Even the DOB has one now.

Have you ever wished that there was a better way to keep up-to-date with all the developments and trends over at the Department of Buildings?

There might not be a whole lot of us, but fortunately, the Department of Buildings is always anticipating the needs and desires of its heavy-users (well, some of our needs and desires—we're awaiting the day when we can see actually see PDFs of building plans online). They've started producing a monthly podcast! It's called State of Construction.

Before you get too excited, you should know that despite the overarching, in-depth approach that a name like State of Construction would suggest, the podcasts are about a minute long and therefore only skim the surface of construction and DOB issues. Topics since the podcast launched in January have included construction in 2012, hub self-service, illegal conversions and the department's mobile app. Not quite the juicy, NPR-quality paydirt we were hoping for, but the information is useful and Commissioner Robert LiMandri has a pleasant voice.

Mostly, the podcasts resemble public service announcements. In his illegal conversions podcast, Mr. LiMandri tells listeners that "certainly, we all know that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" and warns that one should be wary of units that advertise significantly lower prices, basement or attic units and utilities that are included. He also gives the sage, though often ignored advice "to avoid apartments without windows or very small ones."

It's unclear who the target audience is, given that building and real estate professionals would too advanced for this kind of coverage and the general public probably doesn't spend a lot of time hanging out on the DOB website, looking for a one-minute explainer on construction permits. Still, we appreciate the effort. It's not the first time a city department has taken the leap into radio production. New York City has had its own radio station—WNYE, 91.5, since 1938. But podcast sounds cooler, more cutting edge, more up-to-the-minute. Maybe next, the DOB will modernize its ancient file request system? One can hope.

Who is this lady??

It's quite impressive, really. In a post titled "Too Tired to Name-Drop,"  XOJane editor in chief Jane Pratt liveblogged on her iPhone yesterday during a conversation she was having in a tea shop.

Which seems kind of...rude? Liveblogging during a conversation? Especially since Ms. Pratt could have used the phone to look up the name of the very famous actress she was talking to. Instead, she just gave readers clues and asked them to solve the mystery for her.

What is the world coming to? That nice cool woman from the Sopranos and Nurse Betty -- the fantastic actress and fellow single mom I know from years ago -- is talking to me in the tea place and I can't use her name in conversation, even though she is using mine, because I can't remember it. Something with an E? Don't you dislike when that happens? I wind up saying "honey" way too much in these instances. As in, "Bye Jane!" "Bye honey!!" Ugh.

Ms. Pratt knew the person she was talking to was a famous actress who was on the Sopranos and Nurse Jackie. Ms. Pratt knew the woman's name began with the letter "E." She also knew that the woman was a single mother and a friend of hers from a while back. But she just couldn't think of the lady's name, because the former Sassy editor was too tired (and too busy using her phone to blog), because she doesn't drink caffeine except for kombucha and she spent all last night at Courtney Love's house (whose name she can definitely remember). Oh well.

Anyway, what do you do when you can't remember someone's name? (And who is this cool lady I'm talking to?) Good morning, y'all!

This is like a kid's TV show, where Dora the Explorer waits a beat so we can yell out the answer. It's EDIE FALCO! Yay!

We admit, we are a little obsessed by Jane Pratt's creative use of phone-blogging. It's so informal! Now, someone show her how to use Google on this damn thing.

Everything is Important and Nothing Really Matters at All (2009), by Mariele Neudecker.

The curators of “Otherworldly”—which consists largely of meticulous models and dioramas, some of them artworks themselves, others constructed by artists only to be photographed—trace the diorama back to Louis Daguerre and posit as its animating question, “What is real?” But that’s not really the question anymore, except insofar as Renaissance perspective, like Newtonian physics or the Ten Commandments, continues to dominate the popular imagination. If there is a question, it might be “What is the difference between art and design?” But there’s no particular urgency to that one either, since art and design, like spectacle and pathos, can so happily be concurrent. In fact, you could say that “Otherworldly” consists of two separate, concurrent shows: one for children and other devotees of technology, and one for devotees of art.

Looking for art, the first thing we confront is nostalgia. And the most complex and generous take on the fantasies of security and control that underlie it is Michael C. McMillen’s The Studio, a found, herringbone-pattern, wicker case with a Lucite handle. If you put your eye to a stainless steel eyepiece in its side, you see a dirty, empty hallway with a half-open door at the other end. But this little studio reveals itself only when, as if making a conscious act of faith, you hold down a separate button on the pedestal to light the little light bulb inside.

