Articles from the November 9th Print Edition

I was crying; Frank Corsaro was not. We were sitting in a nearly empty movie theater on the Upper West Side one recent Thursday afternoon, watching Where the Wild Things Are. Onscreen, sensitive young Max Records was doing a poignant robot dance to cheer up his mom, played by Catherine Keener. It was only about 10 minutes into the film, and I was already choking up. My companion stared at the screen pensively but,...

Jon Bon Jovi kissed Ann Curry on the cheek. It was a chilly morning in mid-October outside the Today studios at Rockefeller Plaza. Ms. Curry was wearing a peacoat and dark stockings. Mr. Bon Jovi had on jeans and aviator sunglasses. Matt Lauer stood between them. They had news!

Mr. Lauer explained to the guests on the plaza and the viewers at home that, henceforth, Mr. Bon Jovi would be serving as the first...

Everything that comes up must come down, even the price tags for apartments with telephone-programmed air-conditioning, six-head steam showers, motorized refrigerator shelves, heated towel bars, master suite sitting rooms and 1,100-square-foot entertaining terraces.

Earlier this month, the asking price of a four-bedroom apartment at 45 West 67th Street fell to $8,975,000, two years after it was listed for $14 million. “That was a ridiculous price,” said Robby Browne, its current broker.

But the ridiculousness was fixed...

When Newt Gingrich warns Republicans that they are making a grave “mistake” by driving out moderates and enforcing the bizarre orthodoxy of the far right, the novelty of his remarks alone is stunning. This is a politician who is no stranger himself to the wilder shores of extremism, a populist and a purist who rose to great power against the G.O.P. establishment, and a demagogue whose lexicon lacerated the “Democrat Party” as decadent, elitist,...

The software magnate Marty Sprinzen’s $24.5 million, 4,552-square-foot, seven-room apartment at 838 Fifth Avenue, the kind of place where there’s museum-quality lighting, Venetian plaster and heated Portuguese limestone floors in the entrance gallery alone, went to contract last month, according to its Brown Harris Stevens listing.

By itself, that news wouldn’t mean much. After all, signed contracts don’t always lead to actual deals: Last month, listing information shows, an eighth-floor apartment at the supremely fancy...

Back when Senator Charles Schumer was a freshman from an embattled minority party, he used to say that if you put his distant predecessor Jacob Javits—the legendary liberal, antiwar, nonconformist Republican—into a centrifuge and spun it around, it would produce a pair of New York isotopes: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an intellectual who churned out sesquipedalian tomes on social policy, and Al D’Amato, a profane tactician who seemed to understand his office in purely parochial...

The Finian’s Rainbow that opened last week at the St. James Theatre is delightful, a good-hearted, high-energy romp with big laughs, beloved songs and some excellent performances. It is also perplexing, a nonsensical and sometimes tedious story that leaves the audience scratching their heads. (An hour and change after leaving the theater, I received an exasperated text message from a still-flummoxed friend who’d been there, too: “That musical made zero sense.”) It’s impossible...

When Bill de Blasio departed the Clinton orbit eight years ago—he was an adviser in Bill’s White House and managed Hillary’s successful Senate campaign—to represent Park Slope in the New York City Council, he insisted it was because he wanted to help ordinary people with their problems.

Last year, after the change in term limits thwarted a potential run for Brooklyn borough president, Mr. de Blasio announced his intention to seek the public advocate’s...

“For me, a legend is someone I look up to and I respect and admire, and I guess I’m not there yet for myself,” said designer Marc Jacobs humbly on Thursday, Oct. 29, at the Pratt Institute Legends award benefit, where he was one of the evening’s honorees.

“Just because they give me this prize doesn’t mean I am one,” added Mr. Jacobs, who wore black leather boots with white socks, a...

Desigual, the Barcelona-based clothier whose use of geometric shapes and squiggly lines resembles something a preternaturally talented teenager might concoct, is opening a store in Herald Square, its first New York storefront (indeed, its first American storefront) outside of Soho.

