Thursday night I rode my bike from Manhattan to DUMBO, a small Brooklyn neighborhood next to the water, nestled under the Manhattan Bridge. I was on assignment: I was to attend the grand opening of Singularity & Co., a Kickstarter-funded sci-fi bookstore.

DUMBO (which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), isn't "on the way" to anything, despite being located close to downtown Brooklyn, and so it seems an unlikely place to put a bookstore. On top of that, Singularity & Co. isn't even located on one of DUMBO's main drags, or even a through street: its street corner is literally fenced in by an adjacent power station. Ash Kalb, the store's founder, calls it "the bookstore at the end of the world," which has a nice charm to it, but doesn't sound like a great business idea.

And so, as I got lost in DUMBO, asked for directions, got lost again, and finally was helped out by a kindly old lady with a cane, I wondered to myself: "why?" As it turns out, the question Ash Kalb and his co-conspirators asked was "why not?"