Susan Miller.

Today should be a national holiday in recognition of the two-day hangover. Let’s raise a glass of something—anything—to the enduring collective headache. And cheers to New Year’s Eve, whether you were in Millbrook for shooting and scotch (on scotch on scotch)or in Palm Beach for a party hosted by the Coconuts—that super-special club of just 24 men, including David Koch, Leonard Lauder and Wilbur Ross—wearing a carnation and a white jacket for the occasion.

Whatever you did on December 31, yesterday was a joke. A joke with a punch line of nausea. You remember, don’t you? Think heavy curtains and an order of mozzarella sticks with a side of bacon, followed late in the afternoon by a hamburger chaser at JG Melon, the Upper East Side favorite frequented by Old Boys and ladies who actually lunch.) But today ... today is when the real pain happens. You’re back to work, with a whole year ahead of you. Make the most of it!

Before you plunge back into the scrum, however, maybe surf over to Susan Miller’s website, Astrology Zone. As every female knows, she updates on the first of the month, which we’re guessing you missed. Reading your horoscope online is the best way to be proactive about 2013 without lifting a finger ... well, maybe your index finger.

JG Melon, 1291 Third Avenue; Susan Miller’s horoscopes can be found at www.astrologyzone.com

Illustration by Amy Melson

Tom Wolfe’s new novel, the Miami-set Back to Blood, has not been particularly well-received by book critics, but at the balmy, prosecco-soaked doorbuster sale and glad-handing jubilee known as Art Basel Miami Beach in early December, attendees armed with e-readers passed around one brief passage with gleeful approval. The scene, which comes midway through the book and is set at the same fair, introduces a character in whom many see an eerie resemblance to dealer Larry Gagosian—the art world’s widely admired, widely feared and widely resented top dog. The character, a gallery dealer named Harry Goshen (the name is perhaps a tip-off) is described as “a tall man with gray hair, although he doesn’t look all that old, and eerie pale-gray eyes like the slanted eyes of a husky.”

A bit mesmerized, Mr. Wolfe’s narrator circles back to Goshen’s eyes a few lines later: “So pale, those eyes ... they look ghostly and sinister ...”

Several fairgoers who encountered Mr. Gagosian in his booth in the Miami Beach Convention Center took note of his eyes as well. Not sinister, they said, just tired.

“Maybe it’s getting to him,” one art adviser surmised. “The travel, the expansion. At some point, it hits you the wrong way. It’s hard to satisfy everyone and keep all the balls in the air, and when you go to the top like that you become a target. People love to get the giant.”

It’s been an unusually challenging period for Mr. Gagosian, the art world’s silver-maned dealer-emperor, whose sharp eye for talent, business prowess and aggressive style of deal-making propelled an ascendancy from modest beginnings as a Los Angeles street peddler—hawking cheap posters in Westwood—to a position of unrivaled dominance in the international art trade, a sovereignty that some are predicting, a tad eagerly, may soon come to a close.

Even as he grapples with a pair of ongoing lawsuits—one brought by billionaire investor Ronald Perelman and another by art collector Jan Cowles—accusing Mr. Gagosian of enriching himself at clients’ expense, his empire has been rocked by a string of high-profile defections.

As Basel got underway, smartphones began vibrating with a curious piece of news: dealer David Zwirner, the serious-minded German known for shepherding cerebral artists like Neo Rauch to world acclaim, would be mounting a New York exhibition of Jeff Koons, long a prized show pony in Mr. Gagosian’s crowded stable and, perhaps coincidentally, the subject of that lawsuit by Mr. Perelman. Though a Gagosian spokesperson made it clear that the gallery would continue to represent Mr. Koons, who also shows at Sonnabend, the move seemed a noteworthy poke in the eye, and the timing a further thumb-twist.

Then, less than a week later, Damien Hirst—a shrewd market operator in his own right—announced that he was leaving Gagosian after 17 years. Never mind that the dealer had helped turn Mr. Hirst into the world’s richest artist (reportedly worth upward of $300 million) and had recently given over his entire network of galleries around the world to a blockbuster exhibition of Mr. Hirst’s Spot paintings (complete with a zany Amazing Race–type contest prodding jet-setting aficionados to hit all 11 shows).

Hirst was history.

And those Spots of his weren’t the last dominoes to fall. A day later, the dotty Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama—who was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum—announced her own defection from Gagosian.

Three artists out of more than 75 that Mr. Gagosian works with—a number that includes estates like those of Picasso and Warhol—may seem like small potatoes for a world-straddling powerhouse. But there is a common thread that may make their loss a bit more impactful for the gallery, and portentous for the market as a whole. “Look at what they all provided: unlimited supply,” noted an art consultant who has had numerous dealings with Mr. Gagosian. “How many Hirsts do you think they sold? Thousands. How many Kusamas?” Despite her voluntary residence in a Japanese mental hospital, Ms. Kusama remains highly productive. “‘Forty-eight by forty-eight? Can do! You want red? White? No problem!’” the consultant continued, imagining the gallery’s sales pitch. “There are very few artists like that, and he managed to get them. The question is, who can he push to fill that void? Who will be the next million-dollar artist who can churn out a thousand pieces?”

Such artwork, the consultant said, is “like candy”—a quick hit of acquisitional glucose for collectors, necessitating regular replenishment. “‘You have a Hirst? I want a Hirst.’ ‘You have a butterfly? I want a butterfly and a cow.’ Collectors were buying two, three, four at a clip. Because a million dollars didn’t mean anything to these people.”

If the art market has been experiencing a bubble—and many observers believe that it has—this may signal the beginning of a much-needed correction. “I think the whole business has been slowing down,” said one prominent collector, who cited the disappointing auction results for Mr. Koons and several other of Gagosian’s artists at last November’s contemporary sales, despite record-breaking prices for a number of other artists.

Perhaps the gallery overplayed its hand. “City by city, they saturated the market with [Richard] Prince and Koons,” the collector said. “Instead of working with an artist to have longevity—with a slow output, distributed internationally over years—they blitzkrieged and carpet-bombed each city with the work. Everybody got a Hirst.” Perhaps, the collector speculated, these artists were leaving simply because they’d already sold everything they could to Mr. Gagosian’s clientele and it was time to tap a new user base.

“Larry is quite phenomenal,” the collector added. “He got these collectors to buy anything he put out there. ‘Larry’s going to show it!’ became an instant recipe for money. It was absurd.”

These high-level defections follow the deaths last year of several of Mr. Gagosian’s blue-chip artists, the losses of whom likely will be felt not only personally but financially. Cy Twombly, long a jewel in Mr. Gagosian’s crown (newly launched Gagosian galleries in Rome, Paris and Athens all opened with Twombly shows), died in July of 2011, followed by Richard Hamilton, John Chamberlain, Mike Kelly and Franz West.

And then there are those pending lawsuits. The allegations themselves are not terribly dramatic—let’s see you try selling a billion dollars worth of art in a year, as Gagosian reportedly does, without breaking some crockery—but of far larger consequence might be the unflattering light they have shed on the inner workings of the Gagosian empire. Dozens of emails and hundreds of pages of deposition testimony have been made public, opening the kimono on the dealer’s typically discreet business affairs.

This unusual drumbeat of bad news has the art world muttering about a once-unthinkable possibility: could the invincible Larry Gagosian actually be in real trouble? Could a “post-Gagosian era,” as one longtime art writer put it, be at hand?

Is Go-Go a goner?

“People are saying, ‘The whole Gagosian empire is falling apart!’” the prominent collector said.“‘Oh, the whole thing is going to collapse!’ There’s a lot of jealousy.” Art world sources contacted by The Observer were universal in their praise of Mr. Gagosian’s business instincts and his curatorial acumen, noting with particular approval the many influential museum-quality exhibitions his galleries have mounted over the years. They also called him tough, Machiavellian and hard on his employees, a thick-skinned bunch for whom a ready box of Puffs is nonetheless said to be standard equipment. Many sounded mirthful about his string of difficulties. And they all flatly refused to be quoted by name.

“Look, Larry is not a liar, he’s not a cheat,” said the collector. “But he is a frigging bully. He’s very good at intimidating people and running his social pressure on them, and he’s good at image-making, putting out the idea that everything he touches turns to gold. Which of course is bullshit. It worked for a certain amount of time, but no longer.”

Larry Gagosian (Getty)

A spokesperson for Gagosian did not respond to a request for comment, but in a 2010 interview with the Financial Times, the dealer defended his approach: “As long as you behave well, there’s nothing wrong with being aggressive,” he said.

“Everyone wants to see Larry fail,” the adviser noted. “I’m not in that camp. I think he’s extraordinary. Maybe it’s just his time, though. One thing after another put a chink in the armor.”

Mr. Perelman, the billionaire investor and chairman of Revlon, has been a client of Mr. Gagosian’s for more than two decades. The two of them are also, as Mr. Perelman noted pointedly in his lawsuit, longtime friends and business partners (both are investors in the Blue Parrot restaurant in East Hampton). “Accordingly,” the original complaint put it, “Gagosian owed Plaintiffs the highest degree of loyalty and fair dealing.”

In other words: this time, it’s personal.

The rather complicated suit concerns a series of deals—both purchases and trades—between Mr. Perelman and Gagosian Gallery, including a $4 million sculpture by Mr. Koons, Popeye,and works by Richard Serra and Cy Twombly. Mr. Perelman alleges that in multiple instances, Mr. Gagosian misrepresented the market value of these works in order to maximize his own cut on various transactions. Mr. Gagosian’s legal team declined to comment on the Perelman case or any other pending legal matter.

