New York

I just attended our first event of the New York City Wine & Food Festival, Giada De Laurentiis's Meatball Madness (check out that meatball selection!), and our favorite meatball of the night was — gasp! — not even made from red meat at all.

First, a disclaimer: a delayed flight meant that by the time I'd arrived, most of the meatballs were entirely picked over. But of those that were still being served, the one that stunned me the most came from midtown Manhattan's Fresco by Scotto. I'll admit that the restaurant — a Manhattan mini-chain that's recently branched out into, of all things, frozen dinner deliveries — was a bit of an unlikely contender. But I was blown away by the restaurant's impressively tender meatball of ground duck and porcini mushrooms, served in a sauce of sun-dried cherries and Barolo wine.

Despite a longtime love affair with ground meats, it had never, ever occurred to me that a meatball composed of duck meat could be so delectable. After tonight, I've decided that it's going to have to be my next kitchen experiment! Have you ever had a duck meatball?

It's the best time of year to be in New York! No, I'm not speaking about the weather (although that's seriously nice, too); I'm referring to the New York City Wine and Food Festival, the long weekend in October each year when food fanatics convene in the big city to watch Food Network talent like Bobby Flay and Alton Brown dish on everything from celebrity cooking gossip to their favorite kitchen techniques.

Claire Robinson's Tacos	Surprising Giada Facts	Alton Brown Gets Funny
Behind the Burger Bash	Top Grand Tasting Picks	Tyler's Ultimate Dinner

For real-time updates, be sure to follow us on Twitter — it'll be just like you're right there. To get you pumped for the return of New York's favorite food event, check out some of our top moments from years past.

>> After announcing last month that she had parted ways with Jane Pratt and Say Media — the backers of Pratt's website, xojane.com — Tavi Gevinson is readying the launch of her own Web magazine, Rookie, on Monday.

The site's editorial content will have monthly themes, with the first focused around beginnings — “[It's] fairly wide-ranging, but definitely focused on ‘back-to-school’ and other ‘firsts,’” said Emily Condon, Rookie's managing editor, who was a former staffer for This American Life.

“Our content respects a kind of intelligence in the readers that right now a lot of writing about teenage girls doesn’t,” Gevinson told New York Times Magazine. “People think it’s just going to be another site or magazine that talks about how great celebrities are or how awful celebrities are or dieting . . .” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Just you wait and see.’”

Gevinson expects to do around three posts a day, with the first appearing after school, the second at dinnertime and the third “when you do your last Facebook check around bed or whatever,” Gevinson said. “I’m in school, and I can’t be at my computer all day.”

She's assembled a staff that includes Condon; New York Times blog specialist Jeremy Zilar acting as Rookie's project manager; Anaheed Alani (wife to This American Life's Ira Glass, who advised Gevinson in negotiations with Say Media, and a former freelance fact-checker for The New York Times Magazine) as story editor; regular writers like Lesley Arfin and Sady Doyle; and guest contributors including Zooey Deschanel, Miranda July, Winnie Holzman, Joss Whedon, Jack Black, Dan Savage, Patton Oswalt, Shannon Woodward, Anna Faris, Kid Sister, Supercute!, Paul Feig, JD Samson, Alia Shawkat, and Fred Armisen.

New York magazine's parent company, New York Media, is handling advertising for the site, and Gevinson's father, who now acts as her manager, says they're currently in talks with potential investors and sponsors.

If you're a fragrance lover in Gotham, you'll want to be at the Anthropologie in Rockefeller Center every evening from March 31 to April 1. The store is hosting a series of fragrance workshops run by some of the industry's finest noses. On the 30th, Le Labo will be talking about "The Art of Perfume" from 6-7pm, followed by "Botanical Essences" with Strange Invisible Perfumes from 7-8pm. To find out what else is on offer, and how to sign up, just keep reading.

Last week the New York Observer published a trend piece that concluded young New Yorkers are having less sex. A sweeping statement based on a handful of people noticing no couples pairing off at the dead end of night. From there, he hastily drew a familiar conclusion: everyone's a narcissist now. People would rather groom their online persona by posting where they're at than actually interact, but — I can assure you — nobody loves sex more than a narcissist.

Nobody knows how much sex people have without straight-up asking (and even then, who knows?), so I did the next best thing. I talked to someone who knows a lot about "young New Yorkers," their parties, and — for better or worse — their sex lives, Brooklyn-based writer Diana Vilibert. See what she thinks below.