Desigual has signed a lease for the old Baker Shoes retail space at 362 Fifth Avenue, at 34th Street, according to industry sources. This just months after Desigual took the old Kira Plastinina space at...

Who among us has not envisioned a better world and imagined ways to transform the troubled here and now to a new and radiant day? William Blake (1757-1827), an artist and poet of uniquely configured creative talent, put his eye, heart and soul on the line with each attempt to transform the world on behalf of himself and us. So it is no wonder that “William Blake’s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun,’” now...

PALM BEACH—The first thing I do whenever I arrive in Florida is carry our Norwich terrier Liberace into the ocean and wash away any dingle berries from his most private arena. I have become quite skilled at routing them. No dingle berry can escape my detection. Just call me “the dingle-berry whisperer.”

Canine hygiene aside, I am in desperate need of this long weekend sun break. I am, as the Brits say, “totally knackered,”...

The island of Capri—which takes up only 4 square miles of the planet—has given us the Capri pants, the Capresi salad, the rocky passageways of Faraglione, the Villa Malaparte, Somerset Maugham’s The Lotus Eater and now Town and Country editor Pamela Fiori’s book In the Spirit of Capri, filled with history and images of Capri through the years.

On Oct. 28, Ms. Fiori celebrated its publication between the Proenza Schouler and Zac Posen collections...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg now has the time and the mandate to create a legacy of LaGuardia-like proportions. His reelection after a catastrophic economic collapse on Wall Street, leading to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, is a tribute to the high regard New Yorkers have for his managerial skills, economic vision and common sense. Voters clearly understand that as bad as things are in some sectors of the economy, matters could have...

Almost indisputably, the mayoral race this year was a desert of big new ideas for New York City. Be it the lack of a competitive Democratic primary, the billions in budget gaps or the challenger's preference for blanket criticism over policy prescription, the incumbent and-at the time of this writing-presumptive winner, Michael Bloomberg, was never forced to offer much in the way of innovative policy.

This was particularly true in the realm of the physical...

The Men Who Stare at Goats
Running time 93 minutes
Written by Peter Straughan
Directed by Grant Heslov
Starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges

The Men Who Stare at Goats, the latest George Clooney fiasco, is like getting stung by a wasp on the inside of your eyelid. You are blinded to all reason and the agony lasts for days. Despite Mr. Clooney’s easygoing charm and obvious good looks,...

Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Running time 110 minutes
Written by Geoffrey Fletcher
Directed by Lee Daniels
Starring Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey

Raw, harrowing and undeniably unsettling, the controversial, much-anticipated Precious arrives on waves of film festival buzz this week. See it at your own risk, but be forewarned: It is not for the delicate of stomach or faint of heart. Nevertheless, it is so powerful a...

Marco Antonini stood in front of a tiny classroom at the Brooklyn art collective 3rd Ward on Monday night working a PowerPoint and explaining to a group of young artists how to make it in the New York art world.

"The most important thing with collectors is never pull their sleeve," he said. "Never ever. Rich people, they can become very self conscious, and the last thing they want is for you to be nice...

When he won what was supposed to be his final term as mayor four years ago, Michael Bloomberg quickly found himself - or made himself, really - the subject of presidential speculation.

The mayor never formally expressed interest in a 2008 White House campaign, but he managed to keep the talk alive for more than two years. Remember his dramatic exit from the Republican Party in the summer of 2007? And almost as soon...

New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar has signed with Ann Godoff at the Penguin Press to write a book, tentatively titled Extreme Virtue, about people with an uncommonly heightened sense of morality. A publishing source said the deal, brokered by Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency, was worth a sum in the high six figures.

Ms. Godoff and Ms. MacFarquhar know one another well, partly because they met through a mutual friend years ago but also...

Mary Cleere Haran
Feinstein’s at Loew’s Regency

Celebrating the centennial year of the genius lyrics of Johnny Mercer (he would be 100 on Nov. 18), the sophisticated cabaret star Mary Cleere Haran is serving up a banquet of musical delicacies at Feinstein’s at Loew’s Regency. For a hip New York component of everything cool, this soignée vocalist, once an Irish Catholic hippie from San Francisco, is so adaptable to songs she really loves that...

