Auld Lange Syne

By Lucy Sante The New York Observer 1993 If Christmas is designed to bring out the child in everyone, then New Year’s brings out the fool. Sobriety is temporarily fashionable nowadays, so fewer people than usual will wake up this January 1 partly clad, in a strange...

Memories Are Forever

By Todd Drew Bronx Banter November 7, 2008 The memories will not stop. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night and you have to walk. So you head down five flights to Walton Avenue. You pass the spot on East 157th Street where a batboy once found Satchel Paige...

The Medea of Kew Gardens Hills

By Albert Borowitz From The Lady Killers 1991   On the morning of July 14, 1965, Eddie Crimmins received a telephone call from his estranged wife Alice, accusing him of having taken the children. When she had opened their bedroom door, which she kept locked by a...

Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell

By Charles Simic From Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell 1992 Preface I have a dream in which Joseph Cornell and I pass each other on the street. This is not beyond the realm of possibility. I walked the same New York neighborhoods that he did between 1958...

Krim, Breslin, and the Million Dollar “Jewboy” Caper

By Seymour Krim The New York Times November 1973 Both articles are collected in Krim’s You and Me. Part One: Won’t You Come Home, Jimmy Breslin? A friend of mine who works for UPI airmailed Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight yesterday (two pesetas...

The Day Bobby Blew It

By Brad Darrach Playboy July 1973 Bobby Fischer heard a knock at the door. It was sometime after ten A.M., Thursday, June 29, 1972. Three days before the first game of his match with Boris Spassky for the world chess championship. Eleven hours before the plane left...