The Mishneh Torah

There is a Jewish renewal in our lives, and two idiosyncratic instances occurred right here in this city in recent days.

The first was a Sotheby’s auction of the 386-item Judaica collection painstakingly assembled over the years by Michael and Judy Steinhardt, probably the most imaginative Jewish philanthropists of the age. Now, a sell-off is not exactly a beginning. But since money is some indication of value, the event was a magnificent happening. It actually started before the first lot went on the block. Somebody or somebodies (perhaps the Steinhardts themselves) acquired the most singular item in the catalog jointly for the Israel Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was an astonishing manuscript copy of the Mishneh Torah, the first systematic code of Jewish law, assembled and edited by Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon or the Rambam) and breathtakingly illuminated by a painter from 15th-century Italy, one of the plentitude of Jewish figurative artists in history. This particular instance of the Mishneh Torah came in two volumes, the first of which is possessed by the Vatican, and the second is this one, now to be shared between Jerusalem and New York. The Steinhardt edition deals with property law, law courts, injuries, etc. Yes, Jewish law deals with matters of real life.

The New York Times didn’t quite get what the book was about and also missed that it is the literary and scholarly work of Maimonides, whose name appeared nowhere in the article. Maybe the reporter, Carol Vogel, doubtless Jewish, hadn’t heard of Maimonides except in relation to the hospital in Brooklyn. The Times gets most things about the Jews wrong. So why not this? Here were hundreds of pieces of (mostly) exquisite Judaica going through the life cycle and the holy days, ritual objects from the fourth century C.E. through 17 centuries to a gold Torah crown made in Israel 50 years ago, and other historic items of family and the Jewish people. Maybe you can still get the catalog from Sotheby’s.

There were as many as 25 Sotheby’s staffers on the phones, fielding the bids from people who don’t come to auctions in person. (Most of the really big prices at the Sotheby’s Impressionist auction last week came from such bidders.) Before the hammer came down on the first item in the Steinhardt collection, I looked around only to notice a number of snazzy socialites and other ordinarily dressed males and females, some speaking French, others Spanish, still others Hebrew, at least one couple conversing in German. There were no Asians, who had made the weeks before so rich for Christie’s and Sotheby’s. But the crowd was rich enough. There were also perhaps a hundred men with skullcaps and kapotehs (frock coats) and tzitzis (string fringes), usually worn by Hassidim, of whom there were maybe two dozen, an odd lot, but apparently a seasoned lot. They were bidding aggressively, some on the phone, getting their instructions from on high.

But the real sight was the collection itself, which I’d seen twice on exhibit in the week before the auction. The most popular category was

This Italian Torah crown sold for $857,000.

the Hanukkah lamp, of which there were 56, proving once and for all that this was not an insignificant festival in the life of the Jews. All made by craftsmen, whether candelabras or little lamps, grand or finicky, their diversity tells you about economic class, surrounding culture, his toric circumstance, variety of artistic styles, availability of material—all the stuff about which scholars now write. Not surprisingly, there were 42 tzedakah, or charity, boxes, a testament to the deeply rooted Jewish obligation and loyalty to philanthropy.

Whether jewel-bedecked or made of plain wood, the items in this truly diverse collection testify to the flourishing artistic instincts of the Jews. Tin, brass, glass, textiles, silver, gold, enamel, iron, bronze, items both exquisite and plain from all the lands of the dispersion, all of Europe, deep into Asia, the Arab Middle East and also Africa—the places of exile and the place of the Return.

Jerusalem, which is the capital of the Return, provided perhaps the most exciting moment of the auction. On the block was “an elaborate embroidered sabbath tablecloth, Jerusalem, 1821.” It was estimated to sell for anywhere from $20,000 to $30,000. I don’t know what was meant by “elaborate.” I found it rather plain. But it juiced the crowd, on the phone and off. Scholarship tells us that there are only nine of the type and that this is the first of the genre. Moreover, alone among the nine, it was signed by its maker. Back and forth thee bidding went, between I think three people at the end, then two. Then one (in the room) ... at $137,000. The auctioneer said to the winner: “I hope you use this every Friday,” which surely he or she will not.

