Illustration by Luke McGarry

A childhood drawing of mine hangs above my son’s changing table. It’s a mostly unremarkable work, a giant, floating rectangular head with spiky Bart Simpson hair and a nose that resembles an electrical outlet, rendered in fading green marker on flan-colored paper. And yet it has one feature that distinguishes it from the average preschooler’s half-assed artistic endeavor. Emerging from the head is a speech bubble as round and buoyant as a cumulus cloud. And inside the bubble is one word: FUCK.

The story behind the drawing is disappointingly mundane—I was coloring on the floor of my dad’s office, overheard him drop an F-bomb, asked him how to spell it and rewarded his honesty with a Take Your Daughter to Work Day souvenir that only Louis CK’s refrigerator could love—but hindsight imbues it with profane meaning.

Because some 30 years later, I am still that snub-nosed potty mouth (albeit with a neck and a few more teeth), but now the matriarch of a household in which cursing—or “cussing,” if you live in a state that contains a Waffle House franchise—is wholeheartedly embraced.

I am a member of what Tom Wolfe might call the Fuck Patois generation, in which curses have become acceptable replacements for real words in the way that, say, leggings can pass for pants. I enjoy cursing as a noun (“He doesn’t give a fuck”), as a verb (“Oh, the ‘Fantasy Suite’ is just code for The Bachelor fucking the remaining contestants”), as a piece of adverbial flair (“I’ve been waiting fucking patiently!”) and most often as a sort of Hamburger Helper used to enhance otherwise plain adjectives (“These drunken noodles are fucking good”).

In addition to enhancing my vocabulary, curse words also give me an outlet for pent-up aggression that might otherwise be directed at my fellow man. “Nice one, jackass,” I’ll tell the cracked dish drainer as it deposits suds onto my feet. “Why are you being such a dick?” I’ll shout at my computer as it struggles to find my wifi network. If someone were to film me during an afternoon spent home alone, it would resemble a very dark episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

I can’t blame my parents for this. I mean, yes, it is definitely their fault, if you’re the type of killjoy who prefers to express your discontent by saying things like “Fiddlesticks!” or “Oh, poop.” I’ve always considered my natural-born blasphemy a delightful quirk, on a par with prominent freckles or elbows that can turn inside-out. My family is not athletically inclined in the traditional sense, but cursing has always been a sport I could take to with gusto.

Until now, that is. Now I have a toddler constantly underfoot and within earshot, a toddler whose capacity for understanding the English language is expanding by the minute. Right now his vocabulary is limited to “dis,” “dat,” “ball,” “apple” and “baby,” but it’s only a matter of time until he catches on. I know that if I don’t rein in my language, soon I’m going to be fielding requests for “dis shitty apple,” or “dat fucking ball.” And as much as I want my son to cuss with abandon—if he so chooses—when he’s older, I’d like to keep his tongue G-rated for as long as possible. I’ve already caved when it comes to vices like processed sugar and screen time, so I feel like it’s the least I can do to prevent his playground patter from sounding too much like a Mamet play.

Not that it’s going to be easy, especially since I’m not just policing my own language.

“Where is my butt-fucking phone?” my husband, Jeff, wondered aloud the other day as Sam and I watched Blue’s Clues while clapping and slowly being drained of our will to live, respectively.

“Futt-bucking,” I hissed through my teeth. “Don’t you mean, where is your futt-bucking phone?”

“That is what I meant, you cupid stitch!” Jeff said brightly.

Turning expletives into pig latin-esque gibberish is funny for a while, but it’s not a long-term solution, unless I want to raise Sam to believe that “Ouchebag Day” is some kind of national celebration. So the only option, aside from not cursing at all, which isn’t realistically on the table, is to come up with alternative words that will convey dismay without raising any flags at Child Services. The Internet, naturally, has a number of ideas, most of which sound like something a toothless hillbilly might exclaim upon crawling out from under a rock in a Geico commercial: “Dadgummit! Son of a bucket! Judas Priest!”

Everyone’s favorite adorable diet curse seems to be “fudge,” but I can’t bring myself to use it when only the real thing will do. Fudge is the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter of obscenities, and tastes just as synthetic on the lips.

So what’s a hopeless vulgarian to do? My only strategy, I think, is to hide in plain sight. Much like my drinking, nudity and late-night Netflix abuse, I will have to reserve four-letter fulminations for times when my child is absent or unconscious and thus shielded from my Tourette’s-like outbursts. My neighbors might wonder why I gleefully sing a string of swear words to the tune of “Hava Nagila” while vacuuming, but that’s better than the alternative, right?

By day is another story. Just this weekend, I ran into trouble when I attempted to carry the stroller up a steep set of subway stairs, every elbow jab from unsympathetic passersby sending me into paroxysms of silent profanity.

