He was referring to Atlantic Yards, the 22-acre project that will include a new arena for the Brooklyn Nets and possibly 6,400 apartments, assuming the developer, Bruce Ratner, can find more financing for the $4.9 billion project. Mr. Ratner had acquired much of the land between here and Atlantic and Flatbush avenues based on the argument that the area was blighted. With the backing of the state and the attendant threat of eminent domain, he forced a number of businesses and homeowners out, though not before a seven-year fight.

Mr. Oder led the Transom on a brief stroll down Dean. He knows the place well, having written 3,980 posts--and counting--on his Atlantic Yards Report, the blog he launched in September 2005. He is accustomed to giving tours, operating a company that leads them all over Brooklyn, though far less often since the blog took off.

Now, the touring business and some savings are all Mr. Oder has to live on, as last month he quit his job of 14 years at Library Journal to write the definitive book on Atlantic Yards. Friday was his last day.

Mr. Oder would like the book to be popular but is uneasy with predictions. He will not, that is, pretend to be writing the next Power Broker.

He gestured back down Dean Street. "This is a bucolic street," he said. "O.K., it's not bucolic, there's traffic, but it's a relatively quiet, residential street. How they're going to have thousands of people streaming down this narrow street on game night, I don't know."

A free baseball cap Mr. Oder got near his old office kept the sun out of his eyes, and he also wore a pair of beat-up black 501s and a long-sleeve T-shirt, also free, from "Open House New York," the annual architectural tour of the city for which Mr. Oder once volunteered.

He has lived in Park Slope since 1992 and can walk to the future arena site in a quick seven minutes. Still, he insists he is no NIMBYist fighting to protect his neighborhood, even if some of his critics portray him that way.

"I'm not a crank," Mr. Oder said. "I worry about being seen as an irresponsible advocacy journalist rather than a responsible, analytical journalist who comes to conclusions that are highly critical."

It is not the so-called objectivity of The Times Mr. Oder values.

"I'm motivated by my recognition that reality as I understand it does not comport with what's being represented," he said. "It requires skepticism and what may be perceived as advocacy journalism. I argue the opposite, that taking a lot of this at face value is a dereliction of duty."

He points to the lead Metro story in a recent Times about the drinking habits of MetroNorth riders compared to LIRR riders. "What the fuck?" Mr. Oder said. "That could be a cute little blog post, but why that needs to take up prime real estate in the paper, I don't know. It's a dereliction of duty." (The Transom began to worry about what he might think of a profile about a Brooklyn blogger obsessed with a development project near said blogger's apartment.)

After the tour, Mr. Oder ducked into Le Gamin, one of numerous new restaurants on Vanderbilt and a perfect proof of the cappuccino test. During a two-hour breakfast conversation, he ordered only a soy decaf grande mocha. He had already had his two cups of coffee for the day, as well as breakfast, three hours earlier.

"I hate to admit it, but I had breakfast in front of my computer." Mr. Oder said. "As usual."

Every morning, between 5:30 and 7, a post or three, many over a thousand words, appears on the Atlantic Yards Report.

Mr. Oder said he expected the pace to slow, with the project all but assured, following a string of legal defeats for its opponents and the arrival of Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian oligarch who took a major stake in both the Nets and the development.

That was before Mr. Oder broke one of his biggest scoops ever, a plan by Forest City Ratner, the developer of Atlantic Yards, to arrange thousands of green cards for Chinese investors to drum up $249 million for the project, using a program known as EB-5. Mr. Oder revealed how the numbers on the program do not add up, as well as Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz's planned trip to China to stump for it. Mr. Markowitz canceled after the Post re-reported Mr. Oder's findings. And yet the only other outlets to pick up on it were the Journal and the Daily News (and the story may have been leaked to the Journal before Mr. Oder's post to steal his thunder).

The Transom asked Mr. Oder to name his favorite restaurant. He arched his eyebrows and responded, "Totonno's, in Coney Island."

Really?

"Come on!" he declared, becoming momentarily exasperated. "You should be writing about the EB-5 scandal, not Norman's favorite fucking restaurants." --Matt Chaban

Earlier:

SLIDESHOW: Welcome to the Barclays Box Office

Really No Hope for Atlantic Yards Opponents

Atlantic Yards and the Great Recession Groundbreaking

His nationality aside, the 56-year-old New Yorker was an unlikely choice for the huge, hidebound auctioneer. Mr. Murphy arrives with no experience in the art or luxury-goods industries. From 2002 to 2009--after stints at Disney and EMI Records--he ran Rodale, the privately held publisher of Men's Health, Prevention and The South Beach Diet Book. Unemployed since his departure from Rodale, Mr. Murphy joins what is now the biggest auction house in the world, with $3.3 billion in sales in 2009. But rumors have been swirling for some time that Christie's has been on the block, with no takers. Business is down from the art-boom era, and the company recently instituted some unpopular cost cuts.

