In Styles this week, the New York Times profiles Jared Kushner, the young owner of the New York Observer. In Styles! Why? Did Mr. Kushner start a trend? Or did he make a fashion? We may have to revisit this piece a few times! But for now: So, Kushner and the paper's editor, Peter Kaplan, recount a bonding trip to a Yankees playoff game back in the summer. Kushner reveals that two weeks earlier, he'd gone to a game and sat next to "the owner of another New York news media property," and was "astounded at his disdain for his staff." So hard to believe! People, tell us who disdains you. (P.S. Disclosures abound; for one, Weekend Gawker has interned at the Observer. Also, do enjoy the research credit at the end of the story: Happy Blitt strikes again!)

New York Observer publisher Jared Kushner has bought something new! It's a website called Politics NJ. Right now it looks like 5 websites threw up on each other. Wow, the redesign just went up! Historically, PoliticsNJ has tons of local oomph—of course, their most fascinating and long-running story has always been the Krazy Kushner family itself. Awkward! Well, good timing, as the market's wide open since the Times has given up entirely on covering Jersey. Kushner's plans include installing Governor Christine Todd Whitman and former U.S. Senator Robert Torricelli as bloggers. It's just like the Huffington Post, but everyone's blogging at the bar of Tony Soprano's strip club!

We so wanted to dislike debut novelist Katherine Taylor. Rules For Saying Goodbye was hyped as "invoking the spirit of Melissa Bank and Curtis Sittenfeld" in the announcement that it had sold to FSG, and it's rumored to be Starbucks' next pick. Oh, and: "It's hard, when you're blond and attractive and you live in Los Angeles and you've written a book about young women in New York, not to be called 'chick lit,'" she told the Observer's Spencer Morgan. Oooh, bitch! But wait... do we hate her? Maybe she's just being honest. Regardless, she does at least seem to understand the genre's conventions: "'Indecision [by Benjamin Kunkel] was ridiculously simple, I thought,' she said. 'And had it been a girl who'd written it, it would have had the pinkest cover in the world. It would have been the pinkest of all-time pink covers.'" Did we say we hated her? We might just have to buy a few hundred copies.

"It is in an affluent neighborhood with high pedestrian traffic. We couldn't have found a more visible opportunity on the Upper West Side," crowed broker Mark Kapnick in a press release announcing his firm's latest triumph: locking down a lease for the L.A. frozen yogurt empire's fifth location in New York. Barnard ladies will just be able to slip on their Uggs and march over there in their pajama bottoms! Total Pinkberry yogurt domination is at hand! Soon Tasti-D will admit defeat!

"It's just like not being all those fucking metrosexual dickfaces," Freemans Sporting Club member Jack Dakin told the Observer back in November. Oh really? Thursgay's Critical Shopper column details the wares of the Lower East Side taxidermy-filled barbershop'n'$2,000 suits emporium, and it paints a very metrosexual, very dickfacey picture. $390 hand-stitched rubber wellies! $3,000 custom tailoring! A $40 fade haircut! But there is one genre of hipster accessory the FSC doesn't sell, writes Shopper-sub Horatio Silva: "The focus here is clearly on authentic work wear and on the trappings of masculinity—in other words, on the importance of being Ernest Hemingway. Which explains why there are no man jewels available at this Big Papa's House."

Stag Party At The Hunting Lodge [NYT]
Earlier: Freeman's He-Man Woman Haters No Metrosexual Dickfaces Club

Okay, so it's been three weeks, they've had plenty of time to work out the kinks. Let's take a look at the redesigned New York Observer! We dropped the dollar for the print edition, so we're going to go page by page and see what all the fuss is about. Take a seat. We're going to be here for some time.

Those poor, stretched-thin kids at the Observer are going to have to stretch themselves a little thinner. "Edgy Enthusiast" columnist Ron Rosenbaum is ditching the pink paper to share his random meanderings on Shakespeare and Bob Dylan with Slate's more patient, equally geriatric, audience. Rosenbaum, a journalistic legend in this town since 1877, when he wrote an article about how you could make free calls on Alexander Graham Bell's new voice-carrying device, leaves a large acre of space for the Observer folks to fill. Presumably, we can expect more real estate coverage. Or ads, if they can sell them.

