New York City has no shortage of sites that have a direct connection to the Titanic. (See our handy map of some of them below.)

One such landmark is the Jane Hotel, formerly known as the American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailors’ Home and Institute, which on April 19, 1912 was the site of a memorial service for surviving sailors rescued from the Titanic.

The theme for the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series at Joe's Pub in March was Strange Places. Listen to the extraordinary — and absurd — environments that authors Jessica Anthony, Amelia Gray and Heidi Julavitz conjured up their readings.

The Center for New York City Affairs hosted a forum on February 2 to review the connection between child welfare and juvenile justice in New York City and the state.

The event, entitled “Ties That Bind: Reimagining juvenile justice and child welfare for teens, families and communities,” was intended to coincide with the implementation of key new initiatives that would bring the administration of the intertwined child welfare, juvenile justice and foster care services under New York City jurisdiction. 

If there is a lesson to be learned from the post-curtain talk between John Hurt — who has just finished a limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater in Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” — and philosopher Simon Critchley, it’s that if you throw philosophy at an actor, he’ll throw it right back.

The Happy Ending Music and Reading series has formed a partnership with the arts colony Yaddo located in Saratoga Springs, New York, to present programs featuring writers who have been Yaddo fellows. On December 7th, curator Amanda Stern welcomed three Yaddo alums at the series’ performance home, Joe’s Pub, for a program entitled “Reality and Scandal.” 

The Asia Society inaugurated its new Asian Arts & Ideas series this month with “The ‘Chindia’ Dialogues,” a three-day forum that examined the confluence of the world’s two most powerful developing economies.

The organizers chose an unusual point of departure for event — not a historical overview, but a conversation between Jonathan Spence, former Sterling Professor of History at Yale, and the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh.

The poet Anne Sexton took her own life in 1974, but had she lived, this year would have marked her 83rd birthday. Reason enough, thought the actor Paul Hecht, to organize an elegant tribute to her at the Cornelia Street Café on Nov. 14.

With the three-month wait for the re-opening of newly renovated Joe’s Pub over at last, you’d think there would be cause for celebration. But Happy Ending Music & Reading series host and curator Amanda Stern decided on “frustration” as the theme of her series opener, inviting authors Seth Fried, Jesse Ball, and Paul La Farge to vent, with plangent musical guest Anni Rossi adding the low notes.

Two famed poets, essayists and translators — Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger — recently read from new work at the True Story: Non-Fiction reading series at the KGB Bar in the East Village.

While diplomats and academics met at the General Assembly of the United Nations on the East Side of Midtown Manhattan, the Asia Society hosted "Voices from Burma," an event honoring the stories of Burmese refugees and political prisoners.

Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, actor Kathryn Grody, writers Amitav Ghosh and Deborah Eisenberg, and former political prisoner Law Eh Soe read from Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Survivors of Burma's Military Regime. Veteran journalist, educator, and current Director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations Orville Schell opened and closed the event.