“Don’t worry, baby,” I grunted. “People are just—” ignorant fucknuts! “—in a hurry. And the stroller is being—” a fucking asshole! “—a little finicky.” I reached the top of the stairs and smiled down at him beatifically, wanting to throw my hat up in the air Mary Tyler Moore-style.

“Ah-hole,” he cooed.

Uh-oh.

“Mama, ah-hole.”

Oh, God. I thought. He’s right. I am an asshole. I’ve already corrupted him at 18 months. I’ll just have to start fresh with the next kid, because this one is ruined. Shit. Shitshitshit!

And then ... I remembered the Granny Smith he’d been gnawing on the train.

“Is this what you want?” I asked hopefully, brandishing his snack.

“AH-HOLE!” he cried happily.

Oh, thank goodness! His innocence is still intact.

What a rucking felief.

editorial@observer.com

Tom Wolfe (Getty Images)

New York has an interview with Tom Wolfe, the author of the new, Miami-set book Back to Blood, which The Observer described this way: "the novel ensures that the world of ideas and of power dynamics, the only world in which Tom Wolfe feels comfortable, is one to which [racial minority characters are] not admitted." We did pick up a few nuggets that colored our opinion of Mr. Wolfe, though:

1. That hyperactive style of Mr. Wolfe's, with its repeated words and frequent onomatopoeia, is a holdover from writing for the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement. "You get one chance with a Sunday supplement. People pick it up, look at one piece--that'll be yours--and throw it away. So I began to think up techniques."

2. The Bonfire of the Vanities was meant to be titled Vanity Fair, an homage to the satirical Thackeray novel.

3. Mr. Wolfe's home decor mirrors that which he used to mock as a young bomb-throwing journalist: "Two brass-monkey-man figurines hold up candles atop a fireplace. The walls of a nearby half-bath are 100 percent mirror, so that a standing visitor gazes into an infinite regression of marble sinks, cream toilets, and monogrammed towels."

4. He voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and George W. Bush in 2004 and 2000 (if we're interpreting his claim to have "voted for every winner" but Bill Clinton in 1992 correctly).

5. Very few of his friends are writers, and his favorite current writer is the financial journalist Michael Lewis.

"Back to Blood"

The first person thanked in the acknowledgments of Tom Wolfe’s new novel, Back to Blood (Little, Brown and Company, 720 pp., $30), a doorstop set in Miami, is that city’s former mayor, Manny Diaz. The second is the former police chief. There are also “Miami’s maker of yachts that look like X-15s and don’t so much sail as lift off” and the “developers and engines of the Wynwood art district, Miami’s equivalent of New York’s Chelsea.” The book hasn’t yet begun, and already the reader has been plunged into a sea of boldface names.

The only subject Tom Wolfe has ever been interested in is status. Even as a writer of nonfiction: his 1965 piece about The New Yorker was obsessed with staff writers’ relative proximity to editor William Shawn; his profile of Phil Spector, from 1964, is more explicit: “Status!” he writes. “What is his status?” And his much-discussed essay from 2000 on John Irving, Norman Mailer and John Updike, his literary contemporaries, drives the obsession home: “On second thought, I have to mention that cover of Time,” he writes about his own public image. “[T]here I was, not only on the cover, but on the cover wearing a white double-breasted suit and vest and a white homburg ...” He goes on.

The Time cover, from 1998, was to promote the second of his four novels, A Man in Full. As a writer of fiction, Mr. Wolfe is notable for both his neck-vein-bursting enthusiasm and his on-the-scene reporting, traveling to whatever American milieu has captured his fancy that year. But the method by which he obtains information is governed by the sort of access available only to a man who appears on the cover of Time in a double-breasted white suit. The sort of access Mr. Wolfe was afforded in researching Back to Blood, in the company of Miami’s brightest stars and biggest civic boosters, becomes clear early on in the novel. Every piece of information he’s gleaned in Miami, in New York (the subject of The Bonfire of the Vanities), in Atlanta (A Man in Full) and on a college campus in Pennsylvania (I Am Charlotte Simmons), has been in service of the self-evident thesis that in America, status is important.

In his vaunted hyperbolic style, Mr. Wolfe blows up details of consumption and lards each one with an exclamation point; a pixelated focus on the trappings of wealth serves as a stand-in for character development. He is either an author obsessed with exposing radical truths about American materialism or an author whose sympathies lie with those who have power, those he sets out to critique. Anyway, they’re more fun to write about.

In Back to Blood, plot is second to style. That said, the novel is technically about the divergent paths of Nestor Camacho and Magdalena Otero, a former couple, both distanced from their roots, who find themselves implicated in an art-forgery scheme. Nestor, a disgraced cop taken off his beat, is a vigilante of sorts; Magdalena, a nurse with a side job in seduction, finds herself dating an art patron, then a more prominent art patron.

