[UPDATE BELOW] What? You don't think this country needs "Austrian economics" to return to greatness? Why, if you just Wikipedia what that means, surely you'll—GAH! While Wikipedia and Reddit have gone black today to protest the anti-internet piracy bills SOPA and PIPA, the 20,000-strong NY Tech Meetup group has organized a protest today between 12:30 and 2 p.m. in front of the offices of Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand—both supporters of the legislation. more ›

Con Ed is not having a fun time with this heat. Today the utility clocked the highest strain on our power grid ever (13,182 megawatts earlier this afternoon!) and along with it brownouts and a few straight up power outages across town. Though Con Ed told us this morning that the brownouts in Queens were finished we're hearing they never really stopped—and now the utility has started to reduce voltage in neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens Manhattan and Staten Island. Is a citywide blackout or brownout approaching? more ›

While this week's dag nasty heat wave forced many New Yorkers to take refuge in libraries, cooling centers, and public beaches, others tried to cool down with the power of spoken word poetry. Poor Woodside resident Erma Dinis, who had been out of power for days, gave the quote of the week to Eyewitness 7: "We can't take this no more. Yesterday my head go so numb, I couldn't hear anything and I thought I was in a plane from the heat. I mean why should we suffer like that?" Con Ed blamed the suffering on "feeder cable failure," and high demand. more ›

As noted in our newsletter today, 32 years ago tonight, at 8:37 p.m., the blackout of 1977 began. On its 30th anniversary, we did a full recap of the night. The evening has been well-documented elsewhere as well—here are some more images—but the LIFE database actually has plenty photographs from other blackouts in the city's past (1942, 1959, 1965 and 2003). In 2003 the NY Times looked at how the '65 and '77 ones shaped our history. While the former showed people coming together, proving "reassuring and exhilarating," they sum up the latter with a quote a priest named Gabriel Santacruz from St. Barbara's Church in Bushwick. He said the Sunday after the '77 blackout: "We are without God now." more ›

Charles F. Luce, who was Con Ed's chairman and chief executive between 1967 and 1982, died last week at the age of 90 in California. The Bronxville, NY resident died of prostate cancer. more ›