Arianna Huffington (Getty Images)

If you’re anything like us, Twitter made your Election Night both unusually fact-packed—hey, someone had to tell us about Heidi Heitkamp’s win while Diane Sawyer sang old Irish drinking songs on TV—and almost completely insufferable. That manically partisan stream of mots both bon and mal comes in for examination tonight, as The New Republic’s new editor in chief and publisher Chris Hughes leads a discussion with Huffington Post editor in chief and mascot Arianna Huffington and entrepreneur and Bond villain Peter Thiel. The stated topic: “Has Twitter Made Democracy Impossible?” The joke will be on all of us in 2044 when we’re casting our votes simply by tweeting “@jennabush” or “@maliaobama.”

Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, Samuel B. and David Rose Building, 165 West 65th Street, open to New Republic subscribers, information can be found at http://tinyurl.com/8dayNov15.

Arianna Huffington. (Photo via Twitter).

Is there anything more flattering than finding out on Twitter that someone has named their newborn daughter after you?

And respond she did.

"@Ivez congrats!! Welcome to the world little Arianna," replied Ms. Huffington.

We wish baby Arianna Kahn a lifetime of Twitter retweets and replies.

As far as real estate rumors go, "We think it’s a townhouse on E. 80th St." is fairly weak. But there are signs that Ms. Huffington might be in the market. Donald Trump said that he jacked up the rent on an apartment at 502 Park Avenue specifically to keep Ms. Huffington, his sworn enemy, out when she was considering renting there last year. And last we heard she was renting a townhouse in the West Village.

In the event that Ms. Huffington has not bought already, but is seriously considering it, we've prepared a portfolio of available townhouses for her perusal. Our favorite is the Woolworth Mansion, but there are a lot of other strong contenders out there, including one that has suspiciously disappeared from the market.

kvelsey@observer.com

Trump vs. Huffington: The battle extends beyond the twittersphere. (DJDM / WENN.com)

Donald Trump takes his feuds very seriously. He told the New York Post that his enmity toward Arianna Huffington is so intense that he raised the rent on an apartment that Ms. Huffington was eying last year specifically to keep her out.

The two flaxen-haired powerhouses have butted heads in the past: Mr. Trump took issue with the coverage about him on Ms. Huffington's eponymous blog. Their skirmishes did not, however, dissuade Ms. Huffington from checking out Mr. Trump's (similarly eponymous) building at 502 Park Avenue.

Mr. Trump said that Ms. Huffington wanted to lease an apartment in the building right after inking the AOL deal last year.  "We didn’t make it easy for her; in fact, we raised rent to $100,000 a month especially for her," Mr. Trump told the Post. "The price wasn’t in her favor, nor did I care, because I didn’t want her in the building. She balked at the price.”

Mr. Trump said he was displeased with how he was written about in the Huffington Post, elaborating: "She is bad news. Only AOL, being so stupid, would have paid money to buy her site. AOL was even dumber than her husband. The trash they write about me is not reporting, there are so many inaccuracies about me on her site. I won’t hold back when I respond about her to my 1.4 million Twitter followers.”

"Huffington has four Blackberries and one iPhone. Two BlackBerries are for daily use (purple for email, red for calls). The third is a backup; no one but her daughters has the number of the fourth (it's the only one that stays on overnight). The iPhone is for photos."

"Huffington's assistants include an executive scheduler, a personal assistant and three editors who work on speechwriting and research."

Is there any other editor-in-chief who can boast such multilateral support?

"She used to wash her clothes and face with the same soap, said a 2008 Vogue article, and seldom wore makeup, much less luxuriated in the perks of privilege — like the private yoga classes with her friends Kathy Freston and Arianna Huffington — she indulges in today. At Yale, she would stake out Filene’s Basement to procure designer gowns on the cheap. Today, she is regularly photographed wearing Rodarte and Prada."

Ms. Huffington and Ms. Deng recently co-hosted the book party for Ms. Freston's diet book, The Lean. (Ms. Freston is the recently separated wife of ex-Viacom chief Tom.) They served guests Martha Stewart, Joel Klein and Harvey Weinstein vegan hors d'oeuvres made with tofu, quinoa and kale.

Ms. Huffington recalled a toast Mrs. Murdoch gave.

“She said, ‘I grew up so poor in China that one day I aspired to have meat regularly,’ ” Mrs. Huffington told the Times. “ ‘Now that I can have meat three times a day, Kathy tells us we can’t have any meat at all.’ ”

El HuffPo's editorial director is Montserrat Domínguez, a prominent television journalist and radio host in Spain.

"I met Montserrat (or Montse, as everyone calls her) on a Sunday morning when she interviewed me for two hours on her radio show, A vivir que son dos días," Arianna Huffington wrote in her introductory note. "I loved her right away -- her passion for news and storytelling, her intelligence, her gift for intimacy."

