Boerum Hill John Cassidy, staff writer, The New Yorker; author • Sarah Crichton, editor, Farrar, Straus & Giroux • Emily Gould, blogger, Galleycat; author • Courtney Hodell, editor, Farrar, Straus & Giroux • Samantha Hunt, author • Scott Malcomson, editor, The New York Times Magazine • Lawrence Osborne, author • Jonathan Lethem, author • Katie Roiphe, author • Jonathan Burnham Schwartz, author • Craig Seligman, critic, Bloomberg News; author • Elizabeth Spiers, contributing writer, Fortune; author • Michael Thomas, author
Carroll Gardens Kurt Andersen, author; radio host; editor at large, Random House • Joshua Ferris, author • David Grann, staff writer, The New Yorker; author • Phillip Lopate, author and essayist • Richard Nash, editorial director, Soft Skull Press • Vijay Seshadri, author
Clinton Hill Molly Barton, editor, Penguin • Susan Choi, author • Laura Ford, editor, Random House • Fiona Maazel, author • Benjamin Nugent, author • Meghan O’Rourke, literary editor, Slate; poetry editor, The Paris Review; poet • Anna Stein, agent, Irene Skolnick and Associates • James Surowiecki, staff writer, The New Yorker; author • Matt Weiland, editor, The Paris Review
Cobble Hill Geoff Kloske, publisher, Riverhead • Stephen Metcalf, critic-at-large, Slate • Nathaniel Rich, editor, The Paris Review; author • Eric Simonoff, agent, Janklow & Nesbitt • Alex Star, editor, The New York Times Magazine • Paula Fox, author
Ditmas Park Roger Hodge, editor-in-chief, Harper’s
Dumbo Michael M. Thomas, author and essayist
Fort Greene Jennifer Carlson, agent, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner • Bryan Curtis, contributing writer, The New York Times Magazine • Jennifer Egan, author • Sarah Fan, editor, New Press • Ryan Fischer-Harbage, agent, • Fischer-Harbage Agency • Melissa Flashman, agent, Trident Media Group • Amitav Ghosh, author • Emily Haynes, editor, Plume • Brigid Hughes, editor in chief, A Public Space • Trena Keating, editor in chief, Dutton • Chris Knutsen, editor, Vogue • Jhumpa Lahiri, author • Simon Lipskar, agent, Writers House • Sarah Rainone, editor, Doubleday • Rakesh Satyal, editor, HarperCollins • Emily Takoudes, editor, Ecco • Toure, contributing editor, Rolling Stone; author • Colson Whitehead, author
Gowanus Paul Ford, editor, Harper’s; author; blogger
Kensington Daniel Radosh, author; blogger
Park Slope Paul Auster, author • Jonathan Safran Foer, author • Mary Gannon, editor, Poets & Writers • Ben Greenman, editor, The New Yorker; author • Colin Harrison, editor, Harper’s; author • Kathryn Harrison, author • Steven Berlin Johnson, author; blogger • Edward Kastenmeier, editor, Knopf • Porochista Khakpour, author • Nicole Krauss, author • Megan Lynch, editor, Riverhead • Sarah McGrath, editor, Riverhead • Suketu Mehta, author • Elissa Schappell, contributing editor, Vanity Fair • John Sellers, author • Darin Strauss, author • Alexandra Styron, author • Bill Wasik, editor, Harper’s; author • Larry Weissman, agent, Larry Weissman Literary
Prospect Heights Mike Albo, author • Julia Cheiffetz, editor, Random House • Becky Cole, editor, Broadway Books • Keith Gessen, editor, n+1; author • Philip Gourevitch, editor in chief, The Paris Review; staff writer, The New Yorker; author • Mark Kirby, editor, GQ • Larissa MacFarquhar, staff writer, The New Yorker • Rick Moody, author • George Packer, staff writer, The New Yorker; author • Matt Power, author • Laura Secor, author • Paul Slovak, editor, Viking
Red Hook Philip Nobel, architecture critic; author • Jody Rosen, music critic, Slate; author
Williamsburg Jami Attenberg, author • Philip Dray, author
Windsor Terrace Aaron Gell, editor, Radar • Myla Goldberg, author
Illustrated by Philip Burke
OCTOBER 20, 2008 BY IRINA ALEKSANDER
Mad About the Man: What Do Women Really Want?
