• CVS has agreed to buy Longs Drug Stores for about $2.7 billion. [Bloomberg]

• The market turmoil hasn't hurt Bruce Wasserstein. Lazard reported a 5 percent gain in profits during the second quarter. [Dealbook]

"Menupages, the New York City based online restaurant menu guides site, is being bought out by New York Magazine, we have learned. This is the first such online buy for NYM..." [Paid Content via Silicon Alley Insider]

Megamillionaire investment banker and New York magazine owner Bruce Wasserstein (currently under attack from our advertisers) is reportedly getting divorced from his wife (#3) Claude, and taking up with "a young Asian beauty with whom he may already be planning a family." The scandalous tale of wealth, sex, and power will be splashed all over New York magazine next week, in Imaginary World. In the actual world, you probably won't be reading about it there. More interesting than the rich-guy divorce story, though, is the angle that the gossips are hinting at oh-so-delicately: What's the deal with all these old super-rich moguls hooking up with younger Asian women these days? Interracial dating amongst the rich, incredible and noteworthy!:

• Billionaire mogul Bruce Wasserstein is leaving his youthful, second wife Claude for an even more youthful "Asian beauty," whom he has been introducing to friends as his girlfriend. According to the Daily News, this practice of old, white men stepping out with younger Asian chicks might just be a trend! [Rush & Molloy]

Billionaire Bruce Wasserstein is under attack from communists! And they're taking the fight to the blogs! SEIU, the service industry union, has been trying to unionize workers at a chain of nursing homes called Atria Senior Living. Atria was recently bought by Lazard Real Estate Partners, which is a little corner of Lazard Ltd., which is the parent company of Wasserstein's investment bank. Since the buyout, SEIU says the nursing homes have raised rents while cutting staff and level of care. You'll find SEUI's tricky pretend financial ads on the sites of the New York Post, the Times, and, yes, Gawker (see attached, or look up). But you probably won't see them over at the homepage of New York Magazine, which is owned by a guy named Bruce Wasserstein. [NYP]

"A major health care workers' union is running Web ads accusing Lazard kingpin Bruce Wasserstein and his firm of exploiting the elderly in pursuit of profits... When users click on the [ads], they are directed to a site, www.improveassistedliving.org, where the lead item reads, 'Gouging Grandma: Billionaire Bruce Wasserstein.'" [NYP]

Bruce Wasserstein

April 23, 2007: "Business leader Bruce Wasserstein is this year's recipient of the Great Negotiator Award given by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School."

• Sports Illustrated and Dasani water team up for world's biggest blowjob billboard. [NYP]
  

• You can't pay people to read newspapers these days. [PEJ]
  

Though he's supposedly giving a speech today at Lazard (the investment bank he heads as his "day job"), New York magazine's owner Bruce Wasserstein reportedly hasn't been doing well lately. Blogging Stocks claims that Wasserstein has been living reclusively for some weeks; moreover, "[h]e has lost 50 pounds and is said to look like a wobbly, 75-year-old" (Wasserstein is 58). Speculation abounds as to whether this is related to his sister's untimely passing earlier this year or the stress surrounding the Time-Warner-ripping report he created. Personal accounts of recent Wasserstein encounters welcome.

We never quite bought Keith Kelly's claim that rich guy, investment banker, Carl Icahn ally, and New York owner Bruce Wasserstein was seriously considering buying the New York Observer. (If you already owned one publication that covers media and politics and business and Manhattan society, we wondered, why would you buy a second one?) But now it's moot: Today Kelly is reporting that Wasserstein is no longer interested — if he ever was.

If we may be serious for just a moment: Playwright Wendy Wasserstein died this morning of cancer. She was 55.

Post media stalker Keith Kelly has an interesting item this morning regarding the fate of our much beloved New York Observer (#15 on our 123 reasons for loving this godforsaken town): After years in the red and a circulation plateauing at about 45k, the pretty pink paper is being "quietly shopped around" to prospective buyers. Specifically, editor Peter Kaplan, who very much wants to save his baby, has hit London to meet with New York moneybags Bruce Wasserstein.

• Investor Carl Icahn signs on Bruce Wasserstein's Lazard to join in his crusade against Time Warner management. New York feature on Icahn's clever business strategy TK soon. [NYT]
• NYT Mag bigthinker Michael Ignatieff leaves magazine, Harvard gig, and the country to rescue his native Canada from its political crisis. NYU bigthinker Noah Feldman, recently signed up as Times Mag contributing writer, seems set to replace Ignatieff there. [NYP]
• Steve Capus named president of NBC News. [NYT]
• And Rome Hartman, 60 Minutes vet, named executive producer of the still-anchorless CBS Evening News. [NYT]
• Dear Les Moonves: For the love of God, please don't make Katie Couric the CBS anchor. Please. Love, Jon Friedman. [MW]
• Conde's standard Christmas directions aren't good enough for Anna. [WWD]

Funny: To magazine people, "closing" usually means something different than it does to salespeople. And, frankly, we don't so much want to be doing their kind. (We don't really want to be doing our kind, either, but it goes with the territory.) Somehow, though, lines got a little crossed yesterday at New York magazine, where some business folks decided to let no selling opportunity go unexploited and therefore reconfigured the email system to automatically append this flackery to the end of every outgoing message: