According to an invite, illustrated with an Obama portrait and bearing a "Carpooling Encouraged," reminder, co-hosts in alphabetical order include Alec Baldwin, Christy Turlington Burns & Ed Burns, Barbara Lee Diamonstein-Spielvogel and Carl Spielvogel, Laura Durning, Jason Epstein, Katie Lee and Billy Joel, Ellen Chesler & Matt Malow, Obama veteran donors Jay Johnson and Brian Mathis, Isaac Mizrahi, Gwyneth Paltrow, Rosie Perez, Jane Rosenthal, Russell Simmons, and Robert Zimmerman, among others.

The price is the usual $2,300 for admission, but Obama's appeal to the youth vote has hit the Hamptons too, and "specially priced" $1,000 tickets will be available for supporters between the ages of 16 and 25.

At the apartment’s dinner table, back in 1962, Ms. Epstein invented The New York Review of Books with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick and then-husband Jason Epstein. She co-edited the colossally intelligent biweekly until her death last year.

“To be there was to be in the lap of beauty,” the novelist Diane Johnson eulogized in The Review. “She had a talent for surrounding herself with wonderful art and objects, and had chosen the smallest porcelain jug or little watercolor with her perfect eye (and could be ruthless, like an editor, about excising something that didn’t ‘go.’)”

Despite the co-op’s 686-square-foot living room—with immense laddered bookshelves and double-height windows—Mr. Brokaw will probably not move in.

The ex-anchor, who helmed the NBC Nightly News from 1983 through 2004, shares the deed with his daughter Andrea and her husband Charles Simon. The couple married in January 2004—and last year Mr. Simon ran unsuccessfully for a State Assembly seat (representing, of course, the Upper West Side).

Will they live with Papa Brokaw? The apartment’s upstairs bedrooms are side by side, which is potentially problematic. On the other hand, there’s a space downstairs that could be slept in—it’s a “double maids or library,” according to the listing with Brown Harris Stevens.

The buyers’ address is listed in city records at 941 Park Avenue. The new building is more stylish: The West 67th Street co-op, called the Atelier, was built in 1904 for artists, so Ms. Epstein’s apartment has arty, old-school details like 10-foot fireplace mantels and a 15.5-foot-long balcony overlooking the living room.

“This unique home,” says the listing, “is waiting for someone with style to make it their own.”

Deposed Wall Street King Buys His Prince $1.96 M. Condo

Being born to the King of Wall Street has perks. John Peter Gutfreund—whose father is the cigar-gnawing Solomon Brothers legend John H. Gutfreund—has bought a $1.96 million condo at the Arcadia on far East 79th Street.

And J.P. is 21 years old.

The place has floor-to-ceiling windows and “Juliette balconies,” according to the listing with the Corcoran Group. Then there’s “radiant flooring in [the] master bath suite” and, luckily, a children’s playroom in the building.

According to city deeds, the seller is Stacey Greenfield and her husband; Ms. Greenfield happens to be the director of Corcoran Sunshine, the firm that marketed the Arcadia.

“I knew about it before everybody else did,” she said, “so I felt fortunate, because I met the sponsors and sat in the meetings, and said, ‘That’s going to be a nice building.’” Did she get a Sunshine discount? “No, absolutely not. We pay whatever the asking price is; at least, I do.”

Yet the couple never moved in. “Well,” Ms. Greenfield said, “we decided we needed more space.”

How did her young buyer get the five-room condo? The elder Mr. Gutfreund was the head of Solomon Brothers until 1991—when his million-dollar poker games ended with a mammoth Treasury-bond scandal.

And J.P.’s mother is the socialite and interior designer Susan. Will she decorate his new place? “If that is his mother, she’ll do a beautiful job for him,” Ms. Greenfield told The Observer.

Four years ago, mother and son started a clothing line named with his initials. In interviews she said it also stood for “just perfect.”

Video Gamer Has $6.25 M. for Soho Penthouse

Dan Houser, a pioneer of splendidly violent video games, has paid $6.25 million for a high-tech duplex penthouse at 20 Greene Street. According to city records, the seller is Charles Ferguson, who sold his firm Vermeer Technologies to Microsoft for $130 million before becoming a documentary filmmaker.

Despite its seven rooms, two terraces and a media room with a wood-burning fireplace, Mr. Ferguson never moved into the loft.

Broker Roger Erickson, senior managing director at Sotheby’s International Realty, wouldn’t discuss the deal—though he described the long-empty apartment’s details, like a 1,000-square-foot terrace off the second-floor master bedroom.

“All with floor-to-ceiling glass,” he said, “where no one can look in because you’re actually higher than the building across the street.” (Sexy Soho grandeur can be very grand like that.) There happens to be even more space upstairs—plus a panoramic view of Manhattan—via the private roof garden.

The fire-lit media room has a high-definition projection system. “Still kind of rare to find in people’s residences,” Mr. Erikson said. “It’s there, ready to be hooked up.” Plus, the apartment is wired with “every kind of conceivable” home technology.

So Mr. Houser, who co-founded Rockstar Games in 1998, will be able to play his company’s artful but bloody best-sellers like The Warriors or Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Three years ago, the Californian art dealer Serge Sorokko and wife Tatiana—witnesses to Steve Wynn’s recent Picasso elbowing—flipped the apartment for $4.7 million. “He decided not to do the bicoastal thing,” said Mr. Erikson, the listing broker in both deals.

Maybe the Sorokkos’ buyer, Mr. Ferguson, felt the same way: The sales deed puts his address in California. Will he be a movie man? This January, he won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for his Iraq War documentary No End in Sight.

She’s So Over This: Townhouse Re-Designer Lists Latest Fix-Up for $25 M.

Janna Bullock, the doyenne of Upper East Side townhouse overhauls, has put her C.P.H. Gilbert–designed mansion at 14 East 82nd Street on the market. According to the Brown Harris Stevens Web site, the listing price is $25 million.

That’s over twice what she paid in November 2005—$12.2 million, The Observer reported. As recompense, she’s transformed the 103-year-old townhouse into a mecca of high design: The 35th Kips Bay Decorator Show House opens in the mansion next month.

Twenty name-brand designers will saturate what is now 9,114 square feet of shiny white space. Jamie Drake, for example, is decorating the fourth-floor master bedroom. “I’m doing a luxurious feminine nest … so I’m upholstering the walls and swathing the windows and dressing up the dressing room,” Mr. Drake told The Observer. “It’s going to be delicious, sensual and glamorous.”

If that’s appealing, the potential mansion buyer can purchase the Kips design work.

The proceeds go to charity—but Ms. Bullock benefits too. “You know, Janna is a wonderful woman, and a smart and savvy lady,” Mr. Drake said, “and I think she sees the benefit of having 20,000-plus come through and see a house she’s rescued and turned into a showplace.”

Indeed, she’s done it before. Her townhouses on East 64th and 67th streets have become design showcases: The former was once the HQ of The Observer; the latter is reportedly about to go on the market for $35 million.

Likewise, Ms. Bullock owns the house next-door to the Gilbert mansion, which she bought for $14 million from the plastic, feline-faced Jocelyn Wildenstein. Her Upper East Side bounty also includes condo units at Park Avenue Court on East 87th Street.

According to the listing with Guida De Carvalhosa and Paula Del Nunzio, who wouldn’t comment on the record for this story, the space at 14 East 82nd had a yearly rent of four wheat bushels in 1801.

Nowadays, there are three (expensive) terraces on the top floors, and a rusticated bowed façade below. The views look out onto the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Empire State Building.

Mr. Hederman, 61, was seated in his office conference room in midtown Manhattan on Sept. 18, speaking about the idea of editorial independence—both from advertising and business pressure as well as from overreaching newspaper owners—which is something that he values highly. Why? “Because I don’t think there’s much of it any more,” he said.

Mr. Hederman’s pledge not to meddle with editors Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers formed the basis of his purchase of the Review in 1984, for approximately $5 million, and he is widely admired for having kept to his word. Twenty years later, print-media folk are running screaming for the bomb shelters and newspaper conglomerates are gutting their properties, but The New York Review of Books has hewed closely to its original mission of publishing provocative long-form reportage and criticism that caters to the smartest readers rather than the dumbest ones. The magazine still publishes many of the most highly regarded writers in the world. Visually, the publication is almost unchanged from its slightly dorky, text-heavy design, first introduced in 1963. And, perhaps most remarkably, it continues to make money.

