Mother Nature may throw a little temper tantrum this afternoon, so you may want to take an early lunch or have it delivered. A warm front moving north through the city this morning will bring lots of humid, unstable air to the region. A trough of low pressure is expected to follow around 1 p.m. This disturbance will kick off showers and thunderstorms. The storms may contain strong, damaging winds, large hail, and rain of......

December is off to a chilly start. Every day so far this month has been cooler than normal. Yesterday's 14 degrees below normal was the nadir of this current cold spell. Today will be slightly warmer and tomorrow will be slightly more warmer yet again. The minor warming may be accompanied by a bit of light rain as an upper level disturbance runs through the region this afternoon. As it cools tonight the rain may......

If you're a woman and are heading to exclusive Chrystie Street club The Box, be very careful! According to WNBC, the NYPD is two reported rape-and-kidnapping incidents that originated outside the venue. On September 30, a woman says she was "standing in front of the club when she was grabbed from behind, put in a white sport utility vehicle and forced to drink an unknown liquid." After the attack, she was left in Queens. The......

Later on we'll be posting our CMJ Awards (we're thinking of giving Kanye one, since he never wins anything)...but for now we wanted to take a look back at the four long days of shows we held at Gothamist House. First of all, thanks to everyone who dropped by, WOXY, and of course the bands (there were a lot of them!) for putting on some great shows. Some of our personal highlights were The Muggabears......

Not making their way to the greenmarket this week are domestic matsutake, one of the most prized mushrooms in the world. Matsutake have a slight pine flavor and give off a wild, funky cinnamon aroma when cooked. This fragrance is said to do things to people, like instantly transport them to Xanadu or make choruses of ladybugs hail from the sky in intense, Busby Berkeley style formations. Hand foraged and scarce, matsutake are in fact......

Get thee to Flushing -- according to the Times, it's much more than the city's "other Chinatown." Michael Ruhlman discusses this week's episode of the Next Iron Chef and the loss of Chef Davies: "But sad I was to see her go—what a camera friendly smile, and what a buoyant presence generally. I much prefer her to the head sweater, the meat man, or the bald guy with the Neanderthal brow! But for those who......

A 19-year-old man was killed early this morning while returning home from a family picnic with friends. WCBS reports that two groups of men began fighting on the 5 train between 233rd St. and 180th St. and Dyre Ave. in the Bronx, when one of the combatants pulled a gun and started shooting. An initial account from a witness told WCBS that someone simply walked onto the 5 train and shot Rayquan Story in the......

The lead sentence on this morning's National Weather Service forecast: Showers likely and possibly a thunderstorm before 4pm, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms after 4pm. is so precisely worded as to make Gothamist wish we had taken a class on deconstructing literature rather than all those dumb meteorology courses. From what is stacking up to be a busy weather day we parse the NWS as saying that widespread, lighter showers will be the......

French megachef Daniel Boulud has agreed to settle a federal lawsuit that alleges he discriminated against nonwhite employees at his restaurant Daniel, according to an article in today's Times. In addition to an undisclosed financial settlement, Boulud will institute a promotion policy that will be overseen by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the state attorney general’s office. Busboys and runners will receive 8 percent raises. Daniel's managers will get training in racial sensitivity.......

The 2007 FISA Rowing Tour USA makes a stop in New York City today by rowing around the isle of Manhattan. The last leg of the week-long rowing tour is a "Row Around New York" where participants will row 30 miles around the island. The boats began at 6 am today at Pier 40 (Houston St. and the Hudson River) and should finish there at around 5 pm. Participating rowers, there are 70 of them,......

As tankengine's picture above attests, today's air quality is not so good. Heat, humidity, stagnant air and lots of sun have combined to raise our ozone and particulate counts high enough to warrant an Air Quality Alert. The hot and humid air are going to fall just shy of the mark needed to declare a heat advisory, but it will still be plenty miserable outside. Gothamist mentioned tips to beat the heat yesterday. The......

It's a gunk alert day! Add warm air, high humidity, plenty of sun and not much wind and you get an air stagnation advisory. The advisory is in effect from ten this morning to eleven tonight as we'll be dealing with elevated ozone amounts in the city and surrounding counties. To reduce adverse health effects the state Department of Environmental Conservation recommends avoiding strenuous activity while outdoors. The good news is it won't be as......

Perhaps New York University finally felt that it owned enough New York real estate, because now it's thinking about buying up parts of Paris, France. The American University of Paris is building new facilities on an island in the Seine in a partnership with NYU, and hopes to one day become absorbed into the New York school's system. 90% of the Paris school's students hail from outside of France and the American University of Paris......

Yesterday in Bed-Stuy, the NYPD arrested a man accused of robbing eight cabbies in a two week period. Earl Evans, whose driver's license said he was from Nashville, is described as a "hulking country bumpkin" by the Daily News. For good reason too - his license said he's 6-foot-3 and 320 pounds. As if his size wasn't intimidating for the cab drivers he robbed, he also had a very realistic looking 9mm Glock. Evans would......

The funeral of Fermin Arzu was not as much a memorial as an event to condemn his death at the hands of an off-duty police officer - we think. As a husband, father, and uncle was being remembered, community activists and the media were conducting a referendum on racial relations and police conduct. Comparisons were drawn between Arzu's shooting and that of Sean Bell, who was killed in a hail of police gunfire in November......

