A rolling stone gathers no moss, but can a $17.5 million townhouse gather a buyer?

When Jann and Jane Wenner split in 1995, the coupled stayed married,  putting off the legal wrangling that would inevitably arise when they split their publishing empire. Mr. Wenner borrowed $7,500 from his own family and from the family of his wife to found Rolling Stone, and once it grew into an empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars and includes Men's Journal and Us Weekly, it would be understandable if the vagaries of divorce just didn't seem worth it.

Until, that is, 2011. Mr. Wenner had been living with his partner, Matt Nye, a former Calvin Klein model 19 years his junior with whom he's raising three kids, and Ms. Wenner finally wanted out. (There was speculation that the divorce was finalized because Mr. Wenner and Mr. Nye wanted to formally marry each other, but despite the legalization of gay marriage in New York, that never came to pass.) There was a little acrimony in the divorce, including a lawsuit filed by Ms. Wenner's Amagansett groundskeeper, but things seem to have gone as smoothly as a divorce can be expected to go and Jane Wenner got to keep the couple's Upper West Side townhouse, at 37 West 70th Street.

Now, after three years of holding onto the property, Ms. Wenner wants to cash out. Though she acquired Mr. Wenner's stake in the home in 2010 for a bit more than $4 million, now she wants much, much more: $17.95 million. At nearly $2,500 per square foot for the 7,200-square foot home, the asking price is nearly double the Upper West Side townhouse average.

Once owned by Perry Ellis, the 20-foot-wide, five-story townhouse dates back to 1891, when it was designed by architect Gilbert A. Schellenger, who built townhouses from Harlem to Crown Heights. It was most recently renovated by American designer Ward Bennett—a distinction that no new homes will be able to claim, given that he passed away in 2003.

"The bathrooms are outfitted with the Art Deco treasures of the London Savoy Hotel," reads the listing—Wolf Jakubowski of Brown Harris Stevens has the exclusive. The home has five bedrooms, but where it really shines are the fireplaces: it lays claim to a whopping ten, nine of which are wood (or back issues of the glossy magazine) burning.

"Social publishing is the future of journalism, or at least huge part of its future. By joining BuzzFeed, I'll be at the front and center of that world," Mr. Hastings said in the announcement. "It will give me the chance to be part of a media organization that's breaking new journalistic ground, finding innovative and fresh ways to report the story."

"Then there’s the story itself: President Barack Obama’s fight to remain our president. Assuming we don’t bomb Iran in the next couple of days, the campaign for president is going to be the biggest story of the year," he added. "I can’t wait to buy my tickets to O’Hare." He starts April 2.

Mr. Hastings is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he published "The Runaway General" in 2010 (after shopping it to GQ).  The frank portrayal of the U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, then leading NATO's presence in Afghanistan, won Mr. Hastings the Polk Award and got Mr. McChrystal fired. The piece was extended into a book about counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, The Operators, published by Blue Rider earlier this year (after Little, Brown rejected it). Mr. Hastings has written about war and politics for Newsweek and GQ, among others, and is the author of I Lost My Love in Baghdad, about the death of his fiancee Andi Parhamovich in 2007.

"Michael Hastings is one of the great original reporters of his generation, and his Rolling Stone article ‘The Runaway General’ reflected his total fearlessness," BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said in the announcement. " We're thrilled to add him to a web native political team that's intensely focused on breaking news and on original, revelatory reporting.”

Mr. Hastings's new book.

"Two years ago, Michael showed up on our doorstep," said Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates of his star writer Michael Hastings. The viability of the profile Mr. Hastings had pitched, Mr. Bates said speaking in retrospect, "really depends on what kind of access you can get."The audience erupted in laughter.

A crowd was gathered at the Half King Bar to celebrate the release of Mr. Hastings’s new book, The Operators, a document of the American war in Afghanistan built in part upon Mr. Hastings’s incendiary, excessively accessed profile of General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone—one that led to the general’s resignation.

After a secondary introduction by David Rosenthal, publisher of Penguin imprint Blue Rider Press (the publisher that snapped up Mr. Hastings’s manuscript after Little, Brown had abandoned it), Mr. Hastings took the floor. "I can hear, from 400 miles away, the expletives going through Eric’s head when I file my copy!" said Mr. Hastings, by way of thanks. He mentioned, a few times, the catchphrase "hashtag-humblebrag," and incited his audience to follow him on Twitter, before reading a brief excerpt from his book.

