If you're lucky enough to be on the Kushner Companies' Christmas card list, you'll have received this lovely holiday missive, along with - wonders of synergy! -a one year subscription to the New York Observer, "purchased on your behalf by your friends at the Kushner Companies." (Wow, we hope they got a deal on that.) While the best part of this gift is that they may not even have to fulfill the whole year's order, we are comforted to know that at least all of Pa Kushner's pals in the joint will be able to enjoy the continuing adventures of George & Hilly during those long prison nights.

• How long will Sumner Redstone hold on to Midway games? Hopefully, long enough to give us a few more Photoshopped pieces like the one above. [NYT]
  

The Observer draws aside the curtain on an important budding trend-thing today, going (literally!) underground to document a secret society of rugged dudes who are affiliated with downtown aritchoke-dip'n'taxidermy mecca Freeman's. Here's the deal: there's a club underneath the store associated with the restaurant where men can shoot arrows, ride a bike, and even drink beer. But that's not the only revolutionary thing about the club. The men also engage in other traditional masculine rituals — for example, they "talk about some concepts of the modern day and where everybody's headed and what the current trends are." (Hint: taxidermy, facial hair, pretentious faux-outdoorsiness).

Great news for New Yorker readers: Today's Observer reports that Caitlin Flanagan, the rich lady who's made a career of telling you what a bad wife and mother you are for needing to work, is no longer a contributor to that magazine. While Flanagan claims, through Atlantic dinner party buddy Benjamin Schwarz, that she's making far too much money from her book-writing career (her last tome, Get Back In The Kitchen, You Fucking Whore sold a stunning 8,700 copies), the Observer suggests it might have something to do with the fact that a piece on Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers which Flanagan wrote for The New Yorker early this year that pretty much ripped off vast swathes of a Travers biography. Up next for Flanagan: a book "about teenage girls and the ways that they have been both served and also shortchanged by the women's movement." Cum-Guzzling MySpace Sluts should be available sometime in 2008.

We hear from a semi-reliable source that New York Observer owner and real estate empire scion Jared Kushner has broken up with his girlfriend Laura Englander, whose father's $5 billion hedge fund is under investigation by Guv-elect Eliot Spitzer. We also hear that one of cherubic Jared's ex-girlfriends is none other than Charles Stevenson's daughter. Josie seems the obvious choice, seeing as she graduated from Horace Mann in '01 and Harvard (like Jared!) in '05; she currently seems to work in fashion PR for Intermix—putting that degree to good use! But other daughter Stevenson's niece Alexa is also a possibility. And who is Charles Stevenson, you ask? Why, he's the gajillionaire investor husband of NYT shopaholic and Beauty Junkie Alex Kuczynski. See, full circle and all that.

A reader alerted us to this delightful video of yarmulked Observer owner Jared Kushner delivering a speech at the dedication of a new Chabad building at Harvard. (For the non-Jews in the room, Chabad tries to bring non-observant Jews back into the fold, mostly with free food.) In addition to Jared's charming haute-New Jersey accent, he also delivers this gem:

At right, an ad in today's Post that reproduces an editorial from yesterday's Observer. The pink sheet congratulated the Post for its recent rise in circulation, saying that "the paper has worked overtime to create a voice that appeals to its readers, capturing both the street-smart and the smart-aleck, while becoming a brash player in the political arguments of our age." It's heartening as it is to see one money-hemorrhaging organization salute another; we can't wait until the Observer finally reaches profitability by shedding half its staff and the Post reciprocates with a similar reach-around. Celebrations continue in the nation's fifth-largest paper, which runs a gossip item quoting Donna Dees, the recently-axed News flack. "If I were still there," she says of her former employer, "I most likely would have been under my desk drinking kamikazes and committing hara-kiri instead of at Nobu noshing on sushi and sipping sake." We're not sure why Zuckerman canned Dees: we can count at least three alliterations in that one sentence alone. Talent like that is hard to come by.

The Post Makes News [NYO]
Happy Escapee [NYP]

"The entire point of living in Connecticut or Westchester is to limit your exposure to people who are from Long Island and New Jersey," said one magazine editor who has been commuting from Westport, Conn., through Grand Central for over a decade. "That's why we live there, it's why we wear natural fabrics, and it's why we don't stucco our homes. Granted, there are a lot of people in Westport and Darien who grew up on the island and vowed to end all the ridicule by buying a first home here, but these are the people who wear Nicole Miller and practically strive out loud. As far as we're concerned, Long Island might as well be Barbados—fine for a vacation, but year-round is so not going to happen."

It's another "how great was Spy" piece, this time from The Observer (Graydon Carter's subsequent gig):

So there's not much of a Senatorial race here in New York, what with Hilary Clinton looking pretty close to be the first candidate to ever receive more the one hundred percent of the vote. Across the river, however, it's a different matter: Sen. Bob Menendez is locked in a tough battle with Tom Kean, Jr., a state senator and son of a popular former governor. What's making the race unusually tight is the sense that Menendez, is, well, sort of dirty in the way that pretty much all Jersey politicians are. Fuelling that perception is Chris Christie, a Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney who announced "an investigation—61 days before voters go to the polls—into a nonprofit agency connected to Mr. Menendez." Democrats are predictably apoplectic, charging Christie with political motives. But what sort of prosecutor is he? The Observer lists some of his recent targets:

