Articles from the November 23rd Print Edition

It’s not the Metropolitan Opera’s fault that its first production of Leoš Janáček’s final opera, From the House of the Dead, arouses more admiration than love. The company has rarely put on a more impeccably pedigreed show: The Met premiere of one of the major works of 20th-century opera, featuring the company debuts of a legendary director, Patrice Chereau, and a legendary conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen. It sounded great—the singing is uniformly beautiful and the...

Inge Reist’s father was not interested in the subject of money. A medievalist in the comp lit department at Columbia, he reserved a “certain disdain for business and the stock market,” according to his daughter, and preferred instead to spend his time thinking about more meaningful things. “I think,” Ms. Reist said, “it was just the culture among academics to have this disdain for things that related to commerce.”

Ms. Reist began her career...

Melanie Lazenby, the 36-year-old Elliman broker whose father, George, starred in the wildly wonderful On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, finally has an apartment all her own. According to a deed, she just sold off the $1.85 million West Ninth Street co-op she owned with her mother, the Gannett publishing heiress Christina Matser, then bought a smaller condo at the new Superior Ink.

Ms. Lazenby, who The Times described as “tall, impeccable and fair-haired” in an...

An African-American president has Americans reexamining the way they view their country and its history, and now, a new book leaves readers pondering why slavery did not end with the American Revolution.

General Thaddeus Kosciuszko urged the Founding Fathers to abolish slavery right after the revolution, and had they listened, the Civil War could have been avoided. Kosciuszko played a major role in the War of Independence with black men at his side, and...

On Saturday, Oct. 14, a CUNY law professor named Dinesh Khosla sent a very polite memo to the “law-school community,” titled, “Our New Building.”

The memo wondered why CUNY, a public university financed by taxpayers, is paying a decidedly above-market price ($155 million) for its new, 225,000-square foot home at Citigroup’s 2 Court Square in Long Island City.

The memo isn’t going to win Mr. Khosla (whose bio on CUNY’s Web site describes him as, “A...

Last February, Anil Dash; the co-founder and “chief evangelist” for Six Apart, the company that creates the most popular blogging software in the world; was visiting his family in India for the first time in 25 years, explaining what he does for a living. Mr. Dash, 34, is an influential tech blogger and consultant who coaxed business executives and newspaper editors into embracing social media long before every site from The New York Times...

Ho, ho, ho, the Condé Nast Christmas party is back!

After a one-year break, Si Newhouse’s editors and publishers will celebrate the holidays next Monday, Nov. 23, at Aureole, the Charlie Palmer restaurant in the Bank of America Tower on Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street.

Last year, Condé Nast canceled its annual holiday lunch at the Four Seasons after 5 percent budget cuts were mandated for each book in the company. This...

Marco Stoffel is a mysterious man.

His 24-foot-wide West 12th Street townhouse, on a lovely cobblestone block, has been home to peculiar not-for-profits like the Borderline Personality Disorder Research Foundation and the Third Millennium Foundation, which partnered with Al Gore’s Current TV for a contest called “Seeds of Tolerance.” According to a press release, the winner was announced at an event with Mr. Stoffel, Mr. Gore, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Lindsay Lohan. The foundation’s International...

Certain situations make us aware of arithmetic eloquence. Two exhibitions, paying homage to series, do just that.

Dan Flavin’s sculptural installation is a surprise even for those viewers who know his work well, for to enter the galleries at David Zwirner is to be blown back by near blinding color-drenched light. Induced to see the source of the color reflected off the walls of farther-off rooms, the viewer is hooked; and by the time...

A repetitive refrain filled City Hall’s council chambers on Tuesday morning. For a good hour at a zoning committee hearing on the contentious plan to redevelop the Bronx’s Kingsbridge Armory into a mall, council member after council member battered the Bloomberg administration and the developer, the Related Companies, with a similar line of questioning: Given that city subsidies are to be used in the $323 million project, why isn’t there a guarantee that all...

The frugality fad is fading fast.

Bidders are dropping multimillions on Warhols at Sotheby’s; Goldman Sachs wives are preparing holiday shopping extravaganzas in anticipation of record bonuses; and in the realm of commercial real estate, tenants are spending more than $100 a square foot on office space (in which to hang their newly acquired   artwork?).

Right now, an Italian Bank is negotiating for offices atop Mort Zuckerman’s monumental white marble GM Building for more than...

New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor has secured a stunning seven-figure book deal this week with Little, Brown to write a volume on the Obamas.

The deal was the result of a heated citywide auction, and was brokered by independent lit agent Elyse Cheney. It comes on the heels of the 34-year-old reporter’s New York Times Magazine cover story on the Obamas’ marriage, which argued that “the Obamas mix politics and romance in a...

Gherardo Guarducci and Dimitri Pauli, the two handsome Italian owners of Sant Ambroeus in the West Village, were sitting recently on a spacious leather banquette in the dining room of their latest venture, Casa Lever, under the watchful Technicolor gaze of 10 original Warhol portraits (Bob Colacello, Robert Mapplethorpe, Giorgio Armani) on the opposite wall.

They were recounting the restaurant’s opening party on Oct. 10, during which Madonna stopped by to sing “Happy Birthday”...

Asked to predict what sort of working relationship he’d have with Michael Bloomberg over the next four years, the incoming city comptroller talked about physics.

“An electromagnetic force,” he said, “it’s unlike gravity. Gravitational force is only one direction, it’s an attractive force. Electromagnetic forces can be attractive or repulsive.”

That’s John Liu’s approach, for now.

As a two-term councilman from Flushing, Mr. Liu aligned himself with the mayor on some issues...

