Sarah Kate Kramer

New York is a city of specialists from foodies to academics, laborers to shopkeepers. Every Wednesday, Niche Market takes a peek inside a different specialty store and showcases the city's purists who have made an art out of selling one commodity.

Why the Sierra Club?

They were the lucky environmental group to get $50 million pledged from Bloomberg Philanthropies Thursday. Turns out that Mayor  Bloomberg, who was the nation's second largest donor in 2010, has been chummy with the senior leadership of the Sierra Club since 2007. Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Cub, was present at the launch of the city's Greener Greater Buildings Plan in 2009, one of the mayor's signature environmental achievements.

The reality is if Republicans by and large consider this to be a tax increase, it can't pass. Politically, they can't vote for it. And the people who say hey, it's not a tax increas...

Full disclosure: The Campaign Trailer Critic has not seen the entire documentary on Sarah Palin, directed by Stephen Bannon.

New York is a city of specialists from foodies to academics, laborers to shopkeepers. Every Wednesday, Niche Market takes a peek inside a different specialty store and showcases the ...

The iconic image of New York City is the jagged skyline of glass buildings that jut into the air. But Chris Roddick spends his days climbing the city's natural sky scrapers: trees. For 17 years, Roddick has been pruning, planting and inspecting trees at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. 

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are engaging in procedural wrangling in an effort to prevent a looming federal default. If successful, it may avoid the impending doom of a financial crisis, but it would add more layers of complication to an already labyrinthine process.

New York's Hispanic community became significantly more diverse over the last decade. Unlike many other parts of America, there is no one ethnic group that dominates the Hispanic category here. Yet when you take a look at Hispanic representation in the city's political landscape, it would seem that Puerto Ricans have the job of speaking for all.

For those who tinker like it's 1959, Leed's Radio is Candyland. This 2,500 square foot warehouse is literally jam packed with an inventory of  just about anything requisite for a radio made before 1965.

New York is a city of specialists from foodies to academics, laborers to shopkeepers. Every Wednesday, Niche Market will take a peek inside a different specialty store and showcase ...

A page has turned in American political discourse. Government shutdowns are now something to be proud of.

That’s right. For elected officials, breaking government down is now a cause for cheer. This can be seen in the halls of Congress, where Republicans are gloating over their refusal to increase the ...

I basically believe that societies grow and become great not by their conflicts but by their reconciliations. And I'm hoping that at some point the leadership of both parties will a...

The great vice in what the government is trying to do is that it's trying to criminalize the journalistic process with respect to getting information that's classified. If in fact...

Forty years ago Thursday, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 in favor of the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case. Officially known as New York Times Company vs. United States, this is the infamous lawsuit in which the administration of President Richard Nixon tried to stop the Times from publishing classified information about Vietnam War decision making. The papers were leaked to the Times by former government military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The Court ruled that the First Amendment right to freedom of the press trumped the government's right to stop the Times from publishing its secrets. The decision is considered a hallmark of American journalistic freedom.

To have same sex marriage now be the way in which we cut off those rights for domestic partners seems to me to be a bad outcome, rather than seeing marriage as something among a men...

Michele Bachmann's initial campaign video is appropriately shocking...ly low-budget. It was clearly filmed in her office in front of a filing cabinet, probably in one take. She looks directly at the camera and presents uncharacteristically conventional soundbites about being a constitutional conservative. She sort of looks and sounds like she's a robot, a robot with an intense glare that lasers through your body. 

There was a sense that no one was really running state government, you had Sheldon Silver, the longest serving legislative leader, who many people considered the most powerful man...

There's an age gap in attitudes about same sex marriage, and the times they are a'changin.'

"I don't want to be crude but look. The older people, people like me, in my age group, who are against this, are going to die before the younger ones. The people coming along, the younger folks, are in favor of gay marriage, and the younger you are the more likely you are to favor it," Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute said.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Thursday that he expected the bill that would legalize same-sex marriage in New York to pass as Republicans in Albany continued to discuss the issue behind closed doors.

New York is a city of specialists from foodies to academics, laborers to shopkeepers. Every Wednesday, Niche Market will take a peek inside a different specialty store and showcase ...