Indie-Rock Bakery

After 21 years, the Lower East Side bar Max Fish is closing. Having never been there, I come to bury, not to praise, though it sounds like a place I might have liked.

How does a grimy watering hole inspire such indelible loyalty? For two decades, the bar affectionately known as the Fish was a hub for downtown intellectuals, creative types, skateboarders and assorted derelicts. It was the type of place that seemed to sum up the anarchic, youthful spirit of the Lower East Side during the 1990s and, later, stand as a kind of living, punk-inflected relic while the rest of the neighborhood gained respectability.

Frank Bruni goes long on the L.A. dining scene:

Uncommonly ambitious cooking in unconventionally blunt, humble, even improvised contexts: if a single theme captures the arc and essence of dining out in America right now, that’s it. And if you had to pick a single place to study and savor it, you could do no better than L.A., a city in unrivaled tune with the restaurant times.

A toast, of sorts, to a great drink.

It is essentially the original cocktail—the no-frills combination of liquor, sugar, bitters, and water that 19th century Americans would have had in mind when they ordered a capital-c Cocktail (and which old timers eventually found themselves having to ask for by a more specific name as bartenders became more fanciful with their concoctions).

On Sunday, the inaugural Ciclavia shut down 7.5 miles of Los Angeles streets for biking, walking and other non-automobile fun.

Streets normally clogged with cars and SUVs became two-way thoroughfares of the self-propelled. People of all shapes and ages turned out — weekend warriors rode swiftly on their fine-tuned bikes, young kids on training wheels labored to keep up with their parents, an elderly couple smiled broadly as they kept at a leisurely pace.

It all made for a strangely quiet, serene scene. The city’s police and fire departments reported no major incidents.

Practice, practice, practice might get you to Carnegie Hall, but it won’t keep you from being ousted by a $200 million development project.

Ms. Sargent, a poet, answered an advertisement to “live and work in Carnegie Hall” 46 years ago and moved in with a recommendation from the literary critic Malcolm Cowley. Half a lifetime later, on Thursday, she was the last resident to move out of the 116-year-old studio apartments in Carnegie Hall Towers, which once percolated with creativity and personality.