The New York Observer » Joe Pompeo

TV: Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad‘s Dark Side

Bryan Cranston woke up on the morning of Wednesday, March 24, and went for a long run over the Williamsburg Bridge and back. Then he ate lunch, did some writing for a new children's show he's working on for Nickelodeon and popped into the bar at Soho's Crosby Street Hotel, where he was staying, for Read More

Watching the Watchdog

The state comptroller of New York has enormous power over the investment of the Empire State’s $129 billion pension fund. That’s why the scandal over Alan Hevesi’s tainted stewardship of the office deserves as much attention as the various scandals that have overtaken the Paterson administration.

Last week, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo obtained a guilty plea Read More

Close the Deal at Aqueduct

The Paterson administration has beaten a not-hasty-enough retreat at Aqueduct racetrack, announcing that the unqualified but politically wired AEG group will not, after all, get a lucrative deal to convert the track to a so-called racino.

The next step should be pretty simple: The State Lottery Commission, which is overseeing the process, should choose a new Read More

The Subways Cough Up a Screenwriter

On a rainy afternoon in March of 2004, M.T.A. subway worker Michael Martin was in his silver Lincoln Mark VII, stopped at a red light at the intersection of Nostrand Avenue and Quentin Road in Brooklyn, when suddenly: Screeech! He heard a crash, looked in his rear view and saw a car careening toward him. Read More

Speed Dating

Longtime readers of this newspaper know all about the trials and tribulations of singlehood in the city. Our Sex and the City column spoke to the anxieties and hopes of tens of thousands of singles in New York who were always looking for that special someone. Back in the high-flying ’90s, that search took people Read More

Retire These Benefits

There are many words to describe the retirement benefits of New York City’s public-school teachers. Most of those words are unprintable, at least on this page, so we’ll simply stick with one: That would be “insane.”

The Post reported several days ago that more than 700 former teachers—some of them retired from the City University system—collect Read More

Fun With Jane

Jane Birkin stands on the cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s 1971 album, Histoire De Melody Nelson, naked to the waist, covering herself strategically with a doll, her hair cropped short just below her ears. This is the same Jane Birkin that, two years earlier, had faked—or possibly had—an orgasm at the end of “Je T’aime … Read More

Food for Thought

Fans of the great British sitcom Fawlty Towers will recall an episode that featured a dour health inspector who, upon examining the not-quite-spotless kitchen of John Cleese’s hotel, says, “The only gourmets you’ll find here are kamikaze ones.”

Luckily, the same wouldn’t be said of the vast majority of New York’s restaurants. They are subjected to Read More

Probe This Smelly Deal

Law-enforcement authorities—that means you, Attorney General Cuomo—should be asking pointed questions about the odoriferous goings-on at Aqueduct Racetrack. Like the calling card of Aqueduct’s principal entertainers—thoroughbred racehorses—this deal stinks to high heaven.

Governor Paterson’s decision to give a politically connected company the rights to transform the Queens racetrack into a quasi-casino represents all that is wrong Read More

Talese on Salinger

Gay Talese came to New York in 1956, when he was 24 years old. He spent the next nine years as a reporter at The New York Times, having worked his way up from copy boy. All the while, as he made a home for himself among the literary circles of mid-century Manhattan, Talese and Read More

How Tech Became Cool Again

Last week, over cheese sandwiches, Caesar salads and a cauldron of French press coffee, The New York Observer sat down at the Ace Hotel with a cross section of New York’s tech clique to find out how they relaunched the city’s tech scene. There was the classic financier, Dan Allen, principal at Bain Capital; the Read More

Why the iPad Is Actually a theyPad

First, the chutzpah. The “tablet.” On Mount Sinai, Moses received the Ten Commandments written on twin “tablets,” then climbed back down into the desert wilderness and explained the new law to the Jewish people. Clutching his own “tablet,” Steve Jobs orchestrated his appearance before the world press last Wednesday along Mosaic lines, presenting his device Read More

The Insider Trading Myth

Insider trading by hedge funds has a long and distinguished history, dating to the days when people didn’t know that there was such a thing as a hedge fund. Today, Wall Street is drooling over the latest manifestation of alleged hedge fund insider trading, involving Galleon Group’s Raj Rajaratnam. This gentleman has pleaded not guilty, Read More

A Dicey Decision

After years of inexplicable delay, the state has settled on a private company to run a new casino planned for Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens. Governor Paterson chose an outfit called Aqueduct Entertainment Group even though one of the other four bidders, Penn National, offered more money—$300 million—as an initial payment to the state, and another Read More

A Strategic Retreat

Give the Obama White House good marks for recognizing a mistake—holding terrorism trials in downtown New York—and correcting it before any damage was gone. But give city officials and advocates even higher grades for calling attention to the ill-advised plan, showing precisely how it would have impacted downtown businesses and skillfully persuading the White House Read More