“[Mr. Hederman] made what to me was quite an extraordinary statement, which I think is a model,” said the former Nation publisher Victor Navasky, who invited Mr. Hederman to speak at a workshop at Harvard’s Kennedy School. One of the students asked Mr. Hederman what his goal was as a publisher. “He said that it was to make more money so that Bob Silvers and Barbara Epstein would have more resources at their disposal to put towards their writers.

“That to me is so beautiful and so clear,” Mr. Navasky continued, “it’s so spot-on and it’s so unusual, that it’s a model. It’s extraordinary. And it helps explain the success of their enterprise.”

Indeed, Mr. Hederman was so self-effacing that he didn’t put his name on the Review’s masthead for three or four years after he became the owner, “just to show that there was no change in the publication, that the publication was going to go on” as it was.

“I was very sensitive in the purchase of the magazine,” said Mr. Hederman, who is 6-foot-5 and slender, with watery blue eyes and a hesitant manner of speaking that impels one to lean across the table in order to catch what he’s saying. “The purchase got a lot of media coverage at the time, and there were of course worries …. ”

Mr. Hederman goes into the office nearly every day, where the Review is now edited alone by Mr. Silvers, 76. Co-editor Ms. Epstein died this past June, and the matter of editorial succession is one of several that will demand Mr. Hederman’s attention sometime in the future. But the most interesting question about the Review at the moment might be how, in the current publishing environment, it continues to prosper: a look at Mr. Hederman’s business plan serves as a crash course in the art of survival.

“What we’re doing is just constantly trying to find new ways to expand our reach and to make things work for the Review,” said Mr. Hederman. “They’re just little things … and if you don’t have a personal interest in it, you might not do it.”

THE POWERFUL ATTACHMENTS OF ADULTHOOD can often be traced to the indignities of youth, and Mr. Hederman’s played out in the Deep South during the civil-rights era. It was then, as a young editor, that Mr. Hederman learned about the dangers of editorial interference from above.

He was born into a longstanding newspaper family that owned the daily Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss, among others. His relatives, and by consequence their newspapers, were pro-segregation and rabidly racist (as well as journalistically inept)—all of which mortified young Rea, even as he joined the family business.

“Growing up in Mississippi, I went to an all-white school, and segregation was in full force, and I think at some point you just feel like … you have to make a decision,” Mr. Hederman said of his ideological split from those he grew up with. (Even some of his five offspring veered rightward, with one of his grown sons now ensconced at the Heritage Foundation.)

Mr. Hederman eventually became an editor at the Clarion-Ledger, where he proceeded to infuriate many of his family members by beefing up the news staff and by hiring, and covering, black people. His muckraking tendencies were unleashed on corrupt local figures—and sometimes on friends or members of the Hederman clan itself. Mr. Hederman described the period as “very rough,” among other things: “I mean, the number of death threats I had, and reporters who worked for me had, was enormous. This was through 1982! It was way past the initial integration of public schools.”

The newspaper’s turnaround was widely praised and won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. But all the while, Mr. Hederman had to wage daily battles with an extended network of relatives who felt that they had the right to decide what went into the paper; the affair makes Wendy McCaw and her recent Santa Barbara News-Press shenanigans seem like amateur hour. His family eventually fired him. (The paper was later sold to Gannett.)

The whole experience led to Mr. Hederman’s lifelong horror of editorial meddling, and his ready eagerness not to do so at the Review.

“The thing that informed me mostly was that they were always trying to interfere in stories that we were publishing,” Mr. Hederman said. “It just drove me crazy. You have to have editorial independence. Otherwise your life is misery.”

Despite his struggles working within the confines of the family empire, Mr. Hederman said that private ownership of a magazine like the Review was greatly preferable to the vagaries of the capital markets, which just this past week prompted Time Inc.’s decision to put 18 of its magazines on the chopping block.

“Private owners have more invested,” Mr. Hederman said. “They’re dealing with it because they like the publication, because they want the publication to succeed.”

THE REVIEW IS SAID TO HAVE MADE MONEY from its inception, through a combination of low per-issue costs—it is tabloid-sized and printed on newsprint, on a newspaper press—a small staff, and a strong beachhead in advertising from book publishers and academic presses. When Mr. Hederman took over from A. Whitney Ellsworth (the Review’s previous publisher and founding partner with Mr. Silvers, Ms. Epstein and Ms. Epstein’s husband at the time, Jason Epstein), the circulation was around 80,000, and his hopes were to grow and seek out new readers.

“I thought the magazine deserved that. And with more circulation, we’d be able to pay the contributors better,” Mr. Hederman said. A third goal was “to keep the magazine healthy. If you own a publication and the publication doesn’t make money, and it’s not surviving on its own, I think that has some effect on the publication itself.”

He focused on expanding into Europe: The magazine is available in 30 countries, with the U.K. having the largest presence (around 10,000 subscribers); there is also an Italian edition with several thousand subscribers. Mr. Hederman also funded broader direct-mail campaigns.

The Review is decidedly “not mass-market,” Mr. Hederman said, so subscribers must be hunted down “in little bits and pieces around the country and around the world.” He described the readers as slightly older, consisting of academics and professionals, people on Wall Street and in banking, a “very diverse audience” that skews more male than female, with above-average income. While younger people seem to be reading it more online, the profile has basically stayed the same for “years and years.”

The Review’s circulation is now around 130,000, which is the highest they’ve ever had, according to Mr. Hederman; the conversion rate (subscribers who respond to direct mailings and then choose to renew) is around 40 percent, and the straight renewal rate is 90 percent.

An annual subscription of 20 issues costs $66, and many new subscribers reach them through the Web site, which the Review has been operating since 1997. The site consists mostly of a paid archive of every article the Review has ever published (the company had them all digitized in India). This past summer, they also started selling ads on the Web for the first time.

The company also operates a small book-publishing arm, which produces around 45 titles per year—slim volumes of essays that have appeared in the Review, as well as classics that have fallen out of print (and into the public domain) and elegantly illustrated children’s stories. Many are put out in hardback and typically break even once they’ve sold 2,700 or so copies (which most of them do).

Mr. Hederman said that he came up with the trick when he was at the Clarion-Ledger in the 1970’s. His extended family tried to starve his newsroom of funding as a way of influencing its press coverage. Mr. Hederman started commissioning books that complemented the newspaper content—collections of Southern recipes or football calendars—all of which brought in some badly needed extra cash.

The Review consists of about 40 employees, with the largest chunk of 10 or 12 in editorial, which is lean but hardly cash-starved. All of the magazine’s content is written by outside contributors, who are said to be paid decently but not spectacularly—several thousand dollars per article, according to someone familiar with the fees. (Mr. Hederman declined to name the figure, but said that it was “competitive.”) Other than that, there is Mr. Silvers and his mini-army of assistants. Mr. Hederman said that they speak daily, as he and Ms. Epstein also did, and that he often shares his opinions with his editor.

“Sometimes I have suggestions, and they can take them or not,” Mr. Hederman said. “That’s purely up to them.”

Fretting about what will happen post-Silvers is a common extracurricular activity within the extended circle of Review-watchers, but it’s practically forbidden around the magazine’s fluorescent-lit offices. Mr. Silvers, for one, refuses to acknowledge the question at all and will typically respond to it with an abrupt change of subject. Mr. Hederman would say only that he expects Mr. Silvers to be around “for quite a while,” although he did allow that he expects the Review to persist, regardless of who’s editing it.

“I do think it would continue to go on,” he said, his hands clasped tightly under his chin. “I think it would be a terrible thing if it didn’t.”

“I’ve been here probably 600 zillion times,” said Nadia Newman, 22, a billowy Brooklynite who was enjoying a moist chocolate treat. “It’s so soft, it’s absolutely fluffy,” she said, without a trace of remorse. She said she was a singer and that her record label had told her to lose weight, but she was unable to break her weekly Magnolia habit. For her it began late one evening after she noticed a trail of grown adults carrying cupcakes in the West Village and followed them to the shop. “It’s a scene,” she said. “It’s a real hangout.”

