All Stories | The New York Observer

The Ersatz Aristocrats! The Undoing of Lady Catarina Toumei

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:00:25 -0500

Last summer, outside the Starbucks on Second Street and Covina Avenue in the Belmont Shores neighborhood of Long Beach, Calif., Catarina Toumei stepped out of a beat-up car and made her way to a coffee shop. She had just driven two hours from San Diego to meet with a man named Wolfgang Baron von Hildebrandt. The bearded singer-songwriter and self-proclaimed human rights activist was looking for someone to help him in the PR...

'You Don't Have to Look Down on Hugh Jackman Changing'

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:48:21 -0500

"It's really kind of a boring story," Ron Teitelbaum said, referring to his 14th-floor listing at 165 Charles Street. "I wish I could spin it some way that would be interesting to you."

Are you kidding? Since when is a sale in one of Richard Meier's West Side masterpieces not interesting!

After two years of patient waiting--the three-bedroom came on the market in October 2008, a month after Lehman Brothers collapsed--the 2,541-square-foot transparent spread has finally...

Corrupt, Not Stupid! The Michael Lewis Lawsuit as Literary Criticism

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:35:16 -0500

Late last month a defamation lawsuit was filed against the journalist Michael Lewis. The irony of Mr. Lewis being sued for vilifying anybody is that his body of work is so scrupulously villain-free as to cause the reader to suspect the author has some skeletons in his closet. He wrote a book about baseball in 2003 that made zero mention of the word "steroids," and in similar fashion, he declares at the outset of...

Bike Lames! Straw Men on 10-Speeds in New York's Last Culture War

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:30:50 -0500

"I see people who buy $25 mac-and-cheese on both sides of this argument," Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, told The Observer last week as he finished dinner at Rachel's Burritos in Park Slope and prepared to hop on his bike for the 1-mile trek home. "And yet I do think it's true. I think Marty Markowitz and his ilk have been buffeted over the last decade by change after change that...

Charlie Rose, Senator Gillibrand and Puntarella Salad

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:30:32 -0500

Peggy Siegel's tennis group was here Monday. A bevy of blondes and one or two brunettes took over a round center table in the Grill. I delivered a pink-and-plum-colored spring bouquet to their table, because I decided the ladies deserved some fresh florals. You can tell spring is in the air because half of the women had sunglasses perched on their heads throughout lunch.

Facing the ladies' lunch party was Charlie Rose--not Sheen!--and HBO's Richard...

Internal Memo: Tina Brown

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:26:19 -0500

Buzz. Zeitgeist. Electrifying!

Lists. Lists of lists. Lists of the greatest lists of lists. Lists of the most powerful lists of the greatest lists of lists. Lists of the lists that shook the lists that shaped the lists that changed the world forever. I should make a list of these lists. Or someone should make it for me. I wonder if I could get an OmniList iPhone app for my BlackBerry?

Photography. Pictures. The...

Art Fairs Give Ground to Auction Houses

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:17:36 -0500

We were at the cafe at the Park Avenue Armory. The space in front of us looked like a ballet choreographed for mobile phones, with the occasional intrusion of an iPad. The scenery at the ADAA art fair last weekend was modernism, postmodernism and just-out-of-the-shell art, with a few pieces from earlier times. Call it The Secondary Market Waltz and let's go to contract.

The hang at the stand of David Tunick, a Manhattan dealer...

Albany Is Inching Toward Reform

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:13:10 -0500

It seems clear that both Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg agree that merit, not seniority, ought to be the decisive factor in identifying teachers who may be laid off. But the tricky part is politics.

After the Republican-controlled State Senate passed a bill that would have done away with the dreaded last-in, first-out layoff policy, Mr. Cuomo unveiled a counterproposal that called for a slower approach toward the same goal. Mr. Bloomberg hit...

Showcasing Works Old and New, the Paul Taylor Dance Company Triumphs at City Center

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:10:53 -0500

The tremendous achievement of the Paul Taylor season that just ended was the revival of his 1966 masterpiece Orbs. It must be his longest work--it's in two parts, split by an intermission--and it's been revived only once before, in 1982. This is a magisterial piece--an astounding summing-up by a choreographer barely in his mid-30s, set to his most daring choice of music: the late Beethoven string quartets. Only a supremely confident young man could...

Among the Assisterati: Bottoms Up with the Highbrow Bottom Feeders

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:03:10 -0500

On a Tuesday evening not long ago, a group of publishing assistants in their early 20s gathered in a well-appointed apartment on the West Side of Manhattan.

"Assistants: Meet the person on the other end of the telephone," the email had said. Still in their workday Moscots and belted sweater dresses, they found live human beings and an assistant's paycheck worth of cheese and wine, along with a gestural six-pack of beer that would go...