••• The New York Post profiles the guys at Imagine Swimming: “Talk about pooling your assets— that is just what Casey Barrett and Lars Merseburg [right] did. The two former Olympian swimmers took their $10K in savings and launched Imagine Swimming eight years ago in Manhattan with a handful of students. Today, it is the largest private swim school in New York, teaching 2,200 kids a week in 10 locations, including its new Tribeca pool, where there are a few hundred students on waiting lists.”

••• The New York Times profiles Park 51’s Daisy Khan: “Since the summer, Ms. Khan, a former architectural designer, has emerged as an eloquent and indefatigable public face of the maelstrom surrounding Park51, the Islamic community center and mosque that she and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, are trying to build two blocks north of ground zero.”

••• Bridget Applegate, who works in sales and marketing at the Smyth, is the subject of this week’s “The Hunt,” in the Times‘s Real Estate section.

••• The band Kings of Leon hangs out at Smith & Mills (“Nobody really goes there”) and Mudville 9 (“It’s a saloon, so one night I stumbled in there and thought there would be cowboys”), among other places above Canal. Maybe we can coin a phrase here: PlAboCa for Places Above Canal? Or just AboCa, for “above Canal”? As in, “I’m sorry, but I can’t go shopping with you today. I have to run an errand AboCa.” (Wall Street Journal)

••• The New York Daily News rehashes a certain someone’s article on Dans le Noir?, the dining-in-the-dark restaurant coming to Franklin Street.