The site's editor-in-chief is Guillermo Rodríguez, former editor of Público (another daily), and he appears to be a quick study. The stories on El Huffington Post's homepage already reflect the flagship brand's signature blend of politics and breasts.

Middleton.

Historically, Memorial Day is a somber holiday—we all take off of work to commemorate fallen soldiers. But since we already celebrate our men in uniform on Veteran’s Day, the long weekend at the end of May is also an excuse for a bacchanal to celebrate the upcoming summer. Pools open, grills are dusted off and white tennies are spit shined for the courts.

And since this is the weekend of rebirth, what better chance for us to sit down and think about what really want out of this summer? Pippa Middleton moving to New York (or better yet, Brooklyn!); an Arsenio Hall comeback tour post-Celebrity Apprentice; the cancellation of Jersey Shore; the rise of Facebook stock; and the fall of John Travolta.

While the elections may be time for cautious optimism and a rally for action, we’re much more interested in keeping track of the issues addressed on James Franco’s Huffington Post blog. Between tackling the major interests of the day—like ghost tours, what it’s like hanging out with Nicolas Cage, commencement speeches written by friends and that time he met President Barack Obama—the auteur and man of (too) many words has been using his platform to take potshots at The New York Observer.

Not that we’re knocking his new career. If anything, Mr. Franco is an inspiration to graduates: work hard, study and collect Ivy League degrees like they are Pokemon cards, then one day Arianna Huffington may let you write for free on her website.

That’s the kind of sunny future we wish for all of you this Memorial Day.

Sekoff and Huffington. (Image via Getty)

Democratic advisors Peter Daou and James Boyce are carrying on with their bitter lawsuit claiming that Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer stole their idea for a liberal Drudge Report and cut them out of control and ownership of The Huffington Post.

Though many of the pair's claims were dismissed in October, a judge allowed them to go into discovery on a theft of idea claim, according to paidContent. An amended complaint filed yesterday alleges that emails and meeting minutes between Ms. Huffington, HuffPost editor Roy Sekoff and the late Andrew Breitbart reveal a plan to cover up Mr. Daou and Mr. Boyce's involvement, which we've excerpted below:

Because Defendants knew that they had stolen the idea for The Huffington Post,they also knew that they needed to develop a false account of the website’s origins that cut Boyce and Daou out of the picture. Huffington and Lerer discussed this problem during a meeting with Sekoff and Breitbart on March 29, 2005, where the four of them discussed possible responses to press inquiries on the subject of how and when the idea for the website originated.The minutes of that meeting reflect the deliberate creation of a false and fraudulent “narrative” to explain the origin of the idea for The Huffington Post. As reflected in the minutes, the participants at this meeting asked: “How did the project get started? What’s the narrative? …How did the idea for the Huffington Report originate?” In response, Breitbart proposed this answer: “I knew what was missing in the blogosphere, I just needed the rolodex to be able to putit all together, and Arianna provided that. … Arianna called Andrew to talk about an alternative to the Drudge Report. Andrew called Arianna about the group blog - there’s nobody he knows besides Arianna who could make this work.”

The minutes reflect a follow-up question: “So how did Kenny come into the picture? How did he and Arianna come together to work on this project?” This time, the answer was proffered by Sekoff and Breitbart: “It doesn’t matter.” Breitbart then added: “He met you and is retired and excited to leave retirement to join you in this project.” After briefly discussingthe function of the website, the minutes record a return to a discussion of the “narrative.”Breitbart states, “It’s all about coming up with the group blog."

The moral here is never found anything. It only leads to pettiness, embarrassment and unspeakable wealth.

(Illo: Chris Gash)

It is May, and time to spray the doors and windows of my home. I trudge, unhappily, out to the garden shed. The insect repellent waits for me, but by the time I carry it back to the house, I’ve already decided I’m not going to spray the fucking doors or the fucking windows. It’s a beautiful day.

And yesterday, goddamn it, was City Day.

City Day is the day, every couple of weeks or so, that I take the train to New York City and wonder what God is waiting for. He promised destruction. He promised vengeance. Big talker. I don’t know what it is about the city that so infuriates me. It isn’t the usual city complaints; it isn’t the filth (I sort of wish there was more). It isn’t the noise or the stench or rush.

What is it, I wonder?

It isn’t a physical quality. It’s something else. It’s something intangible.  And it bothers me that I can’t identify it.