I, too, bid on some items, one of which (a golden Yemenite woman’s headdress) ran away from my top price. But I succeeded in acquiring three. The first was a kippah that was estimated to sell for between $3,000 and $5,000. I am paying $8,750. Imagine almost $9,000 for a skullcap, even one with gold applique, beads and sequins, lined in leather. Made in Poland nearly two centuries ago, it was on the model of what Jewish men wore at prayer in Spain until the Expusion. I also bought a brilliantly colored talles from Yemen (early 20th century) for $2,000, not bad. Add to this an etching of “David the Harpist” by E.M. Lilien for $4,000. Lilien comes directly out of the pre-Raphaelite tradition of Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Beardsley and the Art Nouveau line of Klimt, Gaudí, Muscha, Whistler, Tiffany, even Josef Hoffmann. Lilien’s androgynous sexuality in imagery was more than once extended to Herzl: Herzl as the young boy David.

“David the Harpist,” by E.M. Lilien, sold for $4,000.

A great collection has been dissolved. It will now go into other collections, big and small. No one takes their art, even the art of the religious life, with them into the grave.

And speaking of the grave brings us to our second instance of religious revival. We had long assumed that Yiddish was already there. Some 75 years ago, Yiddish was the language of 75 percent of the Jewish world. Its literature compares with any other modern literature, and it’s not just Peretz, Sholem Aleichem and Mendele, the three 19th-century masters. My most cherished Yiddish writer is Chaim Grade, who wrote novels (and poetry) of daunting literary imagination, exhausting emotion, taxing logic. His literary estate has now come to YIVO and the Jewish National Library in Israel, a fitting partnership. It will be, I am told, an epiphany. And one thing I already know: in Grade’s lifelong literary struggle with Isaac Bashevis Singer, the little-known figure has already won.

Evgeny Kissin, the miraculous 41-year-old pianist who was born and trained in Russia, had a stint of concertizing in New York. If you can get a ticket to his Carnegie Hall performance (this coming Sunday, with James Levine back at the Met’s baton), you are luckier or richer than I. In any case, I had a Kissin experience that I will never forget. No, he didn’t play Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin or Tchaikovsky, and I have heard him play them before. He was at YIVO, that gem of a Jewish institution, founded in Vilinus (Grade’s hometown; Napoleon called it “the Jerusalem of the North”) in the ’20s to maintain and extend the sobriety and riches of a culture that was always under threat. Hitler almost killed it, and he succeeded in murdering more than half that culture’s lovers and practitioners. But the field is still being plowed, not least by Mr. Kissin himself.

Evgeny Kissin reciting poetry.

He recited nine Yiddish poems, from memory and from the heart, a few of them by Soviet Jewish writers—one of them, Itsik Fefer, who betrayed the rest to the secret police. Yet, Fefer had written, “Even in ashes, Yiddish is fire ...” All the poems were poems about Yiddish, a kaddish, some of them. Each poem that Mr. Kissin intoned is a position in an argument:

Binem Heller:

In the wonderful language of the Jews

The answer is found in the question itself.

Melekh Ravitsh:

I belong to the unlearned

I cannot write the fancy Holy Tongue

I speak the ordinary language

Of the ordinary folk ...

... I am the poet of the unlearned.

And the great Yiddish poet Yankev Glatshteyn, who late in life was an American:

O, let me approach the joy of the Yiddish word.

Give me entire, full days and night

Knot me, weave me

Take all vanities off me

Feed me by crows, give me crumbs

A roof filled with holes and a bad bed.

But give me entire, full days and nights

Do not let forget the Yiddish word

Even for a moment.

Evgeny Kissin’s homage:

My grandparents died

Later, we sold the dacha

But a little Yiddish survived

In my memory and soul

and for me: not mother-, but

grandmother tongue

So why does it resound again and again ...

Obstinate through time, it bursts forth

And a new story begins.

The “not mother-, but grandmother tongue” line is a brilliant and, alas, devastating insight.

The full auditorium was hushed, the audience not knowing whether to clap or to cry. The young American college kids and graduate students, the fancy folk and the people from the boroughs, the Russian émigrés, the old Yiddishists, the people who thought that Mr. Kissin was giving a concert and that the sponsors were providing a good meal. This is YIVO, very much alive and almost fully well. One thing was certain that night: the Jewish past has a future.

Marty Peretz is the former editor in chief of The New Republic.

Mr. Steinhardt, who made his money as Wall Street's so-called most successful money manager and who now mostly focuses on his philanthropy for Jewish causes, picked up the buildings amidst widespread expectation that the Financial District's fortunes will start looking up after getting wrecked by the economic downturn.