“I come here at least three times a week. At least,” said Janelle Yater, 28, who lives on Cornelia Street and works in sales. “I come here by myself alone at night.” She proclaimed the cupcakes “fulfillment.”

She’s not alone. The steely, anorexic ambition that consumed this city for the better part of the last century is taking a snack break. And we’re not talking Veggie Booty, folks. Think big, gooey melted chocolate cookies from City Bakery; pints of real Ben & Jerry’s (no more frozen yogurt!); huge slabs of coconut cake at Bubby’s. Take a look around: New York is fat as a house, and enjoying it.

The city’s new layer of fat is not the apologetic fat of yore; it’s a fat that pronounces itself. It’s the fuck-you fat of James Gandolfini and Rosie O’Donnell and Alec Baldwin; the perky, focused fat of Hairspray sensation Marissa Jaret Winokur and gyrating television teen Kelly Osbourne; the born-again baby fat of pudgy pitcher David Wells; the horny bombshell fat of model Sophie Dahl and rock star Pink.

Call it survivor fat for impending God-knows-what, call it carpe diem, call it simple self-indulgence, but in any event, call the pizza parlor!

More evidence that socking away cupcakes and Skittles has replaced sex as New Yorkers’ favorite vice: The New York Times is covering food as if it were a war, adding unapologetically plump-armed British “domestic goddess” Nigella Lawson and Random House editor at large Jason Epstein to an already bulging roster. Mr. Epstein said that he was approached by the Times after Sept. 11, given carte blanche, and found himself inspired by culinary writer M.F.K. Fisher. “She wrote about food and love when Europe was collapsing in the 30’s,” he said. “Hitler was taking over, the fascists were killing people, and she wrote about sitting down to eat.”

At the Magnolia Bakery, three men in their 30’s--who, in another era, might have been lining up to enlist--were sitting down to stuff their faces with milk and cake at a small iron table. Behind the counter, an employee was spreading thick, yellow icing on a fat, round cake while another slid a hunk of white-chocolate macadamia-nut cheese cake into a customer’s waiting hand and grooved to the music, Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.”

“This is all fattening,” said Barbara DiNicola, Magnolia’s manager. “All flour, whole eggs, butter and sugar.” She said the place was churning out thousands and thousands of cupcakes daily; six years ago, it was hundreds. “People think this place is a nightclub, because of the crowds outside,” Ms. DiNicola said. Down the street, a new bakery, Polka Dot Cake Studio, recently opened, perhaps to siphon off those who can’t wait half an hour for one of Magnolia’s sugar bombs.

The West Village is hardly the only neighborhood with an expanding waistline. At the City Bakery on 18th Street, owner and head chef Maury Rubin said cookie sales have gone up in the last six months.

“Our highest seller is cookies and cookies and cookies,” he said. “We sell a monumental number of cookies every day. I won’t disclose the exact number, but it’s in the ‘beyond several hundred’ category. Chocolate chip is the most popular, of course. People are enjoying all kinds of foods that are otherwise under the--in my mind, idiotic--category of ‘sinful.’”

“Anorexia’s so out,” said a City Bakery customer named Skye Stuart. “That was so three years ago. Nowadays, women, especially, are just like, ‘Fuck you, I’m eating whatever I want, and if you don’t like it, I’ll find somebody who will.’”

On a recent afternoon at Dylan’s Candy Bar, the regressive bonbon emporium on 60th Street and Third Avenue owned by Ralph Lauren’s daughter, a 24-year-old production assistant named Heather Ward had dropped in, as she does regularly, to indulge what she called her “little sugar addiction.” She usually gets the Rice Krispies treats but was eyeing a tray of chocolate-covered graham crackers. “These look good,” she said.

Dylan’s Candy salespeople said that the busiest hours were not in the afternoon after school, when parents help kids choose their gummy bears, but in the evening right before closing. The customers then are adults, and they’re buying for themselves. “They’re even more wild than the kids,” said Jaclyn Ayala. “They’re beasts sometimes.”

Her colleague, Nilsa Mena, was wearing a turquoise T-shirt that hugged her curves. She said she’d gained 20 pounds--“and counting”--in her six months at the store. “I’m gonna eat my burgers and my candy and I don’t care if I weigh 280 pounds,” she said. “The meaning of life is to enjoy it, and I’m gonna enjoy it.”

Gourmet magazine editor in chief and former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl has noticed that New Yorkers are eating more heartily. “It’s about time!” she said. “I certainly think that in the wake of Sept. 11 people started feeling vulnerable and as if they should enjoy themselves as much as possible. Life started feeling very precious. So they started giving themselves permission and silencing that little voice that says, ‘Don’t eat that.’ People started living their lives with more gusto.”

“We all have a natural body type and part of the whole diet craziness is to be something that we’re not,” said Ms. Reichl. “So this is saying, ‘Relax, be the body type that you are, you can eat normally.’ And people did relax. And the consequences really weren’t so horrible. If you enjoyed your food, you weren’t going to blow up. You can relax and enjoy your food and you don’t have to feel guilty about it, it doesn’t mean you have to gain a million pounds.”

Kurt Gutenbrunner, the chef at Wallsé, the Austrian place on West 11th Street, agreed. “For the longest time we overdid it with the wild arugula salad and the Diet Coke,” he said. “Slowly we realized it doesn’t work, we can’t survive on wild arugula salad and Diet Coke. If I put goulash on the menu, it flies out of the restaurant. If I took off the spätzle, there would be a mini-revolution.”

At Bubby’s in Tribeca, manager Vincent Barile said, “‘Save room for pie!’ is our motto here. Now people are eating more and saving room for pie. There’s no more ‘I can’t have this’ and ‘I shouldn’t order that.’ You just don’t hear it anymore. Now we see a lot more ‘healthy’ customers than before, if you know what I mean. This place was a mini-California before. Now Ben Affleck orders the famous Frog Parker Pulled Pork sandwich. J. Lo orders to-go a lot--she likes the barbecue chicken.”

And how does Zagat favorite Danny Meyer (owner of Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Tabla, Eleven Madison Park, etc.) weigh in?

“I can verify that people are less afraid of looking like a protagonist in a Rubens painting,” he said. “When we recently opened Blue Smoke for lunch, with no fanfare, I frankly thought no one would eat barbecue for lunch. But today there were tons of people gorging on barbecue, ribs and sticky toffee pudding. They’re washing those ribs down with--when it’s not beer or bourbon, it’s typically a root-beer float. I’m noticing more voracious consumption also at Eleven Madison Park in the past few months. At dinnertime, we cannot keep up with chocolate soufflés, and those are chocolate soufflés for two. We can’t keep them in the house. Our most popular entrée is the côte de boeuf, a roast beef for two. It comes with potato gratin.

“If I think back to 10 years ago, when I first got into the restaurant business, I notice that now people are more active,” he said. “I think people feel more comfortable with themselves and their bodies and food is something you can indulge in more when you’re exercising.”

Eddie Pugsley, the manager of Smith & Wollensky steak house, said business is up. After Sept. 11, he said, “we were contemplating closing. But now steaks are being eaten at numbers that we didn’t think would be possible only 12 months after. Smiles are on the customers’ faces.”

Bill Yosses is the pastry chef at Citarella in midtown.

“Now, when people indulge, they will go for rich desserts, but they have to be high quality,” he said. “If that’s the case, they’re ready to dive in. There’s more joie de vivre about eating, a European sense of enjoying life to the fullest and eating well. I started a 12-bean vanilla ice cream, whereas most ice creams are only one or two bean. We serve as many desserts as we do main courses here. At this time of year we have a new Concord grape dessert with a cheese-cake soufflé.

“There’s definitely been a priority change,” he added. “That bony look was never attractive. There’s definitely a fuller look today. People are getting over the food phobias of the past. Crazy diets are not in.”

Cheryl Sleade, the pastry chef at Bouley, agreed.

“I know in my own personal life I notice a difference,” she said. “I think people are eating things they feel more enjoyment for. People come in specifically to try the desserts. I’m in a little bit of a food rut personally, because I’m eating a lot of comfort food and not a lot of variety. Right now I eat more what I enjoy. Soon after Sept. 11 my friends and I were laughing about how all of us were eating really hearty food. One person said it was Freudian, in that it means you are ready to take in the world and so you eat more. He had remembered studying that. When everything is bizarre and horrible and then when you’re ready to accept these events, you eat. I remember all of us commenting that we had such appetites.”