Yesterday afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg announced that every yellow taxi on the streets of NYC will go green under the hood in five years. His latest implementation of PlaNYC involves using requirements set by the Taxi and Limousine Commission to have cab owners upgrade their hacks to hybrid vehicles so that the entire fleet will be hybrid by 2012. Yahoo! exec Patrick Crane was on hand at City Hall to donate ten of the new......

A cold front is pressing down upon us from the north. The line of rain accompanying the front stretches from Albany to Scranton and should hit the city by mid-afternoon. Beware! Showers and perhaps a thunderstorm will produce locally heavy rains and gusty winds. We may even see a bit of hail. Most of the rain will be out of here by seven or eight this evening, but the chance of showers will linger until......

We're smack dab in the middle of Bike Month, and today the Bicycle Film Festival kicks off. Tonight at the (solar powered) opening party, there's a bit of a change in the lineup as Mates of State had to cancel their performance. However Team Robespierre and Parts & Labor will be filling their shoes with help of last minute addition Dan Deacon. After that there's a dance party with Gang Gang Dance, the best part......

April 20-21: Wine Rave NYC Wine Rave NYC is an event designed to take away the stuffiness from wine events. There will be tastings galore, plus "Sips of Wisdom," brief presentations from experts, and the "Hip Sips Lounge," where you can talk to wine industry insiders. Friday, April 20 from 6 to 10 pm and Saturday, April 21 from 5 to 10 pm. $65 general admission, $100 VIP tickets, available online, by calling 212-352-9900 or......

When we feel the need to get away from the city without actually leaving the city, we head up to the Bronx. Places like City Island, Wave Hill, The New York Botanical Garden, and The Bronx Zoo are some of our favorite places to visit in all of New York, and we realize that's only the tip of the iceberg when considering the Bronx's appealing features. Unfortunately, the stereotype of the Bronx as a blighted......

Surprise, surprise. It turns out the number of American taxi drivers in New York City may be larger than you think. In records obtained from the Taxi & Limousine Commission, The Sun finds that the United States is the 5th most common country of origin for cab drivers. The most common country of origin is Bangladesh, followed by Pakistan, India, and Haiti. All told, there are about 2,300 American drivers, more than 1,300 of......

EVENT: An evening with David LaChapelle is sure to be a fabulous one. He'll be signing his new coffee table art book, Heaven to Hell, tonight. Wear your Sunday best. 6 to 8pm // Taschen [107 Greene St] // Free THEATER: Coinciding with Black History Month, The Dance – which is not a dance piece – delves into the history of American minstrelsy from the perspective of two African-American performers in blackface makeup. Performed as......

As we mentioned on Friday, Staten Island Chuck's forecast skills aren't the best. Instead of an early spring, today and tomorrow will be the coldest days yet this winter. An arctic front passed through the city around three o'clock this morning, bringing with it bone chilling cold, dry air and high winds. While the temperature may get up to the lower 20s today, it certainly won't feel nearly that warm. Winds coming out of the......

It's a new step in outdoor advertising: Have a big billboard, then wire dancers to get all Microsofty over it! We heard that there would be a special billboard today outside the Terminal Building on 11th Ave between 27th and 28th Streets, but we didn't know it was going to be this...well, Cirque du Soleil. The sixteen dancers were charged to "move across the exterior walls...to form the images of the Windows Vista and......

Earlier this week, the Post ran another story about Esther Elizabeth Reed, the woman used other people's identities to attend colleges, mostly recently at Columbia, and made others around her suspect she was in espionage, as she tried to avoid detection. A man who dated Reed spoke to the Post and offered her letters to him. All hail email accounts where you can store email from your exes! They met on Match.com and met at......

Donna Da Vine is either a minefield of perfectly single, beautiful women quietly sipping on oversize glasses of wine in purple-tinged light, or a bar where all those ladies go to get away from men. Either way it’s gorgeous, and women seem to love it. The two times we stopped by the clientele was almost exclusively female inside. Even accounting for the occasional male date, the purple interior, low light, and all female bartenders seem......

If you see a cab with horns and fake brown-and-white fur, hail it! The Professional Bull Riders are offering free rides in special "bull taxis" to promote their invitational at Madison Square Garden this weekend. The Versus Invitational will showcase the "world's top 45 bull riders will clash against the best bulls in the industry," according the PBR website. All right, but those bull taxis are sort of awesome. There are five bull taxis......

The Reverend Al Sharpton announced the "shopping for justice" protest march he's been talking about since the shooting of Sean Bell, Joseph Guzman, and Trent Benefield by the police."Many will be shopping for trinkets and toys. We will be shopping for justice and making a moral appeal to this city and this nation. The fact that we are going on probably the most visible street in the world tomorrow, you don't have to talk......

32-year-old artist, illustrator, and writer Dan Goldman may hail from Miami, but his current "Brooklyn-blessed" status is evident in his work, whether depicting subway scenes he's meticulously researched or in the guise of 2011 Williamsburg hipster turned Iraq blogger in his breakout collaboration with journalist Anthony Lappé, Shooting War. Shooting War was serialized earlier this year by SMITH Magazine, and will see an expanded hardcover release next fall from Warner Books. Goldman already had one......

Last night, the family and friends of Sean Bell were joined by hundreds for Bell's funeral in Queens. Bell was killed during a chaotic confrontation with police officers last weekend. The Reverend Al Sharpton spoke during the service. From the Daily News:"We must give Sean a legacy, a legacy of justice, a legacy of fairness, not a legacy against police. We don't hate cops. We don't hate race. We hate wrong. We dislike wickedness......