Other artists take on nostalgia more directly. Michael Paul Smith photographs models inspired by his small-town childhood. The Diner Interior is so close to verisimilitude that whatever reveals the diner as false—maybe it’s something in the proportions, or maybe the walls are just too clean—makes it jarringly uncanny. Peter Feigenbaum built a block of burnt-out ghetto to shoot; in Hole in the Sky 6, a corner of the pale blue sheetrock behind the row of buildings is pulled away. Lori Nix’s Violin Repair Shop is a photo of a model of an impossibly cozy workroom with impossibly high ceilings that might be located somewhere over Carnegie Hall. Out the window is a line of half-destroyed buildings. Here the nostalgia pertains to method and content at once: does it seem hopeful or pathetic that someone, somewhere, is carefully varnishing a hopelessly old-fashioned instrument while the rest of the world is coming to an end?

Still others push deeper into the uncanny, so that the building of models becomes a sublimation of violence. Frank Kunert’s Menu à Deux shows a long table, covered in linen and laid with silver, that bends 90 degrees around a corner, so that two diners can watch two separate televisions and pretend they’re alone. And just beside a window in the museum that looks out across Columbus Circle to the glinting, black and gold Trump International Hotel and Tower are two enormous, majestically terrifying digital prints by James Casebere. (In this case we have only the photos, not Mr. Casebere’s models.) Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #8 shows a pack of large, white-and-gray houses with clean walls and sharp lines set on an astroturf hillside among a loose scattering of above-ground pools and autumnal trees. Their shadows trail down toward the viewer like wakes, as if they’re sailing up away from any human gaze into the empty, annihilating sun. Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #3 shows a similar plastic paradise by night, among pines, under an overcast sky.

But concurrence can also be confusing—when we look for technology, we may just find art again. Joe Fig, who builds models of artists’ studios from exact, point-by-point measurements, fully inhabits art as science, or counting as knowing, for good or ill. Chuck Close contemplating an unfinished portrait or Jackson Pollock frozen in the act of casting black paint across a canvas on the floor doesn’t give us as much as Mr. Fig’s portrait of himself in his own studio (Self Portrait 2007), which includes another, smaller model of itself. In that case, Mr. Fig’s counting is contagious: it also has one little ceiling fan; three boxes, 15 large canvases and eight clamp lights in the rafters; a flatfile; three skylights; and a peaked roof 34 shingles long.

And Mat Collishaw’s Garden of Unearthly Delights entrances as technology first—it’s a three-dimensional zoetrope, a giant turntable with multiple sculptured iterations of a single scene spinning under a strobe light—but also marks out the far limit of design as a route to art. “The limitations of the zoetrope,” Mr. Collishaw explains (in a wall label), “mean that you can only really achieve one second of animation before the sequence loops. …  [This] doesn’t lend itself very well to sophisticated movement but is perfectly suited for depicting sex, violence and other animalistic behavior.” In this case, two tiny, naked cave babies try to club three great blue eggs in a nest while a massive sparrow angrily flaps its wings and shakes its head; another baby wields a wooden spear at a snail; a fourth winds up and throws rocks; and a fifth swings a club at a sardine that leaps up out of the table.

Whatever the question this exhibition draws our attention to may be, Junebum Park’s videos 1 Parking and 3 Crossing, shot from a rooftop and showing the artist’s hands apparently moving real cars in and out of parking spaces or herding pedestrians across a busy street, have the answer: the world is what it is, and you do what you can do.

editorial@observer.com

The moral of This Beautiful Life (Harper Collins, 240 pages, $24.99) is the same as that of The Odyssey: If you have a good life in Ithaca, think twice before leaving it behind. Also, watch out for the sirens. Plug your ears with wax, cover your eyes, break your laptop, do whatever it takes to avoid looking at the provocative video sent to you via email. Especially if its star is an underage girl.