Not that the presence of one of finance's most successful faces means the district will cease being FiDi. Mr. Steinhardt and his partner plan to turn the $17 million Trinity Place property, the ASE's one-time headquarters and complete with the old trading floor, into a retail center with a 174-room boutique hotel above it. The Thames Street property, the more expensive of the two, closing at $48 million, is set to meet a grimmer fate: the plan is to tear the building down and build a 60-story luxury condo tower.

mcoyne@observer.com

The Observer first reported in Dec. 2006 (2nd item) that CanWest was taking a majority stake in the company. That was confirmed on Feb 23. Instead of just majority interest, CanWest now owns 100% of the company.

Marty Peretz, who no longer owns part of the magazine, for the first time since 1974, will remain as Editor in Chief.

-Michael Calderone

Full release after the jump

NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release:
February 27, 2007
CanWest Buys The New Republic

Toronto, ON: - CanWest Global Communications Corp. ("CanWest") today announced that a wholly owned subsidiary has acquired a 100% interest in The New Republic, a 93 year old United States based political magazine. This acquisition follows the purchase by CanWest in 2006 of a 30% interest.

"The New Republic, similar to CanWest's other publications, has a strong foundation and a proud history. We look forward to seeing it become even stronger" said Tom Strike, President of CanWest MediaWorks International. "In today's media environment, we need to place a priority on delivering quality content to readers when, where and how they want it. The New Republic is well-positioned to do just that".

The magazine and its website are currently undergoing a major overhaul. The makeover includes a new frequency of publication, bigger issues and a new reader-friendly design. The enhanced website will be launched soon with more daily digital content.

Greg MacNeil, a well-respected veteran of Canadian publishing, is acting as Interim Publisher. Marty Peretz will continue as Editor-in-Chief.

On Dec. 15, executive editor Bill Keller mentioned a tabloid “prototype” during one of his occasional “Throw Stuff at Bill” sessions for the staff, a combination state-of-the-paper address and Q&A free-for-all.

“It’s way too early to talk about it,” Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail Dec. 18, when asked about the tabloid. “It’s one of many projects that are still in the noodling stage.”

The subject arose during the middle of one of Mr. Keller’s three sessions on Dec. 15, in the paper’s ninth-floor auditorium, with publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and managing editors Jill Abramson and John Geddes in attendance. A staffer asked about local coverage, and Mr. Keller mentioned new or planned electronic products, plus a “possible print product” that would be “aimed at younger readers.”

The noodling about the tabloid, according to a source familiar with the project, has been taking place in a Times committee that first convened this past April to generate ideas about marketing and boosting circulation. After a string of weekly meetings, the group—which includes members from the paper’s editorial and business sides—has settled into a less rigid schedule.

So far, the concepts emerging from the group suggest that Mr. Sulzberger’s “platform-agnostic” approach to packaging content is yielding something more like platform Unitarian Universalism—taking inspiration from whatever tradition is handy. The first of the committee’s ideas to reach the public was Urbanite, a daily e-mail newsletter launched Nov. 3, listing goings-on around the city.

Because a Baltimore-based magazine named Urbanite already existed, on Dec. 15 The Times redubbed the newsletter UrbanEye. A Times spokesperson wrote via e-mail that the company “felt we should create and trademark a name that would be exclusive and distinctive to The Times.”

The tabloid idea hasn’t reached the naming stage, let alone the renaming stage. The source familiar with the project described its condition as more a collection of loose pages than a full prototype. In the question-and-answer session, Mr. Keller said that the new publication could be distributed either inside the paper or on its own.

Whatever form the new project takes, there are plenty of precedents for a broadsheet spinning off a tabloid. The Times itself launched a free publication, MarketPlace Weekly, in June 2005. It was a drab creation—consisting mostly of classified ads and articles taken from the regular paper’s real-estate, jobs and automotive sections—and it got a drab reception. It was killed without fanfare, announced during a Times Company second-quarter conference call this past July.

Other broadsheet dailies have had zippier ambitions for their tabloids in recent years. The Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times went head to head in 2002 with youth-targeted titles called RedEye and Red Streak, respectively (Red Streak shut down at the end of 2005). The papers packaged the news in short bits, tuned to their target audience’s expected attention span. The Washington Post did the same with a commuter-targeted tabloid called Express.

There’s always a new way to distribute Sudoku!

But the proposed Times tabloid would not go head to head with amNewYork or Metro on the stairways to the No. 1 train. The idea is for it to be more like a hard-copy relative of UrbanEye than an easy-read news digest. It would be a weekly, heavy on event listings—like The Village Voice, or the New York Press, or Time Out New York or New York magazine or the front end of The New Yorker, for that matter.

