Reading-born necklace eater Simon Doonan is passive-aggressively grumbly this morning in the Observer about how all the city's media internships have been swarmed by "fancy-pants progeny" like CBS CEO Les Moonves' daughter Sara (a Vogue and former Teen Vogue intern, beside whom Doonan was seated at a recent industry event, poor man) and Evgenia Peretz, daughter of longtime New Republic editor Marty Peretz and former Vanity Fair intern, who now writes for the magazine full time. These people might not have their fancy jobs were their parents not famous, he's noticed!

Left: Last week's New York Press cover story about how things are sorta sucky for Jerry Seinfeld. Right: this week's New York Observer cover (drawn by Drew Friedman) for a story about how things are sorta really sucky for Governor Elliot Spitzer. Two things: We had no idea that the stereotypical Hispanic immigrant's fashion sense stopped evolving halfway through the 80s. (No wonder the Observer removed that figure from the paper's actual cover!) Also, we wonder how much time the Press art department spent with their rulers, making absolutely sure that, unlike previous covers by the same editor, the nose of a Jewish man is not drawn more than twice as long as it is wide.

Spencer Morgan goes deep inside the mind of 23-year-old Page Six Magazine columnist and magazine-dynasty heiress-model Lydia Hearst and finds out what astute readers may have already come to suspect: she's not very bright in some ways. I mean, she keeps saying she's "definitely not a socialite" or "airhead" but we keep not believing her. For good reason!

Yoga drama in Carroll Gardens! Three charismatic teachers left Area—the spa and children's clothing store and toy store and yoga wear and yoga studio South Brooklyn monopoly—simultaneously to start their own studio, leaving a "nasty taste" in Area owner Loretta Gendville's mouth. But maybe she should take a page from of one of her ex-employees' books and be more, you know, yogic about the whole thing: "New York is a great laboratory—when the guy on the subway won't move, how do you make that a yogic moment, instead of flipping him off?" [NYO]

Yesterday, Vogue editor Lauren Davis' assistant and socialgay Peter Davis' boyfriend Paul Johnson-Calderone told the Observer that he had been prevented from participating in a "The Hills"-esque reality show called "Frenemies" with Unruly Heir flak, heir Kristian Laliberte, by Conde Nast rules. The same piece implied that Paul and Kristian "were at one time quarreling over the hot pash" of Peter. We wondered what Kristian had to say about all this. Turns out: A lot!

An astute observer of the realms of both politics and portraiture must by now know that Rudy Giuliani is a man of many faces. He's America's mayor, a gun-hating 'bortion-craving conservative. He frowns on civil liberties. He's married, then unmarried and then married again, sometimes to cousins. And yet Catholic. He had cancer. He's a pupa, a chrysalis and a butterfly! Also he is the World Trade Center. Through the throes of his complex and multi-hued transformations, Philip Burke has captured the man for the pages of the New York Observer and sometimes for the New Yorker. What can these paintings tell us about their subject—and hey, about ourselves?

It looks like the New York Observer has somehow yet to find a web host who can withstand a link from Matt Drudge. They're sort of like the goth girl of newspaper websites—when they get any attention they're all, "Oh my God don't look at me I'm so ugly!" Annnd crash. So while their politics desk continues to regularly get stories on the monster uber-crazy-blogger's website (today's apparently is "NY DEMS BAFFLED BY RUDY LEAD: 'I refuse to believe this could happen to our country'... "), their back-office continues to undermine their work. I bet that is really annoying!

I recently started receiving Esquire magazine! (There were air miles to be disposed of, so why not?) And so one came the other week and I sat down and read it. Not sure which issue it was, I think the new one, they all look alike—as in, I just looked at every cover this year and I can't identify which one I read from either word or pictures (what with their covers being a weird corporate last echo of Ray Gun). It was okay! Slightly irritating was that the whole magazine was one long listicle, with "bits" crammed into every corner of every page. The winky hetero-laddishness was a little irksome too, but I know I'm not their target subscriber, not being a credit-card loving, manscaping, overcoat-buying fathead, so I can brush that off. But then yesterday the magazine went and did themselves so wrong. They republished the classic 1966 Gay Talese piece "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" online.

Former New York Observer real estate boy John Koblin is going to be the paper's new media boy reporter.