Upon mention of one unflatteringly portrayed soldier, Mr. Hastings interrupted his own work to note, "He also gave me the one-star review on Amazon, probably." (Mr. Hastings has nothing about which to worry: he was featured at number 20 on the Jan. 29 extended hardcover best-sellers list in the Times Book Review.) Reading an digression about a particular soldier, Mr. Hastings referred to his Rolling Stone coup: "The story was so fucking good we didn’t need that."

"It needed some editing, shall we say, but the bone structure was good," said Mr. Rosenthal. "I want him to do another book—he’ll be a star for years to come."

But how can Mr. Hastings get access like that again? "I have a profile coming out of an up-and-coming radio star," he told The Observer outside his reading. "It’s always challenging to get stories that no one else has, but if you look at my stories for Rolling Stone over the past couple years, we break news every time."

As for Little, Brown’s loss, Mr. Hastings began: "They lost their nerve." In the midst of describing the challenges fending off Obama administration challenges to the book’s facts, he spotted a familiar face: "I think that’s Sebastian."

It was, indeed, war correspondent and Half King co-owner

Sebastian Junger, wandering around the base of the High Line on his cell phone. After a bit more of our questioning of Mr. Hastings, Mr. Junger had hung up, and was thanked for his attendance at the reading."I was outside talking to a friend. But, it was good?" asked Mr. Junger.

It was, said Mr. Hastings.

"You got a book coming out?" said Mr. Junger.

Mr. Hastings offered to send him a copy.

“I am an avid reader of Doree’s work and beyond thrilled she is joining the team as Executive Editor,” said Mr. Peretti. “She was ahead of her time writing stories with the emotional intelligence and social impact that has now become the currency of the social web.”

Prior to Rolling Stone, she was a writer and editor at this newspaper and at Gawker. Speaking of, she'll also be working with fellow Gawker Media alumni Whitney Jefferson and Matt Cherette.

As Ms. Shafrir told the New York Times, “BuzzFeed is super hot right now. There’s incredible talent there, because BuzzFeed is built for the world that journalists live and work in right now — one in which the social web has become dominant.”

Earlier this week, BuzzFeed introduced new Facebook integration that allows users to share content with a range of sentiments beyond the hegemonic "Like" button. They include: LOL, CUTE, WIN, FAIL, OMG, WTF, and GEEKY.

Sorry, Old Meanness: Still no "dislike."

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

"I really don't believe in abortion," Bieber says. "It's like killing a baby?" How about in cases of rape? "Um. Well, I think that's really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I guess I haven't been in that position, so I wouldn't be able to judge that."

Rolling Stone's corrected quote, which acknowledges an "editing error," reads:

"Um. Well, I think that's really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don't know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven't been in that position, so I wouldn't be able to judge that."

The edited version reflects Bieber's uncertainty and confusion about the issue, rather than a glib absolutism (as it first appeared). No word yet from the magazine's representatives on how the error came to their attention, though writer Vanessa Grigoriadis Tweeted: "online version removed a line" and printed the line in full, yesterday. (She also noted that Bieber, due to his far-reaching cultural influence, "deserves to be asked all questions," including ones about thorny political issues.)

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

And with this buzz comes monumental sales: Memo Pad has rounded up the Audit Bureau of Circulations numbers from nearly all of 2010 and found that Rolling Stone and Cosmopolitan owe their top-selling issues to Gaga's shock-pop appeal, with the singer also appearing on Vanity Fair's second-biggest seller. In case you've forgotten, Rolling Stone strapped her into machine gun bra, Cosmo had her in skimpy skin-colored negligee, and Vanity Fair shot her naked with her silver hair tickling her silver tattoo.

You know who didn't fare too well in the off-the-stand game? Nashville's darling ingenue, Taylor Swift. Even with a gossip-stuffed new album (John Mayer is mean to her!) and an obsessed-over new romance (Jake Gyllenhaal is nice to her!) Taylor graced Elle's worst-selling cover of the year, and Glamour's second-worst.

