It has been a long, exhausting work-week filled with brief lunches and looming deadlines. The next few weeks promise to be no different and the only thing to look forward to is Halloween, which, frankly, you’d rather celebrate with a proper day off than dispensing trick-or-treat candy. Comment.

Some restaurateurs start off with a "slow" opening. They do little or no advertising, hoping that friends and a few intrepid diners will spread the word. This way, kinks can be worked out in the kitchen and among the waitstaff. By the time a story or two about the place is published, luring more diners to the eatery, whatever issues surfaced in the beginning will be resolved. Comment.

With only one season as the music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic under his belt, 32-year-old conductor Michael Christie is already leaving an indelible mark on the organization. Comment.

Dancers, artists, musicians and scholars are headed to Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus for a one-day-only, free celebration of "Native Americans: Living the Diaspora." On Wednesday, the university is focusing its semi-annual diaspora conference exclusively on Native American culture and art, hosting a myriad of performers and events that will take place throughout the day and are open to the public. Comment.

There is nothing like a good scare to celebrate the Halloween season. That’s the idea behind the Micro Museum’s "Haunted Maze," which will be terrifying Brooklynites during the last three Saturdays of October. Comment.

Contrary to your guesses, BoCoCa is not a foreign confection, a chic restaurant, or a product of Coca-Cola. Rather, it is a contraction of the neighborhood names Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens that are uniting on Oct. 14 to celebrate two neighborhood additions with a wine-and-food tasting for all. Comment.

Atlantic Yards: One of the remaining property owners in the footprint of the proposed Atlantic Yards project is suing developer Bruce Ratner for mounting a surveillance camera in his building, and then having him arrested for taking it down. Comment.

Smartmom: When Smartmom’s Friends with Brownstone ask if the Oh So Feisty One would be willing to water their plants or feed their pets while they’re away, she almost always says “yes.” Comment.

Development: Will the next freak in the Coney Island be a 50-foot jellyfish, a phosphorescent whale with a gaping mouth or the architectural love child of a Beluga and the Cyclone? Comment.

Letters: The front-page picture of Maggie Gyllenhaal is both tasteless and sexist (“Hello, Neighbor!” Oct. 7). You have insulted your readers and Ms. Gyllenhaal. Is this any way to treat a new neighbor? Comment.

It’s not just any neighborhood where people can swipe a cat off the street, have his or her genitals surgically removed, and be declared a hero. Comment.

Editorial: Just who does Charles Gargano think he’s working for — the public that pays his salary or developer Bruce Ratner? Comment.

Development: A developer’s plan to turn a 118-year-old Fort Greene church into a playground for the rich was temporarily derailed last month by city landmarks officials who took issue with the scale of the 13-condo project. Comment.

Development: That wacky house that everyone knows as “that wacky house” in Park Slope on Second Street and Seventh Avenue, is again on the market — for a wacky price. Comments (1).

Take one crew of cyclists, add a traffic-jam’s worth of cars, a marathon of runners, a pack of walkers, a Peninsula-full of dog-owners, stir in a terabyte of wireless Internet users, a murder of birders, and a smattering of strollers, and at times, Prospect Park can border on mayhem. Comment.

Rep. Vito Fossella has donated $1,000 he received from disgraced ex-Rep. Mark Foley to a Staten Island charity for abused children, and now, Fossella’s Democratic rival for Congress is demanding that he return the $7,000 he’s gotten over the years from embattled House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Comment.

Development: The city Landmarks Preservation Commission has taken up the cause of protecting a Civil War–era mansion in Clinton Hill that is slated to be torn down for luxury condos, The Brooklyn Papers has learned. Comment.

Atlantic Yards: A card-carrying member of the Manhattan establishment has turned on Bruce Ratner’s starchitect, Frank Gehry, calling his design for the Atlantic Yards project “a large part of the problem.” Comment.

Atlantic Yards: Raising money to fight Bruce Ratner has never been as healthy, delicious or entertaining as it will be next week. Comment.

While the NYPD denied newspaper reports that it stopped and frisked black teens in a Park Slope subway station last week, the possible subjects of the alleged searches saw things a bit differently. Comment.

Atlantic Yards: Journalists and opponents of the Atlantic Yards aren’t the only ones complaining that the mega-project’s lead state agency is withholding public information — now a local state legislator is making the same claim. Comment.

Development: Only the dead leave Brooklyn. Comment.

A Manhattan-based real-estate giant, the Corcoran Group, has come under the scrutiny of federally backed agents who charge that the firm steered white home-buyers in Brooklyn to white neighborhoods and discriminated against blacks. Comments (1).