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July 14, 2015 Liam Mathews

When I get ahold of Alec Reinstein late on Monday night he sounds tired. It’s been a big couple of days for him. Reinstein, better known as Despot, the rapper from Queens who signed to El-P’s Def Jux label in 2004 and has yet to release an album due to his crippling perfectionism, put out […]

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July 7, 2015 Liam Mathews

Joe and Kate Bly live in East Elmhurst, Queens, in a house that used to belong to Joe’s grandparents. Shortly after they moved into the house in 2003, Joe started cleaning out the garage, and found a lot of his grandfather’s cool old stuff, which grandfathers generally have a lot of. They decided to embrace […]

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June 17, 2015 Liam Mathews

A very large old elm tree was chopped down on 34th Street in Astoria this spring, much to the dismay of residents. One longtime resident of the block saved some of pieces the tree as souvenirs. She thought the branch in her backyard was dead, but it began sprouting new branches and leaves the other […]

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June 11, 2015 Liam Mathews

CBS New York put up a somewhat peculiar story late Wednesday night about a spate of random drive-by paintball shootings in Queens. The breathless tone of the story doesn’t match the crime. CBS frames it as a “terrifying,” DC sniper-style crime spree while burying the lede, which is that a 17-year-old boy suffered a “serious […]

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June 2, 2015 Liam Mathews

The yellow taxi industry is in full-on “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” mode, trying to slow down the Uber juggernaut. At the behest of taxi industry financiers, state Supreme Court justice Denis Butler has ordered City of New York lawyers to appear before him and argue why the court should not […]

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May 11, 2015 Prachi Gupta

Parts of Queens are starting to look like Baltimore, Detroit and St. Louis, dotted with abandoned homes that have turned into a major nuisance for the local community. DNAinfo reports that some of the vacant homes in Jamaica, Queens were left empty due to foreclosures: According to local elected officials and published reports, of all […]

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May 5, 2015 Liam Mathews

People sure are dumb. According to the New York Post, Sharlene Tse, the owner of a Queens nail salon, changed the name of her business from “ISIS Nails” to “Bess Nails and Spa” after months of harassment from people who were either trolls and/or legitimately thought the nail salon was somehow connected to the Islamic […]

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April 29, 2015 Liam Mathews

Police captured another coyote Tuesday night, as will continue to happen every few days until there are too many coyotes to capture, and then the coyotes will start capturing us. The New York Post reports that this one was skulking in a backyard in Middle Village, Queens, and police took it down with a tranquilizer […]

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April 24, 2015 Liam Mathews

Retired NYPD Detective Specialist Anthony Planakis is one of those guys who, when he’s interested in something, learns everything there is to know on the subject. He has a lot of interests: photography, organic food, HVAC installation and maintenance. But his passion, since 1977, has been bees. He’s kept bees for years, first in Connecticut […]

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April 3, 2015 Liam Mathews

On April 2nd, Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui, sensationally self-described as “bad bitches” who were “all about jihad,” were arrested and accused of plotting to build an explosive device for “ISIS-inspired” attacks in the United States. Both women, residents of Queens and U.S. citizens, are described as having sympathies with radical Islam. Siddiqui allegedly had […]

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