In Helen Schulman’s fifth novel, the Ithaca in question is Ithaca, N.Y., where the Bergamot family once lived happily, employed by Cornell University, and which is rich in suburban luxuries like parking, trees and good public schools. But hubris and ambition bring the Bergamots to Manhattan, where Richard Bergamot takes a high-powered job as vice chancellor at “Astor University,” a place that seems to share the same geographical coordinates as Columbia University, as well as its politics. Liz Bergamot, a sometime art historian and professor, leaves her part-time career in Ithaca to become a full-time mother to her two children, 15-year-old Jake and 5-year-old Coco, who is adopted from China.

At the book’s start, it’s the spring of 2003, and the Bergamots are closing in on their first year in Manhattan. For the most part, they have adjusted well: Richard excels at his job, and Jake and Coco are thriving at their new school, a prestigious private academy where they have free admission, thanks to their father’s position. Liz, however, is uneasy in her new role as a stay-at-home-mom and feels out of place among the other “formers”: women who identify themselves as former editors, lawyers, bankers, agents—whatever profession they left behind. Liz’s situation is not, on the surface, that different from her life in Ithaca, but Manhattan is giving her class anxiety: her new cohort is wealthy, while she’s originally from a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx and has misgivings about raising her children in a privileged, fast-paced milieu.

Her fears are, as it turns out, well founded. One night, when Liz is helping chaperone Coco’s sleepover at the Plaza Hotel, Jake is invited to party in Riverdale, where he dons beer goggles and makes out with the party’s host, a precocious eighth grader named Daisy. The next morning, he’s ashamed of his behavior, and his embarrassment is deepened when he opens his email to find that Daisy has sent him a video of herself, performing a graphic striptease. In one impulsive moment, he forwards the video “like a hot potato” to his friend, who forwards it to his friend, and so on, until everyone at his school—not to mention his parents, their friends and hundreds of thousands of strangers—have seen it. Because the video is an email forward, Jake’s name is attached to it, and he is immediately suspended from school. But that’s just the beginning of his troubles.

What follows is part legal drama, part domestic tearjerker, as the Bergamots try to salvage their reputation and keep their family together. They hire a lawyer with “eyes … that emit no light” to take on Jake’s school and defend him against Daisy’s family. The lawyer advises them to leak their version of the story to “some kid reporter … someone ruthless and eager and hunting for blood.” With this directive in mind, the Bergamots contact—who else?—The New York Observer. When The Observer article (“Prep School Pornathon”) comes out, the Bergamots are shocked by the media blitz that follows. The story begins to be tracked not only by tabloids like the New York Post, but by websites like Gawker.com (in 2003, a new addition to the online scene) and UrbanBaby.com as well. Soon, kids are wearing “Free Jake Bergamot” T-shirts. Jake is overwhelmed by his sudden change in status: “In one week, ten days, he and Daisy had become sort of celebrities. Now they were forever linked and pitted against each other, just like divorcing movie stars.”

Unsurprisingly, Liz discovers that she doesn’t have much support among her new friends, who are more interested in dishing dirt about Daisy and her parents than they are in comforting her. Richard also finds that his professional network is thin, and he is forced to take a leave of absence at a crucial moment in his job. Jake, meanwhile, becomes more popular at his school, but he is so consumed with guilt that he can’t enjoy it. Even little Coco feels the strain and acts out at school, dancing lewdly in front of her kindergarten classmates. As the pressure on the Bergamot family mounts, the compromises of Liz and Richard’s marriage, tolerable in a time of peace, become untenable. Liz resents the sacrifices she’s made for her husband’s career, while Richard believes that he has been forced to shoulder too much responsibility and is irritated when his wife becomes depressed. Before Daisy’s video, the Bergamots’ biggest marital problem was difficulty conceiving a second child, but they were able to overcome that with adoption; there is no equivalent solution for Internet defamation.

It doesn’t spoil anything to say that things don’t end well. Like a Jodi Picoult novel, This Beautiful Life is one of those topical horror stories that people read as much to inflame their anxieties as to work through them. In another writer’s hands, it might come out as a cautionary tale, but Ms. Schulman is careful not to paint anyone as villain or victim. Jake is portrayed as a confused, but ultimately well-meaning kid, Liz as an anxious, but ultimately thoughtful mother and Richard as an egotistical, but ultimately responsible husband. Daisy is also portrayed sympathetically, if vaguely. The only glimpses we get into her life occur at the beginning of the novel, when she makes the video, and at the end, when she’s working as an intern at Goldman Sachs—an ambiguous fate, if ever there was one.

