Neighbors in the News: Barclays, Books, and The Bachelorette

Sara Horowitz, photo credit: Michelle V. Agins/NYT

Today, WNET talks to watchdog journalist  Norman Oder, who’s been hawkishly documenting the Atlantic Yards Project since 2005 on his blog, Atlantic Yards Report. For regular AYR readers, the interview covers pretty familiar turf: Atlantic Yards’ “culture of cheating,” the lack of substantive media coverage, the next phases of the project, post-Barclays. But if you’re not tracking the Oder’s daily posts — and even if you are, (although at a certain point, go look at some cat memes or something, you deserve it!) — it’s worth a read. (Technically, Oder’s actually in Ditmas Park, but given his PS cred, we’re claiming him.)

Meanwhile, Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn profiled neighborhood über-credentialed rare bookseller Heather O’Donnell, who runs her own rare book business from her Park Slope dining room table. Honey & Wax Booksellers “specializes in surprising copies of classic literature, ‘books with a social life and a secret past'” — Walker Evans’ copy of The Waste Land, Graham Greene’s copy of George Eliot’s letters (with his own handwritten indexes!), a signed first edition of Maira Kalman’s Max Makes a Million.

Then on Sunday, the New York Times followed around Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancer’s Union and savior of what seems like half of Brooklyn for Sunday Routines. Her Sunday routine includes coffee, a trip to the Y on 9th Street (“All the people who are working on campaigns are at the Y; I do a little political networking”), some shopping at the 5th Ave Farmer’s Market, and maybe a (non-shopping) trip on the IKEA ferry. Also, The Bachelorette. (She was an Arie fan.)