After numerous nights sans sleep, I’m proud to announce the release of NYC24: BODY, the online news magazine I helped edit and build.

Check it out!

Here’s our press release:

NYC24.com Launches The Body Issue
Real stories, reported from New York City

Feb. 15, 2008 — The New Media Workshop at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism announces the latest issue of NYC24.com, an online news magazine, http://nyc24.com

NYC24 (pronounced “N-Y-C-two-four”) brings you eight feature stories about NYC, centered around the theme of BODY. This collection of multi-media stories burst with the strange, sexy and fun things people do with their bodies. The site is entirely conceptualized, reported, shot, produced and edited by the students.

Editors for BODY:

LISA BIAGIOTTI, PHILIP CAULFIELD, KENAN DAVIS, ELIZABETH R. STARK

In this issue:

* An Afro-Brazillian martial art draws new devotees by ELSA BUTLER & CHANNTAL FLEISCHFRESSER

* Circus performing or yoga — how ’bout both? by LISA BIAGIOTTI, PHILIP CAULFIELD, KENAN DAVIS & ELIZABETH R. STARK

* Craig Hormann’s Ivy-league path to the NFL by DAVE BURDICK & ANTHONY VANGER

* New York’s Tall Club: Do you measure up? by TOM DAVIS & SYDNEY BEVERIDGE

* Make your skin bling with sub-dermal piercing by KATYA SOLDAK & VERONICA ZARAGOVIA

* Sword-swallowers show us how it’s done (hint: don’t drink) by MATTHEW P. MOLL & YIAN HUANG

* The ultimate three-minute love affair: Tango by KAREN ZRAICK & JAY CORCORAN

* Burlesque: Fabulously fit at any size by SANDRA LARRIVA & MATHILDE PIARD

Visit us at http://nyc24.com

Well, we were going to do a real-live live-blog this year, but were sadly unable to, due to the Hilton’s outrageous prices for Internet.

The convention hall was not rigged with wireless. Fringe was told that it’d cost $870 PER DAY to get a hard line into the convention hall. Clearly, the Hilton is stuck in the stone-age.

I went around and asked other online journals if they’d like internet, then found the conference director to try to lobby for Internet for the convention, but to no avail. However, the woman I spoke to handled my complaint gracefully and said she’d do her best for next year’s convention in Chicago.

All the same, the lack of Internet felt like a slight toward the already-marginalized online magazine. Maybe next year things will be different.

I sidled up to the AWP registration desk in the Hilton at 11:35 am and was told folks couldn’t give out any passes till noon. People milled in the ever-filling lobby, hearing the same line from AWP’s workers.

After nabbing my badge, I headed into the book fair to find Fringe’s table. The bookfair is HUGE this year, with three separate floors of booths. Fringe is on the 3rd floor, in Hall of the Americas II at table 429. The exhibition hall was empty, lonely. I can’t wait to see what it will look like tomorrow when hordes of writers descend.

Can’t wait to see you.

We’ve got our fliers printed, our mystery freebie in hand, and of course, our Fringe T-shirts pressed and ironed. We’re ready for AWP 2008.

This year the writing conference is at the New York City Hilton, with 7,000 passes sold, according to the conference website.

Can’t make it? Bummed that it was sold out? Never fear — Fringe’s staff of crack writers will be live blogging the conference for your reading pleasure.

Alternately, you might try to make it to these off-site events. On Saturday, the book fair is free and open to the general public.

Read Fringe? Come by our table in the book fair and pick up colorful samples of Fringe work, submission guidelines, and shot glasses($5), or just shoot the breeze with a few of our editors. We may even extend the 25 Books deadline to allow passers-by to vote in our poll.

Anything is possible — it’s AWP. We hope to see you there.

In my unending quest to avoid TV, I’ve discovered a new diversion beyond clips and shows from ComedyCentral.com and AdultSwim.com — a friend hipped me to FreeDocumentaries.org.

The site believes that documentaries can effect real world change, and hosts a bajillion excellent movies from the more famous (Born into Brothels, Supersize Me) to the obscure (We — Arundhati Roy’s Come September speech set to archival footage and electronic music).

The streaming video quality is pretty good, and scalable to your whole screen. Bored tonight? Give it a shot.

It is a truly Dickensian tale.

This fall, I spent the semester negotiating both cities. Most mornings, I’d wake up on the well-to-do Upper West Side, grab a coffee on the corner, walk past the Gap and Banana Republic to the train.

A half hour later I’d emerge in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, where 45 percent of residents live below the poverty line (which is $13,167 per year for a family of 2), and 97 percent or residents are black or hispanic, according to the New York City Department of City Planning, roll up my sleeves, and start reporting for my classes.