Mad Men’s Don Draper! He’s the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit With a Package! Whining About Stepford Dads: ‘It’s Not Terribly Erotic’
“DON DRAPER IS EVERY PARK Slope mom’s fantasy,” said Paula Bernstein, a 40-year-old author who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, a video editor, and their two children. “The fact that he is so emotionally withholding and mysterious is frustrating, but women are intrigued by men like that, and as much as they say they want a sensitive guy who’s going to let it all hang out, there is an appeal to a man with secrets.”
Ms. Bernstein was speaking about the darkly compelling protagonist of Matthew Weiner’s 1960s advertising drama Mad Men, which airs every Sunday on AMC, transporting scores of New York women into a haze of longing for an era they never knew and a type of man to whom they definitely aren’t married. Who, in fact, may no longer exist.
Don Draper is a bastard, most of these women will concede. He cheats on his pre-Friedan-ized wife, Betty, going through mistresses like packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes. He is stoic, handsome, emotionally stunted.
But he also reminds us of a time before suits were replaced by messenger bags and Converse sneakers. Before hairless chests and Cialis; before men knew pop-psychology phrases like “displaced anger” and “defense mechanisms” and talked about how their parents fucked them up; before Dr. Phil; before dads posted photos of themselves with their babies on their Facebook pages; before paternity leaves—there were men like Don Draper.
“If you just compare him, to, say, Patrick Dempsey on Grey’s Anatomy, Dr. McDreamy comes off as a whiny little sensitive bitch,” said Lindsay Robertson, 31, resident of Carroll Gardens and a self-described member of the “Draper estrogen brigade.”
OCTOBER 27, 2008 BY MEREDITH BRYAN AND JOE POMPEO
NINTH INNING
No Yankees, No Mets, Just a City Compulsively Clicking: RCP, Drudge, HuffPo, Politico and FiveThirtyEight.com; ‘Telling People Not to Give Into Anxiety Makes It Worse’
IT WAS AN UNSEASONABLY WARM evening in a courtyard behind a midtown dive bar called Rudy’s, and a casual after-work crowd of Obamaphiles was bathed in the light of a Florida State football game projected on the wall, talking politics over $9 pitchers of beer. The mood was festive, anticipatory, measured. With just a dash of paranoia.
For the overwhelming number of New Yorkers who support Barack Obama, the news has been allll good lately. Numbers up. Lookin’ sharp. McCain flailing. So why can’t everyone just sit back and relax?
We’d be the last to argue that New Yorkers’ overproduction and overconsumption of media is news. But there’s a strange, unsettling feeling behind the great campaign obsession of 2008: sincerity.
Let’s admit it: Many cynical, hardened New Yorkers are experiencing a refreshing surge of actual emotion toward their Ivy-educated, book-writing, multiracial, bar-admitted candidate!
Perhaps all this frantic clicking and neurotic number-crunching and magical thinking, then, is simply a way of shielding these rarely exposed soft spots. “It’s like when I fly in a plane,” said a lawyer, 35. “I know rationally that chances it will crash are next to nil, but looking outside again and again, checking the wing flaps, is reassuring emotionally.”
NOVEMBER 10, 2008 BY FELIX GILLETTE
NYTV: A Star is Reborn So 2008 restored Couric’s star status; ‘Give me an hour,’ she says
ON THE AFTERNOON OF FRIDAY, OCT. 31, KATIE COURIC SAT DOWN IN the Olympic Flame diner at the corner of 60th Street and Amsterdam, and ordered a cup of coffee.
O.K., Ms. Couric, it’s trick or treat time: What would you want from CBS, the network that paid you a reported $15 million a year to lure you from your perch at NBC’s Today?
“I’d like an hour,” said Ms. Couric.
She’s already getting that, albeit on an ad hoc basis. On Monday, Nov. 3, the night before the election, the network was giving the CBS Evening News (which is typically a half-hour long) twice its usual length, said Ms. Couric. She was looking forward to the extra real estate. In an ideal world, if she had her druthers, the expansion would be permanent.
“I really would like more time,” said Ms. Couric. “Because I think time is not our friend at the Evenin
g News.”
Not long ago, the suggestion was put about that time was not on Ms. Couric’s side at CBS. According to various news reports back in April, CBS, disappointed with her performance but unwilling to pay the ghastly sum the premature termination of her contract would entail, was letting her run out the clock and then planning to cut her loose. Or it was she, frustrated with the network’s handling of her and her show, who was planning to cut the cord at the earliest possible moment.
