The New York Post has an item today about a seemingly unimportant rich person who lives in the East Village. The reason for his inclusion in the standard-bearing gossip column is less due to his own exploits -- though he is, like, a millionaire or something -- and more to his girlfriend's. Her name Read More
The Federal Reserve's $3.3 trillion in bailout maneuvering during the past three years of financial apocalypse has been complicated, and so it's difficult to isolate one particular "winner" from the many, many institutions who benefited from the central bank's largesse. But let's give it a shot anyway.
According to Bloomberg, "Bank of America Corp. and Read More
This weekend found President Obama hitting every Sunday TV talk show to talk up health care policy. For some environmental advocates, this focus deepened their concern that the United States would lose this moment and punt on climate policy. However, take heart, this week the U.N.’s climate summit begins in New York and the President Read More
Wowza! Apparently they buy buildings in Paris too. Naturally, it's a bunch of burly American I-bankers who made the biggest single-asset deal in European history. Lehman Brothers has purchased Coeur Defense, a series of five buildings, from Goldman Sachs for 2.11 billion euros, or $2.8 billion U.S. dollars. It's a record for the overseas bunch. Read More
My people came to this country in the ten years either side of 1900. They were afraid of the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, they came from Poland, Bukovina, Bialystok, to Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. Some day someone should make a Schindler's List-like movie of the guy who helped bring us out. Read More
The Castle in the Forest, by Norman Mailer. Random House, 477 pages, $27.95. Norman Mailer’s first novel in over 10 years has a couple of big surprises right off the bat. One is physical, the other spiritual. As to the first, the welterweight from Brooklyn turns 84 at the end of the month; you lift Read More
Cushman & Wakefield, one of the biggest commercial brokerages in New York City, has called a press conference at 10:30 on Tuesday morning at the Rainbow Room. A spokesperson for the brokerage told The Real Estate that "big news" would be announced, possibly involving a merger or acquisition. Will this press conference have an Read More
At last week's conference on "Freud's Jewish World" at the Center for Jewish History, two scholars talked about journalism. Freud lived an upper middle class life in Vienna, and until he fled Nazism as a dying man, he read the paper that all professionals read: the Neue Freie Presse (pronounced, Noi-a Fry-a Press-a). The Read More
The movie Borat is a lot of things, a comic triumph, mean, weirdly Tocquevillian. It is filled with anti-semitic humor, and I admit I laughed. But there is also something really scary about the film, and that seems to me the takeaway, if you are Jewish (which the maker, Sacha Baron Cohen, is): the feeling Read More
Who’s responsible for mounting the superb exhibition devoted to the paintings, drawings, prints and notebooks of Edward Hopper (1882-1967) at the Whitney? The accompanying press materials don’t say. The show, part of the museum’s ongoing anniversary celebration, is a world apart from the rest of Full House: Views of the Whitney’s Collection at 75, an Read More
Goading Galbraith
To the Editor: Among the complaints that Charles Taylor has with Peter Galbraith’s book on the Iraq war [“Breaking Up Is Good to Do: The Case for an Iraqi Split,” Book Review, July 31] is a big one, which proves to be a major error, and a small one, which is so minor Read More
It’s always seemed to me that groups that have suffered from discrimination—Jews, women, people of color, for instance—have a special responsibility to speak out on behalf of other groups still suffering from bias. And that Senators from New York State have a special responsibility to take a leadership role in that fight. So …. Chuck, Read More
From The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick (1999): "In the Jewish tradition, some memories are very long lasting... Some memories, once functional, become dysfunctional. The concluding chapters of the Book of Esther tell of the queen's soliciting permission to slaughter not just the Jews' armed enemies but the enemies' wives and children—with a Read More