On the night of Monday, Nov. 16, at the sixth annual CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Awards to support emerging designers, Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour stood at the entrance to the back room of Skylight Studios, greeting guests and nominees. Like any good host, she wore a welcoming smile.

“Hi, Thakoon!” she said warmly as the designer, a star of the recent Vogue documentary The September Issue, walked in.

“What the fund has...

It wasn’t so long ago that critics were predicting the death of the City University of New York. The mayor at the time, Rudolph Giuliani, was insisting on high standards for admission to the system’s senior colleges, outraging some faculty and advocates of higher education’s equivalent of social promotion.

City University did not collapse. Instead, it has prospered in the years since the Giuliani-era reforms. And now the university is preparing to expand its mission...

Joe Scarborough held up a copy of The New York Times. It was Monday, Nov. 16, and earlier in the morning The Times had published a piece about Newsweek, which had recently laid off 13 staffers. Quarterly ad revenue at the newsweekly was down 48 percent versus last year. That said, according to The Times, things were looking up. In the third quarter, The Washington Post’s magazine division, largely comprised of Newsweek, lost only...

“It’s terribly … terrific,” said Pop Art icon James Rosenquist when asked how he was enjoying the party celebrating his new memoir, Painting Below Zero. “What do you think?”

The event was rather Factory-like, also held on Monday, Nov. 16, at the private Chelsea residence of Bad Boys II actress Alhia Chacoff and real-estate developer Harlan Berger, with soft reddish lighting.

An ironwork sculpture of five several-foot-long nails, created by co-host and...

What a week! Or, should I say, “Wart a week!”

Yes, a horrid wart! In full view of my public? Can you believe? That’s what I get for trying to avoid the H1N1 virus. What the hell am I talking about? I’ll explain all about Mr. Wart in just a moment. First, let’s talk about something more uplifting and festive:

The Barneys holiday windows! This year I have created, along with my elves,...

Broken Embraces
Running time 128 minutes
Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar
Starring  Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo, José Luis Gómez, Tamar Novas

Broken Embraces, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, is one of those happy moviegoing experiences where you get a bit of everything—love, sex, style, wit, thrills and mystery. And if you somehow weren’t already sold on the ridiculous gorgeousness of Penélope Cruz, this should do the trick.

This is a film about...

Jon Cooper says he saw “the first red flag” back in January, as he sat in his home in Glen Cove with his spouse, Rob, watching David Paterson introduce Kirsten Gillibrand as the state’s new junior U.S. senator.

“Rob said, ‘Isn’t that Al D’Amato standing next to Gillibrand?’”

For Mr. Cooper, the 54-year-old majority leader of the Suffolk County Legislature, that red flag was followed by others, as he learned of the conservative...

We’re happy here, for the most part, in our coastal bubble. We know, or at least we’re repeatedly told, on the cable-news stations and in political dialogue, that the rest of the country isn’t like us and doesn’t like us. We joke about how we sometimes visit “America,” in which we certainly don’t live, and we think we’re being ironically clever, appropriating and re-purposing what’s intended as a slur, like gay people adopting...

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is no ordinary criminal. He is a bloodthirsty terrorist who happily took responsibility for the deaths of more than 2,700 people, and who surely is disappointed that the death toll wasn’t higher.

The Obama administration has decided to bring Mohammed to New York to stand trial, a move that many New Yorkers, including Governor Paterson and former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, have criticized. The governor believes...

"Think of me as you with a vagina,” Vera Farmiga’s character Alex says to George Clooney’s Ryan at one point in Up in the Air, the new film from Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You For Smoking), opening in theaters Dec. 4. “It’s a killer line,” Ms. Farmiga said recently, drumming her fingers absently in a conference room overlooking the lights of Times Square. “That’s the line I had to stand in front of a...

Our favorite humble hometown reporters might be on the verge of TV stardom!

A documentary filmmaker has hit the Times Tower with camera in tow and is planning to make a movie focused on the Times media desk.

“I think that these writers have something invested in their stories that is sort of unique compared to what it would have been like five years ago,” said Andrew Rossi, the filmmaker, who produced...

The New York premiere of director John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning, doomful tale The Road was conspicuously missing its blond South African star: Charlize Theron. 

On the third floor of the Clearview Chelsea Cinemas on Monday, Nov. 16, soft-spoken actor (and poet/musician/artist/sex object) Viggo Mortensen admitted to the Transom that he had concerns over his role. “I was scared to death of the emotional toll,” said Mr. Mortensen, a...

The loudest voices on the right never tire of telling us that they are the truest patriots. They claim to be the deepest believers in our system, the strongest defenders of our Constitution, the most upbeat, bold and courageous Americans anywhere. But now that the government is finally prepared to put the perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks on trial, these same patriots are the first to spread doubt, instigate anxiety and abandon constitutional...

Eliot Spitzer infamously dubbed himself "a f------ steamroller" in his early days in office - a description that didn't exactly hold up as the legislature stared him down and his popularity waned in the ensuing months.

But as a candidate for governor in 2006, Mr. Spitzer absolutely was a steamroller, powered by untouchable, sky-high-popularity that forced his fellow Democrats to give him wide latitude.

And with each day, it's more likely that there'll be...

Red Cliff
Running time 148 minutes
Written by John Woo, Chan Khan, Kuo Cheng and Sheng Heyu
Directed by John Woo
Starring Tony Leung, Zhang Fengyi, You Yong, Chang Chen, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Chiling Lin

Red Cliff is two and a half hours long and in Chinese. These facts may be off-putting, but don’t be deterred: Red Cliff is, in fact, an action-packed epic so large in scale that it makes Braveheart seem unambitious.

Director John...