In a telephone interview and emails, Mr. Murphy made the case that his hire wasn't as unusual as it might seem. "I've worked in creative businesses most of my career--music, publishing--and have profound respect for the creative process," plus considerable "experience in managing teams." As for what he intends to accomplish, he said now was a perfect time for Christie's to "get our growth strategy right." A former colleague of Mr. Murphy's said simply: "He's a numbers man. It's all about P&L."

The executive started the job just as the company began its 2011 budget planning. Christie's insiders said Mr. Murphy's charge is not cost cutting per say, but trimming some divisions of the company, even dramatically, in order to fuel an aggressive expansion in Asia. "It's not about cost-management, it's about where you put the money. It's prioritizing," said Mr. Murphy of his duties. His purview is to grow the business "geographically and technologically." Chairman Ed Dolman predicted that in the coming years, U.S. revenues will make up a smaller proportion of the company's profits, and the company's sales of art online will grow exponentially,

French luxury-goods magnate Francois Pinault bought Christie's in 1998 through his holding company, Artemis, for $1.2 billion. The rumors about the company's possible sale hold that Mr. Pinault, a passionate and profligate art collector, has grown tired of his toy. But just a few days before Mr. Murphy's hire, Mr. Pinault was in Versailles for the opening of Takashi Murakami's show there, standing right at the artist's side.

More likely, the 74-year-old Mr. Pinault might be considering peeling off Christie's as a matter of estate planning: The asset simply isn't to his son's tastes. Francois-Henri Pinault, who is the CEO of the family retail chain, PPR--which owns Gucci, among other brands--is not known to share his father's art-collecting passion. Last year, the younger Mr. Pinault announced he was launching a program to sell the company's European retail divisions.

Asked if his hiring was a move to pretty up the balance sheet for a buyer, Mr. Murphy responded, "Rumors persist about any successful business." He added that he's been in talks with Christie's for several months, and that during the courtship he met with both of the Pinaults and with the head of Artemis, Patricia Barbizet, to whom he (and former CEO, and now chairman, Mr. Dolman) reports.

Some nickel-and-diming is already under way in the U.S. While the company declines to confirm the figures, it has cut roughly 10 percent of its workforce in the past two to three years, though it retains 53 offices around the world.

In his first week, Mr. Murphy launched something of a hearts-and-minds campaign, meeting with senior executives on both sides of the pond. "At first glance, what is most evident is the high degree of pride and passion this team has for Christie's," he effused. He said that "growth and innovation" will come "while preserving a great company's original intent and culture."

A former top executive of the company predicted that Mr. Murphy would find the task more difficult than expected, especially when it comes to winning deals for million-dollar properties with guarantees or cash-up-front offers. "You have to take risks that no sane organization would take. Why? Because if you develop the reputation as the house that doesn't get property, it's a spiral that feeds on itself."

editorial@observer.com

All the same, one of the fledgling site's first major features involves sending dollhouses to the top remaining home-design books, like Elle Decor and Martha Stewart Living, with accessories specifically tailored for the recipient. Martha Stewart's dollhouse comes with a furniture set inspired by her first home in Connecticut.

"We wanted to do something to kind of celebrate the fact that actually a whole bunch of these jobs just switched around," Mr. Steele said of "Operation Dollhouse." "God only knows, it must have been some hazy, late-night meeting that turned out the idea of sending them all dollhouses, and we'll see if they're amused or if we just get a steely glare in return."

To broaden the audience for the neighborhood-cum-real estate porn blog, Mr. Steele has designated interior design as one of the major topics to be covered by Curbed National, which launched last Thursday. Mr. Steele is content to let the rest of his topics originate organically--i.e., from his writers. It's a model that's served him well for Racked and Eater, his other two sites that went national within the past year.

"Our sites are pretty good at sniffing out what would I refer to as the heroes and the villains of these different worlds, and we're kind of like the World Wrestling Federation because you can be a hero one day and a villain the next and switch back and forth," Mr. Steele said. "The point is, you don't really want to force it."

The next few months will be an experimental stage for Curbed National, which Mr. Steele has described as "Architectural Digest after a three-martini lunch."

