Indeed, the magazine signed a deal for the entire 4,000-square-foot 16^th floor of 561 Seventh Avenue, a building owned by the Handler Real Estate Organization that commands $41 a square foot in rent on average. Commentary previously held an office at 165 East 56^th Street.

While his praise may be a bit over the top, Scott Galin, a principal with Handler Real Estate indicated in a statement that the conservative rag would be a perfect tenant at the building. "Commentary Magazine is an indelible brand and its editor, John Podhoretz, it a titan of the publishing industry," said Mr. Galin, who along with Peter Simel represented the landlord in the transaction. "Commentary Magazine is a terrific tenant that adds to the cache of our building."

jsederstrom@observer.com

John’s father—that’s Norman, if you’re not aware—had been the editor of Commentary for almost half a century; more than anyone, it was Norman who turned it into the flagship publication of the neoconservative movement. In many ways, even though he passed the wheel to Mr. Kozodoy in 1995, it remains his magazine to this day.

So it would only have been natural for John—who until last Friday was a columnist for the New York Post—to have asked his father for some advice when the opportunity to inherit his magazine presented itself. Instead, John said in an interview, he kept it to himself, and told his father he’d taken the job only after he finalized the agreement with the governing board of Commentary, Inc.—just a few days in advance of the public announcement.

“I’m 46 years old,” John said yesterday, speaking to The Observer by phone from Disney World. “I wanted to make this decision on my own without reference to my father or his views.”

According to the elder Mr. Podhoretz, that’s exactly how it went: Asked last week if the appointment was a palace coup, he said that if it was, it wasn’t staged by him. “I know that it looks like that,” he said. “But oddly enough it isn’t. … It was Neal’s idea.”

Some skeptics are not so sure. “Of course Norman was involved,” said a longtime contributor who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. “Neal is brilliant but spineless. His entire role in life is to be the Podhoretz family steward. Neal defers to Norman about everything and looks to Norman for everything.”

“On the one hand it’s obvious, but no one saw it coming,” the contributor said. “The nepotism is shocking. This is a magazine, not a little family business.”

The contributor went on: “The people who have worked there a long time have been misled about the succession. These are people who are in the prime of their careers who would not have been putting in year after year as editors if they knew Norman’s son was going to jump over their heads.” Several Commentary editors contacted by The Observer declined to comment.

John dismisses the nepotism charge as an ad hominem attack motivated by ideological differences. “People are criticizing me in that way not because they have any problem with me or even care that much about it,” he said. “It’s a way of belittling and disrespecting the ideas that I express.”

In 1995, John teamed with Bill Kristol—himself the son of a seminal figure in the creation of modern-day conservatism, Irving Kristol—to found the conservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Still, several writers and editors associated with Commentary and interviewed for this article wondered whether John—who writes a column for The Standard about movies, and is known for using pop culture as a lens through which to assess politics—is intellectually serious enough to lead a magazine like Commentary without sacrificing its analytical rigor.

“A lot of people think John is a hack,” the longtime contributor said. “He writes a well-written, entertaining tabloid column. He’s written books, but the books are also very playful. The Commentary universe is meant to be a little more serious. Even his father had a Ph.D. in English literature.”

John said he finds such criticism absurd. Why, he asks, should the fact that he is well-rounded count against him? “My interest in pop culture is not overpowering,” he said. “I’ve been working as a political columnist for 10 years, and I’ve written three books on American politics. It’s a preposterous notion.”

He seems to have the journalistic credentials. He was the Post’s editorial page editor for two years, from 1997 to 1999, and part of that time he doubled as the paper’s arts and features editor, editing 13 pages a night. “I burned out,” he said.

Still, he admits that he was not always ready for this job: “I don’t think I could have done it 10 years ago,” he said. “But you know, I’m 46, I’ve had a very long and established career, and I feel that I can take it on.” His last Post column appeared last Friday, two days after he visited the Commentary offices to meet with his new team.

The younger Mr. Podhoretz certainly has his supporters, and they are not shy about voicing their enthusiasm. The editors of The New York Sun published an editorial after the announcement was made calling him “a leading voice of the younger generation,” and his appointment at Commentary an “inspiring transition for those of us who cover the battle of ideas.” And Richard Lowry, editor of National Review, speaking to The Observer, praised his ability “to do high and low and in between.”

“I don’t think we’re going to see pieces about, I don’t know, Smallville—we’re not going to see that in Commentary,” Mr. Lowry said. “Just because he’s interested in pop culture doesn’t mean he can’t do the highbrow stuff extremely well.”

