Coordinates: 40°43′42″N 73°59′28″W / 40.7283°N 73.9911°W / 40.7283; -73.9911

The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City. It is also distributed throughout the United States on a pay basis.

It was the first of the big-city tabloids that came to be known as alternative weeklies.

The Voice was launched by Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer on October 26, 1955 from a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, which was its initial coverage area, expanding to other parts of the city by the 1960s. The offices in the 1960s were located at Sheridan Square; they are now at Cooper Square in the East Village.

The Voice has published groundbreaking investigations of New York City politics, as well as reporting on local and national politics, with arts, culture, music, dance, film, and theater reviews. The Voice has received three Pulitzer Prizes, in 1981 (Teresa Carpenter), 1986 (Jules Feiffer) and 2000 (Mark Schoofs). Almost since its inception the paper has recognized alternative theater in New York through its Obie Awards. The paper's "Pazz & Jop" music poll, started by Robert Christgau in the early 1970s, continues to this day and remains a highly influential survey of the nation's music critics. In 1999, film critic J. Hoberman and film section editor Dennis Lim began a similar Village Voice Film Poll for the year's movies. In 2001 the paper sponsored its first Siren Festival music festival, a free annual event every summer held at Coney Island. That event has since been moved to the lower tip of Manhattan and re-christened the "4Knots Music Festival," a reference to the speed of the East River's current.

David Sedaris (born December 26, 1956) is a Grammy Award-nominated American humorist, comedian, bestselling author, and radio contributor.

Sedaris has been described as 'the rock star of writers'. He was first publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "SantaLand Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. His next five subsequent essay collections, Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), have become New York Times Best Sellers. In 2010, he released an anthropomorphic collection of stories, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary.

As of 2008^[update], his books have collectively sold seven million copies. Much of Sedaris's humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and often concerns his family life, his middle class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, Greek heritage, various jobs, education, drug use, and his life in France, and most recently in London and the South Downs.

Marion Anthony "Fat Tony" D'Amico is a recurring character in the animated sitcom The Simpsons. He is voiced by Joe Mantegna and first appeared in the third season episode "Bart the Murderer". Fat Tony is a gangster and the underboss of the Springfield Mafia and his henchmen include Legs, Louie and Johnny Tightlips, and he answers to Don Vittorio DiMaggio.

In the season 22 episode "Donnie Fatso", Fat Tony dies of a heart attack and is subsequently replaced by his identical cousin Fit Tony, who soon gains weight and is rechristened "Fat Tony".

"Fat Tony" D'Amico was behind several of Springfield's criminal enterprises. His rackets included illegal gambling, cigarette smuggling, and bootlegging. In "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson", Homer contracts with the mafia to drive out Marge's rival snack food distributors. Fat Tony took out a hit on mayor Joe Quimby in "Mayored to the Mob" in retaliation for a raid on their rat milk facility, which Quimby opposed, as they had promised him "dog or higher". Fat Tony puts out a contract on Homer after his private security business interferes with the mob's interests in "Poppa's Got a Brand New Badge". Homer would have been executed gangland-style if not for Maggie coming to the rescue with her rifle. Fat Tony's son Michael is first mentioned by Fat Tony as he is talking to Marge in "The Seven-Beer Snitch", saying she drove him home from school sometimes. He is then properly introduced in the episode "The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and Her Homer". The episode also reveals that Fat Tony's wife "was whacked by 'natural causes'." Fat Tony and his associates meet in what is known as the "Legitimate Businessman's Social Club". Fat Tony played the violin in "Insane Clown Poppy".

John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founder members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Together with Paul McCartney, he formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.

Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved as a teenager in the skiffle craze; his first band, The Quarrymen, evolved into The Beatles in 1960. As the group disintegrated towards the end of the decade, Lennon embarked on a solo career that produced the critically acclaimed albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine". After his marriage to Yoko Ono in 1969, he changed his name to John Ono Lennon. Lennon disengaged himself from the music business in 1975 to devote time to raising his infant son Sean, but re-emerged with Ono in 1980 with the new album Double Fantasy. He was murdered three weeks after its release.

John Buffalo Mailer (born April 16, 1978) is an American author, playwright, actor, producer, and journalist.

Mailer was born in Brooklyn, the youngest child of novelist Norman Mailer and author Norris Church Mailer. Mailer is a graduate of Wesleyan University. He has written several screenplays and is a freelance journalist. In 2006 he co-wrote The Big Empty (Nation Books, February ‘06) with his father.

Mailer founded Back House Productions in New York City with three other Wesleyan grads in October 2000. The following year, Back House became the resident theater company of The Drama Bookshop’s Arthur Seelan Theater, and developed, among many plays, the 2008 Tony winner for Best Musical, In The Heights. On being involved in theatre, John says: "I think theater will always be a powerful force because we need that human touch, particularly as we spend more and more time with machines, cell phones, computers we start to lose our humanity." In 2001, John’s first play, Hello Herman, had its New York Premiere at the Grove Street Playhouse and nine years later, its West Coast Premiere at the Edgemar Center for the Arts in Los Angeles with John in the lead role. The result was Dramatists Play Services publishing the play in the Spring of 2010. John’s second play, Crazy Eyes, premiered in Athens, Greece in 2005.