Nice as New Yorkers are, they have a well-deserved rep for defending their city's honour against the slings and arrows of outrageous slurs. We can only imagine that any visiting Manhattanites will be ready to rip London a new bagel-hole when they clap eyes on a new advert for Radisson hotels currently running on the Tube. It reads "Heavenly Peace in the City That Never Sleeps" but, in a moment of sacrilege to rival......

So the local football team failed to clamber up the rope ladder to the departing helicopter of the Premier League, and in truth it's nothing more than an ancient dump where the council will spy on you without reason. Yet Croydon's future looks rosy: Mayor Boris has lavished praise on plans for an exhaustive regeneration of the borough. Croydon Gateway, as this swanky, Flash-heavy website ably demonstrates, is a scheme that aims to "shape......

Our weekly roundup of film reviews returns, courtesy of James Bryan… After its Statue of Liberty beheading sensation of a trailer, the internet-hyped Cloverfield finally arrives. For the uninitiated, the film follows a group of young hip New Yorkers whose loft party is rudely interrupted when a big scary monster decides to munch his (her?) way through Manhattan. The big idea is that it’s all shot as if captured on one of the characters......

Photograph of the Trump Soho by Riccardo Sinti Gothamist went to the scene of the Trump Soho construction collapse, which left one construction worker dead and others injured (an indirect culprit - Manhattan's hot real estate market, causing rushed construction jobs).Shanghaiist is confused by media reports as to whether Playboy will be available in China during the year of the Olympics.LAist got fugged in an interview with the Go Fug Yourself girls.Torontoist set hearts......

Torontoist discovered their city's most ridiculous holiday lights setup, with 80,000 lights and two––two!––synchronized music routines. Naturally, they snagged a video. Chicago tragically loses one of its most recognizable neighborhood icons, the pigeon man of Lincoln Square. LAPD leaves body in car at crash scene, then tows it. Massachusetts plus mullet equals PR mayhem. Londonist sleeps in a Haunted plague pit. UC Berkeley students strip naked and race through campus, NSFW floppiness ensues. Phillyist......

Londonist asks that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Hot Dog Stand outside the British Museum 63 Great Russell St WC1B 3BF Hours of operation seem to reflect the museum’s hours Expect to Pay: £2.50 for a jumbo hot dog Map Rating: 6 out of 10 Haut cuisine it’s not, but what’s more indulgent than a hot dog every once in awhile? And, at £2.50 for a “jumbo”......

Anyone remember the Sex and the City moment when Carrie has her Manolo’s snatched? They wanted her shoes – say what? Well, such crime is no longer confined to the silver screen, nor the streets of Manhattan. Early yesterday morning, two fashion houses, Brora on Marylebone High Street and Luella Bartley in Mayfair, were broken into and handfuls of handbags and cashmere seized. The villains – reported to have travelled by moped – skilfully......

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

This week ended with the launch of the seventh and final Harry Potter installation. But while the world was consumed with Pottermania, it's important to remember that there were more serious things going on in the world, too – two of them in -Ist cities. Sampaist was shocked when a passenger jet crashed into the center of Sao Paulo, killing at least 200 people. The airplane, an Airbus A320, skidded off the runway at the......

...get the hell out of Gordon Ramsay’s effing-and-blinding kitchen. Former restaurant manager Martin Hyde of Dillons, an Indian eatery in Manhattan, is suing the British chef in an attempt to stop footage of Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares” being shown on television in the US. The show’s premise is for Ramsay to enter a failing restaurant and turn it around in one week. Accusations have been put forth that "Kitchen Nightmares" hired actors to patronize the......

Spring appears to have, er, sprung, at least temporarily, in most of the Ist-A-Verse, so naturally, we're all feeling pretty good. (Yes, we know that spring doesn't officially start till later this month. Just let us enjoy our weather!) And that makes us that much more eager to share all of the nifty things we're up to... Over at Sampaist, spring has more than sprung: it's sweltering! But, as everyone knows, museums are an ideal......

Housing in London is very expensive indeed. In fact it's so expensive indeed that Londonist HQ is imaginary and we all live in Derby. However, thank your lucky charms that you aren't a lowly wannabe Argentinian farmer. He may not have to pay the congestion charge but farmland from the USA to Argentina is rising faster in price than apartments in Manhattan and London. This is all to do with the rising demand for......