He may also offer other advantages: “The thing about Commentary is it seems to aim to influence three elections from now rather than the next one,” says Ramesh Ponnuru, a writer for National Review. “John Podhoretz’s writing has been much more immediate in its ambitions, so it’ll be interesting to see whether Commentary takes a little bit less of an above-the-fray sort of approach and spends a little bit less time to set the intellectual tone. … One thing about John Podhoretz is he certainly does like mixing it up. He likes being in what ever argument’s going on.”

Even Mr. Podhoretz’s detractors, like the longtime contributor quoted above, said he could make the magazine livelier and help bring in younger readers. That could be essential, as several prominent political journalists interviewed for this article said they’d stopped reading Commentary years ago because it had grown tedious and predictable. “Commentary was interesting because it was not fully an organ of the conservative movement,” said one conservative writer. “Some of the things they said were interesting not just on their own merits but because Commentary was saying them.”

In the past few years, several journalists said, the magazine that once published such adventurous writers as Clement Greenberg and Hannah Arendt has become little more than an official organ of the Republican party. “At a moment where there should have been a venue for the intelligent debate over various Bush administration policies,” one writer said, “they have enforced whatever the party line is. Commentary takes too seriously that its job is to define neoconservatism for the ages.”

I don't know John Podhoretz. I opened the note, and it said, "We know where you live!" That was all.

I was disturbed by the note and I emailed the guy back: "Huh? Who are you? What does this mean?"

He wrote back, "AN EVIL NEOCON JEWBOY! Let's see if you can figure it out...."

I felt pretty sure it was John Podhoretz, the New York Post columnist and a regular contributor to the National Review Online. NRO has a conservative community blog called "The Corner." John Podhoretz is often on there, and when you click on his name, you get the same email address from which the notes came to me: jpod@sprynet.com. And looking around, I saw that Podhoretz refers to himself as Jpod.

I called a few of my rabbis. One of them knows Podhoretz and said he felt sure that it was he who had emailed me. The guy has a pattern of sending weirdly antagonistic emails to people he disagrees with, sometimes accusing them of antisemitism. Another described Podhoretz's emails as "acrimonious." Later I saw that paleo-conservative Steve Sailer talks about Podhoretz's emails on his blog, saying that they show him to be a "moron."

I wanted to be sure the emails had come from Podhoretz. First thing this morning I emailed him at his Post address, jpodhoretz@gmail.com, to ask about the emails from the other address. It's 1. I haven't heard from him. I'm pissed off. I'd ask my readers what I asked "John Podhoretz." Who is he and what does this mean?

"Arianna Huffington, among others, has grown besotted with Gore's newfound 'authenticity,' and contrasts it with Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton's 'triangulation' and 'phoniness.' New York magazine slapped Gore's face on the cover and dubbed him 'The Anti-Hillary.'" –THE GORE MOMENT, by John Podhoretz, The New York Post, May 26, 2006.

He writes:

And, as in politics, Daughtry already has his first job offer.

—Nicole Brydson

His central argument is that Hillary will win in 2008 unless conservatives take pre-emptive action now, trying to force her to choose between left and right in Senate votes and public statements. The trick, he writes, is either to push her so far left that she's unelectable, or so far right that she inspires a Howard Dean candidacy.

Podhoretz has a list of 10 strategies the Republicans should adopt now. You can buy the book for the other eight, but here are my two favorites:

The newspapers who haven't published those controversial Danish cartoons typically cite appropriateness and editorial judgement. Only a few, notably the Boston Phoenix, have added the obvious: Fear of violent retaliation is a consideration -- and not, as John Podhoretz notes, an illegitmate one, as long as you're honest about it.

New York Press, unpolished, ramshackle place that it is, proved a pretty transparent labrotory for how this happens. The publisher's statment was the usual boilerplate: "We came to the same conclusion as many other responsible newspapers and media outlets that have chosen to not run the Danish cartoons. We felt the images were not critical for the editorial content to have merit, would not hinder our readers from making an informed opinion and only served to further fan the flame of a volatile situation."

But, says former editor-in-chief Harry Siegel, that's not what he was told.

"The owner of the paper [David Unger] was talking to me about his fear that things would get blown up," he said today. "This was expressed to us directly: 'I'm not putting lives in danger. We're not getting things blown up.'"

Harry (full disclosure: he's a former colleague, and current neighbor) said he's been shocked at how this story has unrolled in the American media.

"I honestly thought on Friday that 70% of the newspapers in America would run the cartoons by Monday," he said.

"There's this whole attitude that we can't upset the armed barbarian children who will react to cartoons this way," he said, arguing that it's an insult to moderate Muslims. "New Yorkers of all people should know about rent-a-mobs."

