We are unspeakably thrilled to learn from the front page of today's Observer that it's now acceptable — indeed, perhaps preferred — for men to be flabby. But every trend piece needs its "to be sure" graf, and reporter Sara Vilkomerson delivers hers at the very end:
The Observer reports that the otherwise glistening building at 17 State Street has been having some real shit-slinging issues:
• So it really looks like De Niro and pals will buy the Observer. And Kurt Andersen — like Peter Kaplan — is just thrilled about it. [NYM]
• Michael Eisner pisses off Pat Robertson by having the rightwing preacher on his CNBC show, challenges him on gay rights, whether Jews can get into heaven, and whether it was in fact a good idea to have advocated the assassination of Hugo Chavez. For the first time perhaps ever, we're kind of liking Eisner right now. [NYP]
• NBC honcho Jeff Zucker says he's not worried about Today without Katie, or about Brian Williams competing with her. He also says he's thrilled with NBC's primetime performance, positive the stock market is going up up up, and confident that the Iraq insurgency is in its last throes. [USAT]
The true beauty of New York, of course, is public transit. In L.A., it's safe to assume that most of the folks on most of the freeways are more than a little drunk on most of the evenings. But here, subways! cabs! walking! We don't drive drunk not because we're good or pure or noble; we don't drive drunk because we don't drive.
It doesn't officially open, for normal people, for another week. But, even so, today is apparently New Le Cirque day in the New York press. The are nearly 4,000 tag-teamed words on the cover of the Observer about it — and, in fairness, about the Bloomberg building in which it resides. David Carr has another 1,500 words on the front of the Times dining section about the restaurant and its many opening parties. There's even a Carpetbagging-style video report on the opening party on the Times site, reminding us of both Le Cirque's fabulosity and why Carr became a print reporter in the first place. The message of all of this? That it's a big, very fancy, important restaurant for a big, fancy, very important people. That it's exclusive and in-demand, and high society is quietly calculating how to get a table and which table to want to get.
We know how it goes. You have an amusing little conceit — say, a battle brewing between north and south Brooklyn. You know that it's sort of true, and that it's also sort of bullshit, and you're intrigued by the intellectual exercise of spinning it into an argument you can sustain for, oh, maybe 2,000 words. How clever!, you think, as do your colleagues and friends. But here's the thing, which we all forget: Exercises like this hurt innocent people. Pity the poor Californian, set imminently to move eastward for a new writing gig in New York, whose flummoxed plea arrived in our inbox last night:
It's not even a Monday and, still, New York is breaking some interesting news. (Amazing thing, that internet.) The scoop? The mag thinks Arthur Carter has finally found a buyer for the Observer.
The Observer opens up its pink pages to retired Notre Dame English professor Tom Jemielity, a 72-year-old man who quite sincerely laments the loss of metrosexual magalog Cargo. He doesn't care about its sexual identity issues, writing, "I wear what I like and how I like it, and I don't give a shit whether someone else thinks I'm straight or gay because of it. I've got better things to occupy my mind with." And you know what? He's fucking right, even if it makes us feel particularly immature.
Oh, how our mouths were watering after reading Gabe Sherman's dispatch on the Observer's Media Mob blog yesterday afternoon, and not just because its headline alluded to smoked fish. Starting with today's issue, Sherman reported, the Observer would look different. A smaller trim size! (Like The Washington Post!) Five columns instead of six on the front page! A brand-new frontpage design! It is all being done, as it will soon be done at The Wall Street Journal, to save some money on paper, of course. But, still, "it gave us a face-lift," editor Peter Kaplan lemons-to-lemonaded, "that we needed." A face-lifted Upper East Side-bred beauty? This we'd have to see. And so we found ourselves out of the house uncharacteristically early today, purchasing an Observer at the corner newsstand. (Couldn't begin to tell you the last time we did that.) We gave it a good look. And we reached a verdict: The new Observer looks just like... the old Observer.
• Nearly a month after ur-Politicker Ben Smith left the Observer for a lower-brow but higher-salary life at the Daily News, the pink paper has found a new political honcho to fill his shoes (if not necessarily his gym socks). Josh Benson, a political reporter for the Observer in the mid-Nadler years and now covering Jersey politics for the Times, will return to Kaplan's crew after the Newark mayoral race wraps up.
Heterodox thought on the Voice massacres: Messy and dispiriting and disrespectful to longtimers and legends though this period may be, perhaps all the messiness will make the paper once again something actually, you know, interesting and worth reading?
You have to hand it to the ever-blushing Observer — days after news broke that Page Six's Jared Paul Stern had allegedly tried to shake down billionaire Ron Burkle, and they still manage to delight us by sending Gawker alum Choire Sicha up to the Catskills for some cozy time with Stern and his wife, Ruth "Snoodles" Gutman. While Stern's working the press galore, the Observer wisely just lets the voice recorder run, resulting in some really revealing quotage. First, there's the delusional:
It's not exactly news that people leave the The New York Observer for a pasture that's greener — as in more greenbacks. But usually those leaving are the smart, glib young writers who arrived just a year or two earler as smart, glib young college grads. Ben Smith, on the other hand, who announced on the Observer's Politicker blog today that he's leaving the paper for the Daily News, is a comparative old fart, 29 years old and with a media career elsewhere before he arrived at the pink paper. But, then, at that ripe old age he's also got a wife and two kids to feed, and so we imagine that greenback issue was even more pressing than usual.
The Observer's aggressively bespectacled Gabe Sherman wins the Gawky gold star for delivering the answer we've been looking for: The piece Judy Miller is working on for The Atlantic is about Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi. It was assigned months ago, Sherman reports, before James Bennet was named editor, and it's unclear whether Bennet plans to run the piece. He does, however, have a working telephone.
It's things like this that make us realize just how colossally dorky we are:
We're totally digging this we-ask-you-answer thing. Today brings answers to two more of our outstanding queries. Outstanding!
Lately we've been kind of into this whole ask-for-things idea. (It's new for us, and apparently it works.) So yesterday we reported the rumor that Judy Miller is working on a piece for The Atlantic, and we asked for your help. "Anyone have more confirmation that Judy's working for The Atlantic?" we queried. "On what? To be published when?" You can imagine our excitement, then, to find on the Observer's Media Mob sorta-blog today the headline, "Miller Back From Middle East, Writing for Atlantic." Gabe Sherman reports:
Today's Observer publishes a tough investigation into what they identify as the new Affect, a subtle-yet-annoying dialect practiced by city girls of a certain ilk. While we may be so surrounded by the uptalking sounds of these young women as to hardly notice them, linguists identify the Affect by the continual extension of vowels, clipped consonants, and the hoarse whine of Parliaments. The junior linguists at the Observer also posit that there's also another means of identifying the Affected:
A brand-new mom we know recently paid a visit to Upper Breast Side, which describes itself as "New York City's first breastfeeding boutique," and she filed this intriguing report:
