free shipping when you buy three shirts. If you're interested in advertising on Gothamist or any other site in our network, check out our......

Governor Eliot Spitzer had a busy week. Not only was he working himself up to admit his driver's license plan would not pass, Spitzer suggested instituting the state's 8.375% sales tax on Internet goods - just in time for holiday shopping! But only hours after the NY Sun reported on the plan, Spitzer changed his mind, deciding to wait until the new year to implement taxes on Internet purchases. Currently, online retailers who don't have......

A look at some noteworthy television this week: Art in the Twenty-First Century (Sunday, 10:00 p.m., WNET 13) Four artists - Robert Adams, Mark Dion , Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Ursula von Rydingsvard – who explore the intersection between nature and culture. Billy Crystal: The Mark Twain Prize (Monday & Thursday, 9:00 p.m., WNET 13; Saturday, 7:30 p.m. WLIW 21) Billy Crystal receives the tenth annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center in......

At this moment, the first five issues of Amy Fusselman's Zine Bunny Rabbit, dating back to the mid 90s, are selling on Amazon.com for $750. Although Fusselman thinks it'll be a while until anyone ponies up that much cash, she has thought about what she'd do if the seller manages to pull off the sale, "What it might mean is that I'll go back to Kinkos instead of working with a publisher." For $750, wouldn't......

Feed Your Mind is a new column that will focus on food-related books. Have you ever wondered what sparked the culinary careers of the world's top chefs? Sure, they may be huge names today, but where did they start and how did they get there? How I Learned to Cook: Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs is an entertaining view into pivotal moments in the lives of culinary leaders like Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain,......

I want to make some custom t-shirts for my team. Is there a way to do it myself, or have it done cheaply by someone else? Funny that you should ask, we were just researching that for our own purposes. There seems to be a few ways to do it, depending on your design, what you have on hand already, and how fast you need the shirts. For plain old letters and numbers, you can......

Sometimes you need to clean yourself up, get serious, and move in with daddy for a few months before you head to Latin America for a new gig. The District bids Jenna Bush adios. D.C.-based television shows have an elderly audience and DCist has some suggestions to fix that. They're also throwing Butterstick the panda bear a birthday bash. Yeah, we may have a few issues with our World Cup broadcasters here, but this guy......

Apparently, the Department of Education doesn't ">know how to shop effectively. Despite having 1.1 million students to purchase books for, the Daily News is reporting that the DoE is paying on average roughly $1.76 more per book than a shopper "who choose the lowest-priced book on Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble's Web site." To be fair, the News skews the numbers just a smidge to make the DoE look worse than it actually is. When......

Recently Time Magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. Now as these lists seem to come out about once a month and mean about as much as the prize in a box of cracker jacks we've learned to generally completely ignore them. In fact, we probably wouldn't have even registered this latest list if it weren't for this genius post on The Morning News. Matthew Baldwin went through the......

Now, Gothamist has not read Chris Elliott's new book, The Shroud of the Thwacker, yet, but it sounds so much like one of our favorites - The Alienist by Caleb Carr, which was about an investigation of a grisly serial killer in turn of the century Manhattan. Here's a description of the Thwacker: The book debut from the Get a Life and Cabin Boy star is billed as a parody, but this murder mystery wrapped......

Yesterday, the NY Times had an obituary for the photographer Ted Croner, who died at age 82. He was part of the New York School of photographers and this line from the obit sums up his technique: "...[his] rigorously blurry photographs of New York at night in the 1940's epitomized the film noir energy of a city that never sleeps." Croner took his photography class at The New School in 1947 and later worked for......

Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio, YC Media, authors, The Girl's Guide To Starting Your Own Business...

Have you seen a red SUV trolling the streets, with someone taking pictures of your street? It's not a photoblogger with a driver's license, and it's not a terrorist (we think) either - it's Amazon.com's street team! Only, their street team is working for A9.com, Amazon's effort to bring the "Yellow Pages to life by adding 20 million images":The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is “Block View,” which brings the Yellow Pages......

We'll finally see a New Yorker in the Cabinet, as President Bush has nominated from NYC Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik as the new Secretary of Homeland Security. Kerik, who was police commissioner during September 11, 2001, is noted as being a "sharp departure from the usual button-downed mold of Bush appointees" (NY Times), as he's a high school dropout, was a NJ jail warden, ran the NYC Correction Department, admitted that he fathered a child......