But neither character’s actions are in service of the plot, which is diluted by lengthy descriptions of the Magic City’s fine restaurants and art galleries. In spite of the presence of Hollywood stars “Leon Decapito and Kanyu Reade” (yikes), the white people buttering each other up at Art Basel are more authentic than any other characters in the book. “You’re not cutting-edge if your whole generation is dead or dying,” says one art patroness. “You may be great. You may be iconic, the way Cy Twombly is, but you’re not cutting-edge.” Indeed. Meanwhile, Magdalena, squired on a man’s arm, thinks little of this. “What did iconic mean? She hadn’t the faintest idea.”

Art Basel comes midway through the book, but this tone is set much earlier. Back to Blood kicks things off with a prologue entitled “We een Mee-AH-mee Now,” a pidgin rendering of the manner in which a wealthy Latina in a Ferrari (surprised? Mr. Wolfe is!) tells off the wife of Edward T. Topping IV, the editor of the Miami Herald. “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant to the maximum, to the point of satire,” we’re told, though the satire never arrives (unless employing “Hotchkiss, Yale” as a descriptor counts as satire—which, to the Yale-educated Mr. Wolfe, it may indeed).

Topping appears in the book only briefly, but his prejudices are the author’s. By page seven, Topping is thinking to himself, “Oh, ineffable Latin dirty girls!” As smut talk, this is less imaginative than the inventively revolting descriptions of sex in I Am Charlotte Simmons, but conveying the desires of a golden-years WASP may be easier for Mr. Wolfe than doing the same for a young co-ed. Aside from the woman in the fancy car in the Mee-AH-mee parking lot, the only Latina given weight in the book is Magdalena, a beauty who flits from one man to another, whose employment as a psychiatric nurse is complicated not merely by the fact that she’s sleeping with her boss but also by the fact that she is flummoxed by any mention of talk therapy or psychiatric drugs.

The white characters in Back to Blood are granted, in even the briefest appearances, the opportunity to distinguish themselves through ambition or cunning or incisive thinking; the Latinos are important because they are Latino. The book’s title, for instance, comes from Topping’s epiphany, in the prologue, that America is re-segregating. “‘La Raza!’ as the Puerto Ricans cry out. ‘The Race!’ cries the whole world. All people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds—Back to blood!”

Mr. Wolfe does not attempt to make this an argument, to support the claim that “all people everywhere” are seeking to reify divisions between the races. Tellingly, he doesn’t bother to show the evolution of Topping’s thoughts; before his wife and the stranger in the sports car get in a fight, Topping is lusting for the forbidden Latina, “the tumescence men live for welling up beneath his Jockey tighty-whiteys” while contemplating “dirty girls” and his C.V. The thought of renewed segregation “pops into [Topping’s] head from out of nowhere.” It’s so important to the author that he express his particular thoughts on status in 2012—that it’s predicated on race, that white men ought to marvel fearfully at the manner in which Latinos show solidarity to one another even as the same white men exclusively view other races as sex objects or threats—it doesn’t matter if he’s using his characters as accidental prophets.

At least Topping gets to have thoughts. Mr. Wolfe doesn’t deign to expend the same attention on the book’s ostensible main character, Nestor, the cop. He is little more than a body that can be dispatched to accomplish feats of strength. Though he’s the engine that moves the plot forward, Nestor is only sporadically aware of the dynamics of power swirling around him: he’s the tool of a white journalist, just as Magdalena is arm candy for a parade of white boyfriends. Their trajectories—one ultimately happy and one sad—are a matter of chance and accidents. A Latino police officer and a Latina medical professional are, in Tom Wolfe’s Miami, disempowered due entirely to their weak minds and indecisiveness; while this reader hasn’t met many Miami cops or nurses, Nestor and Magdalena’s dim wits seem, at best, an ungenerous sampling of the least flattering of human traits. To have them as the two representatives of Latin-American culture here suggests that whatever Mr. Wolfe saw in Miami, he didn’t like.

Mr. Wolfe describes Nestor’s physique as one might a rock formation: “an entire mountainscape of muscles, huge boulders, sharp cliffs, deep cuts, and iron gorges ... an entire muscle terrain ... ME!” he writes from inside Nestor’s muscle-bloated skull. The character’s thoughts are almost parodically simple. “He asked himself, ‘Do I exist?’” While Topping’s unbidden thought resulted in a passable American Studies term paper topic, Nestor’s inner life is unworthy of the level of close examination his dark foreign body demands.

Nestor sets the plot into motion when he climbs a ship’s mast to stop the attempted emigration of a Cuban refugee. He reacts with astonishment to his Cuban family’s anger at this (“Nestor was bewildered ... couldn’t get a word out ... just stood there with his mouth open. His mother was looking at him in a way she had never looked at him in his whole life! Even Mami!”) and subsequently doubts his own existence. He’s attracted to a Haitian Creole woman whose younger brother is in legal peril, but Nestor is essentially a prude. When a group of women whose jeans “hugged their declivities fore and aft, entered every crevice, explored every hill and dale of their lower abdomens, climbed their montes veneris,” he looks away, leaving the author to salivate alone.