The tabloid will need at least another six months to get off the drawing board, the Times source said. Meanwhile, the committee will stay busy with another outlet for the paper’s newly New York–centered ambitions: a Web site that would gather together city-related stories from various parts of the newspaper, such as the metro and culture desks, and integrate them with service features. Movie reviews, for example, could be accompanied by restaurant reviews of eateries near a particular theater.

—Michael Calderone

The Northern Republic: Frostback Conglomerate Raises Stake in Peretz Mag

Canadian media giant CanWest, which currently owns a stake in The New Republic, is expected to increase its share in the magazine, according to TNR sources.

Editor in chief and part owner Martin Peretz said that negotiations are taking place, but declined to get into specifics.

“I think there’s going to be a change in some percentage of ownership,” Mr. Peretz said by phone from Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Peretz said that since The New Republic is a private corporation, he is not obligated to discuss the percentage of each shareholder’s investment.

“There’s certainly no news here,” Mr. Peretz said.

Mr. Peretz, who purchased the magazine in 1974, has a history of dismissing buyout rumors.

“I’m not now in negotiations with anybody,” Mr. Peretz told the Daily News in November 2001. “There is nothing to report and I don’t foresee anything reportable. There’s nothing going on.”

Weeks later, Mr. Peretz sold two-thirds of the magazine to financiers Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt.

Mr. Steinhardt and Mr. Hertog, both investors in the right-leaning New York Sun, had their politics placed under a microscope after they bought part of the perpetually rightward-tacking liberal magazine. Mr. Hertog is chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute and a trustee of the American Enterprise Institute; Mr. Steinhardt is a prominent Jewish philanthropist and a founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

According to one staffer, the new owners refrained from micromanaging things on the editorial side. The staffer said they hadn’t been seen around the Washington, D.C., headquarters since a 2002 meet-and-greet session ended with an office evacuation, after a smoldering cigarette butt tossed by senior editor Lawrence Kaplan ignited a garbage can.

Asked whether Mr. Hertog and Mr. Steinhardt will remain investors in the magazine, Mr. Peretz said, “That’s also not clear.”

The CanWest conglomerate—which publishes titles including Canada’s National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix—joined the growing ownership group in January of 2006. CanWest’s chief executive, Leonard Asper, joined the other three investors on board of directors. Laurence Grafstein, a managing director at Lazard Frères (and former TNR writer himself), became the fifth member of the board, serving as a tiebreaker, according to a TNR staffer.

At the time the deal was made, Mr. Asper told the National Post that his company was especially interested in the magazine’s archives and Web site.

Mr. Asper, Mr. Hertog and Mr. Steinhardt didn’t return calls seeking comment. Mr. Grafstein declined to comment.

One TNR staffer predicted that employees would be nervous if a huge corporation like CanWest assumed more control of the magazine, which has historically been run as a small shop.

Regardless of any change in ownership, Mr. Peretz said he would remain as editor in chief.

But there is one change on the table: The magazine could move from a weekly publishing schedule to a biweekly one.

“It’s something that we’ve been talking about for a long time,” said Mr. Peretz of the biweekly schedule. “A decision has not been made.”

When might the negotiations be finalized?

“We are still just talking,” said Mr. Peretz. “And I’m not shitting you.”

—M.C.

After Harvard, What? Miller Leaves 02138 for Wolff Start-Up

“It was my idea of fun,” said former New York magazine editor Caroline Miller, of working as editorial director of 02138.

Ms. Miller put in nine months at the new Harvard Hall–of-mirrors glossy magazine, which is principally bankrolled by Atlantic Media head David Bradley. The second issue came out this week with no editorial-director position on the masthead.

Ms. Miller is now working on developing a news Web site with Vanity Fair media writer Michael Wolff.

“It was not intended to be a long-term arrangement,” said Ms. Miller, who spent two to three days a week in Boston, organizing a team that included several staffers recently out of college. She said the young staff had reminded her of editorial stints at New York and Seventeen.

“It was Bom [Kim’s] idea for a magazine,” she said. “It was my role to put lots of things on the table for him. To create lots of possibilities. To help him bring in a team.”

“We envisioned an editorial-director role in the early stages,” Mr. Kim said, by phone from Korea. Mr. Kim said that 02138 had started with a “very lean team,” but he will be adding editorial staff in the future.

The cover of the new issue features a black-and-white photograph of New York Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer and his wife, attorney Silda Wall, eyeing each other lovingly, to illustrate a feature on Harvard “power couples.”

—M.C.