"No one contemporaneously employed by a newspaper has ever been assailed by a colleague in its pages the way Maureen Dowd assailed Miller on Saturday."

Our correspondent writes:

"I guess he's not counting Abe 'Who is this nut?' Hirschfeld. He was only the owner."

The trio has been trying for the last month or so to sell editors and writers around town on the idea. One source compared it to The Industry , the magazine that Adam Moss proposed but never got off the ground back in the early 90's.

Both Mr. Hirschorn and Mr. Andersen said that it was too early to comment on the venture. Mr. Cramer, who writes a weekly column for The Observer , e-mailed to downplay his involvement, calling it "advisory–these are friends and I want them to do well." All three worked together at Mr. Andersen's New York , with Mr. Hirschorn, an editor, and Mr. Cramer, a columnist and old Harvard pal, leaving after Mr. Andersen was fired. Mr. Andersen went on to work for The New Yorker and write a screenplay and a novel, Mr. Hirschorn went on to edit Spin and Mr. Cramer to start TheStreet.com .

This is mostly Mr. Hirschorn's project. Since he was fired as editor of Spin in January–and refunded his monetary investment in the magazine–he did a spell at the New York offices of Slate . Mr. Andersen, who was ejected from New York in 1996, spent some time out in Seattle with Tom Phillips, who had started Spy with Mr. Andersen before he had moved out to help launch several Internet ventures, including ESPN.com.

Mr. Phillip's back in New York now as chief executive of Deja.com, said Mr. Andersen mostly spent his time out West researching his novel, Turn of the Century , which contains lots of half-baked ideas for media ventures. "I can tell you authoritatively he was not romanced by what he saw," he said of Mr. Andersen's time in Seattle. "I think he was intrigued."

Just a week or so after pulling editorial page editor John Podhoretz's gleefully hate-filled column purporting to comically portray John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death as part of some family deal with the devil, New York Post editor in chief Ken Chandler had to muzzle Mr. Podhoretz again. In the first edition of the July 30 paper, an editorial titled "Barbarella at the Bar Association" skewered the American Bar Association for inviting Jane Fonda to serve as its keynote speaker for its annual Silver Gavel Award ceremony. She declined–which the editorial writer attributed to "howls of protests from veterans"–but the editorial went on to huff and puff about the invitation, noting that Ms. Fonda was really only qualified to talk about "bulimia, Barbarella and feeling the burn" or, possibly, "prostitution," since "she won an Oscar for playing a hooker in Klute ." It was that last crack that got Mr. Chandler's attention and never made the later editions.

Mr. Podhoretz told Off the Record that "revisions like that happen frequently. Maybe not frequently, but they happen from time to time." He said this one was made because it seemed "excessively flip."

Mr. Podhoretz refused to comment on whether his recent editorial page adventures had cost him a shot at replacing Mr. Chandler, who is widely expected to soon move up to the publisher spot. Clearly, Mr. Podhoretz has his share of enemies willing to spread such tales, especially after his brief foray as features editor. But a hint that it was more than wishful thinking on the part of disgruntled staff members came from no less than Post spokesman Howard Rubenstein, usually considered a direct channeler of Rupert Murdoch, who told New York magazine for its Aug. 9 issue that Mr. Podhoretz "was never on a short list–or any list–to be editor." Mr. Podhoretz has told friends that was fine with him–as house ideologue with no hard news experience, he never expected to be editor, anyway.

Mr. Podhoretz did tell The Observer that there had been "no edict" on the part of Mr. Chandler to make his editorials less spiteful.

Rufus Griscom, editor in chief and chief executive of Nerve , the Web site dedicated to "literate smut"–the sort of pornography you find in art galleries and college literary magazines–has been talking about publishing a print magazine almost since the site started two years ago. Now he has a real live print editor to do the job: Susan Dominus, a former senior editor at New York magazine, who took over on July 6 as Nerve 's executive editor.

Nerve has long had a fetish for paper. Scarcely after the site started, it sold a compilation of its pieces to Broadway Books. Nerve recently made a deal with Manhattan File where the magazine has created a Nerve section and pays Nerve a licensing fee and a portion of the acquisition cost. The first Nerve section appeared in Manhattan File 's July issue.

"I think there are a lot of people that don't take on-line publishing that seriously, especially the sort of old media people," Mr. Griscom said of his plans for a print magazine. "So definitely it's appealing to get to those people and say, Hey, take a closer look at this."

The team working on the print magazine includes Ms. Dominus, vice president of community development Emma Taylor, and executive editor Jack Murnighan, who has a Ph.D. in medieval literature from Duke University.