Elsewhere, Magdalena (herself possessed, we are told, of a conventionally attractive form) finds herself ignored at an art opening and, through Mr. Wolfe’s narration, expresses the exact same reductive existentialism as Nestor: “A little Cuban girl named Magdalena no longer existed, did she.” Both moments of dwindling personal worth come as the characters deal with their estrangement from their families, from La Raza: They need their blood to exist.

The vacuity with which Nestor and Magdalena question whether or not they exist without ties to their community is insulting. Neither asks what their disavowal of their parents really means. The two characters are asking whether their lives have meaning divorced from their race, when Mr. Wolfe has given the reader no reason to believe that they have ever engaged with the world around them or had a meaningful thought. The question is the answer. They do not, in fact, exist.

Past novels by Mr. Wolfe edged toward a hard, dark border between that which is tacitly acknowledged as acceptable talk for the private club and that which cannot be said anywhere. While Sherman McCoy, protagonist of the quasi-journalistic Bonfire of the Vanities, was satirized for his materialism and infidelity, a character based on Rev. Al Sharpton was portrayed brutally as a corrupt media manipulator. A Man in Full hinged on the rape allegations against the inarticulate and cruel black football star Fareek Fanon. “Fareek,” as in “freak”; “Fanon,” like the author of The Wretched of the Earth. If status intrigues Mr. Wolfe, it may be because he’s a Yale man with money. These poor benighted Miami types! On the rare occasion that Mr. Wolfe finds something to criticize in a character with status, Magdalena or Nestor is there to do something dumber to provide comic relief. An orgiastic art party provides Mr. Wolfe the chance to document bloated late-stage capitalism at work, but more especially the opportunity to spotlight Magdalena’s vapidity. “She had never even heard of Miami Basel until Maurice invited her,” we’re told, a page before Mr. Wolfe slips in a long paragraph about architecture and hotel life and “status” for the lucky ones who are already in the know: “The Random was a typical hotel of the much-touted South Beach Retro boom. A clever developer like Duroy would buy a small, crabbed hotel, eighty years old or more ...”

Magdalena can never hope to know about any of this, nor, in any of her dealings with wealthy art patrons, does she attempt to learn. And she’s as adrift in Miami as the black athletes surrounded by white hegemony in A Man in Full and I Am Charlotte Simmons; mute even in her private thoughts, uncomprehending, suffering for unnamed sins. Whatever she believes—we’re not privy—the novel ensures that the world of ideas and of power dynamics, the only world in which Tom Wolfe feels comfortable, is one to which she is not admitted. Back to blood? Among the many things Mr. Wolfe fails to give his readers is any indication that he, for his part, ever left it.

The soiree at 583 Park Avenue had kicked off with a sober multimedia tribute to the late photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros. But unlike previous years, even a cascade of wine and self-congratulation could not keep crushing mortality at bay. It was everywhere!

Los Angeles magazine snagged the feature writing prize for "The End," an exploration of what befalls the body after it dies.

Christopher Hitchens's Vanity Fair essays on his battle with esophageal cancer won the columns and commentary award. In accepting, Graydon Carter paid tribute to his longtime friend and colleague, but ended on a light note. "He's made remarkable signs of recovery--he's lowered his intake of Scotch," Mr. Carter joked, "but he has developed a taste for sherry."

And then there were the undead, the editors not present--they'd been fired or pushed out--but whose work lived on in the approval of the American Society of Magazine Editors. Harper's editor Ellen Rosenbush accepted the award for reporting, although her predecessor Roger D. Hodge had edited the winning piece, and Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren took home two Ellies for pieces published under Gerry Marzorati. The subjects of their award-winning work? The mysterious suicides at Guantanamo Bay prison and the bedrooms of dead soldiers, respectively.

From the "Last Supper"-style press table looking over the balcony, the crowd was reminiscent of a circle of Dante's Inferno but the Transom was informed that the ballroom had been built by Christian Scientists, who believe that death itself can be staved off by the healing powers of prayer and virtue.

For the secular reader, longevity is all one can hope for. To that end, ASME honored Rodale's service titles, Women's and Men's Health, the latter for a piece called "I Want My Prostate Back." On stage, editor Dave Zinczenko launched into a public service announcement about prostate cancer. It was second only to Tom Wolfe's Creative Excellence Award acceptance speech in length.

Life among the living remains, as T. S. Eliot wrote, very long.

kstoeffel@observer.com

- No. NO! A bedbug on a subway seat! No one is safe. At all. Ever again.

- Guns don't kill televisions. Men who hate Bristol Palin's dancing so much that they shoot the screen, kill televisions.

- Google will now control the way you buy clothes with a new site called Boutiques.com. Give it up; they control everything.

- Yikes. Could New York state really get itself into a billion dollars' worth of debt? 