None of the art-world insiders The Observer spoke to believed Mr. Perelman would prevail, and some noted that the complaint served mostly to advertise the plaintiff’s apparent, if implausible, naïveté. There is, for instance, the contention that “Plaintiffs depended on defendants, whose knowledge of the market and judgment in these matters were without peer, for their decisions with respect to art transactions,” which is a little like relying on the salesgirl at H&M to tell you whether your butt looks big in that sequined A-line cocktail dress. It’s her job to move merchandise.

“That’s the game,” said one well-regarded art adviser who has worked with both men. “They’re all in the game together—Perelman’s like that, too.” Likening the relationship to a marriage gone bad, the adviser added, “People get along for years, and then they get a divorce and want to kill each other.”

“I think Ron would sue his dog-walker, and he probably already has,” the collector noted.

Despite Mr. Perelman’s well-established litigious streak, the move raised eyebrows because it seemed to violate the omertà that has long prevailed in the art world. “It’s shocking,” said the art consultant. “It’s a very respected collector standing up to Gagosian for the first time, and doing so in a very public way, saying, basically, ‘I’m not going to take this shit anymore. I’m not going to dummy up.’ I think that’s what’s happening here—when somebody’s the king of the world, nobody wants to alienate them, but the minute people start to defect, they all start piling on.”

If so, Mr. Gagosian might want to seek the advice of his onetime boss Michael Ovitz, for whom he worked as secretary for a brief period in the 1970s. Years later, after co-founding CAA, Mr. Ovitz came to rule Hollywood in much the way Mr. Gagosian dominates the art world; when the spell was broken, with Mr. Ovitz’s firing from Disney in 1997, the many enemies he’d made along the way lined up to get their licks in.

Whatever its chances of success, the Perelman suit raises a thorny issue for the art world: what information, if any, must a dealer disclose to those with whom he does business, be they artist, buyer or seller? As Mr. Perelman’s complaint claimed, “Unbeknownst to his customers, Gagosian and the Gallery are often on all sides of the transaction—representing the buyer, the seller and the artist—and they use these multiple roles to their advantage by undervaluing works when purchasing them, overvaluing them when selling them, and pocketing the substantial differential.”

Which sounds like a pretty good definition of the gallery trade, except maybe the part about it being unbeknownst to anyone.

Another recent lawsuit also raised the matter of Mr. Gagosian’s supposed fiduciary duty to a client, and some onlookers believe the case may redefine the way business is done in the art world.

An edition of Roy Lichtenstein's 'Girl in Mirror' at Sotheby's in London.

In 1964, Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror—an “enamel” on steel, made in an edition of eight—was a newly minted, fresh-faced ingenue with a bright future and the world at her feet. Today, a little worse for wear, she has emerged as the unwitting subject of a $15 million lawsuit filed by lawyers for art collector Jan Cowles. Ms. Cowles, 93, suffers from dementia, and the suit filed on her behalf alleges that her son, Charles Cowles, who put the Lichtenstein on consignment with Mr. Gagosian and then sold it to him, did not have the authority to do so—and therefore the dealer had no right to sell it to a third party. The suit further alleges that Mr. Gagosian took advantage of Mr. Cowles, who was in tough financial straits, to obtain an unusually rich commission on the sale.

Mr. Cowles, it should be noted, is no novice in the art trade: a longtime dealer himself, he ran a New York gallery for 30 years until closing it in 2009. What’s more, he has a history of unloading works from his mother’s collection—as it turns out, sometimes without her say-so. Indeed, in a settlement agreement between Jan and Charles filed earlier this year after Jan’s attorneys threatened legal action against him, Charles admitted to selling his mother’s art without permission and agreed to pay her back. How he will do so is hard to fathom, though, since the amount owed is said to be approximately $12 million, and Mr. Cowles has no apparent source of income.

In a November court proceeding, the defense stated its intention to add Charles Cowles to the case, a move that the court seemed to approve of. “Well, I’ve been surprised that the son wasn’t brought into the action initially,” Judge Charles Ramos admitted. The defense also indicated that it was considering adding Lester Marks, Ms. Cowles’s accountant and attorney-in-fact, to the case, on the theory that he may have some liability in failing to prevent Charles from selling the artworks.

In late November, both sides agreed to move forward with voluntary mediation, putting litigation on pause.

The Girl in Mirror controversy began in March 2011 with a suit filed over another unauthorized sale. Art collector Robert Wylde sued Gagosian Gallery for fraud after Mr. Gagosian sold Mr. Wylde a Mark Tansey painting, The Innocent Eye Test, that had been consigned by Charles Cowles. It turned out the painting did not belong to Mr. Cowles, but instead was jointly owned by his mother and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr. Cowles was quick to take responsibility for the debacle. “I didn’t even think about whether the Met owned part of it or not,” he told The New York Times after Mr. Wylde filed suit. “And one day I saw it on the wall and thought, ‘Hey, I could use money’ and so I decided to sell it ... And now it’s a big mess.”

Mr. Cowles, whom Mr. Gagosian referred to in a deposition as “a train wreck,” has claimed in an affidavit that he has been treated for memory problems in recent years. He did not respond to requests for comment.

But Charles Cowles wasn’t the one being sued. Mr. Wylde sought $6 million in damages from Mr. Gagosian for selling him a work without proper title, and Mr. Wylde was sued in turn by Ms. Cowles, who demanded the painting back. The case was settled last October. Mr. Gagosian paid Mr. Wylde $4.4 million, Mr. Wylde returned the painting to Jan Cowles, and Ms. Cowles promptly gifted the painting to the Met, where it is now on display.

For Mr. Gagosian, though, l’affaire Cowles was far from over. The Tansey deal, it transpired, had been part of a larger transaction between Mr. Cowles and Gagosian Gallery in August 2009 that also included Girl in Mirror.

Though the dealer the originally told Charles he expected to sell the enamel for at least $3 million, of which Cowles would receive $2.5 million, he had been unable to do so, eventually paying Charles a total of $3 million for both paintings.

In January, Ms. Cowles filed suit over the Lichtenstein. In addition to taking issue with the unauthorized sale, the suit alleged that Mr. Gagosian falsely claimed the piece was damaged in order to induce Charles to accept a lowball price of just $1 million. Evidence revealed that the work had been restored and showed discoloration and wear, but it remains unclear how much its condition should have affected the price.

In papers filed in March, Ms. Cowles’s lawyer, David Baum—an aggressive litigator whose Facebook posts taunting Mr. Gagosian briefly made their way into the proceedings—brought to light an explosive email. The message was sent to Thompson Dean, the enamel’s eventual buyer, by Gagosian Gallery director Deborah McLeod in July 2009, a month after Charles Cowles announced he was shuttering his own art gallery: “Seller now in terrible straits and needs cash,” she wrote. “Are you interested in making a cruel and offensive offer? Come on, want to try?”

Ms. McLeod had initially approached Mr. Dean about the piece in January, at a price of $3.5 million, but he’d cited liquidity issues, suggesting they get “creative/attractive” on the price. By summer 2009, the recession was in full effect, and Mr. Dean got his Lichtenstein for $2 million. “Approx. half off, so I like it,” Ms. McLeod wrote him. Without disclosing to Charles Cowles that a buyer had made any offer for the piece—and certainly not $2 million—the gallery offered to take both the Lichtenstein and the Tansey off his hands for a total of $3 million. Of that, $1 million was earmarked for the Lichtenstein, which meant a hefty 50 percent commission for Gagosian. Mr. Cowles bit.

Mark Tansey's 'The Innocent Eye Test,' 1981.

The complaint alleges that the gallery breached its fiduciary duty to Charles Cowles by working both sides of the deal without full disclosure—in effect using knowledge of Charles’s desperate financial condition to solicit a lowball offer, then lowballing him further and pocketing the difference. Ms. Cowles is asking for some $15 million, which includes the value of the painting plus interest and $10 million in punitive damages.

The art adviser we spoke to recalled seeing the enamel in Basel, where Mr. Gagosian had placed it on view. “It was a tough year,” the adviser said, noting the recession underway at the time. “But you know Larry got somebody to buy it and led Charlie to the bone and took the most monstrous commission anyone’s ever heard of in the art world.”

That said, everyone knows a smart dealer will maximize his profits, and of course Charles Cowles—whatever his personal circumstances—was under no obligation to accept the $1 million offer.

How one views the case is a matter of perspective. Whereas writer Felix Salmon wrote that the deal smacked of “skulduggery,” Art Market Monitor thought the emails merely “show[ed] a high pressure sales organization working hard to make a deal. Though Gagosian made $1 million on the sale himself, I doubt he rubbed his hands with glee. No one in 2009 was confident they would be able to cover their overhead.” Besides, while Mr. Cowles’s financial situation was in fact dire, that’s hardly an uncommon circumstance for collectors looking to part with works of art.

“Look, Larry’s fine to take a million if he can get away with it,” the art adviser admitted. “But seeing the inner workings of the conversation and the McLeod email casts a very poor light on how business is done. I’ve heard a lot of rumblings from collectors wondering about whether they’ve gotten a fair shake in their deals.”

In the art market there are, broadly speaking, two ways to structure a resale. The first is a consignment. The seller consigns an artwork to a selling agent, who markets it on his behalf, taking a percentage of the sale as commission. The second is a buy/sell, in which the agent buys the work from a seller and sells it on to a buyer. At the time Mr. Gagosian got his offer from Thompson Dean, Girl in Mirror was still on consignment. It subsequently appears to have morphed into a buy/sell.