Representative posts include spy photos of Lady Gaga at ABC Carpet & Home and an off-topic conversation with Ikea's automated chat bot. "I like to make the point to everyone involved that, at the end of the day, it's a blog," Mr. Steele said. "Which is to say if we do an item today that's kind of stupid or pointless or doesn't really fit our topic, well, you know what? It's going to be off the blog tomorrow."

His relaxed attitude derives from the fact that Mr. Steele puts a premium on hiring. He recalled an occurrence so common during his time at Gawker Media, where he served as managing editor from 2005 to 2007, that it had become a workplace joke.

A Gawker writer would receive an email with a story idea from Nick Denton and then turn to Mr. Steele for guidance about what to do with the story.

"And I would say, 'Well, you can do whatever you want with it,'" Mr. Steele said. "And they would say, 'Well, I actually wrote about it two weeks ago. Why is he sending it to me again?'"

This is when you knew you'd made it as a Gawker writer.

"The reality is, those of us who run blogs can't be on top of every single thing that's happening on every single blog every minute, so that's why you have to have an enormous amount of trust in your editors," Mr. Steele said. "On a minute-to-minute basis, it's their blog, not mine."

Curbed National is edited by Sarah Firshein, whom Mr. Steele knew from his pre-Gawker days at Cottages and Gardens, and the site's other full-time staffer, Rob Bear, was hired partially on the aesthetic strength of his design-oriented Tumblr.

Mr. Steele's next major sites include a Curbed Chicago and an Eater based in Austin, Texas. When it was suggested to Mr. Steele that his blog empire may soon rival that of his mentor, Mr. Denton, Mr. Steele just laughed.

"If that's the case, then life is really good for him," he said. "We're a speck on the bottom of his well-tailored shoe." --Dan Duray

But the night that Charlie Rangel won his 20th term in Congress, early and often he waltzed out on to the stage, grabbed the microphone, declared victory before saying it wasn't over yet, thanked friends and supporters and introduced each new political guest as he arrived.

By night's end, Mr. Rangel had inched slightly above the 50 percent mark in a six-candidate field, scoring just enough of a validation from the Harlem community he has served for the past three decades to tell the executioners in Washington to hold their fire.

The next day, Mr. Rangel went back to work in D.C., but he returned to the district on Monday night, appearing before a few dozen graybeards for a meeting of Manhattan Peace Action in a basement community center on the Upper West Side.

Sporting a pinstriped suit and an electric blue tie and pocket square, he was there to talk about his plan to reinstitute the military draft, a provocative proposal designed to highlight what he sees as a de-facto conscription of young men and women who see no opportunity in neighborhoods like his own.

But Mr. Rangel, who led 40 men to safety after getting shot in the Korean War and earned a Purple Star for his efforts, soon pivoted to politics.

"Now in combat, just like in races, God has given us a sense of adrenaline, that which gets you all hopped up either attacking or defending," he said. "But somehow it works. You can get people worked up that they got to shoot people or get shot."

When Mr. Rangel started to look like he was weak, after nearly two years of relentless bad news about sloppy financial disclosure forms, improper fund-raising and failure to pay taxes, Harlemites started to come out of the woodwork to take him on. Vince Morgan, a community banker and former Rangel aide, began arguing that it was time for the neighborhood to look beyond the Rangel era. Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV, whose revered father served the district before being ousted by Mr. Rangel, called Mr. Rangel an embarrassment. Perennial candidate Jonathan Tasini accused Mr. Rangel of everything from being responsible for the gentrification of Harlem to prolonging the war in Afghanistan.

Few in the political class, however, abandoned him. Former mayor David Dinkins famously flipped off a gaggle of protestors at a Rangel fund-raiser. Bill Clinton and Mayor Michael Bloomberg robo-called constituents for him. Every local elected official attended his high-dollar 80th birthday party at the Plaza, or sent checks in their stead.

And Mr. Rangel, whose 40-year tenure in Congress has seemed like one endless campaign swing through Harlem, visiting every block party and housing-project barbecue he could, cranked the glad-handing up another notch over the past few weeks, hitting early-morning subway stops, shaking hands at senior centers and rallying for the unemployed on Wall Street.

"Let me thank you for the last election," he said to Manhattan Peace Action. "It meant more to me than politics. It meant the faith that you have in me representing you, and I promise I will never do anything to embarrass you."

After Mr. Rangel was finished, the meeting cleared out as the peaceniks rushed to greet him in the hallway.

