In perhaps the most exciting display of obstetrical performance art since Karen Finley birthed a yam back in the early '80s, Brooklyn-based artist Marni Kotak is letting a gallery audience observe the delivery of her first child.

Updated. Bushwick resident and YouTube user TheFallGuy53 was minding his own business, sitting on his front stoop, when suddenly, an apparition of light. A UFO, lurking in the north Brooklyn sky!

I'll admit, I tuned into CBS' new comedy 2 Broke Girls last night with much trepidation. Here is a show about two mismatched waitresses in a Williamsburg Diner—on CBS. It had the potential to do everything wrong. Surprisingly I was won over, but it's still doing everything wrong.

A Sycamore that stood for decades in Greenpoint's McCarren Park and dubbed the "Vagina Tree" for the way that its trunk — and there's really no delicate way to put this — resembled a Tyrannosaurus rex's ladyparts has been felled by Irene, The Brooklyn Paper reports.

Welcome to the terrible nexus of Foodie and Earth Mama culture: In "The Placenta Cookbook," New York Magazine reports that the placentas of Brooklyn are no longer content to be buried in gardens, or ground into powder and consumed as nutrient-rich dietary supplements. (That is so 2009.) Every placenta who is any placenta gets blended into a coconut juice smoothie, or Bloody Mary, or placenta jerky strip:

New York City already has four huge Apple stores, which are doing fine keeping the city's residents stocked with overpriced pieces of metal. But that's not good enough for Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz. He's begging Steve Jobs for an Apple Store.

A judge has thrown out a defamation lawsuit filed by "Brooklyn-born and bred" coffee shop Gorilla Coffee against the New York Times—upholding the paper's right to report on mean things that people say about each other during disputes. Kind of an important part of a newspaper's job, if you think about it.

We're used to videos of New York being sped up with the flashing lights of time-lapse movies, but this video of Brooklyn does the opposite and slows everything down. God, it's so like Brooklyn to be contrary.

When planning their Saved by the Bell-themed dance party this weekend, the Bell House in Brooklyn used an old promo shot of the '80s teen hit for their flyer. The problem is Screech wasn't happy, and asked to be removed.

William Boyland Jr., a Democratic New York state assemblyman from Brooklyn, was driving his Yukon down Sutter Ave. in Brownsville last night with his seven year-old son. Then—hello!—somebody started shooting, and a bullet blasted out his back window.

"I never gave up hope. I prayed, meditated, and now he's with us again," 47-year-old Bonni Marcus said upon being reunited beloved monkey doll Bongo, who went missing in Park Slope last week. Bonni and monkey doll dad Jack Zinzi the toy from monkey doll rescuer Luis Barreto's Park Slope apartment on Saturday. The New York Post reports:

"You can't keep a good creative down," as the old saying goes. When pushed out of their community by covert gentrification, overt invasion, and other insidiousnesses, good creatives will simply move elsewhere and establish new, even more authentic communities. This is how the Land of NoBro came to pass.

Bonni Marcus and Jack Zinzi dined in Park Slope on Sunday with their "closest companion," a monkey doll named Bongo. They are now offering a $500 cash reward to anyone who finds the orphaned simulation of a primate. Jack explained the predicament to The Brooklyn Paper:

It hasn't been even 24 hours since we published our most recent plea to the media to please, pretty please, stop writing trend stories about Brooklyn. And already, spittle-flecked tabloid sex lunatic Andrea Peyser is defying us. That's mean.

I'd love if someone could explain exactly why the New York Observer has published a lengthy new story entitled "A Twee Grows in Brooklyn." Why? Why? Whyyyyyyyy?

We've always wondered what would happen if a cybercrime dragnet collided with artsy Brooklynites. Earlier this week, denizens of one Williamsburg loft complex found out as the feds raided their weed-laced bohemian paradise.

Seventeen men and women were arrested in Brooklyn on Wednesday and charged with running a pricey prostitution business called "High Class NY". A lucrative prostitution business, too—according to the D.A.'s office, the company raked in $7 million over three years.

Perhaps trying to establish himself in a new neighborhood, a 30-year-old Brooklyn man got tough with a pair of teenagers who were kicking cars and trash cans on his block early on Sunday. After the kids mouthed off to Thomas Dunikowski and his new neighbors, Dunikowski decided that he just wasn't going to take it anymore:

Sitting in an airplane on a tarmac in Detroit, lifelong Brooklynite Robert Sayegh turned to his seatmate and said, "What's taking so fucking long to close the overheard compartments?" Shortly thereafter, the pilot turned the airplane around. Police removed Sayegh from the plane for being "disruptive."

A fight broke out on a crowded boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn on Thursday afternoon, culminating in gunfire that killed one person and injured four on the hottest day of the year so far. It's unclear what started the fight (apparently, one man hit another with an umbrella just before the shooting broke out) or who two of the victims are (the woman who died and a man in "grave condition" were both wearing bathing suits and not carrying ID), though police apparently have one person in custody. It's hard not to think that the heat was partially responsible—both for bringing huge crowds to the boardwalk, and for fraying nerves and heightening tempers—but, for what it's worth, studies show that hot months have similar crime rates to cold months. [NYDN; image via @Copacabanaa]