The day after Thanksgiving has become the biggest shopping day of the year in the United States, earning the nickname “Black Friday” to set it apart from all the other manic shopping days leading up to the December holidays. As it turns out, that term is just as loaded as your…
READ MORE

Sandy – it weakened from hurricane strength before it made landfall – is far from the only major storm to hit the New York City and Long Island region over the last half-century. But the storm that set the bar for East Coast carnage was the 1938 hurricane, which struck at a time…
READ MORE

Just a couple of days after a hurricane devastated Queens’ waterfront communities and left many others without power or heat, Queens Library’s Book Bus rolled up and parked in front of the Peninsula Community Library. In the midst of all that devastation, it seemed almost…
READ MORE

Few things are as scarily satisfying as a good ghost story or a gothic horror tale involving the discovery of some vast, dark secret in a forgotten nook. Most of us know the famous practitioners of this genre. Edgar Allan Poe is celebrated for his stories of murder, death and…
READ MORE

Art lovers had a lot to fret about recently: The Associated Press reported that on Tuesday, October 16, thieves broke into a Dutch museum and stole seven paintings by legendary artists such as Picasso, Monet and Matisse. The haul could be appraised in the hundreds of millions of…
READ MORE