Lovely: "Talk of the Town," in the New Yorker, is always a great cheap read at Barnes and Noble. Here's a good example of how they put a more complex twist on what everyone else would play off as a two-paragraph "News of the Weird" story. It's about how living in Brooklyn and having a nearly famous name changed one man's life.

Russell Jones is a forty-four-year-old art director who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In the early winter of 1996, he and his wife began to receive some unusual phone calls late at night. They would pick up the receiver and a voice would shout "Yo, Dirty!" or just "Dirteee!" and then hang up. Jones was mystified; he thought that maybe his number had been written down in a bathroom stall somewhere.

Interested?