When the judge denied Mr. Gagosian’s motion to dismiss the Lichtenstein case in September, he noted that “Gagosian, as an agent acting on behalf of its consignor, had a fiduciary duty to act in the utmost good faith and in the interest of Charles, its principal, throughout their relationship.” The standard desk reference on art law—which, as it happens, is co-authored by longtime Gagosian attorney Ralph Lerner—takes the same view: “On accepting works from an artist on consignment,” it reads, “the dealer becomes the artist’s agent, and the law of agency applies.”

Should the case go to trial, it may turn in part on whether Mr. Cowles’s role in the transaction is seen as comparable to that of an artist or consignor, or if he was acting as a fellow dealer instead, and was therefore not owed the same fiduciary duty—as the defense will likely contend.

Nonetheless, in his deposition, Mr. Gagosian indicated that throughout his career he has represented both sides of transactions without disclosure of that fact to either party. “To be honest with you, the question hardly ever gets asked,” he said. “I never get asked the question, ‘Are you representing both sides?’” He said he thought the information was “implicit,” adding that “My objective is to pay the seller and to make a profit for the gallery.”

“Lawyers and past clients of Gagosian’s who are not of good will would definitely find ammunition in that type of testimony,” said longtime art lawyer Thomas Danziger. But Mr. Gagosian, Mr. Danziger added, “is the most important and most successful art dealer out there. If he believes this is correct, it should be no surprise that other dealers feel the same way.”

Fiduciary duty is “not well [enough] understood” in the art trade, Mr. Danziger said. “Larry Gagosian’s view as expressed in the deposition might even be the majority view among art dealers, which is that they are representing ‘the deal.’ In point of fact and under New York agency law, you cannot represent both parties on the same transaction unless there is full and informed consent, and that is clearly what has been missing in a lot of transactions we’ve been reading about.”

Whatever the outcome of the Cowles and Perelman suits, many think change is long overdue. “People are going to have to be regulated,” the art adviser said. “More transparency may just be what everybody needs. Then again, maybe if you regulate the art world, it will fall apart.”

“A lot of people think this is the end of the art world as we know it,” the consultant agreed.

As for Mr. Gagosian, the recent patch of rough ice has exposed him—and the freewheeling industry he has helped to create—to unaccustomed scrutiny.” He puts winning first, and he doesn’t care who he steps on or screws,” the advisor said, “but that’s what it takes. It’s all a snake pit. These people deserve each other. And when you think about it, it’s all quite entertaining and amusing.

“The art world is constant entertainment.”

agell@observer.com

Illo: Robert Grossman

As The Observer was going to press on Tuesday, the death toll from what appeared to be the most devastating storm our city has ever experienced was up to 18, after 80 mph winds battered the city and waves as high as 14 feet washed through its streets. Among the storm’s victims were Jessie Streich-Kest and Jacob Vogelman, a pair of friends in their early 20s who were found under a fallen tree in Ditmas Park, having ventured out to walk Jessie’s dog. The subways were slowly draining of water and nobody knew when the system would groan to life again. More than 80 homes had burned to the ground in Breezy Point. As many as 750,000 New Yorkers were without power. The financial markets were down. Schools were closed. People were throwing around estimates of losses in the many, many billions.

A giant crane dangled limply, forebodingly from the side of the most prestigious new address in town.

Eleven years after the World Trade Center attacks, our city was again under siege. The sun was up there, somewhere, but the recovery was just beginning.

Not too long ago—or was it forever?—back when the name Sandy brought to mind a loyal mutt beloved of a plucky red-haired orphan and a tropical depression without a name was just stirring to life in the Caribbean Sea southwest of Jamaica, it was fashionable to complain that New York was getting soft. It seemed back then that the safety-first ethos of our anxiety-prone mayor, a Jewish mother at heart, who really just wanted us to be happy and healthy and well-fed, risked fundamentally altering the character of the city.

That would have been impossible to imagine in the ’70s, the ’80s or the ’90s, when the frisson of danger that seemed so endemic to life here lent every resident an Urban Survival merit badge for the dubious feat of actually making a home for ourselves. In exchange, we dealt with the grit, the graffiti, the vaudevillian array of chains and deadbolts on every apartment door, and the muggings so prevalent (in 1981, around four times the annual number that we have today) that it was thought prudent to carry around a second wallet.

It came with the territory. It was New York. You lived with it. Because, lunatic though it appeared to friends and relatives who lived elsewhere, you lived here.

Little by little, in the years since the Twin Towers fell, living in New York became a lot like living everywhere else. But not this week.

This week, things got scary.

WE’D SHRUGGED OFF the latest would-be terrorist attack on our city—an attempt by a 21-year-old Bangladeshi student living in Queens to do, as he explained to an FBI informant posing as a member of al Qaeda, “something big. Something very big. Very, very, very, very big, that will shake the whole country.” Having parked a van containing 1,000 pounds of explosives in front of the Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty Street, he tried to detonate it via cell phone switch from a room in the Millennium Hotel. To his surprise, it was fake.

A few days later, police would collar one of their own, Gilberto Valle of the 26th Precinct in Manhattanville, for the crime of tapping into state and federal law enforcement databases for his personal use. Which isn't that serious a transgression, except that his personal use entailed plotting to kidnap, rape, torture, murder, roast and eat as many as 100 women.

Mr. Valle was instantly dubbed the Cannibal Cop, and then was promptly forgotten as the city received news of an even more horrific crime. After taking her 3-year-old daughter, Nessie, for a swim lesson, Manhattan mom Matilda Krim returned to her apartment on the Upper West Side to find her two other children, Lucia and Leo, lying in the bathtub in a pool of blood, and their nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, on the floor beside them with stab wounds in her neck. The children died. The nanny survived but remains in a medically induced coma, so we’ll have to wait awhile to ask her why.

WE KNOW THE WORLD is full of horrors. But knowing things and feeling them are different. Based on Samhain, the millennia-old festival marking the moment when the wall between our world and the “other world” is at its thinnest, Halloween is still an entertaining way to process our fears. But we have lots of ways of doing that now.

One is to coo lullabies to ourselves and go to sleep. That’s how we’ve dealt with the greatest collective danger we have ever faced, the warming of the planet, about which all of our leaders in both parties have failed, utterly, cravenly, bewilderingly, to speak a meaningful word.

Then along came a hurricane to nudge us awake.

In an instant, fear came back, and this time it was a little harder to shunt aside. Amid the hurricane parties and the hurricane sex and the endless onslaught of 140-character irony and bravado and awe and confusion, we all felt it this time. This is bad. The meteorologists were talking about a “perfect storm,” an unprecedented weather event, a #Frankenstorm.

Monday afternoon, The Observer stood on the bike path in Hudson River Park at around 30th Street and watched the river beginning to crash over the embankment. Joggers were out. Tourists were posing for pictures in front of the scene. Water finds its own level, we thought. The illusion that Manhattan is an island surrounded by rivers began to fall away. More accurately, Manhattan is a shallow bump in the surface of the Earth—just like so many other bumps, some underwater, others peeking through now and then for some period of time.

Around midnight on Monday, as that crane dangled in the air atop the city’s gleaming new “billionaire magnet,” and 215 patients were being hurriedly evacuated from NYU’s Langone Medical Center, and façades were falling off of buildings and transformers were exploding and fires were burning and people dying, the novelist Bret Easton Ellis fired a tweet out into the storm:

Yet another reason not to live in New York, he wrote.

Mr. Ellis is admirable, in a weird way, for having clung to fame this long. If occasionally one has to troll an entire city of dazed and devastated individuals to keep the spotlight on oneself for another few minutes, so be it.

But what he doesn’t understand is that living in New York has never been about being reasonable. If reasonable were the criterion, we would live in any one of a million other places. We live here because it is New York. Because we love it. Because so many other people choose, unreasonably, to live here, too. Because even when the city is shaken—and it is, periodically, shaken to its core—it is the greatest bump in the water we can imagine standing on.

At one of the innumerable press conferences held Monday night at the Office of Emergency Management, as nature bore down on our home, Mayor Bloomberg waxed philosophical.

“It would be wonderful if we could get through this,” he said, “and then we can dine out on this storm forever.”

agell@observer.com

Dre Skull and Max Glazer, mixing it up.

A crowd of music fans, including Fab Five Freddy, spilled out onto West Houston Street on a clear night last week. The occasion was the record release party for Kingston Story Deluxe Edition, the latest album by Jamaican dancehall superstar Vybz Kartel, a k a the World Boss, a k a Gaza Don, a k a the Teacher, a k a Adija Palmer.

The event featured two DJ sets—one by the album’s Brooklyn-based producer, Dre Skull, and another by Max Glazer—made up of bumping Kartel remixes and “dub plates” streamed live on the restaurant’s internet radio station. The album, which originally received a digital release on Mixpak records in 2011 but had been repackaged with additional tracks by Vice’s Noisey Records, was for sale in CD and vinyl formats, as was Mr. Kartel’s recent memoir, Voice of the Ghetto, a heartfelt jeremiad directed against the forces of “Babylon,” the powerful interests who seek to enslave the rest of us. Little buttons bearing the word Gaza, one of the two sometimes warring musical syndicates that dominate Jamaican music, were also available, though as one attendee pointed out, the logo “could be misconstrued.”

So what was missing?

There appeared to be no Vybz premium handcrafted Jamaican rum on hand, for one thing. Mr. Kartel’s self-branded Daggering Condoms were nowhere to be found, nor was any of the Vybz Kartel cake soap the recording artist marketed a while back, after claiming that he used a similar product to lighten his skin. (Mr. Kartel’s unabashed defense of bleaching has sparked a soul-searching debate throughout the Caribbean—though cake soaps, which are used for laundry, are not actually effective for the purpose.)

Perhaps the most conspicuous element missing from the proceedings was Mr. Kartel himself. The DJ, who is widely considered the most talented and prolific performer to emerge from the dancehall scene, has resided at the Horizon Adult Remand Centre in Kingston for 11 months, awaiting trial in connection with two murders.

It’s an awkward situation. Mr. Kartel’s influence in Jamaican society is hard to overstate. Olympic runner Usain Bolt flashed a “Gaza Empire” hand sign after his 200-meter run, and a number of other Olympians adopted the gesture. Not only does Mr. Kartel’s music and that of his protégés dominate West Indian radio, he is a beguiling provocateur—a little like Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol rolled into one.

“He’s truly a conceptual artist, in my mind,” said Dre Skull, the album’s soft-spoken, impressively bearded producer, who studied critical theory at Penn before entering the music business. “He still dictates the cultural discussion in Jamaica. In terms of what pop stardom can be, he is pushing it beyond what’s been done anywhere.”

Dre Skull and Mr. Kartel recorded the album in Kingston, and they were set to produce a video when the singer was arrested. “I didn’t have even the remotest sense that it could be something serious,” he said. “And when it came out that there was a murder charge, I was just totally shocked and surprised.”

Like most of the party attendees The Observer spoke to, Dre Skull said he had no idea whether there was any truth to the accusations. The Jamaican criminal justice system is notoriously corrupt, and there is no shortage of conspiracy theories claiming the charges were invented to silence a critic of the island’s power elite (a k a Babylon).

In any case, there seemed to be little question about Mr. Kartel’s musical output. Vice cofounder Suroosh Alvi said he became “obsessed” with Kingston Story while in Jamaica earlier this year making a documentary about Snoop Dogg’s new reggae-inspired album which Dre Skull helped produce. “Kingston Story became the soundtrack to my life,” Mr. Alvi said. “I just thought, ‘This guy Dre Skull is incredibly talented and has made a gem of an album—poppy and melancholic and so different than a lot of dancehall—and it needs to be heard by more people. So I suggested we do a rerelease.”

Mr. Alvi recalled his first encounter with Mr. Kartel’s oeuvre during an earlier visit to the island. He had landed at 5 a.m., “unaware of Vybz Kartel’s mythology,” he said. But during a four-hour drive to his destination, the driver blasted Kartel the whole way. As Mr. Alvi became hooked on the music, the driver grew wistful about the incarcerated superstar.
“I miss him so much,” the man told Mr. Alvi.

Veep of faith: Romney and Ryan. (Getty)

In selecting Rep. Paul Ryan as the next would-be President Vice President of the United States, Mitt Romney has rolled the dice on a risky, game-changing candidate (with all the baggage the term implies), a good-looking running mate with serious policy chops, who could nonetheless cost him the race. Meanwhile, however, the move appears to tee up a new era of GOP dominance that could find Mr. Ryan in the White House come 2016, while his erstwhile patron looks on from the private-sector sidelines.

Mr. Ryan’s negatives as a pick are plain to see: He comes from a Midwestern state that favored Mr. Obama by 15 percent in the last election and in which the president still holds a comfortable lead, so even the Badger State’s mere 10 electoral votes could still go blue.

He is the architect of a radical right-wing economic vision that will be an extremely hard sell to general election voters.

Despite his callow visage and Tobey Maguire-esque likability, the Congressional Budget Committee chairman’s series of roadmaps and alternative budgets are full of policy prescriptions that don’t tend to poll well with independent voters: huge reductions in tax rates for the wealthy (not a great talking point for Mr. Romney) as well as the elimination of levies on capital gains, interest and stock dividends. A sawzall spree of spending cuts. The creation of a voucher system for Medicare. And the partial privatization of Social Security.

He doesn’t just touch the so-called “third rail of American politics,” as Tip O’Neill famously called the most popular government program ever devised, he gets down in the track bed and pisses all over it. In Florida, the most prized swing state in the general election, Mr. Ryan's scheme is positively toxic.

The veep candidate gets candor points for peeling off the rhetoric and baring his agenda for all to see. There’s a reason, however, that Mr. Romney has still never been “unzipped,” as Ann Romney proposed, but on the contrary has attired his own economic plans in an exceedingly modest, butt-covering ankle-length skirt: The details simply don’t play well, except with the Republican base and the self-interested billionaire backers of the tea party program. Even Mr. Ryan’s fellow Republicans are wary of his policy ideas.

The fact that Team Romney is still trying to lock down his base suggests that the campaign is in real trouble—and that the candidate may be too weak stand up to his financiers and what seems an increasingly desperate inner circle. They know as well as anyone that the well-paved road to the White House (Mr. Romney is not an off-road type of guy) calls for tacking to the center at this stage in the campaign, not pulling a sharp right and throwing off the GPS. Moreover, the prospect of Mr. Ryan’s Palin-esque upstaging of his new boss is a given, as their joint appearance on Saturday made all too clear.

A number of pundits have made the point that Mr. Ryan has never lost an election. But there’s a first time for everything, and the candidate could not have chosen a better race to lose. While wiping away his crocodile tears in November, the GOP’s new intellectual heavyweight (sorry, Newt) can comfort himself with the notion that he’ll almost certainly emerge as the nationally tested front-runner for the 2016 race.

While no sitting Congressman has ever captured the White House, Mr. Ryan would be able to count on a tailwind of outrage to fuel his run. A conservative base infuriated by the 2012 loss of a Northeast moderate like Mr. Romney—whom they never trusted in the first place—will be in no mood to swallow another establishment pick. And the Kochs, who will be giddy at the prospect of a true fellow traveler in the West Wing, practically a genius in comparison to former standard bearers like Herman Cain, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, will pull out all the stops to put Mr. Ryan in office.

Let’s face it, he wouldn’t be the first competitor to take a dive in one contest in order to better position himself for the main event.

Indeed, when Mr. Romney introduced his running mate on Saturday as “the next president of the United States,” he might not have been mistaken after all—next, as in, After Obama finishes his second term.

Still, while Democrats may be cheered by this analysis, they shouldn’t be. Because while Mr. Ryan’s selection may well help them hold onto the White House, it could also lose them the Senate. Democrats, who hold a slim four-vote majority, are defending 23 seats; Republicans just 10. Numbers-cruncher Nate Silver has identified 16 of these races as competitive, of which seven are seen as tossups.

A string of recent tea party upsets in the the Senate primaries has Democrats licking their chops, but Mr. Ryan’s ability to fire up the base and juice turnout could well become a critical element that turns the tide in these races, and the down-ticket impact will be formidable, tilting still more statehouses and local seats to the GOP.

Meanwhile, four years may seem like a long time to wait for the presidency, but the masterminds of the conservative resurgence have spent decades gazing at the horizon. For them, it’s no stretch at all to imagine Mr. Ryan sweeping into power in 2016, a conquering hero to wild-eyed, ideologically driven GOP majorities in both houses, who will have spent years pushing for special prosecutors to ransack Obama’s sofa cushions while plotting to put the final match to the social safety net.

It’s worth nothing that Mr. Ryan is an admitted noodler. For non-fans of Dirty Jobs (which could do a fun episode on the vice presidency itself, come to think of it), noodling is a method for catching catfish with one’s bare hands. It is also known as catfisting, as Obama’s opposition research shop is undoubtedly well aware.

Catfish are timid creatures; they spend most of their time hanging out in holes, playing it safe. (You see where I’m going with this.) The noodler merely needs to find a catfish hole somewhere, stick his hand in and wait. The anxious fish, desperate to escape its self-made trap, lunges for the hand, at which point the nooder grabs the sucker by the gills and heaves it onto shore.

It looks like Mr. Ryan and his supporters just noodled the hell out of Mitt Romney. And the Romney camp bit off more than it can chew.

Lehrer.

Amid the pile-on of denunciations of Jonah Lehrer, the New Yorker writer whose invention of a Bob Dylan quote was uncovered earlier this week by a contributor to the Tablet, his former editor steps up to defend him. 

I was Jonah Lehrer's editor at Seed magazine, which I believe was the first magazine to publish his writing on neuroscience, and the originator of his "Frontal Cortex" blog. One of the stories we worked on together was included in the 2007 edition of Best American Science and Nature Writing (although that one, in truth, didn't need much help from me).

He is one of the most talented, hard-working, meticulous, and careful writers I've edited (a group that includes Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks, Peter Godwin, Michael Eric Dyson, Evan Ratliff, Bryan Walsh, Jake Silverstein, and Tom Clynes). And having first-hand experience of the fact-checking departments at The New Yorker and Wired, the magazines for which Lehrer most recently wrote, I doubt very much that his manufacturing or misuse of quotes extends much to his magazine writing.

It’s possible that this analysis is colored by my being invested in the outcome of this affair—I don’t know him well but I like and admire the guy. The corrections and suspicious non-attributions that others have uncovered have no doubt already led some editor somewhere in Manhattan to assign a young writer to fact-check all Lehrer’s work; if Michael C. Moynihan’s Tablet article is just the opening of the floodgates, expect the water to rise suddenly sometime next week.

Absent further revelations, though, I find it an unfair double-standard that something Lehrer falsely attributed to Bob Dylan—which is essentially accurate, even if it isn't technically—has cost him his job, and that his publisher is yanking his book. It’s not as if he quoted Dylan as saying, “I’m a Wiccan,” or “Wallace Stevens was a sucky poet.” He wrote, “‘It’s a hard thing to describe,’ Mr. Dylan said. ‘It’s just this sense that you got something to say.’” Here’s Dylan, to Ed Bradley on “60 Minutes” (according to the New York Times’ Media Decoder blog): “It came from, like, right out of that wellspring of creativity…I don’t know how I got to write those songs.”

(This isn't to say what Lehrer did is OK, but as in many cases it seems the attempted cover-up was worse than the misdeed itself; if, say, Lehrer had cut corners in his book proposal’s sample chapter and forgotten or otherwise failed to fix it later, then admitted as much to Moynihan, I venture that he’d still have his cushy New Yorker contract, and his best-seller status.)

Because meanwhile, fatheads on cable TV like Bill O’Reilly knowingly (and probably unknowingly, too) purvey falsehoods every day and they don't lose their jobs, and their books (of much lower quality, and higher degree of falsehood, than Lehrer’s “Imagine,” in nearly all instances) stay on the shelves. Books by Dinesh D’Souza and Ann Coulter have been full of demonstrable falsehoods for years, and what do these authors get? Another six-figure book contract, that’s what. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s and Amazon’s actions to erase Imagine from the market are cowardly, seen in this light.

And what of the politicians’ lies? Sad to say, but the only explanation is that we expect it of them, and hold our writers to a higher standard than our policy makers.

Dylan himself has not been immune to borrowing, appropriation, theft—Jonathan Lethem would know what to call it: Dylan’s artworks displayed at Gagosian Gallery last year included an image that appeared to be mimicry of Henri Cartier-Bresson; he was accused of appropriating lyrics from a Civil War-era poet; and his album “Love & Theft” contains melodies and chord progressions that sound remarkably similar to earlier songs, including one from his own album, “Oh Mercy.”

The fact is that the reporter at Tablet who busted Lehrer; most of the bloggers who've recycled the Tablet article and make a living as parasites on the work of better reporters than themselves (the twit at FishbowlNY can't even bother to spell Jonah’s name right); and this reporter, too, couldn't hold a candle to him as a writer or original—yes, original—thinker. (He's also a hell of a nice guy.)

People will point to Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass (whose articles I ex post facto fact-checked, with Lorne Manly, for Brill’s Content) as evidence that Lehrer’s career as a journalist is over. But, while the editors of The New Yorker and Wired will argue the point, Lehrer has become less a journalist and more of a purveyor of ideas. He’s much higher on the media totem pole than Blair or Glass ever were, and he can come back as an author of books, public speaker, TV commentator, screenwriter.… David Remnick’s distancing statement notwithstanding, Lehrer doesn’t need The New Yorker anymore (not that they would take him).

I hope Jonah relaxes and spends a lot of time watching his child grow for a couple of years until this sad, stupid affair blows over and he goes back to earning a fortune by helping us understand ourselves better. I wonder where the people talking smack about him now will be then.

Paul Tullis has written for New York, Businessweek, Scientific American Mind, Fast Company, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Bon Appetit, Radar, and more than 50 other print, digital, and broadcast media outlets. He lives in Los Angeles.

Now all grown up, the Mirror reported, the Gaede girls had “had a radical change of heart—and are now singing a different tune.”

Having moved from Bakersfield, California, to small-town Montana, they had experienced some rough times. Lamb had come down with serious health issues, and had begun using medical marijuana to treat the pain. Meanwhile, they had renounced racism completely. It was a fun bit of news, and a number of other newspapers picked it up. The National Ledger ran a piece linking back to the Daily Mail, which cited the Mirror. The Algemeiner, a Jewish newspaper based in Brooklyn, also cited the Mirror. Hollywood Life linked to the Daily Mail.

But the story sounded familiar. I’d written a similar piece for the Daily, the News Corp.-produced iPad outlet, nearly a year before. But from what I knew of the girls, they’d had it with reporters. I’d negotiated with them for weeks before they’d agreed to be interviewed, and they'd only done so because we knew each other. I’d visited them at their home in California in 2006 when they were just 13 and written a lengthy profile of them that ran in GQ. They and their mother, April Gaede, who is still an ardent White Nationalist, had considered it one of the few fair stories that had been done, so while they have tried to keep a low profile, they made an exception for me.

I looked more closely at the Mirror piece. Here’s what the reporter, Rachael Bletchly, wrote:

“My sister and I are pretty liberal now,” Lamb revealed in a recent US TV interview.

“Yeah,” chipped in Lynx, languidly flicking her long blonde hair.

Here’s what I wrote in the Daily:

“I’m not a white nationalist anymore,” Lamb told The Daily in an exclusive interview, the twins’ first in five years. “My sister and I are pretty liberal now.”

I liked that detail about the languid flicking of the hair, but I hadn’t had that in my piece. The interview was a phoner.

The Mirror:

“Personally, I love diversity! I’m stoked that we have so many different cultures.
"I think it’s amazing, and it makes me proud of humanity every day that we have so many different places and people.

The Daily:

“Personally, I love diversity,” Lynx seconded. “I’m stoked that we have so many different cultures. I think it’s amazing and it makes me proud of humanity every day that we have so many different places and people.”

The Mirror:

“I’m glad we were in a band, but I think we should have been pushed toward something a little more mainstream and easier for us to handle than being front-men for a belief system that we didn’t even completely understand at that time. We were little kids.”

The Daily:

“I’m glad we were in the band,” Lynx said, “but I think we should have been pushed toward something a little more mainstream and easier for us to handle than being front-men for a belief system that we didn’t even completely understand at that time. We were little kids.”

There were more quotes. Everything in the Mirror appeared to be lifted verbatim from my year-old interview in the Daily. The girls were twins and they don’t look this similar.

The spin was different though. Whereas I had been careful not to connect the girls’ use of medical marijuana with their political views, the European press was eager to link the two things, as if weed had just blown their minds. “We were teenage nazis...then we discovered marijuana” read the subhed on the Mirror’s story. The Daily Mail’s headline was “Marijuana changed us from Nazis to peace-loving hippies”

Interestingly, Huffington Post UK ran a story that linked back to the Daily. The Huffington Post has had its issues with questionable borrowing over the years, but here was an impressive counter example. (True, they’d rewritten an entire news story, but at least they’d rewritten the original, and linked to it.)

The story in the Mirror attributed the quotes to “a recent US TV interview.” That was a pretty vague reference. I texted Lynx.

Hey, you around? Seems like you’re getting new press based on our old interview.

She texted right back:

“Haha i know :/ ... it never ends haha! and we thought montana was a big enough rock to hide under:P”

Me: "So you guys didn’t talk to anyone lately?"

Lynx: "Nope! whatever they got they gleaned from what we said to the daily.."

I called her to bitch about the media a bit. “Someone texted us about it and we didn’t know what they were talking about,” she said. “I actually told my mom I thought maybe our Facebook was hacked or something.”

The next day I placed a call to Rachael Bletchly. The Mirror's website describes her as "a senior reporter and feature writer with more than 25 years experience." She sounded nice. I asked her where her story came from. “It was given to us by a freelancer,” she explained. “I just did a rewrite on the intro.”

I told her the quotes seemed like they might have been lifted from the Daily and asked her who the freelancer was. “Actually, I think it was given to me by the news desk here, by a colleague. But he’s off today.”

Ms. Bletchly promised to get back to me with an explanation, and I’ll update when I hear from her. In the meantime, the story is still generating interest. An email recently appeared in my in-box from a reporter with Germany’s Stern magazine. She was wondering what the hell was going on.

“The story is so amazing, I wanted to write about it too,” she wrote, “but then I found out, that the Daily Mail is recycling itself. Or is there a good reason?”

I told her I’d get back to her.

Samuel Zemurray (Getty Images)

Sometimes a banana is just a banana.

But The Fish That Ate the Whale (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Rich Cohen’s absorbing, nimble and unapologetically affectionate account of the life of Sam Zemurray, the so-called Banana Man, who began his astonishing tropical-fruit odyssey as a penniless teenage Russian-Jewish immigrant, peddling “ripes” in the deep south, and eventually became the uncontested kingpin of the international banana trade, is not one of those times. For Mr. Cohen, a banana is much more. It’s the Platonic ideal of a food—sweet and salutary, complete with its own easy-open wrapping—so perfect that it emerged as a ubiquitous dietary staple despite being impossible to grow in this country. (Mr. Cohen has tried.)

And it’s a kind of treasure, not gold but close to it, the subject of brutal conflicts that soaked the rich soil of the Central American isthmus with blood, prompted a coup in Honduras—a regime change engineered by Zemurray himself—and another in Guatemala, providing the template for many of the CIA’s most famous misadventures.

It’s a sort of organic timepiece, inexorably ripening, dieing, from the moment it’s cut from the plant, turning relentlessly from green to yellow to spotted and finally to mush as men like Zemurray race the clock to bring it to market. “As a salesman of a perishable product,” Mr. Cohen writes, “[Zemurray] was a kind of existentialist, skirting the line between wealth and oblivion, health and rot, a rider of railroads, a chaser of time, crossing the country in a boxcar filled with reeking produce.”

And finally, though he doesn’t say it (he doesn’t have to), a banana is, of course, a phallic proxy, a symbol of male potency. In Zemurray’s case, crucially, this means Jewish male potency.

Like so many of Mr. Cohen’s subjects—the Lower East Side racketeers of Tough Jews, the Lithuanian-Jewish resistance fighters of The Avengers, the hard-headed Zionists of Israel Is Real—Zemurray was a badass of the Hebrew persuasion, a yid with an id, a child of Abraham and a sonofabitch, who built from cast-off produce an empire that eventually employed 100,000 people and commanded the world’s largest private navy.

Zemurray arrived in Selma, Alabama, in 1892, “a tough operator, a dead-end kid, cooly figuring angles.” Soon enough he found one in the piles of ripe bananas he saw being dumped into the sea by the large importers at the Port of New Orleans—not worth the effort of trying to transport to market. Or maybe they were? Zemurray bought them cheap, hustled, turned a profit, and did it again.

Before long he’d built up a small fortune and made the trip to Honduras, where he began buying land, 5,000 acres to start, and hiring peasants to clear it and farm it. Mr. Cohen is a wonderfully visceral storyteller—he wants to feel the book while he’s writing it. In one delirious passage he tries to evoke for the reader, and for himself, “the heat and the fear, the snakes in the brush that have to be killed with a single blow, the sting of the poison that makes you want to lie down, just for a minute, in the shade of the ceiba tree...the way the world appears when you have forgotten to drink enough water, a tiny image seen through the wrong end of a telescope.”

Apparently unique among his peers in the trade, Zemurray enjoyed working alongside his men, swinging a machete, laying railroad track, twisting the chunks of rhizome into the dirt. Which might explain why, when the American government made a deal with the president of Honduras that would have ended the preferential tax-free status Zemurray had negotiated, he fought back with such resolve. He recruited a mercenary army, tapped a friendly replacement for the president, planted some favorable news articles, procured a warship, and in 1911 engineered a “revolution.”

That engagement was nothing, though, compared to the so-called Banana War that pitted Zemurray’s company, Cuyamel Fruit, against its much larger rival, United Fruit Co. (also known as El Pulpo, “The Octopus”) in a brutal contest over a few thousand acres of forbidding jungle. The dispute nearly drew the armies of Honduras and Guatemala into a regional conflict before the U.S. Government stepped in to keep the peace, engineering a solution that merged the rival companies and made Zemurray a major shareholder in the combined entity, while simultaneously requiring his retirement from the banana business altogether.

The story of the Banana Man’s subsequent comeback made for one of the greatest corporate dramas of the industrial era. As the Depression took hold, Zemurray watched helplessly as the chieftains of United Fruit—pedigreed WASP brahmins, to a man—gradually ran the business right into the ground. Finally, Zemurray engineered a putsch. Though his contract stipulated that he could never again run a competing banana company, it failed to deal with the possibility of his running United Fruit itself. After traveling the country, secretly winning the proxy votes of top shareholders, he stood in the company’s boardroom in Boston and explained his ideas for turning things around. When the directors turned him down, he promptly fired the chairman and took his place, explaining, “You gentlemen have been fucking this business up long enough. I’m going to straighten it out.”

It’s an irresistible scene—the Jewish immigrant and former “fruit jobber” turning the pinstriped elites out into the street—and all the more so it seems for Mr. Cohen, whose many works of nonfiction seem to share a secondary purpose, mounting a sort of rolling reclamation project for the beleaguered Jewish masculine ideal, or at least grappling honestly with the challenge. The image of the Jewish male was among the many casualties of the Holocaust, to say nothing of the centuries of pogroms, persecution and slavery that preceded it, and Mr. Cohen has worked, one book at a time, to overturn the nebbish stereotype—from the Alvy Singers of the world to the more alarming image of Jewish passivity amid the race’s near-annihilation. As Mr. Cohen writes in Tough Jews, for a kid raised in 1970s Chicago with the notion of Jews as cerebral and pampered suburbanites, his father’s tales of growing up on the rough streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn, in proximity to the Hebrew gangsters of the era (Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Louis Lepke) were a revelation. “The very fact that Jewish kids were once running in gangs, fighting, shooting, changed everything.... People could no longer judge me on the stereotype because the stereotype was wrong.”

The notion is woven throughout Israel Is Real, Mr. Cohen’s marvelous, impressionistic 2009 study of the mythology and the reality of the Jewish nation. In it, he pegs the familiar stereotypes to the centuries spent in the ghettos of Europe. “Every adjective that people came to associate with Jews (submissive, cunning, neurotic, sneaky, weak) derives from life behind the walls,” he writes.

None of which could be said of Sam Zemurray—with the possible exception of cunning.

There’s much more to the story: Zemurray's friendship with Zionist leader Chaim Weitzmann and efforts to funnel guns and refugees past the British-imposed blockade and into Palestine. His employment of pioneering PR man Edward Bernays (a nephew of Sigmund Freud), who helped to build a market for bananas and later lobbied assiduously for the overthrow of Guatemala’s reformist president Jacobo Arbenz, who dared take on United Fruit in the early 1950s. Rather than confront Arbenz directly, the winning strategy was to tar him, falsely, as a Communist and let the CIA do the rest. (The myriad connections between the intelligence services and United Fruit have fueled decades of conspiracy theories, most of them true.) The inevitable decline of United Fruit, and its devastating vilification by everyone from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda to Che Guevara, who found himself radicalized by his encounters with El Pulpo in Guatemala, is a fittingly downbeat coda.

In all, it’s a magnificent, crazy story, engagingly told. In the book’s second half, Mr. Cohen’s writing takes on a pleasantly frantic quality, as if he’s sprinting toward the end. It’s a sensation Zemurray himself would have recognized—the feeling of sitting in a stifling boxcar with a bounty of saleable fruit, so much product to unload, watching the freckles swell and darken as history keeps spinning past.

One evening in late March, the entrepreneur H. Christopher Whittle found himself in a large conference room in Renda Fuzhong, an elite Chinese academy in Beijing’s Haidian district, rattling off his pitch for Avenues, the bilingual for-profit New York preparatory school set to open in September in a former warehouse building on 10th Avenue in Chelsea.

Listening intently to the presentation were 20 Renda ninth-graders who were already committed to Avenues in the fall and about 100 parents and grandparents. Mr. Whittle explained that a decade hence, Avenues: the World School would comprise an international network of 20 academies, serving K through 12, spanning the globe from Doha to Moscow, and Mexico City to Johannesburg. Every student in the network will have an “automatic transfer right” to any other school—whether to expand his or her own educational horizons or due to the globe-trotting habits of their parents. (In that sense, it’s a little like a pedagogic timeshare, offering an array of comfortable home bases to the next generation of rootless cosmopolitans.) He talked about the intense competition for Ivy League spots, and how it would only get worse. And he talked about the spectacular new facility taking shape beside the High Line.

Mr. Whittle had made precisely the same presentation more than 100 times in the last year to audiences of mostly affluent New York parents at the Core Club, the Harvard Club and Avenues’ startup-chic 17th-floor corporate office overlooking Madison Square Park. This was his first time doing it in Beijing, where the second of Avenues’ 20 branches is expected to open, provided the delicate negotiations with the People’s Republic remain on track.

When he finished the spiel, Mr. Whittle opened the floor to questions, and a student rose to her feet. Like her classmates, she was dressed in a white and red track suit, the Renda uniform.

“I watch Gossip Girl,” she said, prompting some titters. “Are New York City schools like that, and if so, is that a good place for us to be?”

Mr. Whittle, whose daughters both attended Nightingale-Bamford, alma mater of Gossip Girl author Cecily von Ziegesar, was not unfamiliar with the CW series. “Gossip Girl is terrific entertainment,” he allowed in his gentle Tennessee drawl. “But let’s just say it’s a little overblown. That’s not our day-to-day reality.”

At least, not yet. After all, at the time of the Beijing presentation, the Chelsea school building was still in the midst of its $60 million renovation, with 300 hard-hats working in two daily shifts to convert the former ABC/Disney prop storage facility into a 10-story, state-of-the-art schoolhouse. A row of porta-potties were wedged like packaged hot dogs into what would soon be the lobby; a crew was pouring a cement underlayment in the 10th-floor gym, and an on-site construction management office had been set up in what was slated to become the music room.

[View the slideshow: The Road to Avenues]

But while Mr. Whittle is certainly no Serena van der Woodsen, it’s fair to say he has encountered his share of drama over the years, had enough flutes of Krug splashed in his face—figuratively, that is—to fill out a full season of the sordid prep school melodrama. While he has often been hailed as a visionary, he has also been branded a huckster and a charlatan. Vanity Fair once wondered, on its cover, if he were “the devil.” And that’s nothing compared to what the trolls (or perhaps one very unhinged individual) are saying on the pitiless boards of UrbanBaby.com.

A charismatic, genial man of 64 with an unflappable air, Mr. Whittle is considerably more mild-mannered and disarming in person than his history might indicate. But beneath the folksy bow ties and cardigan sweaters lies the heart of a recidivist troublemaker with a habit of poking pointy sticks into institutional hornet’s nests.

Mr. Whittle’s first company, 13–30, which he launched with his friend Phil Moffitt shortly after college, pulled an audacious end-run around Madison Avenue and the publishing industry by creating a series of highly targeted, advertiser-friendly marketing vehicles distributed to beauty salons, auto mechanics’ waiting rooms and the like. One of the most lucrative, a magazine for doctors’ offices, came with a “handsome oak cabinet”—but only if subscribers agreed to forsake most other reading material.

The boldest of these schemes was Channel One, the teen news network, which beamed 10 minutes of current-events coverage (including regular dispatches from Anderson Cooper and Lisa Ling) and two minutes of Pringles, Clearasil and military recruitment ads per day to a captive audience of public school students, buying off school administrators with free AV equipment.

Pundits and pedagogues recoiled, denouncing the company for force-feeding advertising to children, who were required by law to watch it, but within a few years the broadcasts reached 8 million teenagers in 40 percent of the nation’s schools, and 30-second spots were going for $200,000. (Channel One was purchased by K-III for $300 million, but the business soon began to tank. It was sold to Alloy Entertainment—publisher of, yes, Gossip Girl—for a reported $10 million in 2007.)

In 1979, 13–30 purchased the beleaguered Esquire, and pledged to turn it around. Editor Clay Felker was tossed overboard, and Mr. Moffitt took over the editor’s job himself. Unsurprisingly, New York’s literary establishment bewailed the takeover of one of the nation’s most venerable titles by Knoxville philistines. But within a few years, the partners’ strategy (more lifestyle content, endless special issues) succeeded in turning the business around. The partners eventually had a public falling out and divided the company, with Mr. Whittle taking 13–30 and Mr. Moffitt keeping Esquire, which he later sold to Hearst. (Mr. Moffitt is now a mediation guru.)

Mr. Whittle raised eyebrows again in 1989, when—having renamed his company Whittle Communications and selling a 50 percent stake to Time Inc. for $185 million—he broke ground on a baronial $50 million neo-Georgian corporate campus, soon to receive the nickname “Historic Whittlesburg.” Occupying two razed blocks in the middle of downtown Knoxville, the headquarters was designed by leather-man starchitect Peter Marino, who also worked on numerous Whittle residences.

Just a few years later, Whittle Communications suffered a spectacular collapse, a saga chronicled in James B. Stewart’s New Yorker profile “Grand Illusion,” which uncovered problems with the company’s accounting (it hadn’t paid state taxes on Channel One’s VCRs and TVs) and described Mr. Whittle as grandiose, profligate and self-deluded.

The company’s assets were split up and liquidated, and its headquarters put on the market. It now serves as a splendid federal courthouse. (Lesson learned: At Avenues’ corporate offices, Mr. Whittle occupies a cubicle.)

Mr. Whittle’s involvement in education began when Whittle Communications was still a going concern, with his 1991 announcement of the Edison Project. The initial idea was to create a network of 1,000 newly built private schools within a decade—the largest business startup in history, Mr. Whittle called it—but as the privatization drive picked up steam, he saw an opening in simply managing existing public schools for local governments.

That turned out to be harder than he thought.

It’s a measure of Mr. Whittle’s white-knuckle thrill ride of a career that his biography, An Empire Undone: The Wild Rise and Hard Fall of Chris Whittle, by Vance Trimble, came out back in 1995, a good six years before Edison’s bulb blew out. The company never posted a profit and, despite some success at raising achievement, there were notable failures. Union opposition was fierce. Numerous school systems fired the company. The SEC launched an investigation into its accounting practices, and investors fled. The company’s stock, which reached $36 a share in 2001, plummeted 95 percent in 2002, prompting a management buyout. (The fact that the buyback was financed by Liberty Partners, a firm then dedicated to investing Florida’s public employee pension fund, prompted another ferocious controversy.)

The company, now called Edison Learning, offers “turnaround services” and “solutions” but manages only a few schools on an ongoing basis.

While it remains to be seen whether Avenues will be a more lasting enterprise than Whittle Communications and the Edison Project, the endeavor has some of the hallmarks of its mastermind’s earlier efforts: a bold, game-changing vision, an all-star team and a certain messianic flavor.

The difference, it seems, is that Avenues is eminently doable. Whereas Edison sought to manage some of the nation’s worst public schools, and turn a profit doing so, Avenues has a far less extravagant objective: merely to instruct a hand-selected student body of well-to-do children (and a few scholarship kids) and send as many of them as possible off to the Ivies, and on to comfortable lives atop the economic scramble heap.

Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that. The school’s mission statement grandly proclaims its intention that graduates will be “at ease beyond their borders”; “artists no matter their field”; “humble about their gifts and generous of spirit”; “architects of lives that transcend the ordinary”; and 11 other nice-sounding things.

In exchange, the school will collect an annual tuition of $39,750, the going rate these days for a top-drawer private education in New York.

One morning in January, Mr. Whittle sat at a large marble conference table at the Avenues offices and explained the difference between his two great education schemes. Compared to Edison’s $5,000-$6,000 per-student war chest, he pointed out, “$39,000 is just a different planet, O.K.?”

He added that “operating as a private institution rather than a public one means there’s virtually no regulation. And you don’t have unions, which is another form of regulation, basically.”

Indeed, at that very moment, several members of the carpenter’s local were just outside the front door on 26th Street, picketing the company for renovating the site with nonunion labor. “I went to them initially,” he said of the various building trade unions, “but when we got the bill I realized the price differential is real—about 25 percent more. We would have had to take so many features out, I just said, ‘We’ll take the pickets.’”

The plan began to take shape in 2007. “I said, O.K., I have one more time at bat,” he recalled. “I thought, maybe if I can mimic Buffett and Murdoch—you know, in terms of longevity if not in terms of wealth—then maybe I could work 15 or 20 years on something. So I literally sat down one day and thought, I still want to invent the next generation of schools. And we moved the needle on that but we didn’t get it to where it should be.”

Returning to the original Edison vision of remaking private education, he began sketching out what he called “the first global system of top-tier private schools.”

He immediately recruited two partners whom he’d worked with for years, Alan Greenberg, who has known him since their days at the University of Tennessee, and Benno Schmidt, the former president of Yale, whom he’d famously lured from that post to head up Edison years before. Those who witnessed Edison’s unraveling may find it surprising that Mr. Whittle and Mr. Schmidt are even on speaking terms, much less working together. At one especially charged juncture, according to The New Yorker, Mr. Schmidt aggressively lobbied the board to remove Mr. Whittle from the company.

“There was a period when we had a spat, O.K.?” Mr. Whittle acknowledged when asked about the incident. “But we were together again almost immediately. There was hardly a skipped beat.” Both now serve on the board of Edison Learning.

“I think it has actually been very good for both of us,” Mr. Whittle said, “because we managed through it and have been together for two decades.”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Mr. Schmidt said of their long-ago turf battle. Nonetheless, he conceded, “I was wrong, absolutely. And I proved it when I willingly and happily stepped aside as CEO and became chairman and Chris became CEO. Chris is 100 times better than I am at execution.”

The fact that they’ve been through so much and remain close after 22 years, he added, “pretty well speaks for itself. At the end of the day, this is a very, very good friend.”

Mr. Whittle knew that for his global plan to succeed, the New York campus would have to be spectacular. He first set his sights on an empty lot on far West 57th Street. He and his colleagues had signed off on the design and were within days of moving heavy equipment onto the site when “the world just fell apart,” as Mr. Whittle put it. “We had a good chunk of seed funding and we were about to go to market on the construction capital when the world financial crisis hit and everything stopped.” They lost the option on the site, which is now set to become an apartment building. “We just sat on the sidelines and waited,” he said.

Eventually the Chelsea location became available, and the company raised a $75 million series A round—split equally between two private equity firms, Liberty and LLR.

With the money in hand, Mr. Whittle went about hiring the rest of his executive team. “There was a very clear strategy from day one,” he said. “We had to have an all-star cast. Our thesis there was, the only defense against a parent going, ‘This is a new, untested school,’ was to have a leadership team that just overwhelmed them.”

The core group includes Ty Tingley, the former head of school at Phillips Exeter, and Skip Mattoon, recently of Hotchkiss, as Avenues’ co-heads. Nancy Schulman, the well-regarded director of the 92nd Street Y Nursery School, became head of the Early Learning Center. Gardner Dunnan, longtime head of Dalton, came on as academic dean, and Libby Hixson, also of Dalton, would head the Lower School.

Mr. Tingley had recently retired from Exeter and was living in Maine, doing a lot of fishing and working on a book on J.R.R. Tolkien’s tenure as a don at Oxford, when Mr. Whittle approached him to become part of a working group to develop the new school. He agreed, he said, “and by the following summer it was looking like a full-time job.”

He hadn’t planned on plunging back into the work force at 66, he admitted, “but in education, new ideas come along so rarely, and this is a really new idea.”

As to Mr. Whittle’s track record in business, he said, “I was certainly curious about that. But when I got to engage with him, I discovered an enormously open guy and a very, very creative thinker about education, who is totally committed to this project. He works harder than anyone. He’s had good luck and bad luck, and lots of people have said snarky things, but that’s all in the past.”

Mr. Greenberg, who witnessed Mr. Whittle’s trials from courtside seats as publisher of Esquire and an executive at Whittle Communications, was equally sanguine. “I think if you look at most real pioneers, they’re going to have those kinds of highs and lows,” he said, “but the great ones endure and Chris is a great one. From an ethical perspective and a vision perspective, there’s magic there.”

Mr. Mattoon recalled a conversation he’d had with a California venture capitalist. “I asked him, ‘How do you decide to back someone?’” he recalled. “And he said, ‘First, I almost never support anybody who hasn’t failed.’ I wouldn’t actually say that’s true of Chris. He’s had his ups and downs, but Edison is still operating and doing all kinds of stuff. Had I been 35 with a young family, the risk would have loomed larger, but I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

The co-heads divided up the responsibilities: Mr. Tingley would spearhead development of the curriculum while Mr. Mattoon set about hiring the 120-member faculty, 30 percent of whom would need to be fluent in Mandarin or Spanish. “I joked with the group that I could imagine us getting on an empty cargo plane and flying to China or Mexico to find the teachers,” he said.

As Mr. Whittle expected, the marquee hires proved reassuring to parents. “I’m incredibly impressed with the team,” noted one parent with a child entering kindergarten in September. “They have people from Brearley, 92nd Street Y, practically the entire math department of Trinity.” Mr. Whittle said Avenues had hired two math teachers from Trinity, including the department head, but emphasized that they had made it a rule not to poach teachers. The parent added, “Clearly these people see an opportunity to do something amazing.” Still, one observer, a former Wall Street executive who used to sit on the board of another top private school, referred to a leadership team made up of “formerlies—formerly of Dalton, formerly of Yale, people who are famous for what they were.” Suzanne Rheault, founder of the school admissions consultancy Aristotle Circle, pointed out that “getting too many cooks in the kitchen” can lead to problems. “People say, ‘Gosh, so many heavy hitters. Two co-heads. Are they all going to get along?”

