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In many hotel bathrooms, there hang hook-shaped plastic cards urging guests to forgo the laundering of their towels. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examines how often […]

IF the Jetsons had flown Trans World Airlines, they would have felt at home in its terminal at Kennedy Airport, a swooping, birdlike concrete building, designed by the architect Eero […]

THE setting was the gymnasium of a Children's Aid Society community center on East 101st Street in Spanish Harlem, where a half-dozen ragged lines of men and women stretched the […]

If you sell things on the Internet, should you tinker with your Web site so that it ranks high in search results? Or would you be wiser to spend money […]

Apple TV, Vudu, Movielink, Unbox: the Internet is littered with ventures that offer the ability to download movies legally online. Few have had the predicted success. A new report by […]

HAROLD GREGORY, 52, was sitting at a desk in his peeling, leaky three-bedroom apartment, in a squat city-owned building on a dreary block of Morrisania in the Bronx. 'This building […]

SEVENTY-FOURTH STREET, the main drag in the South Asian section of Jackson Heights, Queens, is something of a sucrose alley. There are New Aladdin Sweets, Al-Naimat Sweets and Restaurant, and […]

The gulf between casual and heavy consumers of online video is startlingly wide, according to figures released in mid-February. Among people who watch at least some online video each month […]

PERHAPS more than any other civic rivals, street vendors and brick-and-mortar stores seem to play a zero-sum game. The stores are wary of the vendors, whom they see as nimble […]

FOR as long as most people living in Farragut Houses can remember, the 10 weed-choked town houses around the corner have lain in ruins, partly hidden behind a high fence […]

PAUL SOKOLOFF, a 51-year-old bartender with a small earring and a smoker's rusty chuckle, is a blunt-spoken man, not the sort one expects to talk like a civics textbook. But […]

A paper in The Journal of Consumer Research explores the 'false consensus effect,' the degree to which people assume, often incorrectly, that others share their opinion. The authors found that […]

DOZENS of times a day in winter and more frequently in summer, a double-decker tour bus lumbers off Seventh Avenue South to head eastbound on Bleecker Street. The buses are […]

There are times when a heavy diet of one medium means less of another. For example, teenagers who play the video game Halo 3 are most likely to do so […]

The most-cited measure of a Super Bowl ad's performance is the 'Ad Meter,' a 20-year-old metric created by USA Today. Every year, the newspaper asks a panel of volunteers to […]

A HALF-CENTURY ago, an ammunition barge broke loose from the U.S.S. Bennington, an aircraft carrier anchored a mile offshore in Gravesend Bay. The barge drifted over to Rockaway Point, but […]

JACOB GOLDSTEIN, the longtime chairman of Community Board 9 and the unofficial mayor of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was driving his little red Ford Contour through the neighborhood the other day, […]

A study in The Journal of Consumer Research finds that people have more trouble choosing between bad alternatives than good ones. In one experiment, college students were asked to choose […]

AROUND closing time on dark winter evenings, the boutiques of Broadway are incandescent islands among the fluorescent-lit banks and drugstores of the Upper West Side. On Monday, two shop owners […]

It is well known that people often crave certain things after they see them. For example, a nearby dessert cart can prompt a diner to start hungering for a slice […]

TIME was, the West 30th Street Heliport was of a piece with the industrial Hudson waterfront: a gritty three-block strip of tarmac that emitted a vacuum-cleaner roar at all hours. […]

The share of Google searches that result in visits to Google Maps has skyrocketed since last year, according to the online traffic-measurement firm Hitwise. Over the week ending Jan. 6, […]

IT was a Tuesday afternoon on far West 66th Street and the subject, as usual, was noise. Lloyd Lederkramer, a beatific-looking 56-year-old with hip black eyeglasses, stood on the balcony […]

Library use is far more prevalent among people who have a broadband Internet connection at home or at work, according to a new study. The finding counters a decade-old assumption […]

Macintosh owners are far more likely than PC owners to have recently paid for a music download, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm. In the third quarter […]

