Yesterday afternoon, Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave the final State of the City speech of his 12 years in elected office while announcing multiple new policy initiatives, including a ban on Styrofoam in stores and restaurants. Not everyone was thrilled with this new ban, however, including a Staten Island man who called into Mr. Bloomberg’s weekly radio show this morning declaring, “I’m very upset with you, you’re on a track to ban everything.”

“Come on,” Mr. Bloomberg shot back. “We’re not banning everything!” Read More

It’s possible that the Upper East Side changed the night last September when the fire department broke up the disco party at 980 Madison. The building houses, among other businesses, a luxury spa and Gagosian Gallery. Soon it will have a Gagosian-owned “neighborhood restaurant,” as Larry Gagosian described it in a recent interview with Peter Brant. There will be chili. And waffles.

On the third floor of 980 Madison is Venus Over Manhattan, an art space opened last year by Adam Lindemann, a contributor to this paper and the disco party’s host. The crowd had gathered to celebrate a show by the artist Peter Coffin. Young women carried trays of tequila shots. Around 8 p.m., the festivities moved down the hall to a room dimly lit with red lights. From the street, you could hear DJ Harvey playing records. Professional roller skaters skated around on glowing LED wheels. A cluster of young men and women nonchalantly smoked near the entrance.

When the fire trucks came, part of the crowd decamped across Madison Avenue to Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle, where a pianist played selections from the Great American Songbook and the martinis cost $21.
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Everyone’s favorite children’s singer Raffi, responsible for preschool james like ”Baby Beluga” and “Bananaphone,” has carved out a pretty successful niche for himself on Twitter. His followers appear to be comprised primarily of twentysomethings nostalgic for their youth (ahem) and their parents. He tweets primarily about the environment (his 1990 album Everygreen, Everblue introduced a lot of us to environmentalism) and delightful factoids about his robust discography.
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New York City’s last two mayors each left an indelible mark on the city. Rudy Giuliani’s eight years are remembered for his crime crackdown, the Disneyfication of Times Square and millions weeping as one after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. Mike Bloomberg’s town is an emerging tech hub, dotted with modern public spaces and glass towers, and packed with tourists and ex-smokers riding their bikes to Whole Foods. All that, plus a yogurt store on every block, $4,500 one-bedroom apartments in once-forsaken Brooklyn neighborhoods and a growing class divide that makes Downton Abbey look like a socialist commune. On the positive side: there’s still no Walmart here.

Among all public officials, the mayor is the one who shapes our day-to-day lives the most: not just our subways, schools and streets, but our ethos and identity as a city. This mayoral election, New York City’s first with no incumbent in more than a decade, has attracted a slew of hopefuls eager to remake the city in their own images. And what images they are. Assembled at the starting line are a quartet of formidable Democrats, alongside a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, a man with his own catchphrase and action figure, and a vibrator-wielding, marijuana smoking, alligator-hugging YouTube ranter. Read More

In the age of hunched-over iPhone overachievers, Facebook has birthed a hybrid form of participatory art chat, a free-for-all dialogue sometimes charged with a level of meanness that would do an HBO series proud. These heated conversations have an added layer of social intrigue in the art world: just as often as they are anonymous, your Facebook friends are real-world acquaintances, ones you might run into at an art fair or on your gallery rounds. I’m as guilty as anyone for the tone of the art conversations on Facebook, what with my catty proclamations (more on that in a bit) but probably we all bear some responsibility. Read More

Prophecy, dear reader, is not an exact science—unless, of course, you’re Nate Silver. And you’re not in fact Nate Silver, are you?

(Called it.)

Instead, it is a mystical art, a terrible burden, a mysterious gift that tends to skip a generation, dooms those who possess it to a lifetime of harrowing visions, and makes it really easy to inadvertently reveal Walking Dead spoilers to everyone on your Twitter feed.

In days of yore, soothsayers employed a number of dubious means to foretell the future, from “scrying,” or gazing into a crystal ball, to “hieromancy,” the casting of entrails, and “uromancy,” the study of urine. (You will eat asparagus …)

As for our own methodology, let’s just say it’s a bit more ad hoc. The Observer staff—aided by a few ringers—simply squinted real hard and observed. Occasionally, when the hoped-for revelations failed to materialize, we knocked back a few Jäger bombs and tried again. Eventually, it all became clear.

Herewith, then, a glimpse of the future. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Read More