Julia Furlan

An Indian Lit Primer, Courtesy of Salman Rushdie and Tishani Doshi

Saturday marks the ninth anniversary of 9/11/01. In New York, the day is always loaded, especially in the face of the continuing controversy around the Islamic cultural center proposed for near Ground Zero, and the fact that this year, the Islamic holiday Eid al-Fitr falls on 9/11.

On Wednesday, the shirts were tucked in as Prospect Heights and Park Slope, Brooklyn families sent their kids into the first day of the 2010-11 New York City school year.

Though it looks like any fluorescent-lit church basement, community center or public school teacher's lounge, the basement of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx's Morris Heights neighborhood has a monumental history. It was on this unlikely linoleum floor, under the workaday dropped ceiling, that Clive Campbell a.k.a. DJ Kool Herc first set up the turntables and guitar amp that gave life to what is known now as the sound system and hip-hop music.

"He was the guy who first laid it down and played it for a party crowd," says hip-hop historian Marcus Reeves.

On a normal day, 46th Street, which is marked with a small "Little Brazil Street" sign, looks like any other midtown side street. But on Sunday, 1.5 million people are expected to descend on the 25 blocks surrounding 46th Street for the annual celebration of Brazilian Independence Day, which falls a day later on September 7th.

Thanks to a partnership between the online genealogy group ancestry.com and the National Parks Service, the oral histories of Ellis Island immigrants are available online, and for free, to anyone who wants to click.

Like a bastion of gentrification casting its shadow over TriBeCa, the 20-story James New York Hotel is the third in a string of modernist hotel towers to crop up in the skyline of downtown Manhattan.

This Saturday's Rock the Bells hip hop festival will have fans reminiscing about the battered cassette tapes of yore. The big headliners are Snoop Dogg, A Tribe Called Quest and Wu Tang Clan. To some, that's as close to a hip-hop trinity as it gets.

In addition to the languorous picnics and beach volleyball games you want to get in before the end of summer, you can add three plays to your to-do list. Macbeth, The Punishing Blow and Sex in Mommyville are all closing this weekend, so get to it!

Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara's and his Japanese collaborators are working on an installation that will open September 9 at the Asia Society, and right now fans are flocking to the P...

Manhattan-raised Lady Gaga has broken many barriers. And over the weekend, she shattered another one. Gaga became the Queen of Twitter when she reached over 5.7 million Twitter followers. She dethroned a pop star she used to write songs for: Britney Spears.

If the cancellation of this summer's Pool Parties free concert series at the Williamsburg waterfront made you think of shaving your ironic mustache or pawning your bowler hat, rest assured. This weekend, the big players in the battle to keep or cancel the Pool Parties' final August 29th show resolved the conflict. The fourth year of fist-pumping indie bands with baffling names will culminate in performances by Dominique Young Unique and Delorean, along with a surprise headliner.

When art blogger Andrew Russeth stepped on a mosaic of famed 1960's Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in Queens' Flushing Meadows Corona Park, he stepped right into a 45-year-old controversy involving pop artist and icon Andy Warhol. The story of Warhol's connection to Moses, the World's Fair and the 1998 mosaic that links them together is a plot studded with big names and big question marks—eat your heart out, Da Vinci Code.

Sure, cell phone companies would love you to believe that video chatting from your mobile phone will change your life—but what if it really did? This week, engineers at the University of Washington will conclude testing on software that makes it possible for hearing-impaired mobile users to do just that: communicate through video.

Last month, two hit Broadway shows—the revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning rock musical Next to Normal—changed up their lead casts. The lower ranks of Broadway shows swap cast members with the regularity of a revolving door, but recasting marquee names is a bit more complicated.

Abbey Lincoln, who was born Anna Marie Wooldridge, in Chicago, died on Saturday in Manhattan at age 80, after an acting, singing and composing career that spanned some five decades.

New York City is the kind of place where you can witness a mariachi love song, beat-boxing acrobats or an African drum circle on your morning commute.  But if you want to catch even more of this kind of performance, on stage, the New York International Fringe Festival kicks off this Friday. It features nearly 200 staged off-Broadway plays over the next two weeks.

Reality TV can be a wasteland of bared undergarments and talentless hacks with too much botox. But when Jackie Evancho, 10, launched into a heart-wrenching rendition of "Il Mio Babbino Caro" on America's Got Talent on August 11, audiences saw the kind of reality that talent shows long for: real talent.

What does it sound like when an outfit comes together? 

With her site RetailDJ, Wendi Muse lays out a soundtrack to the most mundane of rituals, commanding readers to "get dressed to this."