If Lady Gaga actually makes it to the cover of March's Vogue, as it's rumored, we'll get another chance to see if her embrace of sex, violence, and genuine oddity can continue to get the copies flying off the shelves.

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: Cory Booker Tweets His Way to a Snow-less Newark>>

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Keith Kelly reports that Wenner has named Rolling Stone executive editor Jason Fine to replace Weiners at the outdoorsy-tinged mag, in a move that could spell more incestuous collisions within the Wenner umbrella.

"It isn't actually a full merger between RS and MJ - just a slow but definite takeover," a source told Kelly.

In another ploy to recoup plummeting sales, Wenner has sold out the brand and logo to create a chain of Rolling Stone restaurants. The first of these emporiums, sure to be stuffed with pitiful classic rock momentos, opened in Los Angeles Sunday night. It is called "RS/LA." And... it's basically a Hard Rock Cafe. Classy move, Jann.

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

"I guess you'd have to say he's our star writer at the moment," Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's publisher, said in a brief interview, praising his reporter's "metaphors and similes and imagery," but also his "sense of outrage."

Mr. Taibbi, though, says he doesn't love the idea of stardom. "I hate doing television. I have to--it's part of the job. Look, this is a cut-throat business now; you have to publicize your work as much as possible. If you're not on television--the difference between selling magazines and selling books and not doing it is basically all about how much television you get on."

When he was on Keith Olbermann last month, he scored fine points with his host by making an obscure sports reference. "Rolling Stone has given me some media training, they brought in somebody. It was helpful," he said. "I think I had two different ones over the years, just a couple of sessions."

The book, as its publicity material says, tells the story of Wall Street's audacious grab for power. Is it conspiratorial? "What does the word conspire even mean?" Mr. Taibbi said. "It's breathe together, that's what the Latin comes from, right? But it's open! I think the fantasy that a lot of Americans have about conspiracy is that it's people who are hidden in back rooms making these marionette-like decisions, but the Wall Street stuff is there for everybody to see. It's just that people don't take the time to look at it."

But the book's tone isn't so much conspiratorial as perpetually outraged, a trait certain critics tend to mock. The odd thing about that rage, though, is its nonpartisan aim: In Griftopia, he veers right sporadically but nonchalantly. For example, he defends what environmentalists would call the "piggish American consumer" from complaints about SUVs, because he blames 2008's spike in oil prices on a commodity bubble, not cars. For some reason, he also calls critics of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge "dickwads who were always sacrificing American jobs on the altar of the spotted owl." He also spends a chapter arguing that health care reform was about Obama trading "billions in subsidies and the premiums from millions of involuntary customers" for a couple of cycles of campaign contributions.

But outside of the "dickwads" line and a few others like it, Mr. Taibbi doesn't really work blue in the new book, and you sort of find yourself missing it. "With that design," one paragraph begins, "the commodities market became a highly useful method of determining what is called the spot price of commodities."

"I'm not really classifiable, I don't think," Mr. Taibbi said in a downtown diner near Sixth Avenue recently, sipping coffee. His second sentence of the July 2009 article called Goldman a blood-funneled and money-sniffing vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. "There are a lot of people who take issue with the whole approach, who feel like if you're going to present this factual case, that it shouldn't be so polemical and so opinionated and have that much narrative in it. I just don't think there are rules about these things."

The last time Mr. Taibbi agreed to be profiled, he met a Vanity Fair reporter up the street. Their coffee ended when he threw his cup at the interviewer, stalked out and then, when the interviewer caught up, told him, "Did you bring me here to insult me? Who are you? What have you ever written? Fuck you!"

READ AN EXCERPT OF MATT TAIBBI'S LATEST BOOK GRIFTOPIA HERE

But that was nearly a year ago. Mr. Taibbi, freshly married and now 40 years old, has a major book, Griftopia, an expansion of the squid profile and its main ideas, out Nov. 2 through Random House. It does not have a chapter on king-hell speed binges, like his first book, or, like his second, anecdotes about gobbling acid before interviewing the former White House Drug Policy head and Kerry aide, in a Viking outfit.

In fact, the book has no stunts or gags in it, and barely any mugging for the camera. "I'm worried about it, because it's not a particularly funny topic," he said. When he was writing, he caught himself trying hard to amuse. "Some of those things ended up being so unfunny that we had to actually remove them from the book."

