Longtime Gawker readers may recall a bygone era in which Laurel Touby, founder of media job board-etc. site Mediabistro, was a regular Gawker "character," famous for her feather boas and inability to use email properly. After she sold Mediabistro for $23 million in 2007, she became more famous for being a Can You Believe The Lady Who Started Mediabistro Is Now Super Rich, What The Fuck Is This World Coming To? Well. Years have passed. Now you must hear all about Laurel Touby's multimillion-dollar apartment.

You don't want to hear about Laurel Touby's multimillion-dollar apartment, of course. Neither do we. Who would? Rich, rich Laurel Touby is, in New York media circles, the embodiment of "Why her?" Regardless, the New York Times is doing its job by simultaneously rubbing Laurel Touby's vast (and some less generous-minded than us might say undeserved) wealth in your face, and making her seem vaguely horrible, as all subjects of NYT Style section stories must.

So here. Read all about Laurel Touby and her husband (also a writer! Just like your unsuccessful boyfriend!) Jon Fine's $3.9 million Union Square loft and its accompanying $2 million in renovations. It's all more or less like this:

Choosing and then waiting for the sort of art furniture Ms. Touby and Mr. Fine were after, like a black rubber Harry Bertoia chair, takes buckets of money and time. Mr. Fine said they quickly went beyond what he used to call in his younger days "Design Not Really in Reach" (though amid so much custom work there were some relative bargains, like $3,500 for a plastic and glass coffee table filled with cobalt-blue pigment and a toy taxi that was a copy of an Yves Klein piece)... Last week, when the final piece was installed - a blush-colored ceramic chandelier - and Mr. Fine had returned from the last concert of his reunion tour with Bitch Magnet, the post-punk, hard-core, Oberlin-grown band of his youth (and about which he is writing a memoir for Penguin), the couple had a housewarming party.

They have a $30,000 couch and a $30,000 "hand-woven leather, chain-mail and fur indoor swing," in much the same way that hundreds of aspiring freelancers who went to various media parties with Laurel Touby over the years have a $30 Ikea couch and a rope swing out back in the yard, but they don't have access to the yard, the landlord said that would cost extra.

New York, New York, big city of dreams.

Update: On Twitter, Laurel Touby says that she "never said two of the most outrageous quotes" attributed to her in the story—specifically, "Never said I wanted a car + driver. That was misquoted from another Times piece by Caitlin Kelly. Or that I wanted to make people jealous." Duly noted. Those were not, however, the most outrageous quotes.

[NYT. Photo: Jenny 8 Lee/ Flickr]