Before Wolfe took the podium, Master of Ceremonies Gay Talese had a few words to say about him.

"He's Richmond's gift to New York," Talese beamed, looking down at his old friend.

Gay Talese was referring to the dapper writer's Virginia homestead, where he was raised. When choosing schools, Wolfe turned down Princeton to stay in state at Washington and Lee, where he acquired his life-long fondness for Southern Gentleman accoutrements—the dandyish white suit—that of course he had donned for the gala. 

His daughter, however, chose to attend to Duke University, which served as a major inspiration for Wolfe's last novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. The book delved into the sexual habits of college kids in work hard/play hard academic settings, so when The Observer approached the legendary novelist we couldn't help but ask about that university's most recent claim to notoriety.

Have you heard about a certain Power Point presentation associated with Duke University that's come out recently, we asked?

At first, he denied any knowledge of the scandalous list, but as we started to roll off some details, Wolfe perked up.

"Oh, wait a minute! You're not talking about the girl who... Ha, ha! I've never seen it. Is it on YouTube?"

We told him it was everywhere online.

"I don't know about it really," he said when we asked for his take on the whole scandal that erupted after Deadspin posted the Duke girl's "thesis" that she "researched" by sleeping with athletes. "But it's another sign that sex is getting out of hand. When girls started volunteering their identity as Tiger Woods' girlfriends—they're still popping up. On the cover of the New York Post today there was another one!"

And with that another man in a suit pulled at the wisp-haired white-suited writer, and Tom Wolfe went back into the crowd.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

It would appear the caviar days are over for Mr. Rosen. Like many of the city's real estate players, the recession has left him limping, and the Journal now reports that he is scrambling to maintain control of two of his marquee properties, the Gramercy Park Hotel and the exclusive Core Club in the East 50s.

According to the Journal, Mr. Rosen is working to push Mr. Schrager out of his stake in the Gramercy, while also buying back a $140 million loan at 65 cents on the dollar. Meanwhile, an $18 million loan for his exclusive social club, where membership costs $25,000 plus $1,000 per month, is in default and due to be auctioned off on Oct. 26, with no indication from Mr. Rosen if he will (or even could) get in on the deal.

All this bad news could actually be good, at least for those not involved. Having watched one high-profile developer after another (see: Macklowe, Solow, Speyer) lose their luster, these moves by Mr. Rosen suggest that banks and buyers may finally be seeing eye to eye. The Journal also points  to the likely sale of Joe Moinian's Downtown W, which he and son Matt have been struggling to hang on to, as a signal that the worst is over.

These latest deals are a sign that these efforts by Mr. Rosen and others are moving into the end game. Until recently, lenders generally have been reluctant to foreclose on property even after borrowers defaulted because values were scraping bottom and the lack of financing made it virtually impossible to sell. But now, a growing number of lenders holding debt on troubled projects are resorting to selling the debt to opportunistic investors.

At least Mr. Rosen has a consolation prize, having recently rented his East 94th Street manse, which had been languishing for some time. Monthly -- monthly! -- rents are predicted to be as high as six figures.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

A few days after New Year’s, I was climbing the steps at the Borough Hall subway station and preparing myself to face the bitter cold. I was thinking to myself that I would probably have to find a new gag because young women probably tone down on the crying when their teeth are chattering. Then I noticed the young woman approaching was in tears.

It was time to take a closer look at the crying scene in New York.

On the subway, I met Patrice Anderson, an attractive 25-year-old social worker, born and raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. She said public crying is part of the code of the sidewalk: You’re anonymous and whatever you’re doing is your business. In New York, public is private.

“It’s true emotion and sometimes you can’t hide that,” said Ms. Anderson, nattily attired in a black-and-white herringbone trench coat with flared lapels, matching paper-boy hat and gold hoop earrings. “It could be that you’re worried about where you’re going to get your next meal, or you’re worried about where you’re going to sleep.”

The last time Ms. Anderson cried in public was two months ago, while walking down Park Avenue. It happened during her lunch break from a training workshop uptown. “I was walking and talking to my mom on the phone, and I was defending my boyfriend; there was an issue. Then I got so upset, I had to stop.” She said she rarely sees people crying on the streets in Brownsville. No, it’s a Manhattan thing: It’s cheek-by-jowl here; you can speed-walk but you cannot hide, and so we cry in public, and that’s that.

I went to the opening of Elaine Stritch’s new show over at the Carlyle. Rosie O’Donnell was there with her good pal Natasha Lyonne and told me that two years ago, after a couples-therapy session, a bad one, she was walking down Columbus Avenue bawling her eyes out. Everyone started noticing, because she’s Rosie, so she darted into a nearby Coach store and bought the biggest pair of sunglasses she could find. They cost $400. She never buys $400 sunglasses; they don’t carry them at Target, where she does all of her shopping. (That said, she’s glad that she did because she still has the glasses and the lenses are fantastic.)