In a time of Enron fatigue, Michael Steinhardt's No Bull comes as a welcome relief. For one thing, he doesn't self-destruct, and though he may have made some bad calls and let his outsized personality get the best of him, he readily admits it. His story is both hard-edged and poignant, the account of a dying age and a dwindling breed: smart Jews who grew up poor in Brooklyn and were the first generation in their families to go to college, then ventured out into a world of seemingly limitless possibility and cashed in spectacularly.

Because Mr. Steinhardt, 61, retired in 1995, he has nothing to lose by letting it all hang out, which he does amply and with gusto, focusing at least as often on his failures as his triumphs. He devotes plenty of space to his family life, though he admits to a certain detachment from domestic details during the forging of his career. It's not entirely surprising that those sections are somewhat lackluster. But when he turns his attention to his first love, the market, a strong voice emerges, ready to tell edifying stories about, say, the crash following the "Go-Go" 60's, or the 70's scam perpetrated by Equity Funding-which "managed to deceive not only Wall Street but the auditors as well."

The fledgling capitalist was launched by his father's bar-mitzvah gift of shares of Penn-Dixie Cement and Columbia Gas System. Entranced by the notion of fluctuating value, he skipped after-school stickball games to hang out in brokerage houses. In high school, he opened up his first trading account and was hooked: "I knew I wanted to work on Wall Street and, once I had made up my mind, I never thought about any other career. It was not work, it was joy."

The young Michael Steinhardt both identified with and was repulsed by his father Sol (nicknamed Red), a compulsive gambler out of a Bellow novel who divorced Michael's mother before the boy was a year old. Sol was a jewel fence with mob ties and did time in Sing Sing and Dannemora. He also gave good advice: He urged Michael to enroll in Wharton rather than take the City College route of his Bensonhurst chums (apparently the sins of the father bankrolled the son at the University of Pennsylvania). Back when the 19-year-old college grad was interviewing for his first job on the Street, he was petrified that someone would find out about his dad; these days Mr. Steinhardt's revelations merely make for a colorful story.

Young Michael snagged an entry-level job at the white-shoe Calvin Bullock, and Sol gave him another jump-start by lending him money to invest. Michael's portfolio swelled to $200,000. After a short stint in the army, notable for an excruciating encounter with electrode-wielding anti-Semites (and these guys were on his side), he landed an analyst gig at the prestigious Loeb Rhoades & Co. Smart calls on Gulf and Western Industries and other conglomerates catapulted him into star-analyst territory: "It was as if I had a direct line to God," he writes. At 27, he teamed up with two other hot young analysts to form Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz & Co. In its first full year, the firm posted a staggering gain of 99 percent.

The partners' secret was stocks with a good story, but there were some exceptions. Any company with "Data" in its name or "-onics" affixed at the end looked good in the 60's. After the oil company King Resources Inc. won the firm over with a first-rate story, its investment quintupled in a few months.

In the early 70's, Mr. Steinhardt's firm performed a dexterous about-face, placing most of its bets on shorts at a time when shorting could get you labeled "un-American." Taking the informed contrarian view that became Mr. Steinhardt's trademark, the firm shorted the "Nifty 50" companies that were the pillars of the Dow and endured one off-year before vindication came in the form of the 1973 bear market. "People began referring to us as greedy and arrogant," writes Mr. Steinhardt, clearly pleased. "Nothing gives a better feeling to a money manager than making money for his or her investors when almost everyone else is losing." By age 38, he was worth over $7 million (today, reportedly, he's worth more than $500 million).

He didn't get there without pain-his and others'. Mr. Steinhardt obsessed over losses, pored over the P&L and grilled his analysts incessantly, asking, "What do you know that the world does not know?" He was never far from a tirade. Looking back, he declares that maximizing returns wasn't as important to him as being right. Occasionally he wiped the portfolio clean and started over-thereby erasing countless hours of other people's work-all in the pursuit of perfection. "It was not my job to be nice," he says flatly. The revolving door at Steinhardt Partners (as it was called after Fine and Berkowitz hit the road) bore witness to that fact. Even a psychiatrist that Mr. Steinhardt brought in to analyze his management style was shown the door unceremoniously. A political contrarian as well, Mr. Steinhardt chaired the Democratic Leadership Council for five years and helped Bill Clinton rise to national prominence.

