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Private nursery school is about expensive toys and wild tantrums . . . but enough about the parents. We've compiled the skinny on twenty established fast-track schools: who goes, famous alums, what strings you can pull, and, most important, what are the exmissions -- that's preschool lingo for getting your kid into Dalton, Spence, or Brearley.

'Tis the season to be worried, say charities facing steep declines in donations.

Sure, New York's a good place to flee one's folks, but it's also a city where family ties run deep -- and strange. The same parents produced Donald Trump and a judge? Diana Ross and a doctor? Paris and Nicky Hilton? (Well, maybe not that strange.) A look at New York's most dynamic brother-and-sister acts: They fight, they trade favors, they want to kill each other, they love each other to death -- and they keep the rest of us deeply entertained.

A road map of crises in a New Yorker's financial life -- and how your neighbors are dealing with them.

Playing Robert Moses, building an archipelago of glittering facilities, and reimagining the city are, for many, the best Olympic sports. A map of our possible future.

By offering to swap ground zero for the airports, does Bloomberg risk giving the city's old nemesis too much Authority?

It used to be paranoia. Now it's being prepared. Robert Kolker hangs out with urban survivalists who've made a science of getting ready for anything the city -- or Osama bin Laden -- might throw at them. Plus: Everything you'll need to survive in the city, whatever occurs, and answers to urban-terrorism FAQs.

Woody's murky finances show he's gone from auteur to employee.

Schools chancellor Harold Levy came in as the consummate manager; he'll probably depart as martyred by the job as any of his predecessors.