But against the odds—she wasn’t allowed the opportunity, for instance, to anchor a single presidential or vice presidential debate for CBS—Ms. Couric has used the 2008 presidential elections to make herself a commodity again. Not the too expensive piece of furniture the Tiffany network had bought and regretted, but the game-changing political journalist she aspired to be when she first took the Evening News. Hers was the most memorable interview of the 2008 election. Über political blogger Mark Halperin named her one of the five most important people in politics not running for president.
NOVEMBER 17, 2008 BY GILLIAN REAGAN
THE OBSERVATORY: RAHM POKED ME!
Barack Obama’s White House Is the First Facebook Administration—From Jon Favreau to Austan Goolsbee!
LAST WEEK, JUST MINUTES after winning the presidential election, Barack Obama sent an e-mail—to me.
“I’m about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first. We just made history.” We did, didn’t we? “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” Signed: “Barack.”
I’ve been on a first-name basis with Barack, our president-elect, since he announced his candidacy nearly two years ago. And in recent months, I’ve received a “personalized” e-mail, Twitter tweet, YouTube video or Facebook update from Mr. Obama or his campaign staff almost daily, assuring me that we were in it together, that we could bring about the change that was so often referenced in 2008. Like my friends and big brother, Barack Obama is part of the Facebook generation.
And so it holds that a good chunk of the folks Mr. Obama will take to Washington with him in January are children of the Internet as well. Let’s call it the Facebook Administration. Sure, politicians have had Web pages and e-mail addresses for years. But so many of those fall easily out of date; their owners treat them with neglect and even contempt. This is different. For the first time, a White House administration is happily online, their profiles—personal and political—there for our perusal; we can express support, irritation or anger for our leaders, and the public, to see. Want to link to Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s Facebook page? Or tell him you hate his guts? He’s there on Facebook. Go for it!
And there are many other Facebookers whose names are being bandied about for top administration posts: Jason Furman, a senior economic adviser during the campaign (his profile picture is a snapshot of his baby girl); Jon Favreau, Mr. Obama’s head speechwriter, who has almost 600 Facebook friends; and Reggie Love, the president-elect’s personal aide, who is friends with Harold and Kumar’s Kal Penn!
DECEMBER 1, 2008 BY JOHN KOBLIN
OFF THE RECORD: The Web Guru
As Media Shatters, Jeff Jarvis Is Ideologue Seer of New Age; ‘Journalists? They’re Community Organizers!’ Says Professor; ‘He and I Edged Closer,’ Says Bill Keller; ‘Bullshit,’ Says Jarvis
IF YOU WANTED TO WIPE OUT the American media establishment in one blow, you might have targeted the Grand Ballroom on the third floor of the Plaza hotel at around 9 a.m. on Nov. 12.
The Foursquare Conference was organized by media mogul Steve Rattner’s Quadrangle Partners, and had the kind of exclusive list Mr. Rattner is known for. Barry Diller attended the conference, as did Lachlan Murdoch, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Tribune chief Sam Zell.
It was just the place for Jeff Jarvis, the tall 54-year-old professorial-looking guy who was looking intently through unfashionable glasses at the participants of a panel discussion on the state of American media, from his perch up front.
The blogger, professor and media consultant has, through his Web sites, seminars, journalism classes, panel-discussion appearances and the occasional flame-war, preached for some time now the gospel of New Media. These days, it’s taking hold—and not just among the patchwork constituency of media studies majors, technophile utopians and media malcontents left and right. To oversimplify it: The old business of journalism has failed. It was full of monopolies, a lot of egos, a lot of overhead; presided over by a medieval guild of protectionist editors, copy editors, managers; staffed by reporters who were doomed to stand alongside “competitors” to cycle out the same press-conference reports for only marginally different audiences.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
A new model of journalism, one that starts in his West 40th Street classroom, begins with new ideas, a smaller staff and a direct cooperation with the public to contribute stories, ideas, videos and more.
If newsrooms are getting smaller, anyway, it’s time to rethink them. Critics, opinion writers, lifestyle writers are all a waste of space. In an industry with few resources, throw them overboard first. Editors just get in the way. They should teach the public how to report for itself, instead of coming between them and the news.