Tom Scocca's Observer profile of Malcolm Gladwell is a fairly even-handed assessment of the New Yorker writer: He's got a unique style and he often tackles his subjects from an unusual angle, but his recent tendency toward the Socratic method and his reductive, show-you-the-architecture tics grow grating. Still, being the shallow types that we are, we found this anecdote more interesting:

• You'll find a lot of information in this David Carr piece on how journalists are forced to act like C.I.A. agents, "encoding files, shredding notes and switching cellphones." What you won't find is any mention of the Observer, which reported essentially the same story two Wednesdays ago. [NYT]
• Nancy Grace, desperate to wrest the title of World's Most Vile Human Being from Ann Coutler, adds plagiarism to her list of sins. Ann Coulter is 45. [NYDN]
• Chris Wallace was stunned that a non-confrontational question suggesting that Bill Clinton was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 American citizens might have been taken the wrong way. [FishbowlDC]
• James Truman, footloose and fancy free, is learning to live without Conde cash. Culture and Travel launches Friday. [NYT]
• Jon Friedman wonders why H-P never tapped his phone. Maybe it's because when you write columns like "The media world is in convulsions" you're pretty much identifying yourself as someone who has no new information. [Marketwatch]

New York Observer owner Jared Kushner may have enjoyed this schmooze with Marisa Tomei and Lili Taylor last month, but one skirt he's definitely not chasing is that of GOP state attorney general candidate Jeanine Pirro. Kushner's presence on a "host committee" for a Pirro breakfast isn't really a level of intimacy he's, y'know, comfortable with right now:

If you're like most overworked urbanites or desperate stay-at-home moms, you likely got hammered last night, drinking with your friendly enablers or in the secrecy of your bathroom. And you may be an incredibly talented writer but, like, so hungover, dude, and so no publisher gives a shit about your drunk tank dramatics. All that matters is whether or not you got clean and if you did so with the appropriate amount of grit, determination and self-deprecation — then you can qualify for the white-hot Rehab Memoir, and join the ranks of James Frey (pre-fabrication), Augusten Burroughs, David Carr, Kitty Dukakis, Bill Moyers and, the focus of today's article in the Observer, former Page Sixer Tom Sykes.

"Next" you say? New York Observer owner Jared Kushner's record of federal campaign donations have been all straight-line Democratic — senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, even the defenestrated Joe Lieberman. So what's he doing on the hosting committee for a shakedown breakfast in honor of Jeanine Pirro, doomed Republican candidate for attorney general? She's 17 points down in the polls to Andrew Cuomo, and has the faithful support of basically no one, including her own party. Seems doubtful that Kushner would bother to plant pro-Pirro bias at the Observer, though the paper certainly doesn't mind sticking it to Cuomo. (In the Observer's defense, Cuomo is usually more than capable of sticking it to himself.) Perhaps Kushner admires Pirro's courageous stand against pedophiles. One can only help that Kushner is just doing Pirro or someone in her campaign a solid by throwing a little pity-cash her way.

Charles Kushner — convicted tax evader, prostitute dispatcher, and father of new Observer owner Jared Kushner — was released from his New Jersey halfway house last week. He wasn't exactly serving hard time, of course. However, it turns out that Kushner was originally sent to a prison camp at Alabama's Maxwell Air Force Base, but in addition to time off for good behavior, Kushner got his sentence further reduced by completing an alcohol abuse program. This raised a few eyebrows among those that knew him, since his drinking problem was news to them. The emancipated Kushner decamped to his Long Branch mansion for the Labor Day weekend, and was supposedly set to return to work at his real estate company, Kushner Cos., as of yesterday — though it's unclear what he'll be doing there, since he stepped down as chairman before going to jail. Something tells us he'll be taking back the big chair and knocking back a few stiff drinks by Friday. If you spot Charlie in the office, let us know.

If you read Radar this morning - and hopefully you read it this morning, since the site has been intermittent all afternoon - you'd have learned that Mary Mapes, disgraced producer to former CBS anchor Dan Rather, would be joining her old boss at HDNet, Mark Cuban's new high-def news channel. Just one problem, according to the New York Observer:

If you read this week's Observer, you might have seen this article about Gary Spitz, a 42-year-old ball boy at the U.S. Open. If you read yesterday's Times, you might have seen this article about Gary Spitz, a 42-year-old ball boy at the U.S. Open. If you happened to be reading the Washington Post around this time last year, you might have seen this article about Gary Spitz, a 41-year-old ball boy at the U.S. Open. In 2002, USA Today had a fascinating glimpse into the life of Gary Spitz, a 38-year-old ball boy at the U.S. Open. And way back in 2001, ESPN took a look at a 37-year-old U.S. Open ball boy by the name of Gary Spitz.

In a stunning display of craftsmanship, Observer writers Samuel Jacobs and Jonathan Liu today provide an anatomy of the trend piece, "a journalistic form in crisis." Jacobs and Liu do such a thorough job that we're not going to bother to restate any of their findings here; you must read the entire article. (We will offer a warning to the two intrepid Observerites: Be careful who you offend. Daniel Radosh wrote a brave and honest takedown of the trend piece years ago; now he's the blogger who does those caption contests.) In any event, as amplification to the article, we've provided a quick chart that graphs the decline in the fortunes of the trend piece. You can find it below.

We asked about the pending prison release of Charles Kushner, father of New York Observer owner Jared Kushner. A reader pointed us to the charming Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator, which tracked down Kushner p re with ease. Charles has a projected release date of Saturday, August 26. The reader explains: