It’s a tabloid truism that baseball sells papers. That’s why, in late November–with the Jets, Giants and Knicks winning and the Rangers hosting former captain Mark Messier–the back page of the New York Post on Nov. 25 was devoted to a baseball player from Florida.
The Post and the Daily News are in the Read More
You may not have noticed, but the best professional sports team in the neighborhood is stealing a championship on national TV.
The team is the New Jersey Devils. They play ice hockey very well, better than any other team in the world. Since ice hockey is one of the Western world’s greatest sports, and they’re Read More
Mitchell Spearman is the most expensive golf pro in the world. He charges $1,500 for a three-hour private lesson, $3,000 for a full day.
Mr. Spearman has tinkered with the swings of Nick Faldo and Greg Norman, Dan Quayle and Phil Knight. But so have dozens of swing doctors with names as well known in Read More
Before dawn on Friday, Feb. 11, a bomb went off on Wall Street and nobody really cared. The professionals barely flinched, as though an explosion at the epicenter of world capitalism were a weekly occurrence.
The bombing was regarded as a curiosity-another trading-floor practical joke, involving a man with a yellow toolbox, a lit fuse Read More
“That was dead-on balls accurate.”
An anonymous stock broker offered this assessment outside a recent screening of the soon-to-be-released film Boiler Room . But before he could elaborate, he was whisked away by his friends, who feared that as a veteran of a sleazy brokerage like the one depicted in the film, he was risking Read More
We all saw how Gerald Levin, Time Warner Inc.’s chief, stood up in front of the cameras without a necktie at the Jan. 10 announcement of the sale of his company to America Online Inc. It was a symbol of his acquiescence to the new economy and the ascendance of the Internet. He’d been taken Read More
Three eloquent bears gathered for breakfast on Dec. 15 in an executive dining room atop the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter building in Times Square. The three bears were Barton Biggs, Morgan Stanley’s chief global strategist; James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer ; and Alan Abelson, the editor of Barron’s .
The Observer had Read More
One of these days, they’ll be able to say, “I told you so,” but until then the contrarians who read-and write- Grant’s Interest Rate Observer will have to endure the taunts of the bull-market babies.
Generally speaking, Jim Grant, the biweekly newsletter’s editor, has been wrong for years, but he wears wrongness better than anybody. Read More
Behind a metal grating, a hand-written sign in the window of the Madison Pub reads, “Closed Vacation Aug. 21 to Sept. 21.” But it is November now, and the sign is tattered and the grating has a look of finality about it. The pub’s door, tucked inside the entryway of an old brownstone at 1043 Read More
Each day during the U.S. Open, Michael Barkann, USA Network’s roving announcer, scours the grounds of the National Tennis Center looking for stories. Mr. Barkann, who hosts a late-night cable talk show in Philadelphia, has been doing the Open for nine years. Dressed in a blue blazer, khaki pants and white K-Swiss tennis shoes, he Read More
