Chow time: Mimi Sheraton and Andre Soltner on what's changed since Lutece

"It’s still possible to make good money owning a restaurant, but not as much as they want to make, not if you want to go corporate and have a huge empire. But if you have a very successful restaurant and you’re the sole owner, you can make a lot of money." More

By Zachary Woolfe

January 4, 2011 9:23 am

Fast times on Avenue A: The life and death of Superdive

There will be no more keg service at this address, and the promise that patrons could pour their own drinks withered long ago. Once, private parties commandeered space for revelries that lasted well into the night, featuring epic beer pong sessions and monster keg stands. It seemed like the good times at Superdive would never end; in fact, its proprietor promised the readers of Eater.com, more than a year ago, “SUPERDIVE will live forever… SUPERDIVE will never close… LONG LIVE SUPERDIVE!” More

By Sarah Laskow

November 29, 2010 8:00 am

Cyborg City: New York’s central nervous system is growing; here's what it can do

The city is already laced with "sensors," a category that could include anything from barcodes that are activated by a device to parking sensors on Roosevelt Island to things as old fashioned as cameras that take photos, identify license plates and send out tickets automatically to red-light runners.

Sensors in weather towers record temperature, air pressure and cloud coverage so eventually we will know whether to take an umbrella to work--or whether our plane will land on time. Traffic cameras tell which bridges are snarled with traffic. Sensors on subway cars record delays, send them to the New York City Transit announcers, who then relay the information to tired commuters.

But this is a boomtime for sensors, as much as anything else because of the possibility of making use of data collected in the physical city to provide services directly to the public as for its old purely administrative uses.The demand for more of this sort of technology, embedded in the physical city to automatically relay information about how the city works to the agencies that govern its most basic bodily functions, is on a steady rise. More

By Gillian Reagan

November 19, 2010 9:38 am

What is to become of Rihanna?

For those willing to pretend such a thing exists, the present century has, ten years in, produced exactly one incontrovertible addition to the Great American Songbook.

“Umbrella,” the new single from R&B songstress Rihanna, is not the best top-40 opus of the era (“Since U Been Gone,” “Ring the Alarm”), or the era’s most definitive (“Jesus Walks,” “Rehab”); it achieves the status of standard precisely by dint of its instant unremarkablility, its uncanny time– and place–lessness. “Umbrella” simply sounds as if it's always been here. More

By Jonathan Liu

November 18, 2010 9:16 am