If there’s one thing New Yorkers like to do, it’s eat. After that, it might be arguing over where to eat — where to find the best slice, the best bagel, best B.E.C., best ramen, and the list goes on. One way to experience some of Brooklyn’s tastiest bites is by embarking on a food tour. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from walking out the front door on a Saturday afternoon and going on your own food tour of Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, or Greenpoint, but the option to focus on eating as a professional guides you around one of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods, dispensing doses of history as you nosh ..read more

 Like what you’re hearing? Subscribe to us at iTunes, check us out on Spotify and hear us on Google, Amazon, Stitcher and TuneIn. This is our RSS feed. Tell a friend! There’s a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln that seems apropos to today, broadly speaking: “I laugh because I must not cry. That is all. That is all.” I’m thinking of it because my guests “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” this week have been mining humor from our contemporary political landscape since 2011, when they crashed an Occupy Wall Street demonstration dressed as bankers i ..read more

More than a hundred people gathered on a scrubby field in Bushwick’s Green Central Knoll on Sunday for the third annual Great Trebulation, a catapult competition in which a record 19 teams hauled their homebuilt siege engines into the park to fling unwrapped Lindt chocolate truffles as far as they could. And, equally important, to see which team looked the best (or most ridiculous) while doing so. The event was organized once again by Bushwick resident Reed Worrell, a professor of  forensic anthropology by day, a part-time bartender by night, and a full-time trebuchet admirer in his hear ..read more

Along Brooklyn’s endless Atlantic Avenue, there is a notably drab, faded stretch on the border of Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, a purgatorial no man’s land of auto shops, industrial businesses, six lanes of traffic and, until this Sunday, Sherita. Part of an old billboard for a long gone company advertising fuel oil to landlords, it remains up for debate what Sherita’s creator was going for with her — dinosaur? Flamingo? Dr. Seuss character? — but what they accidentally created was an icon. In a town where change is constant — businesses, homes and certainly art installations are built only to ..read more

Bar Madonna, a viby new cocktail spot and restaurant that opened a couple of weeks ago in Williamsburg, took some twists and turns on its way to transforming the old Taqueria Diana Cantina space on Metropolitan Avenue. Food- and drinks-wise, the team at Bar Madonna, which include Eric Madonna, Ray Rando, beverage director Rob Crowe and chef Rob Zwirz, joined forces for this venture after working together in various iterations at places like Carbone, the Modern, Lupa, Bar Americano and Marc Forgione’s One Fifth. Given the emphasis on booze here, and the playful, “Italian-American inspired” foo ..read more

If you bought a new record in the past year, you’re hardly alone: U.S. music fans purchased 43 million vinyl records in 2023, representing a 10 percent growth year over year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. And that’s not even counting the massive secondhand market, which has been more-or-less cornered by the online marketplace Discogs. But Discogs is hardly without its problems. And with Record Store Day landing on April 20, there’s no time like the present to shop locally. Record Store Day is an annual event, launched in 2007, aiming to celebrate independently ow ..read more

This weekend sees the return of the triumvirate that is 4/20, Earth Day and Record Store Day. Nice. The sun should cooperate this weekend. Either way, there’s no shortage of things for you to do indoors and outside the bulk of the weekend. Cypress Hill will be swinging through town to celebrate the very sane-in-the-membrane legalization of weed. The Lifted 420 Festival has 12 hours of green-filled fun for you at The Meadows and the Weed Auntie will pop up at the annual FLAMER picnic in Prospect Park. The hit indie dark comedy “The People’s Joker,” which reimagines the DC character and feature ..read more

It’s 10 p.m. on a drizzly Thursday and a herd of animal-horned, face-painted adults are gathered at Bushwick nightclub Three Dollar Bill. Performance artist Tiresias is leading the evening’s debaucherous activities, and tonight, dressed in a furry, mesh skinsuit and a silver, coral-like crown, they’re cosplaying as Dionysus — the Greek god of madness, theater and ecstasy. “On the count of three, we are going to make beautiful, horrifying music,” they boom to the guests assembled around the dancefloor. “We are going to scream — the primal scream from your guts, an animal scream.” Tiresias ser ..read more

It’s 11.30 a.m. on an overcast Sunday morning and about 30 people, wrapped up in rainbow anoraks and sherbet-striped hats, are clustered by the entrance of McCarren Park. Standing in a circle, the group introduces themselves to newcomers — their names, their pronouns, and most importantly: their favorite bird. “We’ve been into woodcocks recently,” smiles one birder, gesturing towards their partner. “I love chickens,” says another. The occasion is a birding and social gathering hosted by NYC Queer Birders, a birding collective launched by Anna Kremer and Hannah Kirshenbaum for LGBTQ+ folks to ..read more

From its scrappy beginnings some 16 years ago, when it first opened in what was then a grim industrial patch of Bushwick near the Morgan L train stop, Roberta’s has grown into an empire. There are outposts in Williamsburg now, and Nashville, and Singapore, and, soon, near Penn Station. I’ve eaten their signature bee sting pie (cheese, funky meat, hot honey — pretty much every pizza place in town offers a version of this now) out at Rockaway on the Beach 67 boardwalk and among the art swells at Frieze on Randalls Island. They’ve launched fancy offshoots like Blanca and Foul Witch. You can ..read more