Last month, in a dispatch for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, "The police are representatives of a state that derives its powers from the people." The gravity of Coates's words are not lost on me, and I have considered the sentence's trueness many times in the preceding weeks. "We, the people," our founding fathers inscribed in the preamble to the Constitution. But our present condition—one that finds the NYPD constantly at odds with the community it is designed to protect—is a reality our founding fathers perhaps had not predicted: a citizenry devoid of power, and a petty police force with no sense of moral obligation to the communities it serves. The deaths of Eric Garner and Akai Gurley—and all the lives the NYPD has unfairly taken, and will likely take again—are what happens when the people have no power. I am troubled.

In 2015 I have resolved to spend my nights as I wish: with a Patricia Cornwell book in my lap and an episode of Law and Order: SVU playing in the background. The combination of these two art pieces is like a natural Xanax for me. I won't speculate as to what this means.

Two NYPD officers were shot responding to a robbery near Fordham University in the Bronx late Monday night. The suspected shooter and an accomplice are reportedly at large.

The subway conductor allegedly attacked by NYPD officer Mirjan Lolja on a Bronx subway platform says the cop tried to escape by train after throwing her to the ground and choking her. The woman anonymously told the New York Daily News, "I believe the only thing that saved me was the train coming into the station."

According to the New York Times, at least 6,500 new condominium units are scheduled to hit the Manhattan market below 96th Street in 2015—the most since 2007 and twice as many as last year, which is great news if you can afford a condo.

NYPD officer Mirjan Lolja turned himself in to a Harlem precinct this week after security camera footage of him fleeing a Bronx subway station, the scene of an alleged attack on an MTA employee, aired on the news.

A full-floor penthouse on the 23rd floor of the Walker Tower, a converted Art Deco skyscraper in Chelsea, sold for $40,730,000, the New York Times reports. The buyers are from California and will use the apartment as a pied-à-terre. They paid all-cash.

To make a point about how New York City hasn't become too expensive for artists, a New York Times reporter deployed an anecdote about attending a party in the elevator room of an under-construction Midtown building: "A barman in a trilby offered cocktails; a chandelier of candles dangled from the ceiling." Very cool.

At a press conference this afternoon, Mayor de Blasio asked activists protesting the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown to put their demonstrations on hold until after this weekend, when Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu—the two NYPD officers shot to death on Saturday—will be buried.

If you wanted to hear both sides of the argument about race relations in America last night, you might have made your way down to City Hall in New York, where pro-NYPD and anti-racism demonstrators yelled at each other across barricades. "You're a fucking racist," one side screamed. "You're a fucking moron," the other side screamed back.

According to the New York Daily News, NYPD Internal Affairs is investigating the arrest of a teenage suspect who can be seen on video being punched multiple times by a plainclothes officer while three more officers work to subdue him.

[UPDATE 12/16/14 9:22 a.m.]: As of late Monday evening, it was confirmed by the New York Observer that Mohammed Islam, alleged genius teen who had supposedly amassed $72 million by trading stocks, was actually a penniless liar who magnificently rolled everyone. "It's a total fiction?" Islam was asked. "Yes." Teens—still fucking everything up. The original fabricated story, below.

As thousands marched on Midtown Manhattan last night in protest of a Staten Island grand jury's decision to not indict the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner, two compassionate Americans walked into WPIX's live broadcast, noticed the camera, and mimed Daniel Pantaleo's chokehold that killed Garner.

Have you ever carefully stockpiled trash, only to have it disappear the moment your back was turned? According to a study published Tuesday from researchers at North Carolina State University, ants could be the culprit.

Snow Dogs star Cuba Gooding Jr. was at Tao Lounge in Chelsea Saturday night when his night of "being all skeezy and hitting on girls" was apparently interrupted by fighting between a group of men seated next to him in the bar's VIP area, a source tells the New York Daily News' Confidential.

What is your second-biggest subway-related fear, assuming your number one fear is being pushed in front of an oncoming train? Take a minute. Is it suddenly finding yourself in a wedding gown, getting married on the N train in front of grumpy strangers on their ways to and from work, like a horrible nightmare from which you cannot awake?

When New York City's Department of Homeless Services was temporarily without beds for a group of local homeless people this month, it did a pretty cool thing: booked 100 rooms at a Radisson in Jamaica, Queens and told the hotel's management they were for a "government group."

The managing director of Citigroup's environmental and social risk management team was found dead in his downtown Manhattan apartment yesterday afternoon.

When Bill de Blasio arrived late to a memorial marking the anniversary of the crash of Flight 587 last week, he came with an unlikely excuse: his boat to the site was delayed by fog. The mayor has since backtracked—he had a "rough night," he said later—but has maintained that weather played a factor. A new report suggests it didn't.

Billy Joel (b. 1949, the Bronx) does not think New Yorkers should complain about the fact that Pennsylvania native and verifiably insane person Taylor Swift is now the Global Welcome Ambassador for New York City. In fact, grumbly New Yorkers who think she's embarrassing are, in a word, "snoots."