Since at least 2008, when he won a National Magazine Award, then began shifting from politics to Wall Street, his name has been a byword for a certain kind of worldview and writing. It is infuriated; inquisitive; indecorous; agog. Except for its lack of psychotropics and costumes, the book is a summation of what his name means to the landscape of financial journalism.

But, especially recently, it's also become a schoolyard put-down. "How about that," a New York item on the analyst Meredith Whitney said this month. "Next they'll be finding holes in Matt Taibbi's reporting."

MR. TAIBBI GREW up on the south shore of Massachusetts, moved to England around age 7 and came back not very long after, which is when his parents broke up. "I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way," he said. "I didn't take pleasure in hard work."

Still, he liked reading, and got The Collector, the John Fowles novel about a lonely young lepidopterist who kidnaps and tortures a beautiful girl, when he was young. "Eleven or something like that," he said. He also went to Concord Academy, a prep school, and loved it. "It's not a status place," he said, though on a list of notable alumni he is behind Caroline Kennedy and Queen Noor of Jordan (and ahead of Grizzly Bear's Ed Droste).

SLIDESHOW>>THE OBSERVER'S MATT TAIBBI PRIMER

He did not want to be a reporter. "Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid--my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people." For about the last five years, he hasn't talked to his dad, the NBC reporter Mike Taibbi, who did not comment. "The only reason I ended up doing it is by the time I got to be in my early 20s, I wanted to be a novelist," he said.

"My idol was Gogol: I went over to Russia, I lived in the neighborhood where he lived and everything." In one of Griftopia's brightest spots, where he calls Alan Greenspan a gnomish party crasher and a gaggle-eyed clarinetist, he drops Nikolai Gogol's name to describe the intensity of Mr. Greenspan's own name-dropping.

He returned to America, briefly. "I had some credits to finish up at Bard," he said. He went back, then came home and worked in a private-detective agency called Dataquest International, run by a former Army man named Russ Bubas. "Once we had a job where we were trying to see if someone was stealing from the Stride Rite shoe company," Mr. Taibbi said. "I parked outside their factory, waiting to tail him, and I didn't realize I'd parked next to the company day-care center, where little kids were playing. They thought I was a pedophile. I was sitting in this old Oldsmobile. They alerted the whole company."

"Matt has got," said Mr. Bubas, reached through the agency, "a really terrific mind."

At Exile, the adored but gaga newspaper he co-edited for years in Moscow, there was a lot of speed. "You get together; everybody gets shit-faced; and everyone assumes nobody has anything going on because who does? Nobody," he told The Observer's George Gurley 10 years ago.

By 1998, Mr. Taibbi had a problem with heroin. "I came back to the States and I didn't have a connection," he said last week, "is how I kicked."

That was not the end of his drug use. In 2005, well after he'd left Moscow, he wrote a New York Press column called "The 52 Funniest Things about the Upcoming Death of the Pope," which, a week later, he said had been written in a Vicodin haze. "I'm too old for that shit now," he said at the diner.

In late 2003, he wrote a Nation cover story on Wesley Clark, in which, as one letter to the editor complained afterward, he "infiltrated a volunteer meeting disguised as an injured adult-film director just to get a rise." In 2004, he began covering politics for Rolling Stone, Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke's old magazine. "People throw that term around, 'gonzo' journalism," he told a reporter who asked him about it in 2007. His book that came out that year used it, too, on its back cover. So does next month's, thanks to an inadvertently flattering line from Lloyd Blankfein, who by "gonzo" meant that Mr. Taibbi's reporting is goofy, not Thompson-tier. "Who the fuck is Matt Taibbi," a line on Wonkette said after a 2006 Rolling Stone cover story, "and what makes him think he is an expert on politics?"

"Who the fuck is Matt Taibbi," said a 2009 comment on the Web site of Men's Journal, another Jann Wenner property, where the reporter covers sports on the side, "and what does he know about baseball?"

"Who the fuck is Matt Taibbi?" a man wrote on an online gay forum, after somone asked if anyone else found him cute and funny.