“When you publish a book,” Philip Roth once wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.” Not really, actually. When Mr. Roth publishes a book, he edits it. And the Transom has proof!

We were lucky enough to receive both the uncorrected proofs and the finished text of The Humbling, Mr. Roth’s 28th novel, which tells the story of aging out-of-work actor Simon Axler...

Three former Wall Street investment analysts—Ryan Klenovich, 24, Jian Chai, 26, and Steve DeWald, 24—plan to save the magazine business with a Web site called Maggwire.com.

“We’re going to do for magazines what iTunes did for music,” Mr. Klenovich, the start-up’s chief executive, told The Observer in an interview.

Currently a free aggregator of magazine articles from more than 650 publications, separated into channels like “Politics” and “Entertainment,” Maggwire.com will soon offer...

The New York Public Library’s Young Lions benefit party Monday night got off to an innocuous start. Library donors in their 20s and 30s gathered under the glass dome of the Bartos Forum in the main branch at 42nd Street, avoiding the dance floor while the DJ spun hits from their youth (Whitney Houston, etc.).

The night was optimistically titled “A Bright Future,” and a giant inflatable light bulb suspended from the dome’s peak...

“My mind doesn’t stop thinking,” the 29-year-old model and real estate entrepreneur Jodie Fanelli said last month, driving in her Porsche SUV to Bensonhurst. “I could wake up in the middle of the night and I come up with crazy things that I’m, like, I have to write it down right away, and I want to try and pursue it.”

“The first business we were ever in together,” her identical twin, Diane, said, “we sold...

Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal drafted plans for a New York–only culture section. It didn’t take long for that project to be shelved, and Rupert Murdoch’s Journal decided to take on the city itself—with a New York–only news section that will cover everything you’d expect from a local newspaper: politics, news, sports and, yes, culture.

“They want to do everything,” said one source familiar with the project.

Inside sources...

Last week, as the scrubbed and smirking mugs of Tom Colicchio and Padma Lakshmi continued to advertise Top Chef’s sixth season in Vegas all over town, Bravo announced an open casting call for the series’ latest iteration, Top Chef: Just Desserts, on Sunday, Nov. 8, at Craftsteak.

“It’s about time!” exclaimed Zak Miller, pastry chef at Kefi, Gus & Gabriel and Anthos (where his specialties include a concoction involving beet yogurt and tahini). “I...

On the first night of the World Series, there were only six people in Puppets Jazz Bar in Park Slope. Three of them, including a reporter, had come to see the pianist Arturo O’Farrill. The rest worked there.

But Mr. O’Farrill, a cherubic 48-year-old pianist-composer who was dressed casually in a black turtleneck, black slacks and white sneakers, played as if the house was full. He attempted a dangerously up-tempo rendition of “Lullaby of...

Michael Bloomberg is on pace to spend more than $100 million on his reelection campaign—more than anyone has ever spent to become mayor of anything, and many, many times more than his effectively resourceless Democratic challenger, City Comptroller Bill Thompson. 

But even as his campaign blanketed the airwaves with ads and clogged mailboxes with glossy literature in the run-up to Election Day, the mayor’s handling kept him on a full schedule of...

It had been eight years since Drew Katchen, a 32-year-old Web producer who works for a major media company in New York, had been in touch with an old friend of his from his home state of South Carolina.

“She was cool. I always really liked her,” he said.

Mr. Katchen was delighted one afternoon when a message from this individual, titled, “Flashback,” popped into his Facebook in-box.

“I decided not to...

The New York Times’ interactive news technologies team has hired a new developer and … it’s a girl! Well, woman, really. Her name is Jacqui Maher and her first day on the job is Nov. 4.

This is the 10-person team’s first and (so far) only female hire.

Software and Web development is a male-dominated field at The Times and everywhere else, editor Aron Pilhofer told The Observer. “It is a serious...