Andover

One of the great things about blogging is that all the stuff I fulminated about in private over the last few years (not getting assigned to write about it for Mainstream magazines) I now have to put down in cyberspace, and take responsibility for. Sometimes people get angry at me, sometimes I go over the line. But I learn a lot about my ideas, and myself. I make mistakes, and I don't get fired or disciplined. I am truly grateful for this experience. It's made me more intellectually and emotionally mature.

A lot of this process, of course, involves my hot-button relationship with my Jewish roots, and my self-description as an "assimilator." I get active comment on this score, a lot of it judgmental. Frankly, I am even grateful to these people.  read more »

The reason I was at the Wyndham, I was attending the Andover commencement (my wife's niece). There was something thrilling about it, something else crushing.

The thrilling thing is that diversity is today a bold insurmountable fact of elite culture. The graduating class was filled with Africans, blacks, Asians, you name it. Oh yes and Jews too. I remember when I got to college, in 1972, how weird I was about preppies. But back then, preppies were a much more homogeneous group. Now these places celebrate diversity every other second. (Yes it gets a little P.C. and suffocating in the selfcongratulation. But still.) And though blacks and Asians appear to self-segregate socially, my Jewish tribe and the Protestant kids mingle freely.

To hop back on my hobbyhorse for a second, this is one of the reasons the Israel lobby is so vexing. Why am I supposed to abandon my political education, which involved struggling with and coming to embrace multiculturalism in American society, when we turn to Israel, yes a democracy, but also a Jewish state that, I'm told, treats Arabs as second-class citizens. (Who told me that? My mother-in-law, a liberal Protestant who has brought hospital supplies to the west bank and who I sat next to as the rabbi did the benediction in Andover's chapel...)

The crushing thing about the Andover commencement was that the leadership culture is utterly and completely severed from any connection to the Iraq War. Iraq was not mentioned once in the long Candlelight Baccalaureate ceremony I attended. Nor in the graduation speeches the next day. Not once.

The war casts no shadow over the lives of the privileged. Compare this generation's experience to the boys of the 1942 Phillips Exeter Academy in A Separate Peace, the John Knowles classic I'm reading. That book involves the fact that all the boys at "Devon" were about to go to war. The headmaster saw it as his job to prepare boys for "Waterloo," as he put it.  read more »

None of these Andover kids is thinking about Iraq. They don't have to. That's sickening. It means that the class that makes the decisions about going to war has nothing much to lose by doing so (what political scientists call "a moral hazard"). And privileged kids and their parents have no personal reason to rise up against this war. The heaviest duty of citizenship, going to war, is something that we've outsourced.

On July 21st, an anonymous blogger called Imaginary Socialite printed some thanks for keeping her—or his— identity a secret. "And everyone," s/he wrote, "who received calls from the Post yesterday and refused to divulge my identity, I owe you some major sample sale, secret concert, after party password dish."

Apparently, those bribes didn't go so well, because today, Page Six pronounced an outing, claiming the blogger to be a young woman (and now, public figure) named Faran Krentcil.

But Page Six didn't elaborate on their reporting of this item, so The Transom thought it might play its own game of Find The Socialite.

The website is registered, WhoIs says, to John Marc Imbrescia, who resides in Lynnfield, MA.

"I am the listed purchaser of that site," confirmed Mr. Imbrescia by telephone. When asked if he was the proprietor, he said, "It is not my writing." When asked who the writer was, and if he had attended school in Andover, Mr. Imbrescia said "I'm not available for comment on that."

Mr. Imbrescia is, according to the official Andover student website, a member of the class of '00.

Isolating this one piece of information as a place to start searching—odd, odd Andover!—does cut a swath through Manhattan's fashion and gossip scene quit a bit.

Peeking around Andover, one finds a student at Andover High named Seth M. Krentcil. (He took third-term honors at Andover High in 2001! Mazel tov!) Mr. Krentcil shares a last name with another local, one Faran Krentcil, who was, according to Artnet.com, the art critic at one time for The Phillipian.

The Phillipian is, of course, the oldest secondary school newspaper in the United States. Isn't that amazing? Who knew! It is the newspaper of Phillips Academy, which is located in Andover.

Ms. Krentcil went on to attend Duke, where she was a columnist for the school paper; it appears as if she graduated in the class of '03. She apparently did a brief spell in PR, and began appearing fairly regularly in Patrick McMullan party photos in Manhattan beginning February 8th, 2005.

Ms. Krentcil is now a reporter at the dishy fashion site Fashion Week Daily, for which she regularly ventures out and about, leading her into the sort of environment where she would collect the sort of gossip and innuendo that appears on Imaginary Socialite.

When Ms. Krentcil was asked by phone if she were, in fact, the author of the site, she laughed, and said, "In fact, no." When asked if she knew the name of the author of the site, she said, "Really I can't talk to you about that. It's not something I would share." And when asked to elaborate, she said, "I really just can't talk to you about that on the record."  read more »

A denial! Drat! And after all that! And then The Transom was sad. —Choire Sicha

From the window seat at Cremcaffe restaurant, horror filmmakerLarry Fessenden kept an eye on the sid  read more »