"I wouldn't take anything I read out of Rolling Stone at face value unless they are talking about pot, cocaine, or music," someone else wrote two Saturdays ago. "Oh and who the fuck is Matt Taibbi?"

BY THE 2008 presidential election, Lehman and Bear had been killed off. "It just seemed pretty obvious to us when the crisis hit that he had to get into this," Will Dana, Rolling Stone's managing editor, said. It doesn't bother him that Mr. Taibbi didn't know anything about the American financial system. "He educated himself very quickly. Once he gets into something, he burrows in deep."

"It's dark, and grotesque, and funny, so it perfectly matches the writing style I have," Mr. Taibbi said about his beat. "The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people."He is also good at outrage--loud, across-the-board, one-hand-on-chest-the-other-clenched, great gasping gall. "Arms flailing," the second sentence of Griftopia goes, "I manage to scribble," which is about taking notes during Sarah Palin's classic convention speech, but it has wider reverberations, too. "I dropped my fork," he writes later, after hearing from a source at a restaurant about the potential sale of the Pennsylvania Turnpike to foreign investors. He is a fork dropper.

The Goldman blockbuster, with its majestic and lurid vampire-squid opening, was one of his first Wall Street articles. "I don't know, I was trying to come up with an image," he said about its huge metaphor. "It was originally just a throwaway line, and they put it up at the top."

"From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression--and they're about to do it again," the article, called "The Great American Bubble Machine," said in its subhead. "I mean," Mr. Taibbi said later, grinning, during an interview with WNYC, "there was a little bit of hyperbole that went into the headline-making there."

Other writers mocked Mr. Taibbi, widely, for suggesting that a single firm could be held responsible for so much over such a long period of time, from Depression-era Ponzi scheming to the tech and housing and oil booms, to the bailouts, to the cap-and-trade plan. "Read the piece more carefully and see if Matt's saying that there's a massive conspiracy," Mr. Dana offered, ruminating on the headlines. "Perhaps we should have said 'had a hand in,' or 'was involved in.'"

The article did two things. First, a year before the S.E.C.'s lawsuit, it popularized the idea that Goldman Sachs was a gargantuan, cackling, antisocial villain, typifying a system built on making money from guile and influence, not merit. Mr. Taibbi describes this in his book as an invisible hive of high-class financial burglars and castrato henchmen pillaging the masses.

Second, it unleashed waves of fury about its author. "I'm not saying that Matt Taibbi is an impotent little bitch, but ..." said Dealbreaker. The Atlantic's Megan McArdle called him "the Sarah Palin of journalism."

Although his other Rolling Stone pieces examine Goldman's rivals--like an infuriating piece about JPMorgan nearly cremating Birmingham, Ala., thanks to brilliantly fraudulent bond swaps and a huge new sewer system, a plot straight out of an early Randy Newman song--the new book doesn't. The only other big villain is Mr. Greenspan, about whom Mr. Taibbi writes that "it sounds facile to pin this all on one guy." Even Morgan Stanley, which, he writes parenthetically, pushed up commodity prices with Goldman, makes only a cameo.

"Literarily, in order to sell people on a lot of the subject matter, it just works better when you make a villain, like a James Bond-style villain, out of Goldman Sachs, and you almost use fiction-writing technique to sell the story," he said. "But it's all factual."

"I'VE JUST CALMED down a lot," Mr. Taibbi said after the diner. What he called the Vanity Fair incident, even if it's already a while ago, was "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years."

Unlike three of his other books, Griftopia does not refer to "near nervous breakdowns," "nervous collapses" or a "howling-on-the-bathroom-floor ten-alarm" break.

"I think he's in a different place in his life," Mr. Dana said. "Writing about credit default swaps probably doesn't lend itself to wearing Viking suits and taking acid. I don't know if Matt's there in his life, anyway. There's only so far you can take that stuff." 

Speaking of which, Mr. Taibbi said he has one more Rolling Stone finance piece coming before he takes a recess. "Then I'm going to be doing some different things. I'll come back to it," he said. "Sometimes the best gift you can give to your readers is your absence, and I think I've kind of hit this as hard as I can possibly hit this, for a while."

mabelson@observer.com

READ AN EXCERPT OF MATT TAIBBI'S LATEST BOOK GRIFTOPIA HERE