She and Ms. Lyonne had recently been to see the opening of the new movie Precious over at the theater near Lincoln Center. It took a lot of doing, but they managed to get into the first show, at 11 a.m. “Within 20 minutes of the movie, the entire theater was in tears. I mean audible sobs,” Rosie told me.

The director Mike Nichols has lived in New York for eons. I asked him if he’s ever seen someone crying on the street. “I’ve never seen it,” he said, en route to his chauffeured car. I asked him if he ever cried, at all, ever. “Not that I can remember,” said Mr. Nichols, who looked trim, tan and taut-faced. “I’ve got nothing to cry about. I’m happy.”

Through with showbiz, I considered models. “They cry all the time,” said renowned stylist Sarajane Hoare. “They’re too young and they’re always jet-lagged, so you’ll always see them crying all the time all over the place.” Ms. Hoare has difficulty seeing at night and recently tripped over a tree guard on the sidewalk. “I had all of these apples and oranges, and I virtually cut my shins in half. And I screamed and screamed and two very posh women—because, you know, I live on 75th and the edge of Park Avenue—they walked straight by me! You would never get that in London. Someone would come up and say, ‘Are you all right, sweetie?’” That’s how the model Sophie Dahl got her big break! She was randomly crying on a stoop that happened to belong to the late fashion icon Isabella Blow.

And after your foot’s in the door? Author Anne Kreamer just completed a book on crying in the workplace, working title Big Girls Do Cry, conducting several national polls. They revealed that an astonishing number of Americans cry regularly at the office, with women wailers in the workplace outnumbering men four to one. “I mean, obviously people are stressed more as a result of the economy, and I’m sure there’s more a sense of huge depression—but that there are basically people who cry and people who don’t cry, kind of tribes for this,” she said. “Although women are obviously more hardwired to be emotionally expressive.” Ms. Kreamer further discovered that on balance younger people cry more than older people. Also: “The transparency of lives lived fully in the context of social media, I think, leads to a very different perception of what’s and appropriate emotional display and what’s not,” she said.

Ms. Kreamer’s research helps illuminate a prevalent strain of gushers who cheapen the tears of others and represent a nuisance to the population as a whole: Call them the town criers.

They come in different forms. There is the woe-is-me hobble, the I-don’t-give-a-damn stomp, the die-a-little-every-day shuffle—which is ideal for the young lady who needs to get in and out of Whole Foods in 20 minutes, tops, and wants to keep a good trickle going. You might find yourself in the wake of a sobber or screamer or—God help you—a shrieker.

“It’s almost like an act of defiance,” said one female colleague who’s cried on the sidewalk more times than she can count, once, after gazing into the tortured eyes of a carriage horse, from Time Square all the way down to the East Village. “You’re almost daring people to stop you and you sort of know no one will.”

“There’s something cinematic about it, when you’re walking in New York.”

Sloane Crosley, whom The Los Angeles Times says is a mix of Nora Ephron, Dorothy Parker and David Sedaris, has cried at least a few times out on the streets. After more or less getting fired from her first job, she went outside, whipped out her cell phone, pretended to call someone and cried. It makes sense, she explained, “because God knows what information is being sort of conveyed to you through the phone, whereas if you’re just standing and crying, it’s a little dramatic.”

She does think the crying here is a little much. “For as public a city as we are, there are plenty of nooks and crannies where you can do that by yourself. Like, I don’t see why you would have to see someone crying in public for more than like 20 seconds,” Ms. Crosley said, whose second book, How Did You Get This Number?, will be published this spring. On the other hand:

“People should be able to enjoy the full emotional range; that’s why this city exists.”

Jamie Clayton, the 32-year-old Lower East Side transsexual once profiled in this column and soon to be host of a VH1 makeover show, complained of suffering town criers on a near-weekly basis.

“It’s one of my biggest pet peeves,” she said. “It’s mostly you see girls, like, yelling, like, ‘I’ve been waiting for you for like 20 minutes,’ or like getting all hysterical and upset. To me, unless you’re crying out of laughter”—which is not uncommon for Ms. Clayton—“it’s kind of a private, personal thing. I mean, sometimes you can get devastating news and it’s kind of uncontrollable.

But it’s like, ‘Come on, pull yourself together.’ It’s definitely gone in the direction of publicly acceptable, and I don’t necessarily think that it is.”

She described the typical crier type as an “attention-grabbing, needy sort of chick,” not confident or in control, but probably not too sloppy, because she “doesn’t mind getting that sort of attention.”

My friend Harris lived in New York for six years before moving back to L.A. He said that he hasn’t seen nearly as much crying out there as he did here, and, yes, he does look at people in their cars. “The annoying thing about seeing a girl sobbing into her phone is ‘I always feel like I should ask if everything is okay, do you need any help.’”

Unless one sees blood or anything to indicate a real emergency, the New Yorker’s policy is to not engage a crier—if possible, to ignore him or her completely.

