Parenting: All the action for you and your kids! Comment.

All the important meetings you should be going to. Comment.

The choice of the next generation could be a new Brooklyn high school for students who want to become “Madmen.” Comments (1).

Williamsburg: Ricci Albenda tried to grow bananas in his backyard — and even though the crop failed (hey, this is Brooklyn!), something else took root for the Williamsburg artist. Comment.

Atlantic Yards: Bruce Ratner will lose $200 million in public money if all lawsuits are not concluded by the end of 2009. Our artist’s take! Comment.

Bay Ridge: A Bay Ridge rail yard site that has become a haven for the homeless people will now be inspected weekly to clear out the area and increase safety. Comment.

Smartmom: Smartmom has to get rid of the big red chair — but, o, the memories! Comment.

Bay Ridge: A local corporation paid $45 million for Dyker Heights’ ailing Victory Memorial Hospital in a private auction this week. Comments (1).

Williamsburg: Kingsland Avenue has become a highway to hell — thanks to hundreds of big rigs that illegally use it as a shortcut through the residential neighborhood. Comments (1).

Williamsburg: First comes the condos, then comes the cardio. Williamsburg’s first 24-hour fitness club will open in the coming months, marking a watershed (or is that a sweat-shed?) moment in the neighborhood’s high-speed transformation from bohemian to bourgeois. Comments (2).

Red Hook: A developer has won what might be a Pyrrhic victory in his battle to build a controversial luxury condo and commercial project in Red Hook — he has defeated the project’s opponents in court, but the real-estate conditions are vastly different than four years ago when the legal war began. Comments (1).

Art: James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer and other famous American artists caught J-fever in the late 19th century, and the Brooklyn Museum has 25 works on paper to prove it in its Luce Visible Storage Center, beginning April 16. Comment.

Carroll Gardens: The developer of a controversial building at the corner of Second Place and Smith Street revealed this rendering, showing his project will reconfigure the adjoining and much-beloved plaza. Comment.

Vinegar Hill: Parents at a Vinegar Hill elementary school say the city has “bamboozled” them with its decision to cram the first Arabic-language academy into their building without extensive discussion. Comments (1).

Two murders shocked normally quiet South Brooklyn last week — the first involving the stabbing of a man by possible sex partner and the other a murder-suicide. Plus all the other crime news from Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Red Hook’s 76th Precinct. Comments (1).

Fort Greene: A shopper spent more than she thought she would when she left her pocketbook on the counter of a fancy soap shop on March 24. Plus all the other crime news from Fort Greene and Clinton Hill’s 88th Precinct. Comment.

Williamsburg: An enterprising perp made off with $35,000 from a home office on Hewes Street on March 30. Plus all the crime news from Williamsburg and Bushwick’s 90th Precinct. Comment.

Bay Ridge: Two suspects posing as maintenance workers attempted to rob a 70th Street house on March 27. Plus all the other crime news from Bay Ridge’s 68th Precinct. Comment.

Vinegar Hill: And you thought your laundry situation was the pits. Try walking a mile in these folks’ shoes — literally. Comments (5).

Cinema: Prostitutes, policement and gangsters. Not another gubernatorial fiasco, it’s “Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master,” a film series celebrating the world of the late director coming to BAMCInematek on April 11. Comment.

Prospect Heights: Two teens attacked and robbed a bicycle deliveryman on Plaza Street East near Butler Place on March 27 — but they didn’t get far before they were collared by cops. Plus other crime news from the 77th Precinct in Prospect Heights. Comment.

Park Slope: Two thieves pounced when two women put their purses down during separate shopping expeditions this week. Plus all the crime news from Park Slope’s 78th Precinct. Comment.

Boerum Hill: The city will pay a developer $240 million to enlarge the currently closed, 11-story, 759-inmate Brooklyn House of Detention into one that holds 1,469 troubled souls, plus boasts ground-floor retail on bustling Atlantic Avenue. Comments (3).

Downtown: A cabbie picked up a woman — but she picked up his wallet — on March 26. Plus all the crime news from Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO, Downtown and Boerum Hill’s 84th Precinct. Comment.

Downtown: A defunct auto dealership that has greeted Brooklyn drivers as they returned over the Manhattan Bridge might start greeting tourists as a hotel. Comment.

Dining: ”Japanimated” — focusing on the art and culture of the land of the rising sun — is the theme of the Brooklyn Museum’s “First Saturday” on April 5. Comment.

Vinegar Hill: Even as the economy shrinks, the Brooklyn Navy Yard continues to grow. This week, the development corporation that manages the site for the city requested proposals for a new, green, and at least four-story-tall industrial building at a dilapidated corner of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, next to the NYPD’s reviled tow pound. Comment.