Fashion week is in full swing in New York, celebrating the irritatingly recurring time of year that all of the self-congratulatory super-socialites take the opportunity to stop patting themselves on the back and pat each other for awhile.  Last night, Betsy Johnson took the opportunity to share the limelight with the Great-Uncle of Glam, John Cale, the founding member of the Velvet Underground, to celebrate the release of his new record, "HoboSapiens." For anybody mystified......

Thanks to strategically placed displays in certain bookstore windows, Gothamist picked up Czech artist Miroslav Sasek's illustrated book, This Is New York, and fell in love. His elegant illustrations of the city crisply captured a New York and its dynamism that still rings true over forty years after its publications. There's a fine site dedicated to the Czech-born Sasek (he worked in Munich but traveled around the world) This is M. Sasek, that's loaded with......

If you're a fan of artists like Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams or Tom Waits, Gothamist highly recommends New Jerseyan-turned South Sloper Dayna Kurtz, playing tonight at Joe's Pub. She's just come off a big national tour opening for Richard Thompson, and is builiding a nice buzz in singer-songwriter circles. A recent story on National Public Radio led to her new cd Beautiful Yesterday (released Tuesday) reaching #11 on Amazon.com, before it even went on sale.......

- The woes of Global Dimming - Prepare for hurricane season over at the NOAA and the NYC Office of Emergency Management - It's been 24 years since the Mount St. Helen's eruption - Think you're too close to the lightning? Here's how to tell. - The Great Humidity vs. Dewpoint Debate, Part One - The Great Humidity vs. Dewpoint Debate, Part Two, in which Joe advises us to find 12-inch long hairs...for science......

Hey, everybody, a little independent film called Kill Bill, Volume 2, is coming out this Friday. Apparently there's a DVD of DVD of Kill Bill, Volume 1 out there and it really is about killing a guy named Bill - go check out first! Actually, don't bother buying the DVD - there will probably be a souped up version of it later down the road. Yes, Gothamist is a little tired of all the Kill......

The perfect gift for the person in your life who loves language and pop culture: Word Spy, the imitable website that, among other things, confirms Mark Simpson is the first to coin the word "metrosexual," is now a book - Word Spy : The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture. Author Paul McFedries has written many other books, including The Complete Idiot's Guide to Smart Vocabulary, which Gothamist should get. Check out the top 100......

In honor of Labor Day, Newsday asks different celebrities what their worst jobs were. Gothamist especially likes the humiliating job stories, because it gives us hope that bigger and better things are out there. Some of the notable professions: Jerry Orbach, Law and Order Hauling gravel." Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com I really enjoyed my summer working at McDonald's, but on my first day a 5-gallon ketchup dispenser fell off the wall, crashed onto the floor and......

Since I started working in technology, I've become an early adopter- digital cameras, TiVo, surround sound, WiFi, LCD screens, PDAs, robotic butlers, brain chip implants. I'm down for all that stuff. That's why it's particularly gratifying to see Amazon.com putting up an Early Adopter page to track and sell this kind of hairbrain technology to geeks like me with too much time and money on their hands. [Via Dashes]......

Via Amazon.com, I bought Summerland by Michael Chabon for my 12 year-old cousin last fall, mainly because there was a baseball theme and it was by Michael Chabon. Now Amazon thinks it knows me very well. And the truth is, it does. Except there do seem to be some glitches: Letter from Amazon.com I actually do have Songbook and have considered the Best American Nonrequired Writing book...but the magazine choice is weird.........

These days, it seems like the big thing is to kiss and tell, and there's no bigger audience than when it's made all the more public. The grungier, sorta B-list version of Britney and Fred, Kelly Osbourne's ex-boyfriend, Bert McCracken, lead singer of The Used, according to The Sun, says they had sex in a limo. And he says he dumped her on Valentine's Day. Bet Kelly wishes Sharon did a better job of shaking......

Actually, the Law & Order game is just a demo so you buy the computer game. Amazon.com: Computer & Video Games: Law & Order: Dead on the Money......