All verticals everything. Needs more verticals. All vertical, no filler. Vertical vertical vertical. Guess what’s new in Buzzfeed news today? Guess what’s new at The Atlantic today? Also, new hires at the Daily News gossip section that will single-handedly save the paper, Jay Carney makes a weird about Drudge Report, and more, in your Tuesday Evening Media Briefs. Read More
An MSNBC power-flack is leaving the network after weathering publicity storms like the departure of Keith Olbermann. Why would he want to leave a job like that? Also, Colin Myler is having one hell of a Monday, a former Observer reporter has resurfaced, and a Conde Nast legend has passed away. Here is your Monday lunchtime Media Brief: Read More
For the last two years, the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, hailed by some to be New York’s grimiest, sloppiest and most dastardly dive bar — i.e. New York’s best dive bar — has soldiered forward with its captain, Stefan Lutek, gone. He died at the age of 89 after decades of tending bar at the joint, Read More
Wednesday, October 10
Lucy Liu by the Numbers
In New York, a night can often be of two minds—two disparate occasions, with opposite crowds, on far-off edges of Manhattan. Take Wednesday, for example. Lucy Liu is having friends over to the Tory Burch boutique, a tony edifice up on Madison Avenue, to celebrate Seventy Two, Read More
“Wow, this is it, this view, New York City!” Michael Fassbender said after opening the door to the roof of the Standard, where the glass buildings lining the West Side bound forth from the meatpacking district toward midtown.
It was Friday night, and The Observer had just watched the New York Film Festival’s screening of Read More
Wednesday, October 5
Walk It Off
El Camino de Santiago is an ancient religious pilgrimage that for centuries has led Christians to a cathedral in northwestern Spain. It’s said to be the final resting place of Saint James. It’s also the subject of a new film, The Way, starring Martin Sheen Read More
The unmarked cop car sped out into the late night cobwebbed streets of Nolita at 3 a.m., bursting through red lights, sirens blaring, and ricocheting around turns that shook us back and forth, east to west. We had to lay low in the back seat, even for the quick trip to the corner of Mott and Houston. We pulled up next to three cruisers, sitting hotly in a giant cough of simmering exhaust, tire tread and the flash of red, white and blue. Read More
“There aren’t many dissenters in the room,” said another young man at the party Monday night for Steven Brill’s new book, Class Warfare, about education reform in the United States. The young man, blond, worked with one of the schooling organizations celebrated in the book.
“But, us two,” he continued to The Observer. “We’re certainly Read More
Wednesday, September 28
Hip Hop for Haiti
As we head into October, New York again braces itself for the annual autumn spree of charity functions. And though the foundations vary, representing any number of worthy causes, it still seems you can’t go a week in this town without a benefit Read More
On a charming August night, The Observer was sitting on our fire escape with two friends, having cigarettes, having beer. We had brought out an iPhone dock, a diminutive speaker machine that plays music right from a mobile device, at a decent, but not offensive-to-the-neighbors, volume.
Then, with a jerk of an arm, there came Read More
