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......

The pseudonymous Lux Nightmare burst onto the alt porn scene as a college student at Columbia where she launched the naked-guy-and-girl site That Strange Girl, featuring stills and video of herself and numerous other models who looked like they could be her fellow classmates. At a time when Suicide Girls and Burning Angel were coming to prominence, That Strange Girl (who, full disclosure, this interviewer posed for) was a homegrown, indie entry in the genre.......

Culturemart, the annual “hybrid” performance festival, is now in full swing at HERE. The festival gives HERE’s resident artists a chance to share the fruit of their year-long residencies. Although the shows are still “in progress” and rough around the edges, the work is typically more engaging than a lot of “finished” productions. Here’s a sampling of some projects yet to be performed: Conceived by Lenora Champagne, TRACES/fades is an “intergenerational movement theatre work” with......

THEATER: Pieces of Paradise is a benefit presentation of four lost plays by Tennessee Williams which were discovered in a trunk in 2000 and never produced in New York. The proceeds will benefit a legal fund for 13th Street Repertory (founded in 1972), which is struggling for survival against - you guessed it - real estate developers. It’s fitting that these plays should be chosen for the benefit, as Tennessee himself visited the theater when......

Michelle Goldberg, Brooklyn resident and senior political reporter for Salon.com, recently published her first book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, a detailed examination of the rise of Christian Nationalism. Her research took her outside the largely secular NYC, and even further afield from the liberal ideology of which New Yorkers have grown so accustomed. In her book, Goldberg details the actions and intentions of the Christian right and presents a clear picture of......

Jessica Valenti, Executive Editor and Founder, Feministing.com...

There are so many holiday theatre offerings right now, many of them closing when Christmas is still a week or more away, so we are going to be ornery and focus on non-seasonal stuff, of which there is plenty, as usual. One show that just caught our eye is Under a Montana Moon, performed by the mime Bill Bowers. We get a lot of puppetry on stages here, but miming, not so much, and Bowers......

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......

Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, authors...

Eve Ensler, Playwright and Activist...