Sometimes Mr. Steinhardt's "variant perception" didn't work. In the crash of 1987, seduced by the possibility of a new era of expansion, he lost big like everyone else. In 1994, with four funds and almost $5 billion in assets, he leveraged himself to the hilt in the European bond market-and toted up losses in the hundreds of millions when that market toppled. He was plagued by an S.E.C. probe of Steinhardt Partners for colluding with two other companies to corner the market in two-year Treasury notes. To help settle a case brought by investors, Mr. Steinhardt paid more than $70 million, largely out of his own pocket, but denied wrongdoing. By 1995, he'd had enough and shuttered Steinhardt Partners: The mere thought that it might continue without him was anathema.

He needed a new obsession and decided it would be assisting the Jewish community through philanthropy-an attempt, perhaps, to atone for the lack of faith he agonizes over throughout his memoir. Pet projects included the Jewish cultural center Makor on West 67th Street, and Birthright Israel, which sends college students to Israel to reconnect with their heritage.

Despite his confessed flaws, Mr. Steinhardt emerges as a fundamentally decent man bent on doing something meaningful with his millions. Like the best stocks, he has a good story to tell-even if he himself doesn't know exactly what to make of it. Absent that sort of personal analytic rigor, the value of his memoir rests on his prodigious financial insight.

Karen Angel's Inside Yahoo! (John Wiley & Sons) will be published in April .

A group of investors including Mr. Black intends to spend up to $15 million to launch a new daily newspaper expected to appear sometime early next year, a source familiar with the venture told Off the Record. The paper, likely to be called The New York Sun , will be edited by former Forward editor in chief Seth Lipsky along with his protégé, Ira Stoll, the editor of Smartertimes.com, a Web site known for its critiques of The New York Times .

For more than a year, Mr. Stoll has been promising that Smartertimes.com would one day lead to the creation of "a new newspaper that would offer an alternative to the dominant daily." The Sun , which will appear five days a week, is expected to cover city news but also embody the same neoconservative values that shaped Mr. Stoll's attacks on The Times as well as The Forward under Mr. Lipsky, sources said.

Neither Mr. Lipsky nor Mr. Stoll would comment for this story. But an outline of the paper emerged from others involved in its genesis, including people who have been approached about working for the publication. There have been other clues: Starting in October, classified ads began running on Smartertimes.com in search of a business executive to run a new newspaper's advertising and circulation effort ("Compensation in the low six-figures") as well as editorial staff ("Willing to work long hours in an entrepreneurial, start-up environment"). In early November, Mr. Lipsky registered several Internet addresses, including newyorksun.com and nysun.com. And on Nov. 7, he applied for a trademark of the title The New York Sun .

Backing the new paper, sources said, is a group of nine or 10 investors that includes Mr. Black-chairman and chief executive of Hollinger International Inc.-as well as Michael Steinhardt, a former hedge-fund manager and prominent Democratic Party donor, who up until mid-2000 owned half of The Forward but is still the paper's vice chairman. Since Mr. Lipsky was pushed out as editor in chief at The Forward , he and Mr. Steinhardt have maintained close contact, sources said. In the ideological battle between Mr. Lipsky and The Forward 's board of directors-Mr. Lipsky's neoconservative leanings did not sit well with the more liberal board-Mr. Steinhardt offered to buy the other half of the Jewish weekly in order to keep Mr. Lipsky at the helm. Rebuffed by the board, Mr. Lipsky ultimately left the paper in April 2000, and Mr. Stoll, who had been managing editor, followed later that summer.

Reached at his home, Mr. Steinhardt confirmed that he had invested in the daily-to-be but declined to discuss other participants.

"Seth is a terrific editor with great skills and great history," Mr. Steinhardt said, "and some of the investors were drawn to him and his sidekick, Ira Stoll."

Mr. Steinhardt said that when he last heard, the paper was to launch in January. He also took issue with the "conservative" label.

"I don't know if I'd call it 'conservative,'" Mr. Steinhardt said when asked of the paper's political bent. "I myself am not a conservative, but some of the other investors are."

As for Mr. Black, neither he nor Hollinger officials returned repeated requests for comment. Mr. Black has made previous attempts to acquire a New York publication, including attempts to buy the Daily News as well as The Observer .

In launching The Sun , Mr. Lipsky and Mr. Stoll will return an old name to New York newsstands. The New York Sun was the first successful penny-press daily after its birth in 1833, appealing to a working-class readership with lurid crime reporting and pro-union, pro-immigrant views. Today, its most famous moment is the "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" letter, which ran in 1897. The Sun finally folded in 1950.

New York Press editor in chief and C.E.O. Russ Smith, who has pined for a conservative alternative to The Times in his weekly Mugger column, relished the debut of The Sun. "I think it's a great idea, and I'd like to write for it," Mr. Smith said. But while he said he thought there was a large audience for a Times alternative, Mr. Smith added that it's a tough time to launch a newspaper: "One would have to be skeptical of a start-up daily newspaper's success."