Mr. Whittle was asked whether the set-up might lead to conflict. “You’re asking, how do we manage the egos?” he said with a smile. “I think there may be an inverse relationship between ego and age. At a certain point it becomes much less about titles and turf and ‘I’ve got something to prove,’ and more about ‘What are we actually doing?’ When you’ve run Exeter for a decade, you’re pretty much at the top of your game. I’ve found, where politics creep into an organization is when you’re not growing and there’s not enough to do. That’s not a problem here.”

Indeed, between managing the Avenues launch, conducting hard-hat tours, coordinating press, leading parent meetings, flying to Beijing once a month to work on plans for what he hopes will be the second campus and overseeing early negotiations for schools in London, Sao Paolo and other cities, Mr. Whittle is fairly busy himself these days. “I’ve always worked hard, but whoa,” he said with a laugh.

While most private schools in New York establish themselves incrementally, opening with just a few classes in a brownstone Uptown and expanding gradually into adjacent properties, Avenues is going all in, launching from a standing start with nursery school through ninth grade and adding a grade every year. The building’s interior, which was designed by Perkins Eastman, features a full gymnasium on the 10th floor (administrators have also negotiated use of the nearby Chelsea Piers), enough “teaching stations” to serve 1,635 students and an “imagination room,” which Mr. Tingley described as a space “for the magic to happen.” There is also a full industrial kitchen in the basement connected by dumbwaiters to a bright cafeteria that seats 500, featuring massive bay doors that open, DeLorean-like, directly onto the High Line. Student work will be displayed on large digital monitors outside each room; “smart boards,” of course, are standard.

Mr. Whittle offered The Observer a tour of the facility in early May, handing us a white hard hat that bore the Avenues logo and donning another himself as we stepped into a construction elevator that clung to the building’s south face.

In a room on an upper floor, he excitedly demonstrated how the windows blocked out the traffic noise from 10th Avenue. Eventually, he noted, they would all be fitted with matching wooden-slat blinds. “I used to have an office in the Seagram Building,” he explained, “and the rule there was that all the window treatments should be the same, to create a nice-looking building. That way you’re not seeing all the hodgepodge.” He pointed out the double-height commons on most floors and the various “interesting moments” that the architects had scattered throughout the space. He pictured students sitting at “two-tops” within spitting distance of the High Line, noting that there would be a security guard watching over the 200-foot porch at all times when the bay doors were open.

On the second floor, we checked out a test kindergarten classroom—er, teaching station—noting that the little chairs had been carefully selected. “They move slightly, but not too much, which is good when the kids are fidgety,” he said with a smile. “And they don’t roll.”

In addition to creating Whittlesburg, Mr. Whittle has overseen renovations on two lavish apartments in the Dakota and now lives with his wife, photographer Priscilla Rattazzi (niece of longtime Fiat overlord Gianni Agnelli) and daughters in a townhouse in the East 90s. He has curbed his expensive habit of collecting 19th-century artworks—he sold the Sargent but kept the Chase and Doré—after running out of walls. During a particularly difficult moment in 2002, he placed his Georgica Pond estate (also designed by Mr. Marino) on the market for $46 million, eventually opting to hang on to it, along with a getaway in Palm Beach.

Mr. Whittle’s many adventures in architecture and interior design have taught him a few things that have informed Avenues, he said. For instance, “You cannot approach a job of this scale with the same attentiveness to detail that you would do a residence, or you will absolutely drive yourself crazy—and broke,” he said. “Part of it is, you’re going to be disappointed and you just have to suck it up. You have a budget, and that’s it. You may have a personal set of standards but those are not applicable.” New York City’s new rule dictating that sprinkler pipes be painted red has thrown off the aesthetic, for example. But he’s dealing with it.

The Avenues team, under the direction of Mr. Tingley, has spent months hashing out the curriculum from scratch based on the latest educational research. But the biggest debates, Mr. Whittle said, involved the school’s physical design, “where the designers are going, ‘Let’s spice this up a bit, make a beautiful classroom,’ and the educators are going, ‘Yeah, but where are we going to put our manipulatives?’”

Not unexpectedly, the issue of uniforms also provoked a raging debate. In the end, they settled on a subtle look: black, grey and white, with “lots of mixing around,” Mr. Whittle said. “Our strategy is, on the street nobody knows you’re in a uniform, but when you’re in the school it becomes apparent.”

Mr. Whittle, it must be said, is partial to a uniform himself—he is almost never seen without a bow tie and sweater. “One day about 30 years ago, I said, ‘I like what I’m wearing. Why don’t I just wear it every day?’ So that’s what I did. It’s a great thing.”

While Avenues’ first classes are still months away, enrollment has gone well, Mr. Whittle said. Contrary to anonymous reports on UrbanBaby suggesting that the school is taking anyone with the means to pay, The Observer heard several examples of seemingly qualified kids who were turned away, something of a surprise given how many spots were available for the first year. Mr. Whittle, who estimated that the school would open with somewhere between 700 and 800 students, said that he was careful not to give the admissions department a quota, but instead instructed them simply to assemble the best possible class. He added that the New York campus has already broken even.

New York’s cut-throat independent school community seems ready to declare the roll-out a measured success. “They’ve done an absolutely terrific marketing job,” noted Emily Glickman of Abacus Guide Educational Consulting. “For a school that has yet to exist they have inspired tremendous interest and even created a feeling of scarcity, which is pretty amazing when they have so many seats to fill.”

In addition to an expensive-looking website and a slick ad campaign in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Observer and elsewhere, Avenues has done a “big keyword buy,” Ms. Glickman noted. “I’ve searched for my own name and they’ve come up!”

“I think there were a lot of people who said, ‘Serious advertising will backfire, because it’s just not something good schools do,’” Mr. Whittle acknowledged. “I think we proved that’s not true.”

“Personally, it doesn’t feel right to see schools marketed like that,” said Victoria Goldman, author of The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools. “It feels aberrant, but it’s worked for them. They’ve increased awareness. It’s a genius marketing plan.”

“The widespread feeling is that this is a desirable club to get into,” Ms. Glickman said. “They have really studied what gets the 21st-century parent excited.”

Among those key elements: a serious language-immersion program that begins in nursery school, in which each child chooses a second language (Mandarin or Spanish) and spends fully half of every school day in a classroom in which all lessons and materials are in that language through fourth grade. The global approach also seems to be a big draw, as is the dream team of educators. Avenues has assembled an impressive faculty not only by highlighting the opportunity to create a new school from scratch but by paying up to 25 percent more than its competitors. “They’re coming after a lot of people,” noted David Harman, headmaster of Poly Prep. “We’re all afraid. We have a great head of the Chinese program. I think, ‘Are they coming after her?’”

Nonetheless, many parents are still proceeding with caution. Some are troubled by Avenues’ for-profit status (most independent schools are not-for-profit). Others don’t want their children to be the “guinea pigs,” as one mother put it. “As a general rule, nobody wants to be in a new school,” Ms. Glickman noted. “Parents are worried children will walk in the front door and the ceiling will fall on their head. Nothing is known and they don’t want to be left holding the bag. You could enter and suddenly the school gets a bad rap and your child is stuck.”

Most top-tier schools are judged by outgoing college placements, a yardstick that’s not yet applicable to Avenues. “The trouble with saying, ‘We’re going to be the best,’ is that it’s 10 years before that message is understood by colleges,” noted Jeff Beard, director of the International Baccalaureate, which offers standardized curricula recognized around the world (Avenues has chosen not to offer an IB program for now).

“It took us 50 years to achieve what they want to do right away,” said Dwight chancellor Stephen Spahn. “They have really good people at the top. They have good ideas, but it takes five years to get the kinks out. We’ve been around 140 years.”

Given the scarcity of desirable schools in New York these days, none of that may matter. “We have so many clients staying in the city longer, and when the music stops, great kids don’t have a chair,” Ms. Renault said. She added that increased demand had created “a perfect storm” in Manhattan, where even the once fail-safe plan of buying a home in an area with a decent zoned school was no longer a guarantee. “We have parents who buy near P.S. 41,” in Greenwich Village, “where the average apartment value is $1 million, and at the last minute they’ll find out there’s no room.”

“There’s a lot of excitement about Avenues,” said a mother of a prospective kindergartner. The girl got 99 on the ERBs, her mother said, and had strong recommendations and connections. She applied to 10 schools, got into two and was waitlisted at three more. In the end, the family chose Avenues. “We and the other parents we know feel like pioneers,” the mother said. “We feel like we’re going to be in this together. Part of it is there are people out there who want it to fail—why, I don’t know. But we want to prove it can be done.”

Mr. Whittle may have something to prove as well. The mother had watched the saga of Edison with alarm, but “meeting him now, I’ve overcome all my misgivings,” she said. “The fact that he’s had such a hard time of it—clearly he wants to make this work. It’s his reputation on the line.”

The motivation for Mr. Whittle has more to do with what he’d like to accomplish, he said, than saving face. “I view my entire career as an evolutionary process, and I hope I’m learning all the time.”

He seemed confident that the New York campus would be a smashing success—he has rarely lacked for confidence—but Mr. Whittle made it clear that merely launching a first-rate school was not enough for him. “What I hope,” he said, “is that a decade from now people will look at it and go, ‘That’s what a new kind of school looks like.’

“To me the biggest risk is that we’re just another fine school,” he added. “If that’s all we are, this was a waste of time. That’s not what this is about.”

[View the slideshow: The Road to Avenues]