It's the oldest trick in the book: go to a fancy restaurant. Order an enormous, sumptuous meal. Eat it with relish. Leave a small amount of food on your plate (perhaps the uninspiring salad garnish or other bit of the meal that didn't interest you). Add to it a dead cockroach you brought with you. Call management and complain loudly; threaten to take the restaurant to court for poor hygiene standards. Back down graciously......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

Sunday. Usually, a quiet, contemplative day in the Blogosphere. But not here in the Ist-a-Verse. Nonono! Just look below and see all of the wild and crazy stuff our staffs are up to. In Austin, bands are beginning to confirm for SXSW and the rumor mill is up and running. Good thing, too, because we all know how much Austinites love live performances. Austin also found itself in the national spotlight, with Longhorn Legend......

Morden’s Good Shoes have spent the past 2 years since their formation in 2005 traipsing around the UK and Europe with their brand of two-and-half-minute guitar pop with a hint of a punk edge. Comprised of lead singer/guitarist Rhys Jones, guitarist Steve Leach, bassist Joel Cox, and drummer Tom Jones, they have already released 3 singles, played at the Reading and Leeds Festivals, and been mentioned in the NME (but then again, who hasn’t).......

A few days back, we reviewed The Meaning of Night, a new novel partly set in the shadier parts of Victorian London. We caught up with author Michael Cox, to ask him about his London influences and plans for the sequels. The Meaning of Night is brilliant. Where do you get the inspiration to write something like that? In April 2004, I began to lose my sight as a result of cancer. In preparation......

Fitzrovia wasn't always so. It was once plain North Soho, though it was far from plain. The poet and chronic Sohoitis victim J. Meary Tambimuttu Christened the area 'Fitzrovia' after the Fitzroy tavern on Charlotte Street, where he frequently became pissed and, in his intoxicated state, hired nubile young receptionists. There have been repeated failed attempts to rename the area Noho (NOrth of soHO), in the New York fashion. This is silly, as SoHo and......

Woody Allen's co-workers and relations have today EXCLUSIVELY revealed that he adores filming in London. Really? We hadn't noticed – especially considering the twaddle he came up with for Match Point. (One pet hate of ours – why do filmmakers photographing London insist on warping its geography? Miss Johansson walks a long way for a drink after a failed audition, from the Royal Court to the Audley, near Grosvenor Square, W1. Just a small......

This week is 'Animal Week' as far as the movie releases are concerned so let's crack on with the biggest animal of them all: King Kong. We'll start with the Times, where their (strangely anonymous) reviewer awards the big monkey four stars. "A visceral nightmare with scenery to match, concludes the Times, "Jackson’s set pieces put every adventure film you’ve ever seen in the shade while poaching rides from the best." Which is all......

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, Dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix... It was with these immortal words, more or less fifty years ago to this day, that the poet Allen Ginsberg first burst onto the American literary scene. The event was the ‘Six Poets at the Six’, a poetry reading held at the Six Gallery in San Francisco.......

When photographer Diane Arbus visited London in 1970, she wrote in a letter, "Nobody seems miserable, drunk, crippled, mad, or desperate. I finally found a few vulgar things in the suburbs, but nothing sordid yet." We daresay that if she had just asked Londonist, we could have pointed her in some promising directions. (Okay we weren't around in 1970, but still.) In any case, the letter from London seems to confirm everyone's worst fears......

Croydon has taken some flak over the years, and Londonist doesn't want to fall into the hackneyed ways of lesser commentators by adding to that already sizeable bucket of mockery. But when objective evidence is uncovered that justifies all the piss-taking… Well, maybe just this once. We will try and get through this article without using the word 'Chav', but no promises. Archaeologists in Croydon, who probably don hard hats long before reaching their......

It's headlines like this that give local papers a bad name: 10-year plan: Could Croydon be the next New York? All credit to the Croydon Guardian for having the balls to even ask the question, but if you're going to make those kind of grand claims then you need the evidence to back it up: "New York City may have the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Centre and Central Park but if developers have their......