-Gabriel Snyder and Sridhar Pappu

You may not have noticed, but the Sunday Styles section, that appetizer of the Sunday New York Times people turn to first before plowing into the thick coverage of war and terrorism, is no longer an exclusive New York City pleasure. As of Sept. 30, the section has been now included in the national edition of The New York Times , which on Sunday has a circulation of about 800,000 outside the New York metropolitan area.

The national launch of Sunday Styles, long discussed, came at an awkward time for the section. There was, of course, Sept. 11, and before that, a new executive editor, Howell Raines, who took over on Sept. 5. There have also been some staff departures, complicating the heavy lifting of putting out a weekly section. And then, of course, there's the $64,000 question: How do you change a city-oriented section if you're writing for a national audience?

Trip Gabriel, who edits Sunday Styles and the fashion section, said there has been an internal debate on that point. And much to the relief of people who fear reading about a night out at the Nashville Swine Ball, Mr. Gabriel comes down on the side of trying to maintain the section's roots.

"I think that to the extent we were a trend section, a lot of trends start in New York, or they start in L.A., and I think we continue to cover them," Mr. Gabriel said. "We're not going to give equal weight to Seattle, Minneapolis and St. Louis just because we're now distributed in all those places."

Mr. Gabriel's boss, Barbara Graustark-who, as head of the Times style department, oversees Sunday Styles, House & Home, Dining In/Dining Out, as well as the fashion pages-said it's possible to write stories that appeal to both New York and the heartland. As examples, she pointed to a recent story about traveling home for the holidays and an assessment of ABC's broadcast of the Victoria's Secret fashion show. The section's challenge, she said, is "trying to take stories that are as relevant to a national audience as a New York audience."

Though the section has been national for about two months now, the editors said it's still trying to feel its way. Originally, the plan was to do a soft launch in September and then do a more public rejiggering in January. There had also been talk about giving the section more columns to fill, but at last word from Ms. Graustark, that isn't going to happen.

Meanwhile, world events have dictated that the style folks mostly figure out things themselves. Said one Times staffer, "It's my impression that [assistant managing editor] Andy Rosenthal and [managing editor] Gerald Boyd are all-hands-on-deck with the war effort, and the back of the book is largely unsupervised."

But Mr. Gabriel denied being orphaned. "In no sense are we suffering from the neglect of the executive editor or any members of the masthead," he said. "We're a pretty autonomous section in a fairly autonomous department. I don't think it's fair to say it's not on [Mr. Raines'] mind-he has a lot on his mind."

Said Ms. Graustark: "I can only imagine how busy Howell and Gerald are. I have not heard from them what the section should be doing …. I am sure I would hear from them if they didn't think the section was doing what it should be"

But as it moves to a larger audience, the Sunday Styles section is also being assembled by fewer people. At the end of the summer, the section lost its deputy editor, Ilene Rosenzweig, and staff reporter Rick Marin. Alex Kuczynski, who had been a media reporter on the business desk, moved over to the section, but the deputy editor position-the person who does most of the line editing-remains unfilled, though Ms. Rosenzweig still comes in one day a week to help with assignments. For a while, former Harper's Bazaar beauty director Christine Shea was coming in several days a week, but that was only a temporary stint. Said a Times source: "They don't really have the manpower to put out the section without breaking everyone's back."

But help is on the way. Ms. Graustark said the section is actually looking to hire another writer. "This addition to the staff is really a relief," she said.

In the meantime, Kate Betts, the former editor of Harper's Bazaar , could always pitch in. She wrote a story in the Oct. 28 issue about wartime style icons.

Mr. Gabriel said Ms. Betts will be contributing some more stories for Styles. "I expect her byline will appear in the section again soon," he said. "She's got a busy life these days, but she's got such great skills as a journalist and a depth of authority on fashion that it's a treat to have her writing for us."

-G.S.

Last week, this column detailed a brouhaha between the Web site Free Williamsburg and The Village Voice . The former had accused The Voice , in its Nov. 13 issue, of ripping off a story it had done in September on the music scene in that bastion of coolness. Their case? The Voice profiled the same clubs, quoted from the Free Williamsburg piece without attribution and used the same awful headline: "A Scene Grows in Brooklyn."