Gowanus: A highly contaminated former refinery that is “bleeding” coal sludge into the Gowanus Canal will take at least three years to clean before the city can implement its plan to put housing and open public there. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Gersh Kuntzman’s bones are proving slow to heal, nearly 11 weeks after his Jan. 11 slip-and-fall in a Vermont parking lot. Here’s an exclusive update on this breaking story. Comment.

Williamsburg: A wide swath of Williamsburg will be off-limits to high-rise developers thanks to a City Council vote last week that halted 14 projects, some already under construction. Comments (1).

Letters: The mailbag is filled with letters on Bruce Ratner’s no-longer-mega mega-project; The Paper’s bias in favor of Styrofoam trays and against Williamsburg 311 users; film crews; and even a letter from Broken Angel creator Arthur Wood. Comment.

Dining: I’d heard rumors about the building forever. Perched on the corner of North Sixth Street and Wythe Avenue, completely encased in vertical wood planks, some people said it was a restaurant, others claimed it was a private dining club and still more swore it was a warehouse with some dark, nefarious purpose. What’s inside of 77 N. Sixth St. was quickly growing into a Williamsburg urban legend, like the affordable studio apartment or pleasant rush hour commute on the L train. But it’s a Toyko-style Japanese restaurant. Comment.

Gowanus: One of the first properties gobbled up in the ongoing land rush around the Gowanus Canal is back on the market, signifying that developer Shaya Boymelgreen’s plans to build a glamorous waterfront community on the canal’s eastern banks are washed up. Comments (1).

Brooklyn South: Our columnist discovers that the fastest way to strengthen a neighborhood’s heart is to feed its stomach. Comments (1).

Politics: The City Council approved the mayor’s plan to charge car drivers $8 and truck drivers $21 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street by a 30–20 vote on Monday. But here in Brooklyn, the vote went the opposite way. Comments (3).

Music: Perhaps it was fitting that Kagero — a Japanese gypsy rock band helmed by Bedford-Stuyvesant-based frontman Kaz Fujimoto — was playing in a Colombian bar in Queens named after an island in the West Indies. Comment.

Brooklyn Angle: Nobody likes a bad review. So when former City Councilman Abe Gerges — now the newly minted administrative judge at the Adams Street courthouse — read our recent editorial slamming judges for parking on a walkway in Columbus Park, he did what any former show-business performer would have done. He called me to complain. Comments (2).

Kensington: Borough President Markowitz is siding with the descendants of Doris Cohen in their battle to get a Kensington elementary school to retain their mother’s name. Comments (1).

There’s a virus spreading through the borough. Triggered by the blooming of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s collection of cherry blossom trees, it seems that no one is immune from becoming infected with excitement over this gorgeous horticultural event, “Hanami.” Comment.

Beware the ides of September — if you’re using a 2008 calendar from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. Comments (1).

For every beginning, there is an ending, and animal lovers learned that lesson again last week. Comment.

DUMBO: There’s a new high-rise in DUMBO, but this one isn’t residential. Police parked a two-story mobile patrol tower on Front Street between Adams and Pearl streets last week, directly beneath the Manhattan Bridge, puzzling residents of the quiet neighborhood who don’t think of the area as needing 24-hour surveillance. Comments (2).

Brooklyn Heights: Black smoke filled the air in Brooklyn Heights on Tuesday night after a large fire broke out in deli of a Gristedes supermarket on Henry Street — a fire that possibly started in a rotisserie chicken device. Comment.

Williamsburg Waterfront: State officials have turned off the lights on a plan to construct a power plant on the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront — clearing the way for the creation of a long-sought new park. Comment.

Art: It’s not the futuristic nude sculptures or trippy, Alice in Wonderland–style magic mushrooms growing out of the floor that has tongues wagging about the “Murakami” exhibit that opens April 5 at the Brooklyn Museum. It’s the 550-square-foot Louis Vuitton boutique, hawking $5,000 purses and $10,000 canvases within the show, which seems to be the real sensation. Comment.

Downtown: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will relocate some workers to an abandoned Downtown building this week, despite calls from the neighborhood’s leading business group to use the Jay Street office tower as a small business incubator and a new shopping strip. Comments (1).

Downtown: Talk about artistic license. Check out the rendering of Toren, the 38-story skyscraper under construction at the corner of Myrtle and Flatbush avenues. It’s not exactly the most bucolic of locations, though you’d never know it from this rendering, which depicts one of the noisiest places in Downtown Brooklyn as a sylvan glen right out of County Cork. Comments (1).

Prospect-Lefferts Gardens: It could be the development that finally lights a fire under the long simmering Prospect Lefferts Gardens real-estate market — to the delight of some residents and the dismay of others anxious to retain the character of a neighborhood still relatively untouched by new construction. Comments (3).