Earlier this month, a 75-year-old woman was beaten with a nail-studded wooden plank by a homeless man in midtown Manhattan. Andre Lineaux, 51, admitted to police that he repeatedly beat Kim Chong, 74, with the 2-by-4 piece of wood. And he says that it was an homage to a Stephen King novel, Storm Of The Century. more ›

The holiday-time movie releases are starting to pile up with their usual feverish frequency. Some have Christmas themes, like the widely reviled Vince Vaughn vehicle Fred Claus that’s already roadkill on the lost highway of cinema history; others, like Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, are timed to make an impression as close to Academy Award-voting season as possible. Here are some of the biggest gorillas set to dominate New York’s screens in the next six... more ›

MUSIC: Frequenter of the Hotel Chelsea, Country Joe McDonald (pictured at Woodstock) will be taking the Joe's Pub stage tonight to perform a tribute to Woody Guthrie where he "deftly conveys all the charm, talent, and social and political consciousness of the legendary folksinger from Oklahoma." more ›

Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on. more ›

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! more ›

Today many will gather at Strawberry Fields in Central Park to hold vigil on the anniversary of the death of John Lennon, which took place 26 years ago today. The NYCLU has asked the city to lift the ban on music at Strawberry Fields for every day of the year, not just twice a year for Lennon vigils. more ›

EVENT: Tonight PowerHouse books is having a signing event for the release of photographer Ron Galella's "Disco Years". This visual diary of the New York club scene in the 70's and 80's is sure to make you nostalgic for Studio 54 - even if that was before your time. more ›

Reading is a necessary part of many airplane trips. And books haven't made the list of prohibited items - yet. But for some reason, airport security at one of the area airpots (probably JFK) gave Harry Potter author JK Rowling a hard time about her manuscript for the seventh book in the series. On her website, she writes:

The heightened security restriction on the airlines in August made the journey back from New York interesting, as I refused to be parted from the manuscript of book seven (a large part of it is handwritten, and there was no copy of anything I had done while in the U.S.). They let me take it on, thankfully, bound up in elastic bands.

READING: READINGS: Looks like literary talent might just be genetic - 26-year-old Owen King, son of best-selling spookmaster Stephen King, has a collection of a novella and short stories out and is reading tonight at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble. We're All in This Together has been called "compelling" and "imaginative", and having a famous father can't hurt, right? - Krissa Corbett Cavouras more ›

Thanks to Product Shop NYC (who also reports that the New Year's Eve act at Madison Square Garden will be...The Black Crowes), Gothamist is salivating over this year's New Yorker Festival line-up. Edie Falco! The RZA! Ricky Gervais! Trey Parker and Matt Stone! Sleater-Kinney! And Wallce and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit! The New Yorker Festival runs September 23-25, and tickets will go on sale on August 25. The tickets range in price from $5 to $50, most being in the $15-30 area, and the programs range from the highbrow (reading by Ian McEwan, Town Hall Meeting on Iraq) to the delightfuly low (A Salute to the Three Stooges). Here's a list of the programs. more ›

An editorial in today’s Times reminds us that prison isn’t just a plot twist in the stories of powerful people like Martha Stewart and Judith Miller; a lot of people spend a lot of time there, and we could do a better job of making that time about rehabilitation. Thanks to Lauren Cerand at Maud Newton, we see that this Sunday at Pier 63 (Hudson River at West 23rd Street) Books Through Bars is having an event to increase support for and awareness of educational resources for prisoners. Between noon and 5:30, if you donate a book you can see various panels and readings (including, at 1:30, a panel of formerly incarcerated writers who will discuss their writing lives in and out of prison; PEN sponsors an interesting prison writing program, too). more ›

For a while now Music For America has been providing us with endless amounts of entertainment, events and information. more ›

Jessica Delfino, Dirty Folk Singer/Stand-Up Comic more ›

When Gothamist first read this, we thought, "Great, but how about just developing programs that are good, overall?" Of course, the argument isn't as simplistic as that (there are other variables of production and talent costs, amoritization, likelihood to capture the largest share of audience or target demographic...) but when it comes down to it, network executives picking shows that are not solely driven by achieving a cookie cutter formula would be a step up. There's a reason why we didn't watch Coupling, Jeff Zucker. more ›