“Everybody orders desserts at our restaurant,” she added. “They not only get a dessert, they get a dessert soup first.”

Later this month, Mr. Silvers will turn 76. His tenure at The New York Review of Books represents one of the longest editorial collaborations in the literary world: He has edited The Review alongside Barbara Epstein since its founding in the winter of 1963. The Review has experienced a recent surge in significance since the Iraq war began, and remains one of the most revered literary and journalistic enterprises in publishing today—even as it is sometimes also seen as a tad musty. Mr. Silvers—a compulsively curious man—is an old-school editor in the truest sense of the word: Every sentence means something to him; every idea, be it about war or opera, must be handled with precision.

But even more than that, Mr. Silvers—and The Review by extension—is a memory bank of American intellectual life. The magazine and its galaxy of friends and contributors is one of the last connections to a bygone era—to Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald, to a time when ideas mattered and the smart people and the beautiful ones enjoyed a natural affinity.

Unlike some of his peers—say, the David Remnicks, who write their own stories and whose names are well-known, or the Katrina vanden Heuvels, who work the media circuit as advocates—Mr. Silvers remains behind the curtain. He and Ms. Epstein do almost everything themselves, from assigning and editing pieces to the outline of the cover designs, so The Review is seen as a place for bright young people to pass through. There is no way to move up, as everyone knows that Mr. Silvers (and his co-editor) don’t yield the real editing to anyone. The thought of a Review without Mr. Silvers is basically inconceivable.

“My expectation is that he will still be editing The Review when he’s 120,” Mark Danner, a contributor to The Review and a former Silvers assistant, said. “It’s hard for me to imagine Bob and The Review as separate entities.”

Said another former Review employee: “I feel like he’s gonna die in his chair.”

Imagining who could possibly step in for him is a bit of a game in literary and media circles. Mr. Silvers won’t discuss retirement. “We can’t do enough!” he said in response to a question on the subject. “I’d like to do more. I feel there are a huge amount of things we should be doing.”

Mr. Silvers has dark, gleaming eyes, a slightly waggish face, and seems younger than he actually is (this is possibly due to his devoted vegetarianism, which is said to have taken hold after he edited the animal-rights ethicist Peter Singer). On a recent Wednesday afternoon, he was wearing what is apparently a fairly typical workday outfit: a gray chalk-stripe suit, white dress shirt with starched collar, and a blue-and-white hound’s-tooth check tie—only he’d replaced the suit jacket with a navy cardigan streaked with stains, and the tie was shoved over to one side, as if he’d tried to yank it off.

Many of the subjects that The Review deals with, from art and literature to science and politics, reflect Mr. Silvers’ own intellectual voracity. He turns up at The Review’s midtown offices every day—walking, sometimes, from his apartment at 68th and Park—and often stays late into the night, fixated on shaping, clarifying and improving the dense critical essays and reported pieces that fill the pages of The Review every other week. He has four assistants who operate as his remote brains, helping to track the heaps of books that travel in and out each month. His office functions as a kind of nerve center: a vast, bright room, where he sits at a desk a few feet away from his quartet of helpers, with towers of books on every surface serving as substitute cubicle partitions. The atmosphere is intense and slightly hermetic.

He insists that he isn’t a workaholic, but that he’s motivated by “a feeling of the greatest urgency to deal with the manuscripts and the books and the things that we’re doing.”

Unless he has a particular engagement in the evening—perhaps a dinner party or a visit to Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera—he’ll just stay at his desk as long as he can. Sometimes, he’ll dart out to the aforementioned party and then return for a few more hours. (He also has a lady friend, Grace, Countess of Dudley, whom he affectionately calls “Youngie.”) He said that he only needs four or five hours of sleep, and he often does his reading—books and “dozens” of periodicals and newspapers, which he scours in search of writers who he thinks are special—late at night.

Editing was the natural thing for him to do, Mr. Silvers said. He attended the University of Chicago and started (and quit) Yale Law School, then was stationed in Paris while serving in the Army. He remained in Paris during the 1950’s and became a chum of George Plimpton, who made him an editor of The Paris Review (he is still a member of the Paris Review Foundation board and had a heavy hand in selecting that magazine’s new editor). He returned to the U.S. a few years later and worked as an editor at Harper’s.

A hint of obsessive compulsion creeps in when he discusses his work. “It is almost an uncontainable impulse, to make such suggestions in the prose. In a way, you can’t help it,” Mr. Silvers said of the editing process. “And you would feel terrible if you published something that you felt could be better, and you hadn’t tried to do something to improve it, or to suggest something to improve it. And that, I think, is what, in a way, editing is—it’s something you can’t help.” Mr. Silvers cited Elizabeth Hardwick and Joan Didion as two Review writers that he rarely needs to touch.

The Review was launched during the New York newspaper strike of 1962-63, which had put The New York Times Book Review out of commission. Jason Epstein, who was then at Random House, where he continues to edit the occasional book (and who established the paperback lines both there and at Doubleday), conspired with Ms. Epstein (his wife at the time), Ms. Hardwick and Robert Lowell (who were then married to each other) about the idea for a new literary review. They invited Mr. Silvers to serve as co-editor and published a first issue that featured Mary McCarthy, W.H. Auden, Philip Rahv and Norman Mailer, among other writers.

One of their priorities was to maintain control over their editorial content. “There was no publisher, no foundation, no person who, because they were rich, could tell us what to do,” Mr. Silvers said.

Since 1984, The Review has been owned by Rea Hederman, who is regarded as a benevolent and hands-off publisher. Paid circulation stands at the improbably large figure of 127,000 and increased 10 percent over the last five years, according to Jenie Hederman, Mr. Hederman’s daughter, who works at The Review. The journal has for many years made a profit.

It was in the late 1960’s, during the most heated time of the Vietnam War, that The Review started printing anti-war pieces by McCarthy, Noam Chomsky and I.F. Stone, in addition to high-quality literary criticism, often sparking outrage and intellectual splits that persist to this day. The present conflict in Iraq has infused The Review with a similar sort of political purpose.

“There are obvious similarities,” Mr. Silvers said, contrasting the Vietnam days with the current. “The country is at war. It’s a highly controversial war. And there are people dying, and there’s an element now which I think we in the paper have felt very strongly about, which is this common use of torture.”

Mr. Silvers and The Review commissioned and published many pieces that were critical of the Bush administration’s conduct in the war and other matters early on. Mr. Silvers said that it “nags” at him that some of his writers have had “insights and perceptions about international power and the war that are very important, that should have but haven’t got the attention they deserve.” He shuffled through a folder of recent stories, pointing out Frances FitzGerald’s September 2002 interview with Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Advisor to George Bush senior, who was opposed to the Iraq invasion; Brian Urquhart’s coverage of Hans Blix and the aborted Iraqi weapons inspections; Michael Massing’s critical stories about the press and reporting on W.M.D.; and Mr. Danner’s pieces on torture and Abu Ghraib as some examples.

However, Mr. Silvers said that he doesn’t believe that articles in The Review can have an impact in any concrete way, and that he felt the same way during the Vietnam War. When asked why he thought it was important for The Review to address such issues if that was the case, Mr. Silvers said: “I think it’s a question of historical truth about life-and-death matters.

“We started this paper in a great fit of intense hope …. And ever since then, I have been constantly trying to keep up,” Mr. Silvers said. “I feel it’s a fantastic opportunity—because of the freedom of it, because of the sense that there are marvelous, intensely interesting, important questions that you have a chance to try to deal with in an interesting way. That’s an extraordinary opportunity in life. And you’d be crazy not to try and make the most of it.”

Gaudi’s towers and spirals faded from view as the Silversea cruise ship the Silver Shadow started its voyage Friday to Marseilles from Barcelona …. The interior of the ship provides such diversions as a daily putting contest and, of course, food, but it’s what’s outside the ship that is inspiring: the full moon lighting the sea at night; the lull of the water rocking the ship gently, and the ports of call on the French Riviera. The ship has offered tours of Aix, where Cezanne painted, and two hillside towns near Saint Tropez, Gassin, and Ramatuelle …. One passenger with his mind soberly on home is the literary icon Jason Epstein, husband of the jailed New York Times reporter, Judith Miller …. Mr. Epstein is traveling with a group of the couple’s friends, who all are deep admirers of Ms. Miller. I’ve lost track of the toasts to her and the prayers said for her over the course of the trip.