“It seems that I alone realize that all tears concern protection,” said the great Tom Wolfe over the phone. “And sometimes people will cry because someone has been protected; it’s not always a call to come protect me, it can be just, ‘Oh my God, he protected her.’”

When John Glenn returned from being the first American in orbit, he said, there were big tough Irish cops crying in the intersections of New York, because they believed that he had risked his own life to bring us even with the Russians.

But our sensitivities have changed. On my way into the cleaners, I noticed a woman with lots of tattoos, sitting on some stairs with her cat in a travel box. She looked sad and was intently staring at nothing in particular. The signs were there. But after a few minutes there was no additional glaze or puffiness about the eyes, so I gave up waiting.

The landlord and art collector has tried for that long to get approval for an apartment tower at Madison Avenue and 77th Street designed by British starchitect Norman Foster. He’s gone to hearing after hearing at the Landmarks Preservation Commission, repeatedly rebuffed with instructions to cut the building down and make it more harmonious with the historic Upper East Side that surrounds it.

On Tuesday, Oct. 13, the commission—either satisfied with the latest design, or perhaps simply wishing to wash their hands of it—gave Mr. Rosen the green light he was looking for. In an entirely different economy, that is.

The new building, which would rise four stories out of the landmarked 980 Madison Avenue, a former home to Sotheby’s built in 1949. The new top would be coated with a bronze screen, capping out at 108 feet.

More harmonious, perhaps, but the design and surrounding controversy are now quite a bit more boring then back in 2006, when Mr. Rosen proposed a distinctive 30-story elliptical skyscraper to soar from the limestone building. That design provoked Upper East Side outrage, with no less than Tom Wolfe writing a scathing op-ed in The New York Times.

Consistent with the state of the fight, Mr. Rosen’s statement was rather boring: “You can build with distinction in an historic district if you respond responsibly and work collaboratively with the Landmarks Commission.”

ebrown@observer.com

“Mort and I are far from retiring,” Lynn Nesbit said on Friday afternoon. “It isn’t a question on the table at the moment. It really isn’t.”

The night before, one of the stars at the boutique literary agency Ms. Nesbit runs with Mort Janklow abruptly announced that he was leaving for a job at the global, multiplatform talent agency William Morris. Eric Simonoff, who represents Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri and others, had spent 18 years at Janklow & Nesbit. Apart from a stint as an assistant at Norton the year after he graduated from college, it was the only job he’d ever had. At 41, he was widely thought to be the prince of the firm, in line to one day take over for Ms. Nesbit and Mr. Janklow alongside his equally heavy-hitting colleague, Tina Bennett.

Precisely what such a takeover would potentially entail depends on who you ask, but until last week, the consensus assumption among publishing people was that the agency’s namesakes, 78-year-old Mort and 70-year-old Lynn, had been deliberately grooming Mr. Simonoff and Ms. Bennett, and would hand the reins to the agency over to them when they got tired of steering it. 

Because of this, many found Mr. Simonoff’s sudden defection puzzling, and the motivations behind it have been intensely debated.

Though Mr. Simonoff could not be reached for comment, Ms. Nesbit said Friday it wasn’t really so complicated at all.

"I think what provoked him is the huge financial offer,” she said. “I think it’s as simple as money. He said they made him an offer he felt he could not refuse.” 

She added, “He’ll be the only alpha male in William Morris's literary department.”

Suzanne Gluck and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, co-heads of the William Morris literary department, announced their new hire on Friday just as all of publishing prepared to pack into the New School’s Tishman Auditorium for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. The news appeared on The New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog under the headline, “A Star Book Agent’s New Home.” Therein, Ms. Gluck was quoted as saying Mr. Simonoff had been her “dream date” for years.

Three well-placed sources who would not speak for attribution said Ms. Gluck and Ms. Walsh (neither of whom would comment for this article) had been actively looking to add someone of Mr. Simonoff's stature to their ranks for several years. Several industry people—knowledgeable ones, the lot of them, though obviously all too shy to speak on the record—said William Morris could use someone with literary sensibilities who can hit home runs with titles that skew more commercial than the high quality (but often narrowly targeted) stuff that Bill Clegg tends to do.

Publishing people were giddy when they heard about Mr. Simonoff's job change last week, and not even because they were happy for him—though some were—but because it was surprising, and exciting, and an undeniable show of force by William Morris that no one really knew how to explain off the top of their heads. Editors, publishers, agents, everyone wanted to talk about it, and they got into work on Friday still drunk on the news and excited to start calling and emailing one another about it. People asked if a “dominant theory” had emerged, the question invariably coming out sounding hopeful, but also cautious, because no one really wanted the fun to end.

The last time anyone felt this way was in June, when News Corp. fired Jane Friedman. With all that had happened since—the wrenching reorganization of Random House, the closing of Collins—that felt like a lifetime ago. 

