• Desperate women have been swindled out of tens of thousands of yuan by a man posing to be a potential husband, who in reality was already married and had three kids. Local police have warned single women to take care.
• New York University has started construction on its second major international campus here in Shanghai. The teaching will remain the same as the campuses in New York and Abu Dhabi as the university has been given independent status. No Chinese censorship?
• Apparently there is too much music in Shanghai, so much so that audience numbers are dwindling. A lack of motivation and self-promotion is to blame. It seems there can be too much of a good thing after all.

Leave it to New York University, the second-largest property holder in New York, to be one of the first American institutions to try and design a building here just for them. According to the student paper, Washington Square News, NYU is coming to Shanghai in full force. more ›

star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur, the new graffiti king in town, Bill Cosby's adorable dog, and the disturbing tale of a yoga instructor who was found guilty of killing his girlfriend, a dancer from Ohio who stripped to make ends meet. more ›

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. more ›