—A.L. Gordon, The New York Sun, July 26 2005

From a waterlogged journal found last week in a locker in a Miami bus station:

July 23: Have only been on the Silver Shadow three days and boy have I been guzzling the giggle water. Boogied the night away at the disco on deck E with that pretty little filly with the cha-chas like Tijuana maracas. Beats staying up all night with Judy listening to her ask whether whatever she’s writing “sounds plausible …. ”

July 24: Heard my incarcerated spouse is expecting a visit from Maureen Dowd. Better watch out, Judy baby! The flame-haired flame-thrower likes you about as much as that maid of ours you fired for retrieving your Chalabi notes from the trash. Back later; I got an appointment with a piña colada and a secretary from St. Louis with a backside like a shrimp buffet!

July 25: Received an “urgent” message from Judy: Her inmates in the Big House jumped her in the rec room Lizzies-style cause they “said they didn’t like my face.” Nothing I can do about that, sweetie! At least you’re not getting any more anthrax letters. Why don’t you fend ’em off with some bedtime stories about secret biolabs. Tee hee! Or call Scooter! I guess that “secret security clearance” you threw in my face every time I asked you to make the beds or cook some grub doesn’t work with a prison “hubby”! I’m off to shuffleboard with Isabella Rossellini!

July 26: What is it I love so much about these little umbrellas they put in the drinks around here?

July 27: Today was the most fun day I think I’ve ever had! We docked and went cruising around the island on mopeds! I felt just like Steve McQueen!

July 28: Ruh-roh. These swell kids I’ve been hanging out with onboard have been asking me lots of questions about Judy, Judy, Judy. Are they just curious? Or could they be Democrats—or Arab terrorists? Ah, shucks, now I’m starting to sound like Judy! Nothing a dip in the naked Jacuzzi can’t fix. Hey, kids, wait up while I get my bathing cap! Be-lu-ga!

July 29: Ah, nuts. Today’s the last day of my cruise. Now I have to go home and listen to Judy gripe about all the fun I had while she’s locked up in the joint. But never mind. The night is young, the moon is full, and I just got a pass to go see Bobby Vinton on the Twilight Deck!

Mini-Malls

Alan Neagle of Williamsburg makes miniature shopping malls. These are exact scale models of real malls, usually four to six inches long. “Everyone recognizes how precious and magical seashells are,” explains Mr. Neagle, “because we can put them in our pocket. But a shopping mall puts us in its pocket. A mall is too large for us to see.” By shrinking them, Mr. Neagle re-imagines them.

And what does one do with a tiny mall?

“You may display one on a mantelpiece, or carry it around for luck,” Mr. Neagle reveals. “I believe they have spiritual energy. Every mall is a microcosm of the universe, containing food, bathrooms, clothing, books, music—all of human existence. If you shrink a mall down and contemplate it, it’s like a crystal.”

Especially potent is the Paramus Mall (circa 1964), with the largest mural in the world, Mr. Neagle believes.

—Sparrow

Chihuahua Chicks

Chihuahuas are not generally considered the most attractive creatures in the animal kingdom. Their black onyx eyes bulge, their ears are oversized, and they shiver in even the mildest November breeze. But in New York, a city increasingly obsessed with iPods, BlackBerries and all things totable, it’s this mousy, quavering breed that best fits into a handbag.

“They are very portable dogs,” explained Myles Weissleder, a spokesman for Meetup.com, a company that organizes 770 local interest groups citywide, such as the New York City John Edwards Meetup Group (473 members) and the New York City Witches Meetup Group (471 witches). With 528 devoted members, the New York City Chihuahua chapter puts the wonks and witches to shame.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, about 30 members unpacked their coddled dogs from purses and pocketbooks at the Happy Paws Pet Resort, which is located on Lafayette Street near Houston Street. The diminutive pets immediately began chasing each other around two fake tree trunks in the indoor playground. They stretched to reach their owners’ knees and struck shivering poses for incessantly flashing cameras. The room reverberated with the clicking of tiny paws on white linoleum, barking, growling and lots of women chattering in cloying terms. (“They’re all so tiny!”) One woman wore a red shirt that said “Chihuahua” in white lettering. Another carefully unrolled a portrait of her black shorthair named Spock. It was drawn in a Russian icon style, with a gilt halo behind its pointy ears.

The group’s organizer, Ada Nieves, wore an orange Purina ball cap and handed out cookies shaped like dog bones. She gleefully welcomed Joey, Moto, Zeena, Lana, Pablo and other familiar furry faces with mostly two-syllable names as they were extracted from the bags of their owners. Those owners, for the most part, didn’t know each other’s names.

“We’re having a Thanksgiving dinner to give thanks for our friends and our Chihuahuas,” announced Ms. Nieves in a strong Puerto Rican accent as the dogs ate cake off of plates. “There are so many of them.”

But few of the many were housebroken. By roughly 12:30 p.m., as the meeting reached a raucous quorum, walking and inhaling had become treacherous in the glass-encased room. Wet paper towels ringed the fake trees like yellowed snow, and the owners ominously slipped on their black “Chihuahua business” gloves.

Despite all the leaking, everyone seemed enamored with the Chihuahuas’ distressed stares, wool booties and cashmere sweaters.

“I like Laura Ashley,” said Brittany Somerset, 24, who dressed her dog, Odin, in a tight red sweater with a flare of dark synthetic fur, like a little mane, around its skinny neck. Another dog managed to claw out of its sailor suit only to find itself dressed like Santa. Ms. Somerset, who made her dog’s sweater out of a sleeve, insisted the gathering was more about friendship than fashion.

“Chihuahuas need a lot of socialization,” she said, as her dog scampered off to pee on another woman’s polka-dot purse. “They tend to get introverted. When I first got him, I passed him around like a football.” She then took pains to explain that many of the Chihuahuas in the room were actually … not Chihuahuas.

“A Chihuahua is six pounds or under. It’s a toy breed. They have an apple head. The other terms are all marketing ploys: ‘deer head,’ ‘doe head.’ People can make up whatever term they want to make themselves feel better, but it’s all crap. They aren’t Chihuahuas. They should have flat eyes set apart—and they shouldn’t have that bugged-out look,” she said, pointing at a strung-out dog named Pepsi.

Such snapping isn’t new to the seemingly happy Chihuahua family. In November of last year, a post on the group’s online message board, which is usually dedicated to problems such as “My Chihuahua’s Hair Loss,” accused fellow members of being “superficial animal breeders whose only interest is in knowing where your next puppy is coming from and how cute it looks in a picture.”

As one can imagine, the message caused howling in the city’s Chihuahua community, but things really exploded a month later, when Meetup’s administration received complaints that Ms. Nieves was using the group to promote her Chihuahua modeling business, and then banned her from the message board for hawking photos of pets Cinnabon Bon, Vanilla Salt, Tequila Bon and Sylvia Salt.

“I feel so hurt by this—no one has any idea—therefore, I have decided to resign as [the Meetup] organizer,” she posted at the time.

The group eventually got beyond those crises, and on Saturday, a palpably warm feeling had returned to the loud and increasingly mephitic room.

“Some of the males here get kind of humpy,” said Karen Biehl, a tall, blond 42-year-old woman whose dog, Eli, was busy mounting a Chihuahua in a wool wrap. She regretted, however, that there is much less humping among the Chihuahua owners. It turns out that very few available straight men are keen on carrying small dogs around in a shoulder bag.

“My mom asked me if any straight men had Chihuahuas,” said Ms. Biehl, looking somewhat sadly around the room full of cooing women. Suddenly her face lit up. “The guy at the Canine Ranch has one, and he’s very straight.”

—Jason Horowitz

Gaudi’s towers and spirals faded from view as the Silversea cruise ship the Silver Shadow started its voyage Friday to Marseilles from Barcelona …. The interior of the ship provides such diversions as a daily putting contest and, of course, food, but it’s what’s outside the ship that is inspiring: the full moon lighting the sea at night; the lull of the water rocking the ship gently, and the ports of call on the French Riviera. The ship has offered tours of Aix, where Cezanne painted, and two hillside towns near Saint Tropez, Gassin, and Ramatuelle …. One passenger with his mind soberly on home is the literary icon Jason Epstein, husband of the jailed New York Times reporter, Judith Miller …. Mr. Epstein is traveling with a group of the couple’s friends, who all are deep admirers of Ms. Miller. I’ve lost track of the toasts to her and the prayers said for her over the course of the trip.

