The New York Observer

I’m a financial reporter for a certain paper of record, tasked with monitoring the daily mood swings and professional machinations of the Wall Street overclass. Yet I must periodically affect an air of professional puzzlement—about the masters of the universe who make up my beat, about the larger, destructive drift of the speculative paper economy, and about the best way to justify my glorified courtiership. And like all practiced petty cynics, I need to blunt any chance that my ruminations might create any real moral or cognitive dissonance with an exculpatory mood of ironic detachment.

So on a lark—duly approved by my editors, and subsidized by the discreet providers of luxe personal services, who ache to have their carriage trade identified with the .01 percent—I’ve donned all the fripperies and acquired all the emollients of the ultrarich for a day, as part of my paper’s stupendously tone-deaf and section-long celebration of wealth for wealth’s sake. Read More