You catch that Observer piece on Princeton's eating clubs and their rush (or as the school has it, "bicker") process? Intrepid reporter Spencer Morgan went undercover last weekend—and we can only imagine how difficult it was for young Spencer to convincingly portray a sozzled WASP—and got the whole shocking story of race, class, sex, and nudity. Turns out, though, that not everyone at Princeton was thrilled with the piece.

The New York Observer is deep inside the freakshow of their second tabloid close—they'll put out 64 pages of somethin' tomorrow!— but there's one office that's not humming with activity. Mary Dixie Carter—the newspaper's publishing director, editor of their website's unholy Bridal Blog, and also the clear winner of 2003's New York Times wedding announcements competition—has packed up her belongings. The daughter of Arthur Carter, the paper's former owner-publisher, she is off to be a writer for The Economist. We have one thought. If our mom were on Desperate Housewives and our dad was Sandy Weill's original business partner and a pioneer of the leveraged buy-out, we sure as fuck wouldn't be working anywhere. We'd be sitting on our asses on a yacht, asking the poolboy for another Singapore Sling.

We just trudged to the newsstand at the corner of Spring and Lafayette secure in the knowledge that it's the newsstand that has everything. But not, alas, Jared Kushner's new New York Observer! For the first time in the history of ever, the NYO sold out at a newsstand. We did get to have, swear to God, the following exchange with the cashier:

• Comedy Central and TVLand head downtown to Hudson Street, although that may just be a plot by Viacom to make mass layoffs easier to handle. [NYP]
  

• Tabloidism is allegedly the most radical change in the New York Observer's history. [NYO]
  

Poor Observer editors, toiling away until all hours in the service of boy-publisher Jared Kushner's diabolical tabloidical schemes, and now, a tipster reports, with nowhere to get relief. Apparently there's been no running water in 915 Broadway, the building that houses the NYO, and one reporter describes the bathrooms as looking and smelling like Baghdad. Mmmm.

I want to be New York's answer to Rachel Zoe . . . Yeah, Nicole Richie did fire her and called her a bitch, but you know she worked her way up to that. She's one of my idols.

Lawyer turned reporter Melissa Lafsky went big over on The HuffPo today, with a story about the pink weekly New York Observer. Big news! Tomorrow marks the re-launch of the paper as a tabloid—plus a new web site!

So what's behind the mystery of Rebecca Dana's employment status? Dana, you'll remember, was plucked from the Observer to join the Times. Yesterday's Broadcasting & Cable suggested that she might be staying at the pink paper after all. Why would that be? The following rumor is making the rounds:

Jason Horowitz leads today's Observer with a profile of Delaware Senator - and presidential candidate - Joe Biden. As Biden surveys his rivals on the Democratic side, he offers up the kind of quote that a reporter only dreams of getting:

We just finishing yawning our way through Chris Shott's tour of the purported constant blogfucky networking party that is the L.E.S., which features tour stops at "Blogger Peach Pit" The Magician and a nod to "the babe-hopping habits of BlackTable.com editor A.J. Daulerio." The Black Table, like everything else about this article, has been defunct for at least a year. Well, or so we hear. We actually sort of wouldn't know; our hobnobbing in "Hell Square" with this "college-educated yet often high-schoolish crowd" has been limited. Like, doesn't Shott know that these people are, in addition to being "old-school," also just . . . you know, old?

Yesterday, we reproduced a tip from a long-ago Observer intern who worked for "pre-plastic surgery" Alex K., whose "cackling" at this young lady's unfortunate choice in panstwear still causes her pain. As you know, our goal is to bring you balanced coverage of the issues that matter, and it's in that spirit that we bring you this counterpoint:

• "Time Inc. has selected Stockholm's Bonnier Group as the winner of the auction for the right to buy 18 of Time Inc.'s magazines. There was no immediate word on the price that Bonnier will pay, but the terms are in place and a deal should close within a month." That's what AdAge said, but then they pulled it. So who knows? [AdAge]