powerhouse arena
For Powerhouse Arena and other Dumbo merchants, a time for brutal assessments
Tubs full of children’s book became floating vessels and then capsized. Wooden IKEA shelves turned buoyant and crashed into merchandise racks and event tables, spilling stationary, tote bags and event copies into the flood. The ADT system, DVR player and store computer all shorted out.
Then, as the floodwaters receded, the pressure exploded the glass front door, dragging waterlogged books and postcards out of the store toward the Hudson River.
The Brooklyn state of mind: Kind to indie bookstores
"In Park Slope, especially, people will go out of their way to patronize a family-owned pharmacy than a chain, and that worldview applies to most retail business by those that live there." More
Author Joshua Cohen celebrates a new collection devoted to our virtual lives
Perhaps because Cohen has steadily built a reputation, rather than bursting onto the scene, the launch was a casual affair. More a gathering of friends—Cohen seemed to know almost everyone present personally—than the overstuffed bash one would expect for the author of a book feted just last week in the New York Times by Dwight Garner. More
Lizz Winstead speaks up about speaking out
“My mom is half deaf and watched Fox News which means she gets half [of] half the truth. And then she starts fighting with you, so she would call me and say, ‘Can black people get citrus-cell anemia? And I’m like 'Citrus-cell anemia is not a thing,'" More
Elizabeth Cline's cure for throwaway fashion: 'slow clothes'
“Fashion’s race to the bottom,” as she puts it, can’t be fixed overnight, but she shows that we need an extreme makeover of our attitude towards clothes as disposable goods. Cline’s book is as personal as it is polemical, and it follows her journey from a Forever 21 fanatic to an educated, careful consumer. She confesses her sins early on: the moment she realized that she had to change her ways was when she hauled home a heavy bag of identical shoes from K-Mart. She had seen a bargain she just couldn’t pass up—$7 a pair—and, in the thrill of the hunt, bought out the store in her size. The shoes soon fell apart and fell out of fashion, and the remainders languished in her closet. More
Sheila Heti, the woman with all the questions
“It’s really interesting to have your characters tell you that you did it wrong,” Heti said, acknowledging Williamson’s collaboration on the book. “It’s really useful.” Heti read from her book’s prologue. The line “these are my fucking contemporaries!” earned the biggest laugh, from an audience of Heti’s contemporaries. “Maybe I’ll answer a few questions and then we’ll go back to lining up for beers,” Heti said after she had finished. The first question, alas, was not a question; it was a command to “talk more about” the difficulty of male-female relationships. More