Now it appears that someone may actually be the beneficiary of this: Grant Moser, the writer who penned the original piece for Free Williamsburg. According to Mr. Moser, he left a message with The Voice last Monday saying he should write for them, and he soon heard back from music editor Chuck Eddy saying yes, he should. After sending in a couple of ideas, Mr. Moser said last Thursday The Voice sent one of their own for him to pursue.

"Is it everything I wanted?" Mr. Moser said. "No. But in life, you don't always get everything you want."

Mr. Eddy said there wasn't any penance going on here, because there was no sin to repent for.

"He called and I e-mailed him back," Mr. Eddy said. "It's conceivable that he might write something for us. But I wouldn't call it a make-good."

-S.P.

Generally speaking, Jim Grant, the biweekly newsletter's editor, has been wrong for years, but he wears wrongness better than anybody. He is the most eloquent of the eloquent bears. Surveying the nation's roaring financial markets, he has predicted trouble for years-then made light fun of himself when the trouble hasn't come. "I suppose it's better to deprecate oneself than to wait for others to do it," he said. "If one has been bearish in this environment, one has had plenty of cause for self-deprecation."

But the self-effacement is not entirely sincere, because Mr. Grant and the investment professionals who are skeptical or curmudgeonly enough to shake their heads over the various excesses in the world's capital markets believe fiercely that this supposed New Age, in which the S.&P. index only goes up and rates stay low, is not a new age at all. The sky will fall. The bubble will pop. It has to.

As Mr. Grant said on a recent morning, quoting the economist Herbert Stein: "If something can't last forever, it won't."

He was speaking at a fall investment conference hosted by Grant's . About 150 investment professionals had gathered at the St. Regis hotel in midtown on Nov. 10 to talk gloom and doom with their favorite purveyor of it. They sat behind long tables in rows of cane chairs, dipping into tins of Pastilline hard candies as they listened to each speaker at the podium try to reconcile troubling signals in the economy with the seemingly unstoppable boom.

It was an older crowd-people who have been through more than one business cycle, who know this one will end. They almost want it to, for vindication's sake. "I joke in a hyperbolic way about doomsday and calamity," Mr. Grant said a few days later, "but what most people in that room are disappointed in not seeing is a reversion to the mean. A return to something like normal valuations, for example."

One hedge fund manager at the conference said, "It's a different generation. Everybody here, including myself, feels somewhat insignificant. I consider myself a good fundamental analyst. Yet no matter how detailed and capable my work is, I feel like it doesn't matter. This market is so psychology-driven right now. It's in the throes of manic gold fever. The mood overwhelms the subtleties and the need to pay attention to them. It's discouraging."

The conference room was full of the kinds of guys you see all the time walking down Madison Avenue: slightly tan, hair a little wild, great shoes, strong eyes, a bad knee, a European newspaper. You see them and you know: These men manage a shitload of money.

There were a few legends there, too: Michael Steinhardt, the hedge fund wizard who got out of the game in 1995. Leon Cooperman, the chairman of Omega Advisors, one of the world's largest hedge funds. And Jim Chanos, the renowned short-seller.

Mr. Cooperman, a short fat man with an ear-to-ear combover and white shirt cuffs, sat in the back row, jacket off, sprawled in his chair looking a little bored but a little amused, too. (He was one of the very few who conspicuously called in trades to their offices during breakfast, before the speeches began.)

There were eight speakers. Jim Grant kicked it off with a speech entitled, "What have they done with our interest rates?" Then came a presentation called "Dow 3600."

Mr. Steinhardt was the last one to take the podium. His job was to ask questions of Barrie Wigmore, a retired partner of Goldman, Sachs & Company and author of The Crash and Its Aftermath , who had just delivered a speech about the circumstances surrounding the 1929 crash. "If we are at the precipice, at that moment we have sought and not found," Mr. Steinhardt asked him, growling into the microphone, "what is the bullet that will push us over?"

Mr. Wigmore stepped up to the mike. "I'm a historian!" he said, by way of poor-mouthing his prediction. But then he said that in his opinion, we were not at the precipice. He turned the question back on Mr. Steinhardt.

"I don't do it anymore," Mr. Steinhardt said. "I don't really follow things closely enough." Then he made a few general observations: stocks are overvalued, the trade deficit is a serious issue, and wage growth is coming in the next few months.

Mr. Cooperman spoke up from the back row. He wanted specifics. "Michael, you say you don't do it anymore, but surely you've been dabbling here and there."

Mr. Steinhardt confessed. He was a dilettante now. "If you insist, Lee, I continue to have a predilection toward the short side. I was born with it. I think that there were four days during my career that I was long."

He was in good company.