Being a Brooklyn Writer turns out to be exactly how you imagine it to be, if debut novelist Porochista Khakpour's Facebook status update is to be believed.

"Stripper" is the styling-of-choice for so many non-stripping ladies these days. So what's the difference between an actual pole-dancer and, say, classily "branding" yourself as a young, sex-positive lass? (Heck, even the housewives of New Jersey have stripper-pole workout sessions in their own homes.) Can anybody tell the different between a strip club and the basement of Happy Ending on Tuesday nights anymore? This weekend, I went deep into Brooklyn to a neighborhood strip bar to find out if it felt just like the playgrounds of Manhattan. It didn't!

Yoga drama in Carroll Gardens! Three charismatic teachers left Area—the spa and children's clothing store and toy store and yoga wear and yoga studio South Brooklyn monopoly—simultaneously to start their own studio, leaving a "nasty taste" in Area owner Loretta Gendville's mouth. But maybe she should take a page from of one of her ex-employees' books and be more, you know, yogic about the whole thing: "New York is a great laboratory—when the guy on the subway won't move, how do you make that a yogic moment, instead of flipping him off?" [NYO]

A Park Slope mom is incensed! It's Tuesday, and also, her daughter has been issued a warning letter from the Sanitation department for 'vandalizing' her own stoop with a chalk drawing after a neighbor called 311. Says the mom: "Admittedly, this drawing was not her best work—she usually sticks to cheerful scenes, not abstracts, frankly—but to send a warning letter like that is outrageous." Also: "This whole thing is ridiculous." Yes. [Brooklyn Paper]

Apparently Bay Ridge is the new Ninth Ward! "Two months after a tornado ripped through southwestern Brooklyn, a sign with 'Vacate' in red letters still hung from the front door last week, keeping Ashraf Eshra and his family from moving back in.... 'The mayor's office came, FEMA came, and nothing happened,' Mr. Eshra said. 'FEMA said we can do nothing until you get settlement from insurance.'" [NYT]

Brooklyn Heights was the scene of a terrible tragedy on Saturday night, when the shooting of the new Coen brothers movie with George Clooney and Brad Pitt at Clinton and State streets somehow took out the cable T.V. in local buildings. Reports a resident: With no T.V. to soothe the masses, the streets were filled with "throngs of otherwise too-good-for-celebrity stalking parents camped out with their children for a sighting. Street reporting revealed nobody had gotten one but I did spot one five or six year old boy, bent-legged on the sidewalk, head resting in his small hands and asleep. I'm calling child welfare...."

There are parties in New York not run by publicists, parties that don't promote perfumes. Tracie Egan (the artist formerly known as "Slut Machine") and Nikola Tamindzic went out in the field this weekend to a real party: A raging kegger in South Williamsburg. There, they discovered oddly-shaped hickeys, uptight douchebags and a lack of alcohol. And we learned a lot about the way we live now. Or did we?

In a trenchant piece of geosocial commentary, not-a-she Alex Williams tackles some big questions: "What if Brooklyn's recent cachet as the locus for what's next is little more than a thin and fragile crust of chic, hiding the insecurity of people who constantly measure the social currency of their ZIP code by Manhattan standards?" Gee, what if!

After waging war against a plague of bedbugs, the urban warriors of the Brooklyn hipster-lofts at 248 McKibben are now embroiled in a pitched battle against the New York Police Department. It's like the Masada over there. They are in big trouble for drinking up on the roof!

There's a totally insane assault on Brooklyn writers—yes, nearly all of them! Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss and even the Brooklyn writers who actually live in Manhattan, such as Ben Kunkel—in the Autumn issue of the American Scholar. It's notable for the sheer intensity of its hatred.

"We're really into co-parenting," New York magazine "Breeding" columnist and author Amy Sohn said. "I mean, we only have a part-time nanny." The assembled crowd nodded sympathetically and shifted in their folding chairs, especially the children, who were beginning to get restless. They'd liked it better when Neal Pollack had been reading from his parenting memoir Alternadad a bit earlier. He'd used the word "shit" a lot, prompting a four-year-old girl in the second row to shoot me a way too knowing glance. Clearly, we were at the Brooklyn Book Festival.

"Touting "kosher amenities" — including two-sink kitchens, balconies pre-fit for sukkahs, gyms with separate schedules for men and women — new condominiums are being custom-built for Orthodox populations that are growing in both absolute numbers and wealth. In Flatbush-Midwood, construction is about to start on a new luxury condominium targeting Orthodox Jews. In Williamsburg, several new buildings have been erected specifically for Satmar Hasidic residents. And in Crown Heights, about 20 new buildings with kosher amenities have been unveiled recently — including a 94-unit project by local developer Mendel Drizin, which will include a synagogue in the lobby, a gym with separate hours for men and women, and a special storage room for strollers." [Forward]

"The early-20s hipsters left in Manhattan are a more dance-club oriented crowd. People who are paying Manhattan rents are interested in glamour, not rock 'n' roll." The knives are out: It's a war between Manhattan and Brooklyn hipsters.

As news broke that Dean Street's most famous inhabitants, Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams, had decided to end the almost three-year relationship that produced their adorable daughter Matilda, Emily Gould and video boy Alex Goldberg decided to walk around the 11201 zip code and learn about brownstone Brooklyn's emotional response. What they found was a neighborhood left deeply shaken, but not too shaken to eat a panini at an outdoor cafe while nursing.

Kind of great video from last night's Daft Punk show in Brooklyn. [YouTube]

Dear Brooklyn: Like a sugared-up 11-year-old, you're always claiming things. Sometimes it's "That dirty Pole touched me in a bad place." Sometimes it's "We invented electroclash and it's good!" A lot of the time your outrageous claims have to do with babies and how great life is and the joys of microbrewing beer. You know: Lies. Over the years we've started to ignore you—which meant when you came to us yodeling about a tornado yesterday, we smiled, nodded and backed away. I guess it's just hard for all of us to tell your "personal" truth, the James Frey kind of truth, from the actual truth sometimes. Maybe you should go back to your "great apartment" and think about that?

Now you know where the sidewalk ends: Bay Ridge. Go figure.
PHOTO: Rebecca.

BREAKING: THERE WAS WIND IN BROOKLYN. "The thunder was not normal. It was like a different thunder you never hear, like a real loud thunder, like 'boom,' real loud, and lightning, very loud explosions. The lightning was crazy." [NY1]

According to an article in today's Times, Brooklyn's Smith St. is fast falling into the comfortable embrace of upmarket mass-commodification. Lucky Jeans recently opened a store there, Trader Joe's is coming soon and the long-time residents are in as much of a furor as their yoga practice will let them be. (Breathe, breathe, engage moola bandha.) Styles reporter Eric Wilson took to Smith street to find the longest-time resident he could—presumably the one with most historical perspective.

Next month, the moment you've been... waiting for? Hipster love, on stage, but all double-cross ironic—like Xanadu only ugly and less gay. It's like a swift kick in the pants to the idiot village that is Williamsboard, one hopes.