Left: Paul Wolfowitz and Arianna Huffington yuk it up in D.C. over the weekend. Right: New York Observer media reporter Michael Calderone flanked by Corynne Steindler and Bill Hoffman of Page Six, last week. [Photos: Julia Allison & ETP.]

The New York Observer site has just put up a link to their new, redesigned website, and according to a cheery note posted to the front page, managing editor Tom McGeveran wants to know what you think. The Observer has undergone some major changes since young publisher Jared Kusher started signing the checks last summer, and this one is the biggest since they remade the print version into a tabloid back in February.

The significance of holding last night's party to celebrate the New York Observer and its new website at the Four Seasons restaurant was intentional, obvious, and not at all lost on anyone. Despite its recent Frank Bruni demotion to two New York Times stars, the restaurant remains the symbolic and probably actual center of New York old-guard media power. After so many years of playing gadfly to the media, politics, and real estate elite of this city, the Observer and its boy-owner and his advisers chose to make a very specific sort of statement.

Remember back when it was possible for people to simultaneously be famous and also seem genuinely cool? Hillary Frey, the new culture editor of the New York Observer, totally does. "An It Girl was out and about; she walked our streets, shared our parks, sat next to us at the International Bar on First Avenue. She was Chlo . Parker. Claire." Sadly, though, those ladies are all now successful in mainstream TV show and movies! (Also, Claire Danes and her English lover were sitting two feet away from Hillary Frey last Tuesday at the Old Town Bar, which is kind of funny.) Also, Our Girls are older and not as wild now. And a new crop of "It Girls" hasn't risen up to replace them, according to Hillary. Why? Oh, oops, it's our fault.

• Nike uses the Don Imus controversy for an ad campaign it hopes "will spark continued conversation about race in America." And sell sneakers. [AdAge]
  

"But you know, it just depresses me: Some girl named Peaches who lives in the Bronx—I don't what she does—looks at this world and says, 'Oh wow.' And I would never want to give off something that is an illusion, because you hurt people that way. And they're already struggling so much—the people." That's aspiring filmmaker Arden Wohl, on the socialite culture she reviles. Yesterday, Arden told us that she wouldn't consider hiring a publicist. We're praying to every god and goddess of which we're aware that she keeps her word on that one.

Yesterday, we found out that New York Observer goldenboy Jared Kushner has been mucking about with none other than Trump Organization goldengirl Ivanka Trump, complete with PR-man assertions of "friendship." But! Were we just pawns in one of Kushner's maniacal games? Yesterday we were contacted by several Observer staffers, who said that about a week ago, Kushner had been parading Ms. Trump around the Observer offices, "as if he wanted one of us to tell you guys, because he knows that everything here gets leaked. So of course, we didn't." The pair reportedly entered Kushner's office, "leaving the door open," one Observer staffer said, though this staffer also remarks that the whole thing "seemed weird." We've been used, in some horrible image management co-branding scheme! Kushner, you rascal! (*Shakes fist*) We'll get you next time.

In their ongoing Kushnerian effort to get more readers in the coveted Kidz These Days demo, the Observer is doing all kinds of wild things. Such as: going to Brooklyn! Also, going to visit pornographers in Brooklyn! We hear that preppy low-hanging chinos nerd cute web desk reporter David Foxley is deep in an investigation of Williamsburg alt-smut peddlers Burning Angel. He's wanting to "meet with [co-CEO] Joanna [Angel] for a short time, to learn more about the industry and her role therein." We hope he'll bring a similar throbbing intensity to the story, which should run next week.

We're hearing that bachelor millionaire playboy and New York Observer owner Jared Kushner has a new playmate! The two of them have lots in common. Both love to discuss their recent acquisitions (and, of course, their fathers'), and we imagine that their shared Ivy League backgrounds also provides much pillow-talk fodder. Unfortunately, they are doomed to be just friends, as Ivanka Trump is most certainly not a Jew. Too bad, really; their kids have some intense super-genes at their disposal. For the official word from Jared's spokesperson, it's just that "they're buddies."

On Friday at a little after 5 p.m., the New York Observer posted up a 131-page book proposal by Michael Hastings, a Newsweek Baghdad correspondent. The memoir is about his time overseas and the death of his fiance. The Observer post promptly disappeared. Besides the obvious copyright issues with making the whole shebang available, there was another reason mega-lit agent (and poet!) Andrew Wylie wanted the proposal disappeared from the internet: it was going to get people killed in Iraq.