—A.L. Gordon, The New York Sun, July 26 2005

From a waterlogged journal found last week in a locker in a Miami bus station:

July 23: Have only been on the Silver Shadow three days and boy have I been guzzling the giggle water. Boogied the night away at the disco on deck E with that pretty little filly with the cha-chas like Tijuana maracas. Beats staying up all night with Judy listening to her ask whether whatever she’s writing “sounds plausible …. ”

July 24: Heard my incarcerated spouse is expecting a visit from Maureen Dowd. Better watch out, Judy baby! The flame-haired flame-thrower likes you about as much as that maid of ours you fired for retrieving your Chalabi notes from the trash. Back later; I got an appointment with a piña colada and a secretary from St. Louis with a backside like a shrimp buffet!

July 25: Received an “urgent” message from Judy: Her inmates in the Big House jumped her in the rec room Lizzies-style cause they “said they didn’t like my face.” Nothing I can do about that, sweetie! At least you’re not getting any more anthrax letters. Why don’t you fend ’em off with some bedtime stories about secret biolabs. Tee hee! Or call Scooter! I guess that  “secret security clearance” you threw in my face every time I asked you to make the beds or cook some grub doesn’t work with a prison “hubby”! I’m off to shuffleboard with Isabella Rossellini!

July 26: What is it I love so much about these little umbrellas they put in the drinks around here?

July 27: Today was the most fun day I think I’ve ever had! We docked and went cruising around the island on mopeds! I felt just like Steve McQueen!

July 28: Ruh-roh. These swell kids I’ve been hanging out with onboard have been asking me lots of questions about Judy, Judy, Judy. Are they just curious? Or could they be Democrats—or Arab terrorists? Ah, shucks, now I’m starting to sound like Judy! Nothing a dip in the naked Jacuzzi can’t fix. Hey, kids, wait up while I get my bathing cap! Be-lu-ga!

July 29: Ah, nuts. Today’s the last day of my cruise. Now I have to go home and listen to Judy gripe about all the fun I had while she’s locked up in the joint. But never mind. The night is young, the moon is full, and I just got a pass to go see Bobby Vinton on the Twilight Deck!

Mini-Malls

Alan Neagle of Williamsburg makes miniature shopping malls. These are exact scale models of real malls, usually four to six inches long. “Everyone recognizes how precious and magical seashells are,” explains Mr. Neagle, “because we can put them in our pocket. But a shopping mall puts us in its pocket. A mall is too large for us to see.”  By shrinking them, Mr. Neagle re-imagines them.

And what does one do with a tiny mall?

“You may display one on a mantelpiece, or carry it around for luck,” Mr. Neagle reveals. “I believe they have spiritual energy. Every mall is a microcosm of the universe, containing food, bathrooms, clothing, books, music—all of human existence. If you shrink a mall down and contemplate it, it’s like a crystal.”

Especially potent is the Paramus Mall (circa 1964), with the largest mural in the world, Mr. Neagle believes.

—Sparrow

Chihuahua Chicks

Chihuahuas are not generally considered the most attractive creatures in the animal kingdom. Their black onyx eyes bulge, their ears are oversized, and they shiver in even the mildest November breeze. But in New York, a city increasingly obsessed with iPods, BlackBerries and all things totable, it’s this mousy, quavering breed that best fits into a handbag.

“They are very portable dogs,” explained Myles Weissleder, a spokesman for Meetup.com, a company that organizes 770 local interest groups citywide, such as the New York City John Edwards Meetup Group (473 members) and the New York City Witches Meetup Group (471 witches). With 528 devoted members, the New York City Chihuahua chapter puts the wonks and witches to shame.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, about 30 members unpacked their coddled dogs from purses and pocketbooks at the Happy Paws Pet Resort, which is located on Lafayette Street near Houston Street. The diminutive pets immediately began chasing each other around two fake tree trunks in the indoor playground. They stretched to reach their owners’ knees and struck shivering poses for incessantly flashing cameras. The room reverberated with the clicking of tiny paws on white linoleum, barking, growling and lots of women chattering in cloying terms. (“They’re all so tiny!”) One woman wore a red shirt that said “Chihuahua” in white lettering. Another carefully unrolled a portrait of her black shorthair named Spock. It was drawn in a Russian icon style, with a gilt halo behind its pointy ears.

The group’s organizer, Ada Nieves, wore an orange Purina ball cap and handed out cookies shaped like dog bones. She gleefully welcomed Joey, Moto, Zeena, Lana, Pablo and other familiar furry faces with mostly two-syllable names as they were extracted from the bags of their owners. Those owners, for the most part, didn’t know each other’s names.

“We’re having a Thanksgiving dinner to give thanks for our friends and our Chihuahuas,” announced Ms. Nieves in a strong Puerto Rican accent as the dogs ate cake off of plates. “There are so many of them.”

But few of the many were housebroken. By roughly 12:30 p.m., as the meeting reached a raucous quorum, walking and inhaling had become treacherous in the glass-encased room. Wet paper towels ringed the fake trees like yellowed snow, and the owners ominously slipped on their black “Chihuahua business” gloves.

Despite all the leaking, everyone seemed enamored with the Chihuahuas’ distressed stares, wool booties and cashmere sweaters.

“I like Laura Ashley,” said Brittany Somerset, 24, who dressed her dog, Odin, in a tight red sweater with a flare of dark synthetic fur, like a little mane, around its skinny neck. Another dog managed to claw out of its sailor suit only to find itself dressed like Santa. Ms. Somerset, who made her dog’s sweater out of a sleeve, insisted the gathering was more about friendship than fashion.

“Chihuahuas need a lot of socialization,” she said, as her dog scampered off to pee on another woman’s polka-dot purse. “They tend to get introverted. When I first got him, I passed him around like a football.” She then took pains to explain that many of the Chihuahuas in the room were actually … not Chihuahuas.

“A Chihuahua is six pounds or under. It’s a toy breed. They have an apple head. The other terms are all marketing ploys: ‘deer head,’ ‘doe head.’ People can make up whatever term they want to make themselves feel better, but it’s all crap. They aren’t Chihuahuas. They should have flat eyes set apart—and they shouldn’t have that bugged-out look,” she said, pointing at a strung-out dog named Pepsi.

Such snapping isn’t new to the seemingly happy Chihuahua family. In November of last year, a post on the group’s online message board, which is usually dedicated to problems such as “My Chihuahua’s Hair Loss,” accused fellow members of being “superficial animal breeders whose only interest is in knowing where your next puppy is coming from and how cute it looks in a picture.”

As one can imagine, the message caused howling in the city’s Chihuahua community, but things really exploded a month later, when Meetup’s administration received complaints that Ms. Nieves was using the group to promote her Chihuahua modeling business, and then banned her from the message board for hawking photos of pets Cinnabon Bon, Vanilla Salt, Tequila Bon and Sylvia Salt.

“I feel so hurt by this—no one has any idea—therefore, I have decided to resign as [the Meetup] organizer,” she posted at the time.

The group eventually got beyond those crises, and on Saturday, a palpably warm feeling had returned to the loud and increasingly mephitic room.

“Some of the males here get kind of humpy,” said Karen Biehl, a tall, blond 42-year-old woman whose dog, Eli, was busy mounting a Chihuahua in a wool wrap. She regretted, however, that there is much less humping among the Chihuahua owners. It turns out that very few available straight men are keen on carrying small dogs around in a shoulder bag.

“My mom asked me if any straight men had Chihuahuas,” said Ms. Biehl, looking somewhat sadly around the room full of cooing women. Suddenly her face lit up. “The guy at the Canine Ranch has one, and he’s very straight.”

—Jason Horowitz

"I've been here probably 600 zillion times," said Nadia Newman, 22, a billowy Brooklynite who was enjoying a moist chocolate treat. "It's so soft, it's absolutely fluffy," she said, without a trace of remorse. She said she was a singer and that her record label had told her to lose weight, but she was unable to break her weekly Magnolia habit. For her it began late one evening after she noticed a trail of grown adults carrying cupcakes in the West Village and followed them to the shop. "It's a scene," she said. "It's a real hangout."