"A tremendous load has been lifted off of my shoulders," he said once he had waded through them. "If you feel more bounce in my step, that's because it was a very heavy emotional toll. Not so much the accusations but what are my friends and constituents really thinking. It's a painful thing when people say you let them down."

Mr. Rangel is not in the clear yet. His House Ethics trial has yet to begin. It is unlikely that he will get the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee back, assuming that Democrats retain the majority in Congress. Republicans are likely to run ads all over the country for the next several weeks pointing to Mr. Rangel as a reason why they should not.

But his just over 50 percent victory shows that he is still the kingmaker in Harlem. And even as a batch of Harlem elected officials line up to replace Mr. Rangel, his victory says that they perhaps should put away the drape-measures for the time being. He has, after all, given no indication that 2010 will be his last race.

"Now I know that at the very minimum, people are saying, 'I believe what you said, I give you a chance,'" Mr. Rangel said before stepping into his Town Car and heading home. "And so if I seem more fired up, it's because I am." --David Freedlander

In July of 2007, less than two years after she took over at Jane, Ms. Holley was called into a meeting with Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse and editorial director Tom Wallace. The two men told her that they had decided to close Jane earlier that day.

After three years away, Ms. Holley is coming back. Last week Condé Nast announced that for the second time in the company's history it was bringing an editor in chief back to edit a different magazine. Ms. Holley would take over Lucky from Kim France.

For the second time in Ms. Holley's history, she is taking over a magazine at the company from its founder. And since Ms. Holley had been working at Yahoo for the past three and a half years--editing Shine, its women's interest site--it is the first time ever at Condé Nast that an editor in chief arrives with experience running a Web site. (Shine draws 25 million visitors per month.)

"I hadn't thought about going back and, in fact, was pretty clear that I wasn't going back," Ms. Holley told The Observer a few hours after her return to the company was announced. But Mr. Wallace convinced her. "Condé is in a really great place," she added.

"We never lost touch with her," Mr. Wallace told The Observer last week. After Jane closed, Mr. Wallace got Ms. Holley an interview at Yahoo.

"When they were explaining the job, I just interrupted the person who was talking to me and said, 'I want this job,'" Ms. Holley said. She remembers using her laptop during her phone interview to look up the definition of acronyms used in Web jargon (e.g., SEO?). "I realized that I had to retool my career and take a step back and start something from scratch in an industry I didn't know much about," she said.

She described her time at Yahoo as school. "I have a list of the words I had to look up. And now I wish I could send you some of the emails I write now. You wouldn't believe what comes out of my mouth--it's crazy geek talk."

But Ms. Holley was on the geeky side of Condé Nast editors even when she was editing Jane. In 2006, before magazines, especially those inside Four Times Square, had begun to take the Internet seriously, Ms. Holley was posting videos made by her staff on Jane's Web site and asking her editors to blog two or three times per week. She encouraged readers to submit photographs of their breasts and post anonymously on the magazine's Web site about their bodies.

At Lucky, Ms. Holley's first mission is to build community on the site. "I want UGC. More UGC, damn it!" she said jokingly (user-generated content, for anyone without a Yahoo diploma). She's excited about the way women are engaging with the Internet, "how women are using content online, how technology gets them to lean forward and participate and the social aspect. I mean all of that has been a great part of the last three years--not being an editor that sends a magazine out into the world but being an editor that goes back into the common thread, pulls it back out, and interacts with the users on a day-to-day basis."

Building a robust comment section online isn't normally something incoming Condé editors talk about in their first interview, but Lucky isn't a normal Condé title. The magazine, which was inspired by barcode-filled Japanese shopping magazines, was designed as an Internet catalog of sorts before the Internet blossomed as a shopping destination. "There are a lot of women who really love this magazine, and I want to be careful with that," Ms. Holley told The Observer on Tuesday. She had been in Lucky's offices at Four Times Square the day before to meet the staff. "It was a very short meeting, just to say hi to everyone," she said.

Ms. Holley said she wants to inject newness into the magazine, but first she has to get into the office and determine what is working well. "I do think that bringing bloggers into the magazine now is a great idea," she said.

"There's kind of a ground-up thing with fashion right now that's really fun."

Mr. Farrell, Mr. Rasmus and their third partner, Joe Schildhorn, are all multiyear veterans of the Patrick McMullan event-photography empire. Anyone who attends a certain type of New York party knows that Mr. McMullan's Web site is a first-priority morning-after destination: If he or one of his 20 or so photographers has posted a flattering photo of you, the event was a success. Until four Fridays ago, when they quit, the three partners in the new Billy Farrell Agency were among Mr. McMullan's stars. Several years ago, he agreed to take on a one-quarter stake in their side-project wedding-photography business, Izola Weddings, which counts Julianna Marguiles among its clients.