Mr. Griscom said that as he hires more people he hopes to hire more expats from print and academia. "I never thought I would take pleasure in the depressed salaries in print publishing, having come from that world, but I think academia and print publishing are both attractive [for hiring] because the ratio of I.Q. to salary is very high."

Asked if she got a raise over her New York job, Ms. Dominus told Off the Record: "Hell yeah!" Ms. Dominus also received stock options that maybe–cross your fingers–will be worth big bucks if Nerve does an I.P.O.

–Gabriel Snyder

It's a big deal at The Wall Street Journal to have a correction run on one of your stories. "It goes in your file," noted one reporter. It's not unheard of for newer reporters to get fired for winding up in the corrections column too often. So it is not surprising that there was some glee among staff on July 23 when the paper had to run a correction for a piece written by one of the top editors. The mea culpa was for a July 9 review by managing editor Paul Steiger of a brand memoir called Selling Dreams , written by the president and chief executive of Ferrari's North America unit. Most of the book review was a discussion of Mr. Steiger's obsession with Ferraris, starting in his childhood and culminating last year when he was finally able to drive the sports car while on vacation in Italy. And that's when the booboo occurred: He wrote, "The car I drove had seven forward gears." In fact, the street transmission has six forward gears. "The transmission in Ferrari's Formula One racing cars, on which it is based, has seven forward gears," says the Journal correction.

At the New York office, members of the staff of Sidewalk.com are afraid they're about to end up curbside, despite earlier

assurances there would be places for them within the company that has bought the Web firm.

The formerly ambitious Microsoft "city guide" initiative on the Web, which started out declaring the end of New York magazine's Cue section as we know it, was bought out by Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch in mid-July. The staff was at first assured it has until October, when Sidewalk.com ceases to exist, to find new jobs within Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch. But on July 22, according to those in the Sidewalk office, Citysearch officials came by and told everyone that there wouldn't be any jobs open in the office in New York. Within a week, that was amended with news there were a couple of jobs available–but all at considerably less pay, not to mention their location in the considerably scruffier Citysearch offices on West 13th Street. Sidewalk's offices are in a bombastic high-rise in midtown called Worldwide Plaza.

How far the fall. An e-mail transmitted to the Sidewalk staff from Microsoft headquarters on July 19, the day that the deal was announced, crowed about Sidewalk's results: "In the final Sidewalk Media Metrix report for FY '99 (June '99) Sidewalk achieved an 8.7 reach (#26 in rank). This was tops among all city guides with Digital City trailing at 6.8 reach. The combined Citysearch-Ticketmaster plus advertisers was a close third with 6.6 reach. Citysearch alone posted a 1.7 reach." HQ went on to say, "Congratulations to all who worked hard to make Sidewalk.com the top on-line city guide and a top ranked site nationally."

And then the sale. The official Microsoft line, according to a spokesman, is that, "There are about 90 employees nationwide who will be possibly transitioning over to Citysearch. They have about 200 positions open. So city by city, and New York specifically, they will certainly have the opportunity to interview for positions. And Citysearch is quite excited, actually, to bring Sidewalk employees over, if not all." But, over e-mail, Sidewalkers are already buzzing about how, in one city, the restaurant reviewer was offered the job as editor in chief of the local Citysearch and found the job paid less. In Boston, staff members said, two employees are said to have cried when told how much they'd make under new management. "A lot of people will be laid off," said one Sidewalk source, who noted that there were 40 people in the New York office.

One Citysearch source noted that no additional desks are being moved into their warehouselike space. "The deal was more about acquiring content than personnel, though a few people may be offered positions, if not in New York then nationally."

The source added: "I don't know what the [Sidewalk] severance packages look like, but unless they stink, I can't imagine why they would want to come work here. Near as I can tell, they hated us, hated the fact we put our pictures on the site, that we were so opinionated and personal. And up until a few weeks ago, Microsoft was telling them they were winning the war, that we were toast. Now we jam."

A number of the 40 New York staff members have stock–some quite a bit. And a failed Internet venture on their résumés won't stop most of them from getting a new job by Oct. 19. Already, America Online's Digital City guides division is in talks with several members of the Sidewalk office to work for them.

"We made the No. 1 slot and had a great time doing it," said Jamie Pallot, Sidewalk's New York executive producer. He's not sure where he's going next.

Michael Goff, the Out founder who had moved out to Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters to oversee Sidewalk, now works for the Microsoft Network and will remain there. Meanwhile, Sean Elder, the head of the New York Citysearch office, isn't going to enjoy the merger: He quit on July 23 to become Salon 's media columnist, a job that used to be split between Susan Lehman, who went on maternity leave in May, and James Poniewozik, who was hired away to write about television for Time magazine in June.