"I come here at least three times a week. At least ," said Janelle Yater, 28, who lives on Cornelia Street and works in sales. "I come here by myself alone at night." She proclaimed the cupcakes "fulfillment."

She's not alone. The steely, anorexic ambition that consumed this city for the better part of the last century is taking a snack break. And we're not talking Veggie Booty, folks. Think big, gooey melted chocolate cookies from City Bakery; pints of real Ben & Jerry's (no more frozen yogurt!); huge slabs of coconut cake at Bubby's. Take a look around: New York is fat as a house, and enjoying it.

The city's new layer of fat is not the apologetic fat of yore; it's a fat that pronounces itself. It's the fuck-you fat of James Gandolfini and Rosie O'Donnell and Alec Baldwin; the perky, focused fat of Hairspray sensation Marissa Jaret Winokur and gyrating television teen Kelly Osbourne; the born-again baby fat of pudgy pitcher David Wells; the horny bombshell fat of model Sophie Dahl and rock star Pink.

Call it survivor fat for impending God-knows-what, call it carpe diem , call it simple self-indulgence, but in any event, call the pizza parlor!

More evidence that socking away cupcakes and Skittles has replaced sex as New Yorkers' favorite vice: The New York Times is covering food as if it were a war , adding unapologetically plump-armed British "domestic goddess" Nigella Lawson and Random House editor at large Jason Epstein to an already bulging roster. Mr. Epstein said that he was approached by the Times after Sept. 11, given carte blanche, and found himself inspired by culinary writer M.F.K. Fisher. "She wrote about food and love when Europe was collapsing in the 30's," he said. "Hitler was taking over, the fascists were killing people, and she wrote about sitting down to eat."

At the Magnolia Bakery, three men in their 30's-who, in another era, might have been lining up to enlist-were sitting down to stuff their faces with milk and cake at a small iron table. Behind the counter, an employee was spreading thick, yellow icing on a fat, round cake while another slid a hunk of white-chocolate macadamia-nut cheese cake into a customer's waiting hand and grooved to the music, Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life."

"This is all fattening," said Barbara DiNicola, Magnolia's manager. "All flour, whole eggs, butter and sugar." She said the place was churning out thousands and thousands of cupcakes daily; six years ago, it was hundreds. "People think this place is a nightclub, because of the crowds outside," Ms. DiNicola said. Down the street, a new bakery, Polka Dot Cake Studio, recently opened, perhaps to siphon off those who can't wait half an hour for one of Magnolia's sugar bombs.

The West Village is hardly the only neighborhood with an expanding waistline. At the City Bakery on 18th Street, owner and head chef Maury Rubin said cookie sales have gone up in the last six months.

"Our highest seller is cookies and cookies and cookies ," he said. "We sell a monumental number of cookies every day. I won't disclose the exact number, but it's in the 'beyond several hundred' category. Chocolate chip is the most popular, of course. People are enjoying all kinds of foods that are otherwise under the-in my mind, idiotic-category of 'sinful.'"

"Anorexia's so out," said a City Bakery customer named Skye Stuart. "That was so three years ago. Nowadays, women, especially, are just like, 'Fuck you, I'm eating whatever I want, and if you don't like it, I'll find somebody who will.'"

On a recent afternoon at Dylan's Candy Bar, the regressive bonbon emporium on 60th Street and Third Avenue owned by Ralph Lauren's daughter, a 24-year-old production assistant named Heather Ward had dropped in, as she does regularly, to indulge what she called her "little sugar addiction." She usually gets the Rice Krispies treats but was eyeing a tray of chocolate-covered graham crackers. "These look good," she said.

Dylan's Candy salespeople said that the busiest hours were not in the afternoon after school, when parents help kids choose their gummy bears, but in the evening right before closing. The customers then are adults, and they're buying for themselves. "They're even more wild than the kids," said Jaclyn Ayala. "They're beasts sometimes."

Her colleague, Nilsa Mena, was wearing a turquoise T-shirt that hugged her curves. She said she'd gained 20 pounds-"and counting"-in her six months at the store. "I'm gonna eat my burgers and my candy and I don't care if I weigh 280 pounds," she said. "The meaning of life is to enjoy it, and I'm gonna enjoy it."

Gourmet magazine editor in chief and former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl has noticed that New Yorkers are eating more heartily. "It's about time!" she said. "I certainly think that in the wake of Sept. 11 people started feeling vulnerable and as if they should enjoy themselves as much as possible. Life started feeling very precious. So they started giving themselves permission and silencing that little voice that says, 'Don't eat that.' People started living their lives with more gusto."

"We all have a natural body type and part of the whole diet craziness is to be something that we're not," said Ms. Reichl. "So this is saying, 'Relax, be the body type that you are, you can eat normally.' And people did relax. And the consequences really weren't so horrible. If you enjoyed your food, you weren't going to blow up. You can relax and enjoy your food and you don't have to feel guilty about it, it doesn't mean you have to gain a million pounds."

Kurt Gutenbrunner, the chef at Wallsé, the Austrian place on West 11th Street, agreed. "For the longest time we overdid it with the wild arugula salad and the Diet Coke," he said. "Slowly we realized it doesn't work, we can't survive on wild arugula salad and Diet Coke. If I put goulash on the menu, it flies out of the restaurant. If I took off the spätzle, there would be a mini-revolution."

At Bubby's in Tribeca, manager Vincent Barile said, "'Save room for pie!' is our motto here. Now people are eating more and saving room for pie. There's no more 'I can't have this' and 'I shouldn't order that.' You just don't hear it anymore. Now we see a lot more 'healthy' customers than before, if you know what I mean. This place was a mini-California before. Now Ben Affleck orders the famous Frog Parker Pulled Pork sandwich. J. Lo orders to-go a lot-she like the barbecue chicken."

And how does Zagat favorite Danny Meyer (owner of Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Tabla, Eleven Madison Park, etc.) weigh in?

"I can verify that people are less afraid of looking like a protagonist in a Rubens painting," he said. "When we recently opened Blue Smoke for lunch, with no fanfare, I frankly thought no one would eat barbecue for lunch. But today there were tons of people gorging on barbecue, ribs and sticky toffee pudding. They're washing those ribs down with-when it's not beer or bourbon, it's typically a root-beer float. I'm noticing more voracious consumption also at Eleven Madison Park in the past few months. At dinner time, we cannot keep up with chocolate soufflés, and those are chocolate soufflés for two . We can't keep them in the house. Our most popular entrée is the côte de boeuf, a roast beef for two. It comes with potato gratin.

"If I think back to 10 years ago, when I first got into the restaurant business, I notice that now people are more active," he said. "I think people feel more comfortable with themselves and their bodies and food is something you can indulge in more when you're exercising."

Eddie Pugsley, the manager of Smith & Wollensky steak house, said business is up. After Sept. 11, he said, "we were contemplating closing. But now steaks are being eaten at numbers that we didn't think would be possible only 12 months after. Smiles are on the customers' faces."

Bill Yosses is the pastry chef at Citarella in midtown.

"Now, when people indulge, they will go for rich desserts, but they have to be high quality," he said. "If that's the case, they're ready to dive in. There's more joie de vivre about eating, a European sense of enjoying life to the fullest and eating well. I started a 12-bean vanilla ice cream, whereas most ice creams are only one or two bean. We serve as many desserts as we do main courses here. At this time of year we have a new Concord grape dessert with a cheese-cake soufflé.

"There's definitely been a priority change," he added. "That bony look was never attractive. There's definitely a fuller look today. People are getting over the food phobias of the past. Crazy diets are not in."

Cheryl Sleade, the pastry chef at Bouley, agreed.

"I know in my own personal life I notice a difference," she said. "I think people are eating things they feel more enjoyment for. People come in specifically to try the desserts. I'm in a little bit of a food rut personally, because I'm eating a lot of comfort food and not a lot of variety. Right now I eat more what I enjoy. Soon after Sept. 11 my friends and I were laughing about how all of us were eating really hearty food. One person said it was Freudian, in that it means you are ready to take in the world and so you eat more. He had remembered studying that. When everything is bizarre and horrible and then when you're ready to accept these events, you eat. I remember all of us commenting that we had such appetites."