Jared Kushner, the owner of the New York Observer and bridge and tunnel real estate magnate, has purchased... a 10-story office building on the far West 44th Street? For $87.5 million? Hmm. There's a dot we're not able to connect yet here. It's on the tip of our mind-tongues.... In any event: Kushner immediately twirled his invisible mustache and promised to more than double the rents in the building. [Real Deal]

New York Observer media reporter and chronic party-goer Michael Calderone has ankled the pink paper for Politico. [Fishbowldc]

Therapy patient George Gurley's long love affair with Republican propagandist Ann Coulter, 46 (now 48??), continues today in the pages of the New York Observer. It's the same old shtick from the fiery polemicist, and, like Ann herself, it's pretty damn thin: Hillary Clinton will "impose communism" on America if elected, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are responsible for 9/11, the death of 3000 American troops in Iraq is no big deal, etc. Frankly, it's a little pathetic: Ann has pretty much tapped out her ability to provoke outrage, because we've heard it all before from her. There's pretty much nothing she can do or say at this point to shock or offend. Unless she's somehow satisfied with her increasing irrelevance in the national conversation, she's going to need to make some grand gesture that once again puts her in the forefront of American hate figures. We're not sure how she could do it, but maybe she could start by calling Barack Obama what the kids call "the n word." That might ruffle a few feathers.

The object of your curiosity is a $21 variation on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: a special, though almost every night it's on the menu, described as a "torchon of foie gras, macadamia nut butter, strawberry-vanilla jam, toasted brioche." At a restaurant known for taking culinary whimsy to a sometimes illogical extreme, this invention seems decidedly illogical: a kitschy bastardization of a fourth-grader's lunch.

The Post goes off on some crazy story today about Elli Frank, who runs a service that provides girls for Manhattan parties, and how the New York Observer "accused [her] of prostitution" in a profile in 2004 and supposedly there was a settlement when she claimed defamation. Though, probably, it was not any meaningful kind of settlement, because the story's still there and it says things like "Ms. Frank says her girls don't have sex for money, and don't get propositioned" and also says "Her parents, a former Catholic lay minister and a registered nurse, as well as her three brothers, tease her that she's Heidi Fleiss." Doesn't it seem that any newspaper's lawyer who'd agree to a defamation settlement over a story like that would have to be a complete moron? (Also? Don't terms of settlements usually state that parties are forbidden from mentioning the settlement?) But we think we know why the Page Six item ran—we hear that Elli's telling friends that Paramount caught her story and bought the rights. So she may not be a whore-monger, but.... Well, congrats, ya little fame seeker!

The New York Observer continues its acquisitions with the hiring of a new media editor: One Zachary Roth, late of the Washington Monthly. We figure if you finish this piece of his on election financing or this one on parents and television, you'll know all you need to know about him; we sure didn't so we totally don't. He has a blog with his brother. We have yet to find any pictures of him, but oh, we will.

Near the end of day yesterday, Gawker's Doree Shafrir handed in her two weeks notice. She'll be leaving us for the New York Observer, where she'll write and report on "ideas." (That role has been, it seems, officially unfilled since the departure of Sheelah Kolhatkar for Portfolio over the winter.) Doree began here as an "associate editor" last October, and early this year transitioned to reporting on the media full-time. She can only be replaced here at Gawker with a terrifying room full of jerry-rigged threshing machines held together with baling wire and lubricated with grain alcohol. We sincerely wish her the best of luck in destroying Jared Kushner from inside his own shop—or, at least, in bringing that paper what the boy publisher may not know it so desperately needs.

Exactly how big will tomorrow's New York Observer play the death of Brooke Astor? Cover drawing plus page one, double-column obit? Special guest columnists? Obit pull-out section? An entirely black overleaf? Will they actually not publish the issue in memoriam?

We hear that Rebecca Dana, who left the TV beat at the New York Observer to go to the New York Times but was shanked on her way in the door, has taken Brooks Barnes's old job—or an iteration of it—covering TV for the Wall Street Journal.

New York Observer new gal Meredith Bryan has two solid swings this week: one hit (seriously, the Klute haircut piece! Wild!) and one miss. In the latter article, she writes of an annoying trend that's plaguing Williamsburg and presumably other places where people have a) dinner parties and b) computers. "We were sitting around eating appetizers and drinking wine," Meredith quotes "Eleanna, a 27-year-old artist who lives in Williamsburg" as saying. "Then we somehow started having an argument about yams and sweet potatoes. As in, 'Is a yam a sweet potato?' And Matt was like, 'That's it, I'm going online.' So we all crowded around his computer and learned that yams were not sweet potatoes. This was like, the evening's entertainment." Dear god. This article. Really? Let's all hop into the wayback machine and travel to February 15, 2007, the last time an iteration of this 'technology and real human interaction meet and mingle, so wacky-annoying' article made us want to punch someone in the face.

According to the New York Observer's Lizzy Ratner, the "New Victorians" are a cozy bunch of luxury-addicted, monogamous, career-focussed twentysomething urbanites whose appetites run more to "home and hearth and eating" than the crazy coke-fueled orgies that 'used to be' the earmarks of NYC early adulthood. "Eminent New Victorian couples can be found all over New York these days, puttering about their brownstones (original detail carefully restored), or pushing babies with names like Beatrice, Charlotte, Theodore and Henry in gigantic prams to the local playground," Lizzy explains. Well. This seemed like one of those classic, ridiculous Observer articles that strains to prematurely name and define a trend based on a few specious examples. And on the other hand....