Narrowback Slacker

[...] chatter in the twitterverse has made me obsessed with this question. In all my years as a Rockaway Beach local, a journalism student and eventually a book editor, and armchair student of local [...]

[...] NarrowbackSlacker: #TBT: A few images of Rockaway Beach from the dark days. Originally posted on Oceanus 11693: In 1988, I took a few pictures of [...]

[...] Here in Rockaway Beach, NY, there are two sorts of people (well two sorts of homeowners, at least): Those who lost [...]

[...] what’s the point of living here if I can’t get my kids in the water most days. 3pm, Rockaway Beach, NY So, yeah, we still have a lot to do this last week. But we don’t have to do [...]

[...] So, yesterday was the two year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. The storm made landfall around sundown, so most of my memories of the storm itself are muddy– [...]

I should have known better: We’d lost power on our block for a week after Hurricane Irene the year before. But the neighbors were kind enough to let [...]

[...] his Paperwhite. Two weeks later the books-in-the-house issue was rendered moot when Hurricane Sandy brought 8 feet of water into the basement, where most of the books that remained resided. [...]

I made a joke on Facebook the night before the storm hit, joking that (to paraphrase the Talking Heads), I had some groceries, some peanut butter, to [...]

[...] of all, thanks to everyone who has visited and taken time to comment on the Momentum Optimization Project. I’m absolutely gobsmacked by the response–I guess all my friends who saw our [...]

[...] When I first posted about the Momentum Optimization Project, I was expecting just a few friends and family members to read it. But it must have [...]

I started this post four months ago. I can explain. It was a busy summer and early fall, consumed by a large project that was running late. I was, [...]

[...] them to finish off their summer work. Seems like a good time for an update on the Momentum Optimization Project. The general takeaway for Summer 2014: Inconsistent enforcement, but nonetheless  [...]

[...] for now I just wanted to acknowledge those who felt my wording did a disservice to comics and graphic novels, because on review, I totally agree with them. [...]

[...] . All of which is kind of hysterical. Seriously, media–tv, books (including comics and graphic novels), movies, music, online gaming and computers–makes up a huge chunk of our family [...]

[...] communication. It should be avoided when possible, in favor of specific neighborhood names (Rockaway Beach, Rockaway Park, Far Rockaway, Arverne-by-the-Sea, [...]

[...] . They’ve got the best organized boots-on-the-ground effort we’ve seen in my specific neighborhood (check out http://interoccupy.net/occupysandy/rockaways/). It’s overwhelming. [...]

[...] right-this-minute. Rockaway. “Rockaway” is a shorthand/generic term for “The Rockaway peninsula” is used to refer to any place, person, or thing related to that geographic [...]

Yesterday was the first acceptable beach day of the year, and also the first beach day ever when I felt like my son was old enough to send him out on [...]

Sometimes, you need to add more index cards. When I started The List, I told them that by “tidy” I just wanted to be able to look in the room and [...]

[...] and a bite from New York’s newest restaurant row, and be back on the ferry by bedtime. And Rockaway locals would be more inclined to go enjoy Manhattan and Brooklyn on a Friday night or Saturday [...]

[...] are the guidelines I would put in place were I editing a book on Rockaway Beach/Rockaway/The Rockaways right-this-minute. Rockaway. “Rockaway” is a shorthand/generic term for “The Rockaway [...]

A few months back, I stumbled upon a review of Justin Hocking’s The Great Floodgates of the Wonder World  in The New York Times Book Review. It� [...]