I’m a student at the Columbia School of Journalism, where students are assigned a neighborhood in New York City that they report on all semester.

I wrote stories on hunger, crime, welfare, community health, the schools, and many other subjects, and what I found shocked me, not because I hadn’t read about communities like Mott Haven, but because seeing and reading are two different things.

A few telling facts that I ferreted out:

• The principal of IS-162, Maryann Manzolillo, budgets money for graph paper, because there’s no where to buy it in the community. She also opens the school library to parents, because there are few, if any bookstores in the community (I never saw one).

• Asthma rates are among the highest in the city and have been connected to the intense pollution and poverty of the area. As a result, the neighborhood’s rate of asthma hospitalization — meaning a person’s asthma is so out of control that they might die — is more than three times the rate for all of New York City, with 123.6 hospitalizations per 10,000 people. In contrast, New York City as a whole has only 35 hospitalizations per 10,000 people.

• I met a man, Anthony Ormas, who lived in a dilapidated apartment. In his bathroom, there is no light, and there hasn’t been for several years. “We live by candlelight,” Ormas said. Water drips continuously from a pipe in the wall where a bathtub faucet should be. The floor is rotted in places where steam from the pipes that feed the rusty old radiators has leaked out and risen up from beneath the floorboards. Many of the windows do not close at all, close poorly, or fit to the window frame a kilter, leaving gaps for cold air to come inside. Drug addicts and prostitutes gather on the stairwell inside his apartment, and on the roof.

• Sometimes, food stamps are not enough. The junior warden of Saint Ann’s explained that $135.50 per week in food stamps goes fast for a family of four with growing children, and that parents often make choices between nutrition and quantity – unhealthy food like soda and white bread is cheaper than fresh produce. Ironically, one in four Mott Haven residents are obese, compared to one in five in New York City as a whole, and 17 percent have diabetes, compared to 9 percent of New York City residents, according to 2006 New York City Department of Health statistics, and 36 percent receive food stamps.

• On Labor Day, 2005, Naiesha Pearson, 10, was playing outside at a Labor Day picnic for children, when she got caught by a gunshot and bled to death in her mother’s arms. During the murderer’s trial, her mother said, “I ran to her and I called out, all she did was say mommy and stumbled to me. She stumbled to me and said mommy and fell into my arms.” As bled to death, someone stole her new bike.

There is some light in the neighborhood — there are numerous community groups, including churches, that are working toward positive change.

In reporting, the scope of the area’s problems surprised me — the area’s issues are complex and interlocking, so that poverty, for example, often means that residents can’t afford healthy food, which ups rates of obesity and type II diabetes, which can’t be treated well because residents can’t afford blood testing strips…

This is America at its most hideous.

We can afford to build new stadiums for the Yankees, but not to give families of four more than $135/week in food stamps, which is, of course, a gross-oversimplification of the situation.

So I’ll say it — shame on America for ignoring communities like this. It’s inhumane, it’s real, and it needs to change.

The end of the year approaches, and so does the end of Ethnos submissions and our 25 Books project.

This week is your last chance to submit writing on ethnicity and race for our second anniversary issue. We are particularly in need of art submissions!

Also, the 25 Books polls close December 31. So speed-read those last few books on your yearly reading list and get voting.

The end of the year approaches, and with it, the closing of Fringe’s 25 Books Poll.

In a nutshell, we were appalled that the New York Times top 25 list included only 2 women, one of whom was the only writer of color on the list. We vowed to make our own list, where the public could qualify to vote by reading two or more books from our pool.

We still want to hear from you about the books you read from the pool, and which novels of the last 25 years changed your outlook, inspired you, or moved you to tears.

The polls close on January 1, so you only have 2 more weeks to sound off and let us know what you think.

Click here to read about the project.

Clear here to VOTE.

Not sure what book to read next? Click here for a list of Fringe Reviews.

Here it is ladies, evidence of a drastic advance in gender equality…guyliner.

Before you know it, we’ll be making 100 cents on the dollar.

Here’s a holiday gift suggestions for those of you who are still shopping — check out Women for Women International’s bazaar, which sells crafts made bywomen survivors of war.

For those of you who don’t know, Women for Women is an award-winning nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lot of women in war-torn countries.

You can sponsor a woman, which entails a $27/month donation. $5 of this donation keeps the organization running, and the rest provides your sister with staples for her family, and pays for job and rights-awareness training. Depending on where and how educated your sister is, you may be able to correspond with her. At the end of one year, each woman “graduates”.

The upshot is this — the organization helps women in warn torn countries find each other, recover, start self-sustaining businesses, and apply for micro-credit. In my book that’s a worthwhile goal.

So consider getting me a set of those cutting boards(are you listening, Santa?), or better yet, sign up to sponsor a woman.