Over breakfast at Scotty’s on Sixth Avenue, Phil talks to me about his new girlfriend. She’s great, but a little old, and she has kids, and Phil’s not sure if he wants kids at this point or if he wants kids at all or if he wants to take on someone else’s kids and he’s starting a new company, it’s an online aggregator of something that culls data from somewhere and sells it to someplace else and he really feels he should be focusing on that right now and it wouldn’t be fair to her not to mention her kids and it wouldn’t really be fair to him, either, when you stop and think about it.

At lunch at a diner on Lexington Jen orders the soup and salad. She’s cutting out meat as best she can, but not eggs yet, or fish, and dairy is probably next but she loves cheese and is a big coffee drinker and can’t stand cream but then one teaspoon a day probably isn’t going to kill her, and the truth is that she’s not doing it for humane animal rights reasons but for personal health reasons (she’s forty-two now and the fat doesn’t come off as quickly as it used to, God, she feels old even though she knows forty-two isn’t old) and it bothers her because that seems selfish of her but why should she care what other people think about her anyway, she’s doing the best she can.

I sit on the train headed back upstate, unable to write because my few hours in the city have made me doubt everything I’ve ever thought about everything. I’m very suggestible (until I become enraged and reject everything), and I stare at my laptop screen questioning everything I’ve ever written. Should I be writing a vampire novel? A sitcom? A Ben Stiller vehicle? Also, should my jeans be skinnier? Should my sneakers be lighter? Fortunately, Amtrak now has wireless internet access, so there is no risk of thought, no chance of self-examination, no possibility of reflection and self-appraisal. You are safe here from the horror of yourself, and, thus free, I logged on.

I don’t know what it is about the Huffington Post that so infuriates me. It isn’t a political thing, that much I know, because I don’t particularly care about politics; if there’s one thing we can thank the internet for, it’s revealing how utterly stupid and ridiculous the whole game is: take any left-wing website, change all the adjectives and nouns to their closest opposites (smart to stupid, hero to socialist, Rethuglican to Demo-Rat) and you have yourself a right-wing site. So what is it? Is it Arianna? It could be. Maybe it’s Arianna?

What is it, I wonder?

It bothers me that I can’t identify it.

Soon, though, the brown brick buildings outside my window give way to mountains and trees, and I look out over the Hudson River and I am somehow, for some reason, relieved.

I don’t know why.

And it bothers me.

***

“For use outside the home,” read the directions on the pest spray, “to control home invading pests such as ants, cockroaches, crickets, earwigs, fleas, house flies, millipedes, mosquitoes, spiders, and ticks including American, deer tick, brown dog tick. Do not treat firewood. Do not spray in enclosed area. Do not…”

I decide to go for a hike.

I call for my dog, and walk into the woods behind my home, up the old logging trail that leads to the mountaintop. It is a steep climb, and at the small stream that crosses the trail at the head of the next mountain, my dog stops for a drink of water. Some trees have fallen over the winter, others have grown; the boulders and stones, though, never change, and they help mark the way as the trail begins to fade. When I was a child, my rabbi taught me that King Solomon could talk to the animals, to all of nature, in fact, and the calm I feel filling me makes me imagine I can do the same. I send silent greetings of joy and thanks to the squirrels, the trees, the breeze around me.

None reply. If anything, the forest quiets, as if waiting for me to go, to be gone, to just leave already. If I could refrain from killing something, or paving something over before I go, that would be most appreciated.

And that’s when it hits me. What it is I hate about the city and Arianna and the fucking Huffington Post; or rather, what it is I love about the woods.

“I go to nature,” wrote John Burroughs, “to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”

Not me.

“A morning-glory at my window,” wrote Walt Whitman, “satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.”

Nope. For me, it isn’t the beauty or the majesty or the oneness with nature. It’s our twoness with nature. I like nature because nature doesn’t care. Nature doesn’t need us, or give a damn about us either way. Here, says the forest, is how much you matter: not at all. The world was here before man, it will be here after, and nothing in it—not the trees, not the animals, not the stones or the moss or the frogs or the streams—will give a flying fuck about us when we’re gone. Something about the city makes people think they matter, think this world is theirs, think the only history that counts is the history of man.

ANDERSON COOPER CALLS OUT OBAMA OVER GAY MARRIAGE!

Shut up, Arianna.

STEWART SLAMS GOP WAR ON WOMEN!

Seriously – shut the fuck up.

CHRISTIE GOES ROGUE ON SOME DAMN THING!

Go for a walk, Huffy. In the woods. Alone. Embrace your meaninglessness. If there’s any happiness possible in this world—if—that’s likely the way to it.

I call for my dog, and head back down the mountain, feeling small and vanishing and utterly, wonderfully insignificant. I get home, grab the insect repellent and begin spraying it, as directed, around the windows and doors.

“I hope,” the spider says to the ant, “that stuff keeps the humans in there.”

“It’s worth a shot,” says the ant. “They’re fucking everywhere.”