Stop us if you've heard this one before... According to Page Six The Magazine, some Manhattan parents are so desperate to give their children a leg-up on their peers, they're sending them to Mandarin classes! (And Hindi! And French! And German!)

Page Six's Jennifer Rose quotes a parent named Brett Hauser, who pays $395 for his 6-month-old son to take 10 sessions at The Language Workshop for Children saying, "Mandarin is the language of our future. With China poised to become the world's leading economy sometime this century, I'm doing the only responsible thing. It's like reading to your kid or making sure he gets all the right foods. I'm helping him prepare for his future. Thirty years from now these kids are going to be translating for all of us."

The magazine calls this phenomenon "NYC's New Baby Talkers."

Talkers, yes; new, no.  read more »

Yesterday, Lydia Hearst resigned from Page Six Magazine due to what she claimed was a fabrication that appeared in her column, The Hearst Chronicles, on Sunday.

In the column, "Blood Dispute," it seemed as though Ms. Hearst was turning on her family's empire:

Hearst Corporation, which my family owns, continues to host parties even as it folds magazines like CosmoGirl. From an objective point of view, it seems excessive. The crash in the '80s was a blip compared to what's happening now, so it's going to come as a shock when this trickles up into high society. At least Hearst recently canceled the company Christmas bash. It's time to work through this crisis, not party through it.

Yesterday afternoon, the Daily Transom received a letter from the socialite claiming that she never wrote the above statement.  read more »

In her column in Page Six Magazine this week, socialite Lydia Hearst declares a 'shame on you' on her fellow socialites for continuing to party and worry about their wardrobes despite the current state of the economy. And while on the subject, Ms. Hearst even turns on her own family's empire:

Hearst Corporation, which my family owns, continues to host parties even as it folds magazines like CosmoGirl. From an objective point of view, it seems excessive. The crash in the '80s was a blip compared to what's happening now, so it's going to come as a shock when this trickles up into high society.

 read more »

Did you spend a dollar on The New York Post this Sunday so you could read the new issue of Page Six: The Magazine?

You could've saved that dollar for laundry by reading most of the magazine's features in other publications. Here's a guide to how the Serpentor of weekend supplements was made:

Cover Story: Kerry Washington, by Suzanna Zuckerman.

Read instead: Party Girl in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, January 6, 2008.

Hot Fuzz: Why Full Beards Are In, by Joshua David Stein.

Read instead: Paul Bunyan, Modern-Day Sex Symbol, by Eric Wilson, The New York Times, March 23, 2006.  read more »

Colin Hanks, son of Tinseltown bigwig Tom, moved here from L.A. last year. In Sunday’s Page Six Magazine, the 30-year-old actor answers a few New York-centric questions, shedding light on a few of his favorite things.

Mr. Hanks, who lives in a “small but quaint” West Village apartment, has to endure lots of late-night noise from the bar downstairs. Sleeping through the drunken din is apparently no Biggie for the Orange County actor, but snoozing with the smell of bacon wafting in from a neighboring deli is another story.  read more »

For those who may have missed yesterday’s Page Six Magazine, here follows a quick rundown of some of the issue’s highlights:

Just when it started to seem like fresh book ideas from eager-beaver magazine assistants had all been exhausted, Anna Godberson burst upon the literary scene. The 27-year-old writer from Berkeley, Calif., who was an assistant to a literary editor at Esquire for four years after graduating from Barnard, has landed her new teen novel, The Luxe, on the Times best-seller list. Ms. Godberson’s novel, about a teen socialite at the turn of the 20th Century, has allegedly attracted interest “from TV producers, leading to whispers that it could be the next Gossip Girl.”  read more »

Like a mighty rainstorm over the parched Sahara, yesterday’s Page Six Magazine profile of Byrdie Bell offered sweet promise to Manhattan’s socialite landscape, which has grown decidedly athirst for new blood. And though Ms. Bell’s been around, smiling for Patrick McMullan at glittery galas for a few years now, our understanding of her was just that—rather two dimensional. Not so anymore. In just three short pages, Gawker’s soon-to-depart Joshua David Stein gives us exactly what the social doctor ordered.

Leave it to the Post to title the piece “Byrdie of Paradise,” whose pictures of the 22-year-old are attended by—what else?—exotic birds. But beside the photos, readers learn not only that Ms. Bell understands that affection is often expressed with puke, but in the lyrical styling of her musical-social boyfriend, James “Bingo” Gubelmann, too: “Bella was bored to death at South Beach/Not one celebrity spotted in days/She was tired of her mood/Lunchin’ on vegan food.” The article even goes so far as to compare the “youngest in an almost Biblical line of society jewels” to Brooke Astor, Mona von Bismarck and Lauren Hutton.  read more »

Page Six Magazine has actively been searching for new talent around town and just nabbed a higher-education reporter at The New York Sun. Annie Karni emailed the Observer and said she'll become a new senior writer and news editor at Page Six Magazine beginning on January 2. She'll be writing primarily feature stories.

UPDATE: To clarify: Annie Karni did not email Media Mob first. She simply confirmed the news to the Observer.

More than eight weeks since Page Six Magazine went weekly, a portrait of the Sunday supplement’s prospects is beginning to emerge—and it’s decidedly mixed.  read more »

Looking through Lydia Hearst's column in Page Six Magazine this weekend might have brought on a case of deja vu. In an item titled "Craziness at Cavalli," the magazines model-heiress diarist writes:

Last week, [Ed.: emphasis added] I flew from New York to Florence with three other models—Jessica Stam, Theodora Richards and Erin Wasson—to shoot the Roberto Cavalli for H&M ad campaign. It was surreal.  read more »

]]> http://www.observer.com/2007/lydia-hearst-recycling-tuscan-tale#comments O2 Lydia Hearst Page Six Magazine Roberto Cavalli Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:40:53 -0400 David Foxley 59165 at http://www.observer.com