"Everybody orders desserts at our restaurant," she added. "They not only get a dessert, they get a dessert soup first."

The Business of Books , by André Schiffrin. Verso, 131 pages, $23.

It is often said–usually by disgruntled authors–that book editors are just failed writers. Actually, there are plenty of crossover successes: Think of Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow, Starling Lawrence, Frank Norris, Peter Davison or T.S. Eliot. (Charles Dickens acted as his own editor, publishing himself in his magazine Household Words .) In the old days, editor-publishers would occasionally write their memoirs, which were then issued (in tiny print runs) by the house they had worked for. Toeing the company line, these volumes offered potted histories of Harper & Row or Doubleday or Houghton Mifflin and would recount, in forced jocular tones, the editor's greatest hits, the company's far-sighted vision, the near-misses, the lunches, the trips to London. It's always interested me, given how lively an editor's actual work life can be, that the old-line memoirs have been so boring. The two notable exceptions are Bennett Cerf's At Random , a wonderful window onto the rise of Random House, and Michael Korda's Another Life , the best account ever written of how a publishing house really works. Mr. Korda captures the varied personality of Simon & Schuster with panache and complete brilliance; his book is the one to turn to if you're looking for a smart, funny and subtly acerbic panorama of editorial goings-on.

Now two slender books have been published in the same season, both by distinguished editors, both of great interest to the student of book publishing. One is a highly personal memoir wreathed in bitterness; the other, a shorter, more elegiac volume that prognosticates about the possible future of a business that is increasingly being labeled futureless.

Son of the elegant French publisher Jacques Schiffrin, who fled the Nazis and brought his family to the United States, André Schiffrin initially worked at New American Library, founding the successful paperback Signet Classics line before coming in 1962 to Random House's Pantheon Books imprint, where he would stay for the next 30 years as managing director. Mr. Schiffrin quickly became noted for the intelligence and quality of the books he published, volumes that brought intellectual excitement to reading, that bucked political trends, that discussed important topics candidly. I.F. Stone, Julio Cortazar, R.D. Laing, Michel Foucault–their work was Mr. Schiffrin's meat and potatoes. "We found ourselves in the happy position of admiring people who were often rejected or neglected by others," he writes, as he picks up books by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Gunnar Myrdal and Noam Chomsky. "Never once was I prevented from taking on any of the initially unprofitable titles that we published."

But the good times were not to last. S.I. Newhouse bought Random House and eventually replaced the gifted publisher Robert Bernstein, Mr. Schiffrin's ally, with the unlovable Alberto Vitale, who immediately began questioning the financial strength and direction of Pantheon's list. Mr. Schiffrin begins his account of the subsequent nightmare in a chapter called "Fixing the Bottom Line," a thunderously ferocious insider's account of how Mr. Vitale (whom Mr. Schiffrin refers to as "the businessman with a thuggish disposition and a thoroughly anti-intellectual attitude" and "illiterate") seemed to be willfully disrespectful of Pantheon's identity, sneering at the idea of publishing books of intellectual value, constantly flogging the need to publish for considerations of profit alone. Mr. Schiffrin's account of his torture and eventual forced resignation is riveting. Still angry today, he slashes at the notion of publishing for the business department alone, of relegating smart books to the dumpster if their initial sales are low, of chasing after pseudo-books of little lasting value that themselves fail spectacularly to perform financially or in any other way. "Newhouse and Vitale had achieved the remarkable result," he writes, "of lowering the intellectual value of the firm, cheapening its reputation, and losing money, all at the same time." Later, he quotes German publisher Klaus Wagenbach: "Let's make this as explicit as possible: If books with small print runs disappear, the future will die. Kafka's first book was published with a printing of 800 copies. Brecht's first work merited 600. What would have happened if someone had decided that was not worth it?"

(Many in the business feel Mr. Schiffrin should have left Pantheon long before he was ousted. His style was said to be difficult, and his list not especially profitable even by the standards of his kind of publishing. I am not among his critics. Publishing needs more smart, independent book people willing to take financial hits for the long-term effect of getting and keeping books that matter in print.)

Jason Epstein's Book Business –which began as three lectures given at the New York Public Library and was slightly expanded to book form–is a very different book from Mr. Schiffrin's The Business of Books . Mr. Epstein himself has had a tremendous impact, on readers and on publishing–more, perhaps, than any other book editor since Maxwell Perkins. He is the inventor of the trade paperback, specifically the line dubbed Anchor Books, which put titles of philosophy, history and serious fiction–including works by Edmund Wilson, D.H. Lawrence, Gide and Stendhal–into durable and attractive paper bindings (they were more expensive than the existing paperbacks aimed at mass audiences–and worth it). Mr. Epstein is also the co-founder of The New York Review of Books (created to satisfy book addicts during the New York newspaper strike of 1963) and germinator of the Library of America and The Reader's Catalogue . He clearly loves the product of publishing, and has excelled at discovering and deploying for readers the best possibilities of printed matter.

Mr. Epstein's career, a long one, has flourished in only two houses: Doubleday, where he began in an obscure position in 1950, and Random House, to which he moved in 1958 and where he stayed for the next 40 years. He mentions some differences with the Doubleday management, a situation that came to a head over the publication–or non-publication–of Nabokov's Lolita . But he spends little time rehashing grievances. The majority of the memoir portion of his book is an elegy for the way books used to be found and bound and sent to the stores, an essentially fond account of how editors really used to know their authors as people and even as friends, working with them, feeding them, sometimes lending them money and always fighting for them. Even so, he felt that something was missing from the business, a feeling he sums up neatly by noting that he fell into publishing by accident and stayed in it for half a century for lack of better alternatives. "During all this time I kept the walls of my office bare and my desk drawers empty. I was prepared to flee in an instant without a backward glance. It was this illusion of freedom–this belief that I wasn't really there at all–that made it possible for me to spend a lifetime in the business."

Surely this is not entirely true, not coming from someone who has published so many good books and who has been a kind of guiding brain of the industry. Or maybe it is, and that illusion of freedom allowed a creative mind to range freely, seizing on unlikely possibilities and what-ifs to engender true innovation. Hence the main thrust of his book, which centers on the potential of the Internet to change, for the better, the way writers reach their readers. The Internet, he says, "offers the possibility of almost limitless choice and foreshadows a literary culture thrilling in its potential diversity."

Mr. Epstein makes no bones about embracing new technology. Recognizing the widening weaknesses in the way publishers have done business for all these years, he takes a remarkably optimistic attitude about electronic publishing, claiming that it is financially advantageous to writers–who, after all, tend to make relatively little money from their books (the publisher takes the lion's share)–and potentially lifesaving for publishers as well. At this point, I would share Stephen King's fitful skepticism about the future of Internet publishing (Mr. King fluctuates between realism and aggressive endorsement, depending on what is being said about his latest experiment, The Plant , a Dickens-style Web-serialized novel that he deracinated last month, when readership dropped from its initial 120,000 hits to 40,000). Perhaps Mr. Epstein should also be wary: His brainchild, The Reader's Catalogue , fell victim to the Internet, in the form of Amazon.com. He's right, though, to raise the issue of the Internet, and to suggest that business as usual is not necessarily healthy or fully creative or rewarding, financially or culturally. It's an interesting exercise to poke at the possibilities with him. But is it just a coincidence that the most personable parts of his book, and the most interesting to an outside reader, look backwards at his early days in the business?

Today, the book business is a New York-centric industry in which many otherwise lackluster editors seem desperate to become celebrities in their own right; they tend to forget who actually wrote the books they publish (at a dinner some years ago, one editor crowed to me about how she had won the National Book Award; it took me a second and a half to realize that she meant a book written by an author she'd signed up). In the midst of this frantic activity, it is a relief and a pleasure to read a pair of books by publishers who each created a cultural entity of lasting value. The audience for these two slender volumes should not be restricted to fellow publishers–though, as a profession, we have a drastically short memory and need always to relearn our business. As books proliferate, as television expands its boundaries to carry two stations entirely devoted to books, as authors become ever more public figures and the culture changes faster than we realize, André Schiffrin and Jason Epstein provide a most valuable and interesting service: They hold up the mirror to how we were.

André Bernard is the editor in chief of Harvest Books, the paperback imprint of Harcourt.