"Was I shocked? No,” Ms. Nesbit said on Friday. “I was surprised but not shocked. I think Eric has to spread his wings. Maybe it was all too much like family."

But what exactly was behind Mr. Simonoff’s defection? His colleagues in the industry were left scratching their heads over the weekend.

“There had to have been something material that prompted it,” one editor said. “It’s not something you would do just for the sake of it ‘I just want a change’— agents don’t do it.”

Was it as Ms. Nesbit said? Had William Morris just offered Mr. Simonoff a dizzying amount of money? Or was there more at work—like, say, unresolved succession issues at Janklow & Nesbit that might have caused the famously ambitious agent to lose his patience with the firm and seek out something more secure? 

In a sense, there are two stories here, one about why Mr. Simonoff is joining William Morris, and the other about why he is leaving Janklow.

One theory is that he was tempted by all the perks that come with working for a large multimedia talent agency—namely, access to in-house film and TV agents who can help him not only by selling his adaptation-ready literary properties but also by giving him business whenever one of their celebrity clients wants to write a book.

In an interview Friday, former William Morris literary head Owen Laster, who retired from the firm after 46 years in 2006, said many of the opportunities a large organization with many branches offers are simply not possible at a small, prestige shop like Janklow & Nesbit. He offered that when he was agenting at WMA, he “personally handled many film and television deals” for his clients, and “very often” collaborated with people in other parts of the company.

“That office [Janklow & Nesbitt], although primarily literary, has a pretty wide base, but not like William Morris,” Mr. Laster said. “Their connection with CAA and other offices gives them power in those areas, but at William Morris it’s more direct—it’s our clients.” 

While the possibility of multimedia domination may have certainly appealed to Mr. Simonoff, the real reason behind his decision to leave his longtime home probably had a lot more to do with the murky question of succession at Janklow & Nesbit and the sense of uncertainty that is clouding the agency’s future. 

For one thing, Mr. Janklow is said to have thought seriously about selling the company over the years—and though he has denied it, he has reportedly put a price tag on it that was rebuffed by potential buyers. For another, there is the matter of Mr. Janklow’s 41-year-old son Luke, a former rock singer and current restaurant owner who has in recent years been doing some agenting for his father's shop, and Ms. Nesbit’s daughter Priscilla Gilman—a recovering English professor who recently returned from a nine-month leave of absence during which she wrote a memoir about motherhood.   

Did the presence of the young Mr. Janklow and Ms. Gilman signal to Mr. Simonoff that the agency would always remain a family business? That all the loyalty in the world wasn’t going to make it any more likely that he'd ever be made partner?

Nonsense, according to Ms. Nesbit: “I don’t think it was about succession," she said. "I honestly, genuinely do not think it was about that."

"I think Luke has many strings to his bow,” she added, referring to the young Mr. Janklow’s various non-literary pursuits, which also includes collecting guitars and cars. “I have a very strong alpha male here, you see, in Mort Janklow. Eric felt more comfortable with another younger guy here. I don’t think Luke and Priscilla were in any way a threat to him.”

Regardless of why it happened, Mr. Simonoff’s departure unmistakably leaves Janklow & Nesbit with a future even more uncertain than the one it was already looking forward to, especially considering that whatever finally convinced Mr. Simonoff to flee could conceivably convince Ms. Bennett to do the same.

Several people noted that Ms. Bennett and Mr. Simonoff are the only major players at the agency bringing in new clients and making spectacular sales with any regularity (Update, 5:15PM: It should be noted that just two weeks ago, Ms. Nesbit placed the journalist Andrew Meier's The House of Morgenthau with Random House, and before that sold a memoir by young Iraq veteran Christopher Brownfield to Knopf). Mr. Simonoff has Ms. Lahiri and Edward P. Jones, for example, and in January, he showed his muscle when he sold Danielle Trussoni’s debut novel Angelology in a hotly contested auction for nearly $1 million. Ms. Bennett, in turn, represents Malcolm Gladwell, Fareed Zakaria, Laura Hillenbrand, Eric Schlosser and many others. Sure, the elder Mr. Janklow can still do a multimillion-dollar eight-book deal for Danielle Steele with his eyes closed when he wants to, and Ms. Nesbit is still putting up dizzying numbers with her Tom Wolfe and her Anne Rice sales. But as one publisher put it, “they’re not taking on new people. What’s the future?” 

That publisher, along with other executives, speculated on Friday about whether Mr. Simonoff’s departure might inspire Ms. Bennett to look for other work, or whether it would instead have the effect of forcing some of the succession issues at the agency to the fore.  

Though unlikely, Ms. Bennett could conceivably follow Mr. Simonoff to William Morris. Said one knowledgeable agent, “Jennifer Walsh used to say, 'I'll get Tina Bennett over here—Watch me.’”

Ms. Nesbit sounded cool as a cucumber when confronted with that scenario Friday. "I expect Tina to be here forever,” she said.

Ms. Bennett declined to comment for this article.