From the mailbag: "Starting this week New York will abandon the letters column in favor of 'comments.' Letters will be excerpted in order to get to the main events, online traffic will be graphed, and awards will be celebrated. The patient's head is now completely lodged in its own anal cavity!"
In the Times magazine this weekend, we learned that "it is possible to move out of the class you were born into, either up or down... but the transition almost always means a great disruption to your sense of self. And you can ascend the class ladder only if you are willing to sacrifice many of your relationships and most of your values—and only if you first devote yourself to careful study of the hidden rules of the class you hope to enter." Also, we hear that rising U of Illinois sophomore and Park Avenue Peerage blogger James Kurisunkal has transitioned from New York magazine profile punchline to New York magazine intern. Congratulations, James!
Looking for work? Want to get in the ground floor of a can't-miss new idea? Your ticket may have already been stamped!
We feel like this article on an obese chihuahua might, perhaps, be trying to tell us something about its owner, Pamela Arconti, an executive assistant on Wall Street. (Her dog, Lola, weighed 16.2 pounds when the normal weight for chihuahuas is four to six pounds.) There are no photos of the owner, so we just have to go by the clues laid out for us in the article:
We're hearing that music writer and editor Melissa Maerz—most recently co-editor of New York's brand-new "Vulture" blog, former Spin editor, and current girlfriend of Chuck Klosterman—is leaving Adam Moss's tender embrace for that of Jann Wenner. Hopefully Chuck's taught her how to keep her cubicle clean.
Today's New York contained one of the most self-indulgent articles ever written. It was by James Cramer and it was, of course, about James Cramer. Could Gawker do better? We naturally turn to look inward. It was editor Alex Balk who came up with some answers.
This week, New York magazine marks the descent of book-industry tradeshow BEA on our town with "Book Hunt," a special section celebrating our city's literary culture. Or maybe celebrating our city's perpetual cutthroat, superficial search for the next lit it thing to fetishize and then discard! Same diff. Here, you can vote ("our tacky idea") on which promising young writer's pagelong excerpt is most deserving of... who knows! Something! We're partial to the one whose mom died and the Ethiopian. Still confused about whether it's fruitless and pointless to try to make it as a writer in this city? Let New York connect some dots for you.
According to Parker Posey, the best thing about being famous isn't all the free shit—it's that your friend's dog won't get in trouble for biting a girl. "She was totally freaking out, and she wanted to go to the emergency room and everything. She was stoned, you know?" Parker explained to New York mag. "But then she recognized me, and it just changed the whole temperature of things. She was like, "Oh, my God, I love you," and everything was fine. That's what's good about being a celebrity."
"It seems a bit excessive to rent and completely redo an apartment for a single burst pipe," writes Manhattanite Jeffrey Hurley to, and in, New York Magazine. "Has the productivity of the construction industry brought people to this? I would've thought a week at a nice hotel would have sufficed to mop up some water and redo the floors. It's borderline decadence." He just might have a point. There was something sort of vaguely almost excessive about modern furniture collector Sharon Colman's floor to ceiling apartment renovation, wasn't there?
New York magazine goes against type this week in a searing indictment of the medical treatment afforded to the lower classes and people of color who develop cancer. How else to interpret this collage of survivors other than a to-the-trenches style photo depiction of the horrifying fact that so many wealthy, entitled people in our town manage to survive the illness?
We hear today's New York mag profile of Tom Ford got tamed down a bit in late edits. While the published piece does contain lots of talk about his underpantsless junk, the actual description of said junk didn't make the final cut. "Nice and thick" is the summary description from one early reader of the piece. See? Now that's service journalism. And of Tom Ford's business, we'd expect nothing less. Now, back to your regular high-falutin' coverage.
New York magazine is looking for a research manager. What type of candidate they desire says, it turns out, quite a lot about how the magazine sees itself. Favorite words: "spokesbrand" and "trybrid." Also? As a workplace, its "a very collaborative and self-reliant environment" both!
