Alicia Colon, our favorite crank at The Sun, has been blogging up a storm of late. It's all the crazy you've come to expect from Alicia, condensed into bite-size bits of batshittery. Call us traditionalists, but we prefer to get our nutty natterings in full-length column form. What's she on about today? Oh, distorting a classic of children's literature! Neat!
Today's David Blum New York Sun ball of crazy—about how the internet has created an environment of permissibility for anonymity which has lead to an upsurge in literary fraud, or something—asks more questions than it answers. We decided to try to rectify the situation.
The New York Sun has long left free, unsolicited, and impossible to get rid of copies on the doorsteps of the posher zip codes of Manhattan (including Howard Dean's mom's doorstep!), but their circulation strategy seems to be expanding beyond the wealthier denizens of our fair city. A correspondent reports that copies of the paper were recently left on doorsteps in Bensonhurst, the working-class, historically Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn that's seen its fair share of racial incidents over the years. It left our tipster to wonder: "Really, couldn't the Sun just move their offices to Staten Island and be done with it?"
The New York Sun's Lenore Skenazy brings her a-game (sorry) to the Alex Rodriguez "busty blonde" story today, making the shocking observation that:
Reporters in New York City have some of the world's greatest human interest stories right in their metaphorical back yard (so few of them actually have back yards). And yet they often write their stories like stereotypical students at a j-school surrounded by cornfields, tossing off story after story in what those who follow the situation say is a disturbing and dangerous epidemic of pieces about teenagers drinking. What's more, a 2007 city survey found that 28% of white reporters at the city's major papers had, within the month before the survey was taken, written the four or five stories in one session necessary to qualify as a "binge."
The New York Post thinks so! In today's special Sunday edition of Page Six, we are told that his new novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, "is bound to set off a firestorm of controversy." Why? Because Chabon "depicts some of his Jewish characters as willing to do anything, including massacring other Jews, in the cause of Zionism."
As he enters his last week as the chairman of Dow Jones & Co., Peter R. Kann has a book review in today's Wall Street Journal Pursuits. It's about a biography of Dolly Schiff, the visionary lady who ran the New York Post from 1939 until 1976. Most of the way through, Kann's piece sounds like a tender love letter to Schiff and her Post—a paper he remembers as an "oasis of independent, albeit leftist, journalism in a gray era when the New York Times was blandly centrist and the rest of the New York press was scattered to the right."
If we've read one 'rich Manhattanites will do anything to get their kids into preschool' article, we've read a hundred. The one in today's Sun is different, though, for two reasons: 1) It's not in New York magazine and 2) it mentions a new weapon in these toddling overachievers' arsenals: r sum s. Also, video r sum s. One preschool director even received a "media kit." But don't worry—she found it "distasteful." Some parents are undaunted, though, and defend their choice to pimp their children however they think best: "'There's such a supply-and-demand imbalance,' the Greenwich Village resident, who asked not to be identified, said. 'It seems like the chances of getting into an Ivy League school or graduate program are better. You can't imagine the stress it creates for parents.'" The stress it creates for people who are just trying to cling to their last shred of hope for humanity was not mentioned.
LA-import froyo chain Pinkberry is gearing up for the opening of its third fourth—goodness!—Manhattan location on Spring Street. Exciting! However, while the yogurt stays frosty, the controversies surrounding the company are heating up. Today in the Sun, Pinkberry president Young Lee denies that LA-based 'copycat' Kiwiberry owner John Bae's claims that Young threatened him with "great bodily harm." "I can't handle this at all," Mr. Lee said. In other bad news, Tasti D-Lite has at long last issued an official statement claiming that they do not consider the unsweetened yogurt purveyors "any competition at all." Will Pinkberry still manage to carve out a big enough niche among this town's rexy ladies? Rest assured that we'll stay on the case.
At long last, the Village Voice has found itself a managing editor. She's Deborah Kolben, most recently of the Sun. Kolben follows the defection of Sun spokesperson Maggie Shnayerson, which suggests that either there's something so wrong at New York's mostly unread wacky conservative paper (as opposed to the wacky, but read, Journal) that even Cooper Square seems idyllic by comparison or that after dealing with Alicia Colon on a regular basis, Mara Altman gives no cause for concern. Full memo after the jump.
Today's Sun article about a rivalry between long-lauded UWS boob mecca Town Shop and upstart Bra Smyth fascinated us for all of twelve seconds until we realized that there would be no photos of Town Shop's famous hands-on bra-fitting procedure. We were also surprised — well, okay, fake-surprised — that the Sun implied that the Upper West Side is our city's only tit district:
It may seem to you like the equivalent of jumping off the Titanic to climb aboard a larger — but still sinking — ship, but congratulations to New York Sun uberflack Maggie Shnayerson, who will be leaving that, uh, organization to toil in the fields of the Village Voice. We suppose it might be nice to not have to read Alicia Colon on a professional level anymore. Full release after the jump.
While many have chosen to disparage the massive bonuses "earned" by Wall Street figures this year, the stout souls at the New York Sun, whose failure to produce a financially viable business model has surely engendered their respect for any sort of fiscal acumen, take a stand for the billionaires. In an editorial yesterday, the paper declared that,
Former Ladies' Home Journal editor Myrna Blyth has done a lot of stuff post-LHJ: She writes for the National Review, and she's also authored such classic texts as Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness—and Liberalism—to the Women of America and the forthcoming How to Raise an American: 1776 Fun and Easy Tools, Tips, and Activities to Help Your Child Love This Country. She's like a less in-your-face, more matronly Ann Coulter. Hot!
Remember how, during the 2004 presidential race, there was that idiot rumor that buying Heinz ketchup would somehow aid the Kerry campaign? And remember how a couple of clever entrepreneurs, banking on the craziness and paranoia of the extreme right wing, put out a rival "W Ketchup"? We always wondered who was dumb enough to fall for it. Thanks to today's Sun, we know of at least one satisfied costumer. That's right, it's our old friend Alicia Colon:
