CONTEST ALERT: Tomorrow night the indie-elite will gather at Terminal 5 for The Plug Awards -- featuring Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, St. Vincent, José Gonzalez, Dizzee Rascal, The Forms, DiVinci and more. Tickets are sold out, so you can either watch the show here, or you can win tickets from us! We're giving away 5 pairs, starting now. Just email GothamistContest@gmail.com and tell us why you want to go. MUSIC: White Williams,......

THEATER: Over the summer the Belarusian Free Theater was arrested, along with their audience, during a performance of their play Being Harold Pinter, which uses Pinter’s magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech as a springboard for theatrical dissent, something the Belarus police state isn't really so into. (For that reason, the company’s performances are normally held secretly in alternating private apartments.) Unable to bring the entire production to New York for his Under the Radar festival,......

People planning weddings - or people wondering why they've seen so many weddings outside lately: Theres a nice article about the trend towards weddings in parks and other public spaces in the city in today's NY Times Style section. With parks - complete with dazzling views - getting cleaner and safer, couples are getting married in Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn and Gantry Plaza in Queens. The most important thing to investigate is......

TIP: Starting tomorrow Opera-For_all begins the first of three nights of performances. For cheap! The New York City Opera is selling tickets to every seat in the house for just $25. Over the course of "opera season" 50 or more seats in the front orchestra will be priced at just $25 as well. As for this week, here's the sched: Thursday, September 6the OPERA FOR ALL Concert, with party to follow (this will showcase the......

We all knew the real estate bubble was causing insanity, but we should have known it's encouraged people to divorce. There's a NY Times Styles section article about some who wait until the market's at its peak to divorce - that way, they can benefit from an even bigger profit when selling their homes. There are quotes from Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, who showed that couples with a drastic rise in net worth were......

In the NY Times' Styles section, there's an article about how there may actually be a three-year itch when it comes to relationships. Divorce lawyer Raoul Felder chalks it up to various technological changes in society: "We’re all addicted to a television-clicker lifestyle." Dr. Ruth, though, cautions against believing in a three-year itch, "How dangerous it is to say something like that. From now on, everyone who’s getting married will say it will last......

The most powerful suggestions in this week's NY Times Weddings & Celebrations? If you write about dating or a hapless love life, all is not lost! Actually, we got that idea from Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City, too, but not everyone can end up with Mr. Big or marry a hunky principal dancer at the NY City Ballet. Anyway... The most intriguing meet-cute is that of Kristina Grish and Scott Mebus, who were......

DISCUSSION: Noam Chomsky will be taking questions on US foreign policy tonight, following a screening of Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. Get your questions ready, smartypants. You can watch the video of Pinter's speech here, too. 6pm // Columbia University, Miller Theater [Broadway @ 116th St] // $5 THEATER: Isabella Rossellini with be playing Lotte Lenya in a one-night only performance at the New-York Historical Society called Kurt and Lenya: Two Great Artists......

NY1 has a good look at the differing rules for cell phone use at two very different public schools in the Bronx. One is DeWitt Clinton High School, where classes are frequently overcrowded and there are metal detectors at the entrance. The other is Bronx High School of Science, the magnet school whose has seven Nobel Prize-winning (in physics) graduates. Current Department of Education rules say that students are not allowed to bring cell phones......

They're probably drunk on champagne up at Columbia - Professor Edmund Phelps was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. His "analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy." Translation from the AP: He "challenged prevailing views in the 1960s by developing a new economic model that has helped corporate and government leaders balance inflation and unemployment in decision-making." Phelps told reporters in his New York apartment that he learned of the prize in a......

MUSIC: Doug Martsch of Built to Spill performs a stripped down acoustic set tonight before heading over to Irving to play with the band. This will be pretty amazing, so even if you missed out on tickets to the show at Irving, try to catch him solo. 5pm // Sound Fix [110 Bedford Ave, Williamsburg] // Free READINGS: At Strand tonight, Joseph Steiglitz with his new book Making Globalization Work, the sequel to Globalization and......

Ah Tuesday, how we love you. One day closer to the weekend, one day further from the regrets of last weekend, and the day that brings us the New York Times Science Section. For those too busy or cool to read it, allow us break it down for you. + Another inconvenient truth: We’d better do our best to save the glaciers, lest they become killer waves. Giant walls of water typically gain our attention......

Leave it to the Wall Street Journal to spend 2000+ words complexifying a a relatively straightforward question: what's the best way to split up a cab-fare when everyone is going in the same direction? We've faced this problem literally dozens of times, and usually end up with one of two situations: the person who gets off last pays for the entire thing (as an act of generosity, figuring that giving a lift to the other......

While it seems unlikely a bill like this would ever get passed, but just the idea that the City Hall is considering some sort of toll for drivers to enter the city and create more congestion makes us excited. The NY Times looks at how various groups are looking at using congestion pricing in NYC to encourage people to use mass transit and carpools, versus driving their cars in and thereby promoting traffic, increasing......

After hearing last week that Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in literature, we immediately wondered how long it would be before one of his plays was on a New York stage again. Thanks to a quick visit to nytheatre.com, which looks ahead farther and more nimbly than we can, we’re able to inform you that the Atlantic Theater Company will be staging not one Pinter play but two, and in a very interesting......

Finally-- a post that should offend just about everyone! This week's cover story in New York Magazine tackles one of the most pressing questions of our day: are Jews smarter than everyone else, and if so, by how much?. The original title of the article was "One more reason to hate the Jews", but apparently the far blander "Are Jews Smarter?" won out. The article goes on to make a fairly dispassionate argument-- presenting and......

Robert K. Merton died the other day. Who is Robert K. Merton? Well, aside from being the father of the focus group, that imperfect but there's nothing better tool that helps companies, politicians, and more decide what we get to buy, consume, and understand, Merton helped advance sociological study of ourselves. This short paragraph from a Times article by Patricia Cohen nicely sums up Merton permeated into our daily lives: "Even if most people......