Throughout This Beautiful Life, there is the nagging feeling that Daisy and the Bergamots would have been just fine in 1993, but in 2003 they are doomed, caught in the cross hairs of the Internet. This is likely Ms. Schulman’s point, but it’s hard to feel sorry for characters who are undone by technology rather than by any real moral failing or fatal flaw. At times, This Beautiful Life even felt dated—it’s unclear why Ms. Schulman chose to set a novel about sexually explicit material gone viral in a time before YouTube and smartphones, not to mention TwitPics. Then again, it’s worth remembering that one of the most popular video memes of 2003 was “Star Wars Kid,” a video in which an awkward high school boy practices Jedi moves with a golf ball retriever. It was one of the first cases of a video made for private consumption becoming unintentionally public, when the boy’s classmates leaked it as a prank. There was a lawsuit—the boy and his family sued for emotional distress, and won—but nevertheless, today the whole scenario seems pretty innocent.

This Beautiful Life captures some of that innocence, especially when it details Richard Bergamot’s initial reaction to Daisy’s striptease: “For all the video’s dismal raunch, its tawdriness, for all its sexual immaturity and unknowingness, there is something about the way this girl has revealed herself, the way that she has offered herself, that is brave and powerful and potent and ridiculous and self-immolating and completely nuts. It speaks to him. Is he crazy? He feels crazier in this moment than he has ever felt in his life.”

The bewilderment in this passage is recognizable, even in 2011, when we are all a lot more blasé about the things we see online. Ms. Schulman’s ability to unearth such a heartfelt reaction is noteworthy, especially in a novel that seems, at first blush, to be a story about the way the Internet is stripping us of our humanity. Although This Beautiful Life will probably not remain relevant for very many years, for now it’s a good reminder of the complicated ways in which the Internet seeps into our private lives and changes them, for better and for worse.

editorial@observer.com

I just tested it, and it seems to work. So, who should I Skype with and what should I ask?

Walter Shimoon, a senior director at Flextronics, an Apple supplier, was arrested today, charged with leaking details about the iPad way back in 2009, according to Reuters. 

Transcripts from the investigation also reveal the incredible climate of secrecy at Apple.

Shimoon is quoted in court papers talking about the iPad, codename: K48, "At Apple you can get fired for saying K48 ... outside of a, you know, outside of a meeting that doesn't have K48 people in it. That's how crazy they are about it."

Shimoon and the three other men arrested were either informants or employees at Primary Global Research, an "expert network" that allegedly connected hedge fund managers to employees with valuable information. 

Frost was sentenced to 30 months in jail and ordered to pay $50,000 in total resitution by an Ohio court for hacking into web pages belonging to O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Rudy Giuliani.

Frost's internet crimewave occurred between August 2006 and March 2007 while he was a student at the University of Akron. According to Computer World, Frost attacked O'Reilly's site, BillOreilly.com, five times using a botnet hosted on the university's computer network.

O'Reilly's page was temporarily shut down by Frost's assault. Frost also launched attacked on AnnCoulter.com and Giuliani's presidential campaign site, JoinRudy2008.com.

Frost was charged with the attacks in May and he pled guilty. In addition to the $40,000 he owes O'Reilly, Frost will have to pay $10,000 to his alma mater.

"For the last 12 hours at least, the NYT's entire blog system has gone suddenly, quietly dark," nytpicker wrote. 

The Observer had multiple problems visiting the "Media Decoder" blog Tuesday evening. As of this writing, the paper's blogs appear to be back online.

The Times posted a message about the outage on its Twitter page at about 6 a.m. Wednesday.

"To our followers: We are still wrestling with the technology that powers NYT blogs. Sorry for the hassle, but we're working on it," it said.

Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha told The Observer that the outage was isolated to the "Dealbook" blog:

"The 'Dealbook' site has experienced a technical issue. We are isolating the glitch now and expect to resolve it shortly."

Rhoades Ha also said there was "no indication of malicious activity."

Update 9:43 AM: Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said the outage was the result of "a technical problem on the blogging platform that affected all the blogs."

"They went down last night for a few hours, and early this morning, but have been back up since 7:30 am," McNulty said.

The Times is still investigating the cause of the blog blackout.

Full Disclosure: Hunter Walker worked as an intern at the New York Times from 2006-2007.