And now, a word from those of us who are actually threatened by the size of Dana Vachon's $650,000 advance. Or who, at least, think that publishers dole out such advances to highly marketable youngsters at the expense of real novels by real writers— who don't at all feel that Vachon is "the best pure writer to have emerged from the blogosphere" (we've actually read his entire book!), and who don't know him personally and also don't often find "affable Westchester goofiness" adorable in anyone. So! Today's Observer semi-takedown: predictable, yes, but right in at least one important respect. By underlining greasy eminence Jay McInerney's blurbing of both Indecision and Mergers & Acquisitions and dubbing Vachon this year's Lit Boy, Lizzy Ratner makes the point that writing a Bright Lights homage has basically become a literary genre unto itself. What is it about these Lit Boys' books that make them so irritating yet so compelling? Well, maybe Julia Allison, who said that the book made her want to fuck Dana Vachon, is onto something. YES, I JUST SAID THAT.

Sad news today for anyone who was predicting that Salman Rushdie and his fourth wife, model turned food writer and TV personality Padma Lakshmi, would go the distance: no less than Diane Von Furstenberg is spreading the rumor that they're through. And Padma is apparently the dumper, not the dump-ee: per DVF, she's thinking of leaving her marriage to focus on her hosting duties on Top Chef. While Padma's commitment to her career is laudable, it seems potentially ill-considered. After all, the producers of Top Chef clearly have a trophy-wives-only requirement for their hostesses—how else to explain Katie Lee Joel? If Padma does ditch Salman, they will no doubt immediately step up their efforts to recruit Melania Trump.

Why, we'd love to attend! Where are you guys registered?

Katherine Taylor is afraid of being considered a writer of chick lit ["Farrar Thinks Pink," Spencer Morgan, The New York World, March 12]. To establish her seriousness, she tells The Observer that my novel Indecision "was ridiculously simple" and suggests that "had it been a girl who'd written it, it would have had the pinkest cover in the world." I wonder why, if Ms. Taylor feels like that, she allowed her editor to send me the galleys of her novel, asking for a blurb. I didn't provide one—though I read enough of Ms. Taylor's book to understand her anxiety about being taken seriously.

Benjamin Kunkel
Manhattan

"Downshifting" is the new term that everyone is using —okay, so far, that two Observer reporters are using—to describe the phenomenon whereby people who actually live in one neigborhood exaggerate their proximity to a rougher area. Apparently, Erin "West Bushwick" Geld isn't the only person who's blurring the Bushwick-Williamsburg divide. Other culprits include Graham L stop-area waitress Xeniz Viray, who thinks her neighbor-friends "downshift" because "Bushwick sounds edgier than Williamsburg," and the Bushwick Country Club, a Williamsburg bar. But do a few map-illiterate dummies constitute a trend? Well, maybe ("Carroll Gardens," "Red Hook," and "Gowanus"-wise, especially), but downshifting isn't working for us me. Ghettofabricatin'? Hoodwinking? Anyone?

When Jared Kushner, tall boy-king of the New York Observer, sent out an email to his staff last night, it was during the most hectic part of the Tuesday night close, and he may have given a few folks mini-strokes.

In the culture section of this week's New York Observer, real estate reporter Max Abelson tries his hand at music criticism and spills a few hundred words on the new album by LCD Soundsystem. We're sure it's a fine piece, but as it happened, we didn't get through half of it before we noticed that the accompanying photograph of James Murphy was taken by none other than Win Butler, lead singer of the Arcade Fire.

Futher departures at the Voice: culture editor and insanely Brooklyn-hip mom Joy Press is heading to Salon, where she'll fill the slot recently vacated by Hillary Frey, who left that site to take a similar job at The Observer after Suzy Hansen left to go to... Istanbul. Two things: First, it's got to suck to have suffered through the entirety of the Blum era (Press is actually a veteran of ten years) only to get a new job just when things look like they might be turning around. Also, there is now a vacancy at the Voice for a culture lady. We expect that a couple folks at the Sun are updating their resumes as we speak. Must be female to play!

What a time for a young gossip columnist's drugs to permanently kick-in—beneath the short-ceilinged Graydon Carter nest that lurks across the street from Harvey Weinstein's endlessly-renovating townhouse. (Or maybe we meant "peeks," and so did Spencer, probably, when he wrote "Eddie Vedder looked upward, his face peaking out from a tangle of rangy locks." How high? So high!) Ha, we're being so mean and nitpicky—the peace is actually very good! Piece. Sorry. Glass houses! Anyway! Spencer's thesis is that, while in some ways Graydon Carter's Waverly Inn is the new Elaine's, in other ways, well, it isn't. But if one reduces his work to a list of proper nouns, it becomes a handy way to define the Waverly Inn itself!

New Village Voice reporter Felix Gillette (of that crazy con man story semi-fame) is moving to the Observer to work as a media reporter, where he'll make sure that current media reporter Michael Calderone finally has time to get lunch. Or eat Jared Kushner's free but shameful pizza, whatever! Gillette worked at the 'Voice' for all of three months or something, but remember that that's like a decade in David Blum years.