"I found The Sex Diaries thoroughly entertaining, but I was disappointed by your omission of a critical Manhattan dweller: the college student," writes Lena Chen to, and in, New York mag. "My friends and I were inspired to take a page from your book and start weeklong diaries of our own. After seven days of awkward dates, booty texts, and drunken hookups, we came to a conclusion: Harvard students are getting more play than New Yorkers." Well, sure, we'll buy that. What's a more powerful aphrodisiac than not having gotten any in high school? But Lena neglects to mention a crucial detail in her letter: she writes Sex and the Ivy, a sex blog full of insights like "Is it any wonder that of the guys I have hooked up with, the overwhelming majority are from this year's graduating class? It's not as if two-year's difference means terribly much but the difference, however minute, is enough." What's the real purpose of the letter, then? Perhaps Lena, though she's only a sophomore, is already spreading the word about where she'll be spreading her postgrad legs. Watch your back, Julia Allison!
Today Radar launches a much-deserved attack on New York magazine. John Cook writes: "New York is to journalism what The Eagles were to rock: a technically flawless assemblage of expertly crafted elements that look, on paper (as it were), as though they ought to translate into a superb magazine, and yet somehow still manage to suck." The whole thing is so worth your time (bonus points for "Reading it is like eating a bowl of ice shavings prepared by Jean-George Vongerichten") and it also put us in mind of an email conversation we had some weeks ago with New York's icy publicist, Serena Torrey.
Are Valentine and Olga Rei really the former child superstars they told the author of New York's socialite cover story they are? Stunningly, these notorious liars may have lied about that too! At least, that's what New York's own Daily Intel's Jesse Oxfeld thinks.
Sure, Olivia Palermo is on the cover of New York magazine. But Isaiah Wilner's hotly anticipated article isn't really about her at all. Nor is it really about Valentine and Olga Rei, the Russian stepsiblings who have finally officially outed themselves as the creators of now-defunct website Socialite Rank, which "wiped out what little dignity New York society had left." (Hilarious!) It's especially not about Lydia Hearst, who had complained to Socialite Rank that she'd been told the article would be about "my career as a model and entrepreneur and success and my handbag"—she is mentioned in the article only as a "nonstop e-mailer" of the site. And it's not about Tinsley Mortimer, and it's not about Fabiola Beracasa. It's not even about unearthing the truth about Olivia's shameful, and possibly fake, letter ("there are four basic theories") to fellow socials, or whether or not Tinsley really elbowed her at that charity fashion show ("the alleged incident"). Turns out, it's all about the mastermind behind Park Avenue Peerage, Socialite Rank's successor-site. He's a University of Illinois freshman named James Kurisunkal. "I live in Urbana, near a farm... I'm like—I'm not even white!" It gets better.
Isaiah Wilner's long-awaited article will be in next week's New York magazine, and the question on everybody's lips is: Who will be the cover girl, boy, or girlyboy? Probably not Kristian Laliberte (pictured here in all his furry glory!) but we can always dream. Other strong contenders are living symbol of the socialzeitgeist Olivia Palmero, last month's living symbol of the socializeitgeist Tinsley Mortimer, and Socialite Rank suspects of yore Peter Davis and Derek Blasberg. (Also: Maybe a completely unknown random person. Your guesses welcome.) Are you so excited? Eeeep! Probably not as excited as Isaiah Wilner, who we hear is looking for this article to open expensive doors for him at, say, Vogue. Good luck to all involved!
Last night, New York magazine scored a terrifying and decisive sweep at the ASME mag awards. (Much more on this soon!) Apparently none can resist New York's glossy to the point of chapsticky take on New York. And who can resist its popular Look Book feature? It's a window into the kind of New York we all not-so-secretly crave, a world of aspiration and consumption and youth. Now, if you walk down any actual block in this town, you're aware that there's a whole other New York, a place whose less fortunate inhabitants rarely find themselves inside the glossy pages of Adam Moss' chronicle of the beau monde. Don't these people also deserve to show off their style? So in honor of the Adam Mossbot and his many awards, here's our take on the Look Book; a chronicle of the real New York. Justin Rocket Silverman and Richard Blakeley are your interlocutors.
