Blast From The Past

Ginger Lee speaking to the media about then-Rep. Weiner on June 15, 2011. (Photo: Getty)

Woman Involved in Weiner Sexting Scandal Disapproves of Mayoral Bid

Count Ginger Lee, a stripper who was intimately involved in the sexting scandal that led to former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s downfall, as among his detractors as he now seeks the top job in City Hall.

“I do not think Anthony Weiner should run for Mayor of New York City because even now, nearly two years after this story broke, there are still details relating to other women that have not been exposed,” Ms. Lee said in a statement sent to Politicker. “Each time Anthony Weiner deflects or obfuscates these details, my life and perhaps the lives of other women are made more difficult by the increased attention from the media.” Read More

Museums

Jan van Eyck and Workshop Assistant, 'The Crucifixion; The Last Judgment,' ca. 1430. (Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Met’s Renovated, Reinstalled European Art Galleries Bewitch

The treasures have returned.

Today the Met officially reopened its European art galleries, the 45 rooms that sit atop its grand staircase, after three years of planning and nine months of rolling renovations and reinstallation. Twelve galleries once used for special exhibitions have been commandeered for the permanent collection, enlarging the galleries by a full third. You should pay them a visit.

Filling the immaculate spaces are some 750 paintings—”all off the wall, all looked at, all dusted,” an ebullient Keith Christiansen told a crowd of journalists in one of the opening galleries this morning. Read More

Going Shopping

Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (Photo: D Dipasupil/Getty Images)

Mayor Bloomberg Adds Yet Another Property to His Collection

The city’s billionaire mayor has added yet another property to a collection that now includes more plots of land than the number of shoes in most people’s closets.

The mayor purchased a new property in Southampton, New York in May 2012, according to highly-redacted tax returns and other disclosure forms released by his office this afternoon. The 4.8-acre property, adjacent to a home he already owns in the town, is characterized in the forms as “vacant unimproved land” valued at $500,000 or more. Read More

Hires

Jonathan Martin (Image via Politico).

Jonathan Martin Named Political Correspondent at The New York Times

POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin is going to The New York Times as to be their national political correspondent, Carolyn Ryan, the recently named political editor announced today in a newsroom memo. Mr. Martin, who was a senior political reporter at Politico, was one the site’s earliest hires.

POLITICO, for their part, wrote their own newsroom memo. which was obtained by FishbowlDC, where they tried to frame their loss as a positive and explained that, although Mr. Martin told them he was leaving for the Times today, they were not surprised by the news. Read More

The Future of the Ebook

(Photo: Amazon)

Meet Luna Loupe, Author of Some of the Most Bizarre Erotica Amazon Has to Offer

Luna Loupe is a prolific writer. According to Amazon, the self-described “erotica author, geek and generally classy lady” has written 25 anthologies of completely bizarre, out-there paranormal sex novels.

Though she hasn’t updated her blog or tweeted since 2012, Laughing Squid picked up one of her stranger works out of the blue today. Called Someone to Cuttle, the erotic story revolves around a gay man who discovers and eventually has a sexual relationship with a trio of shapeshifting cuttlefish. “18+ only!” reads the warning. “Contains partial shifting, hot gay sex, and a cuttlefish shifter gangbang!” Read More

Visiting Dignitaries

Mr. Kutcher has invested in Foursquare, a check-in app; Chloe + Isabel, a social commerce jewelry company; Airbnb, a network of user-hosted accommodations; and Socialcam, a video sharing app that's a competitor to Viddy (look out, J. Biebs).

Ashton Kutcher Says He Hates Using Twitter Ever Since the Media ‘Fucked it Up’

Ashton Kutcher is totally over Twitter because we all fucking ruined it. The apparent barometer of what’s “cool” told the CTIA Conference on Thursday that his experience on the site changed for the worst since joining and that we have no one but ourselves to blame for it.

Mr. Kutcher said that the media’s oversharers wrecked the once-personal experience of publicly broadcasting your every thought to everyone with an internet connection. He added that when he first joined Twitter, it was hip and represented the democratization of media, but now that it’s gone lamestream, he’s OVER IT. Read More

Manhattan Transfers

Corten steel: it's not just for Barclays!

Sandy Who? Red Hook Townhouse Tries To Set Neighborhood Record With $2.15 M. Pricetag

“The slum that faces the bay” is what Alfieri, an Italian lawyer in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, calls Red Hook. Wedged in a subway-less corner of South Brooklyn, hemmed in by the docklands and Robert Moses’s Gowanus Expressway, Red Hook was for years—as late as 1988, LIFE magazine called it “the crack capital of America”—Brooklyn’s most notorious slum.

But that was then. Buoyed by an unrelenting wave of gentrification sweeping eastwards across the borough, Red Hook has been enjoying the runoff of demand from neighborhoods like Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, which has turned the neighborhood into any other in brownstone Brooklyn: that is, too rich for our blood (and that of most other New Yorkers). Read More