VIEW SLIDESHOW > SHOOTING WAR: THE COMPETITION

Mr. Farrell and Mr. Rasmus said that the plans for the new agency have come together in the past few months; several factors combined to give them the push they needed. "It wasn't really about leaving Patrick at all; it was more about doing something for ourselves," Mr. Farrell said. "We all turned 30 this year, and at some point you have to start your own thing." He also admitted, perhaps a bit sheepishly, that last season's finale of Mad Men--in which a group of the show's most prominent characters start a new independent advertising agency--provided some inspiration.

"I think it's a little bit more like Julius Caesar, coming out of the Forum, to be quite honest," Mr. McMullan told the Transom. "You know, 'Et tu, Brutus?'--because Billy has been planning this for a while, and he never came to me and said, 'Look, I'm thinking of starting my own agency.'"

"Somebody wrote that it was amiable, and I couldn't be reached for comment," Mr. McMullan continued, referring to an item on the new agency that appeared in the Daily News. "I mean, I have a cell phone. I can always be reached for comment."

Since that fateful Friday, Mr. Farrell and his partners have been hard at work preparing for tomorrow's launch. Their first party is tonight, at this summer's trendiest hot spot--Le Bain, the rooftop pool at the Standard hotel--which they lament means they have to keep the guest list to 250. The agency will also provide the in-house photographers for the Standard during Fashion Week. They've nailed down several major fashion houses as clients, too, though they're not telling which ones just yet. They have 12 jobs booked for this Friday's sprawling Fashion's Night Out alone.

All of these bookings, of course, bring up the question of how Mr. Farrell is planning to assemble his staff--a question he and his partners answer delicately. "We're trying to refine our structure here," Mr. Farrell said. Mr. Rasmus added, "Our goal is not to build up a staff of 15 photographers," presumably leaving two words--like Patrick's--unsaid. "We'd really rather have a small group of really good photographers." For Fashion's Night Out, they'll be using freelancers they've trained ahead of time. "A lot of guys that have been in the industry," Mr. Rasmus said. "Not poaching," he continued, carefully. "But guys that we think are great."

Those guys' photos will appear on the agency's brand-new Web site, also set to launch tomorrow. The beta version Mr. Farrell showed off revealed a clean, elegant design, based in Helvetica, with subtle watermarks, plenty of white space to highlight the photography and a few nifty functions unique to the site. It's similar to patrickmcmullan.com, but just a touch less busy, and without all the built-in history of Mr. McMullan's archives. It feels new--and that, it seems, is sort of the point.

VIEW SLIDESHOW > SHOOTING WAR: THE COMPETITION

Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to The Player [starting @ 11 p.m. on IFC]

Why we'll try to stay up and watch it: Every single time we see The Player, we are reminded at how amazingly good it is. Watching Robert Altman's epic Hollywood satire is like meeting a friend you rarely see for a drink. When the evening is over, you invariably find yourself saying, "Damn, we should hang out more!" Robert Altman's The Player is that friend. Whenever we watch it, we always end up thinking it should rank higher on our personal list of favorite movies.

This is truly great stuff: sharply written, darkly funny and expertly performed. From the opening eight minute tracking shot, with Buck Henry pitching The Graduate: Part 2 ("it'll be funny; dark and weird and funny and with a stroke."), to the twisted Hollywood ending, this is an ode to movies like we've never witnessed.

Tim Robbins holds the film together, adeptly playing the stringy anti-hero of moral question that he's done so many other times since. But it's the rest of the cast we love, especially Peter Gallagher as an over-eager studio rival to Mr. Robbins, and Richard E. Grant as an uncompromisingly artistic screenwriter who ends up compromising everything for box office gold. As the film's fictional studio says, "Movies, now more than ever!"

When we'll probably fall asleep: Ideally we'd like to stay up until the perfect ending, but that won't occur until after 1 a.m. and we have work tomorrow! So we'll probably make it through the hilarious pitch that Mr. Grant's character gives about 75 minutes into the film at 12:15 a.m. The story, about a D.A. who falls in love with the woman he sends to the gas chamber ("Habeas Corpus"), is arch, awful and completely believable as an actual Hollywood film. In fact, it was so believable that a similar movie starring Sharon Stone called Last Dance was released only five years later.