There comes a brief shining moment in the life of every phenomenally popular social media start-up when "monetize" isn't in every other sentence written about the company, and people just marvel at the concept. Turntable.fm, a new streaming music site, seems to be having such a moment.

"It started last year in response to the economic downturn," says Manom Slome, cofounder of No Longer Empty, a cooperative formed to stage site-specific exhibitions in vacant commercial spaces. "Walking on Madison one day, we counted about 15 empty storefronts," Slome recalls.

Winemakers diversify their portfolios—by planting vegetables. NAPA VALLEY JUST 40 YEARS AGO was a vastly different landscape from today. Acres of orchards, fields of produce and thousands of oak trees once competed for space with vineyards. However, following the region’s rise to fame on the heels of 1976’s Judgment of Paris—when some Napa wines bested their French counterparts in a tasting—much of this diversity was wiped out in order to produce as many award-winning wines as possible.

Plywood boards are the green shoots of the restaurant world. Plywood and a sign that a favorite restaurant is moving in is the happy counterpart to those sad-sack save-Joe's signs that go up as the last dying embers of a beloved eatery go out. The fall generally brings more of the former and fewer of the latter. And there has been reason to get ebullient over the sign of plywood lately.

A series of recent studies modeling what the possible effects of climate change on wine production might have posited the possibility of gamay from the Yukon and Rocky Mountain riesling by the...

He’s been there for as long as anyone can recall and, as far back as most can remember he’s gone almost every day to the same concrete bridge over Sonoma Creek at the Sonoma...

Make no mistake, Williamsburg's relative-newcomer Walter Foods is a very, very welcome addition to Grand Street, where another seemingly anonymous eatery seems to pop up weekly. If you couldn't guess by the frightening mer-cow logo (which causes passersby to exclaim "dear god" before they are enchanted by the smell of grilling meat), the place is a chophouse-seafood mashup.

Yesterday we learned not only that Sarah Palin had completed her memoir in record time, but that it would be called "Going Rogue." Forget for just a moment what you think or feel about Sarah Palin -- whether she's the MILF you love to hate or the savior of conservative values, crank, hockey mom, or pest -- it makes no difference.

Known for its giant redwoods, its world-class wine country, its inhospitably cold waters braved only by wet-suited surfers and large sharks, its greenest cash crop and the burnt-out hippies and outlaws who grow it, Northern California is a unique combination of subcultures. You can sniff, swirl, sip and spit with snooty sommeliers one day, camp out on the coast and carefully forage for mushrooms the next and hike and kayak to your heart’s content the day after.

In the past few days everybody has been thinking and talking about where they were and what they were doing on 9/11. What about how we picked up the pieces on 9/12? To be sure, there were many head-on musical responses to the events of September 11, 2001.

In California, not only is marijuana on the cusp of being legal (it's walking a razor's edge), but it's big business. Think expo halls full of half-naked females being leered at by middle-age, judiciously stoned men. At this year's Hempcon 2011 in San Jose, California - the basic conceit of which is, "So, you want to open a marijuana dispensary?"

Think about this for a second: monkeys that are robots, fighting. Or to put a finer point on it: robot monkeys smashing into and hitting one another until your local bar is littered with shards of broken plastic. This Saturday, Brooklyn takes on Manhattan in the Robot Monkey Wars Chimpionship II at t.b.d.

The off-season on the East End was nothing so much as an elaborate game of musical chairs, where restaurants swapped locations, switched bays and changed towns, and when the music stopped, one of the only people sans chair was, of course, Jean Luc.

You always knew Williamsburg was a real freakshow. And if you like both craft-brewed beer and sideshows, then has Spike Hill got the lager (and entertainment) for you. Coney Island Lager is finishing a week-long residency at the Bedford Ave bar. How does a beer have a residency you may ask?

Few people come to the West Village to go to the WXOU Radio Bar. It's flanked by famous neighbors like The White Horse Tavern across the way and The Spotted Pig down 11th Street. But locals know WXOU boasts one of the best jukeboxes in the city and provides a respite from having to elbow your way to the bar at other places.

Just when you think we've all gone off the cliff in this city, that we've all become so obsessed with the minutia of leisure and lifestyle and dining that we no longer make any sense and never will again, that we've gone past the point of no return, there is the voice of reason to rescue us from spiraling into meaninglessness.