DECEMBER 8, 2008 BY DANA RUBINSTEIN
BROKERS AS SHRINKS
Hardened commercial brokers find themselves empathetic ‘hand-holders’ to jittery Masters of the Property Universe
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
DO YOU FEEL BURDENED WITH AN EMPTY STOREFRONT? ARE YOU convinced you’re the only landlord saddled with too much debt? Do you feel terrified that the bottom of this infernal market will never come? Are you anxious? Depressed? Lonely?
Call your broker.
The plunging market has turned commercial real estate brokers—those hard-nosed, pinstriped wheeler-dealers who play by few rules but their own—into purveyors of comfort and wisdom. It’s an activity that brokers, being brokers, have archly dubbed “hand-holding.”
“The landlords, the owners, the developers, they are in need of constant hand-holding and assurances,” said Faith Hope Consolo, chairwoman of the retail leasing and sales division at Prudential Douglas Elliman. “Now, to hear from a landlord five times a day is not unusual. The same landlord. And asking the same questions over and over. If they ask you the same question at 9, they ask it again at 11:30.”
Of course, absent a triplicate prescription pad, there’s only so much a broker can do to calm a client’s nerves. And, thankfully, not all clients are equally panicked.
“All that’s happening now is that people want information,” said Simon Wasserberger, senior vice president at CB Richard Ellis. “Nobody’s jumping out a window, at least that I know of.”
DECEMBER 1, 2008 BY GEORGE GURLEY
THE NEW YORK WORLD: HOW TO BE BROKE AND NOT BE A SUCKER
SO I’M BROKE. I HAVE A NEGATIVE balance. Minus $9.44.
Nothing to do, nowhere to go, imprisoned here on Roosevelt Island. Back in ’99 I bought a $400 bottle of wine at Raoul’s to impress what I thought was my girlfriend. Turned out I was merely one of three dudes she was nailing. And now I can’t even afford giant litter box liners. The cat’s been wobbling around making it real clear she’s not happy about the litter box situation. Tried to do a makeshift job with pieces of garbage bag and Scotch tape but it’s just not working. Cat’s giving me funny looks. Translation: Mama, I’m gonna drop some dookies in your bathtub again.
So this morning on the way out I stopped at the A.T.M. in the lobby. No real need to—I knew I had at least $140, I’m on top of things, got my life under control, but why not withdraw $60? That’s when things get fuzzy. First, shock, then a real sinking feeling of hopelessness. Is this rock bottom or the beginning of the end? What will happen? Will I starve or go mad? Coal mines, tenements, Third World countries. So much for cat box liners—that’s out. All a sudden, a woman screamed into my ear, “Max! Max!” H
er little boy was just down the hall. Too deflated to scream back at her: “Hate to break it to you, lady, but odds are Max will turn out to be a complete dope. Maybe next time go with a goofy lower-expectations name like Buford or Dippy.”
Had an endoscopy. Was worried I had Barrett’s esophagus and gout. Gastroenterologist Dr. Bamji gave me a clean bill of health. So decided to celebrate last night, stayed out until 10 a.m. Pretty sure at 6:30 a.m. I was talking to Lydia Hearst on the phone in Madrid and that I’m invited to her Xmas costume party. All day been burping, gurgling and tooting even after popping Beanos, Gas-X and Tums. An endoscopy is when they cram a black tube down your throat. Was paranoid about anesthesia so asked for smallest dose, which meant I was conscious the whole procedure and gagging. Sexy Asian nurse kept telling me to “Just relax” during the deep throatage. Dr. Bamji promised to put a finger in my ass next time. May cancel. Well, for six weeks I was waking up at like 6 every morning from the gurgling sounds in my throat. I’d sit up, burp 20 times, then drift off before another episode. Dr. Bamji has outlawed spicy, fried, fatty, tomato-based foods; citrus, caffeine, carbonated drinks; onions, garlic, chocolate, smoking and binge drinking. Have to switch from Metamucil to FiberCon.
So Malcolm Gladwell has another best seller and everyone’s slobbering all over him, except the lady from The Times, who called it clumsy, glib and thoroughly unconvincing. Makes me feel better about the $4 million advance. Maybe I should write Broke: How to Unlock the Unlimited Power of Being Fucked. Never read anything by Gladwell, though I think I’m one of his “connector” types who start trends and have a special gift for bringing the world together like Paul Revere. For example I invented that late-night party game “Band Names A-Z.”
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 71