Teenage girls are more likely than boys to have engaged in creating most kinds of online content, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. […]

OVER the last three years, the most visible adherent of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism has been a strapping 20-something reggae singing star named Matisyahu. After joining the sect […]

ON Monday night at 10:27, listeners to the Newark-based jazz station WBGO could hear the legendary Red Norvo plunking away at the final bars of 'Have You Met Miss Jones?' […]

ONE evening in late September, a contractor named Michael Tubridy was relaxing in his boat on Jamaica Bay when he saw a tug pulling a derelict-looking barge. The barge was […]

As everyone knows, advertisers pay for time on television shows according to the number of viewers. But they should care about more than ratings, according to data newly released by […]

RESIDENTS of the bungalow district of Brighton Beach, a 10-block stretch of wooden single-family houses in Brooklyn that stand cheek-by-jowl along narrow lanes, are accustomed to feeling embattled. Since the […]

There is much research into how viewers form opinions of a movie or television show. But there has been less study of how people unconsciously influence one another. A paper […]

LAST week, at the corner of Prince and Mulberry Streets in NoLIta, a scene was playing out that would have gladdened the heart of any advertising buyer. Pedestrians were turning […]

America's least-loved Christmas song is a Danish recording of 'Jingle Bells,' performed in dog barks. The song -- which enjoyed brief success in the United States in 1955 and 1970 […]

THE Seventh Regiment Armory, the massive, crenellated red-brick building that occupies a full square block on the Upper East Side, spent much of the 1990s falling apart. 'When we took […]

MIMI REINHARD, 92, sat very straight on the edge of a sofa, her lipstick freshly applied, her neck garlanded with pearls. Though the furniture was mostly gone from her apartment […]

People spend money, in large part, based on how much they think they have; and that perception, it seems, is easily manipulated. A series of experiments reported in The Journal […]

ONE of the more unlikely witnesses to the changing commercial face of the Upper West Side is Annemarie Legendy, a short woman with a soft German accent and a cap […]

JOU JOU CAFE is a bustling coffee shop on West 168th Street near Broadway. With its big, midpriced sandwiches and the usual array of flavored lattes, it is a favorite […]

If the writers' strike drags on, one TV show after another will exhaust its supply of fresh episodes and move into repeats. Executives are aware of the wide disparity in […]

THE year 1999 seemed to mark the end of an era for the Gowanus Canal, and a smelly era it was. In summers past, said Craig Hammerman, the district manager […]

A study in The Journal of Consumer Research explores people's faulty memories of how much they liked an experience, showing that they look for cues in their own subsequent behavior. […]

IN a soundproof glass booth in the back of a travel agency on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, Alex Polanco was murmuring into his microphone in Spanish. 'We want […]

On Wednesday, the radio station KCKC in Kansas City, Mo., became the first station of the year to start playing Christmas music exclusively. Hundreds of other stations will soon follow, […]

NICK SANCHEZ, a 20-year-old musician, was fiddling with a computer in a recording studio on the top floor of a ramshackle brownstone on West 131st Street. At the touch of […]

African-Americans' television preferences have converged with those of the general public over the last decade, according to Nielsen Media Research. The company recently released data showing that, during the 2006-7 […]

FOR as long as small boats have used Sheepshead Bay, they have sunk in it. Newspaper articles record more than a century of nautical mayhem: flaming houseboats, leaky fishing boats, […]

Frequent moviegoers tend to arrive at the theater 16 percent earlier than the average moviegoer, according to a survey by Arbitron, the audience research firm. The survey was commissioned in […]

THE setting was a classroom on Fordham Road in the Bronx, decorated with construction-paper tributes to the British philosopher John Locke. The subject was finance, high and low. 'Y'all ready […]

SERAVALLI PLAYGROUND is a half-block of concrete just off Hudson Street between Gansevoort and Horatio Streets, planted with a dozen skinny trees. For the most part, the playground is a […]