Ah, so that's where the New Yorker cartoonists get their inspiration. Overheard, in the elevator, at Conde Nast headquarters in Times Square, one emaciated fashionista to another: I have people waiting in line for my hand-me-downs.
The New Yorker's James Suroweicki says that the failure of the AOL/TW merger has more to do with TW's failure to utilize AOL's distribution network than the culture clashes between the two companies. Time Warner never had a homogeneous culture in the first place. He doesn't, however, deny that such conflicts existed. AOL's astronomical valuation left newly merged AOL execs much wealthier that their TW counterparts and one TW employee recalls an AOLer ending a meeting by saying "Well, I'm worth $100 million, so the truth is, I just don't really care."
The culture excuse
Oh dear, Harvey Weinstein will be really insufferable now. Last night at the Golden Globes, Miramax won best director for Gangs of New York, best drama for The Hours, and three awards for Chicago. Cue a chorus for the great leader that wouldn't have been out of place at a Ba'athist party conference.
We haven't done our official "Why San Francisco Sucks" issue yet (we're trying to cull the mountains of material), but the New Yorker's Calvin Trillin provides one more reason: no delivery. As we've pointed out on prior occasions, you can get anything delivered in Manhattan. Trillin, in San Fran visiting the grandchildren and the newly arrived great-grandchildren, observes that all the restaurants offer take-out, but not delivery. "Take-out," he notes, involves the annoying inconvenience of having to get in a car and drive. Manhattanites who "have expensive apartments with no kitchens" (or in some cases, use the stove to store fashion magazines,) have created a commercial environment where restaurants have an incentive to deliver, and nearly everyone does.
Local bounty [The New Yorker]
In this week's New Yorker, Robert Sullivan engages in a favorite Manhattan recreational activity: making fun of the suburbs. The posh suburbs, that is. The Ryes and Scarsdales of the world. (The real suburbswith their Olive Gardens, prefabricated houses, people who feed their kids spaghetti from a can, and ubiquitous Gapsare never funny.) "Hob Nob"a sort of poor man's Greenwichis an hour and half from Grand Central by Metro North, but 15 minutes by car service. The city has a "real history," a small downtown area, the requisite farmer named Bob, and who knows, maybe even a Toyota dealership so the "poor" people can buy cars.
If you're thinking of living in... [New Yorker]
Paul Goldberger analyzes the world trade center proposals in this month's issue of the New Yorker and offers commentary on the plans themselves as well as the "byzantine" process that will theoretically result in a final decision. He also questions the logic of holding separate competitions for the new business complex and the site's September 11th memorial.
Press release: "Designing Downtown" [New Yorker]
Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, Art Spiegelman, is leaving The New Yorker. Again. Spiegelman insinuates that Remnick's New Yorker is too timid for his tastes and that he feels as if he were in "internal exile." The exiled Mr. Spiegelman will be taking refuge in the European media, with a book coming out in Milan, and his work published by German newspaper, Die Zeit.
Spiegelman splits from The New Yorker [Observer]
If you're thinking of living in: it's the real estate column in the New York Times which describes, lovingly, distant neighborhoods so unfamiliar that the reporter could well be making them up. A possibility explored in the latest New Yorker.
Conde Nast is a notoriously political and opaque organization, and the seating plan at Si Newhouse's Christmas lunch is one of the few ways to work out which magazines are in favor. At the top tables: David Remnick of the New Yorker, Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair, Alexandra Golonkin of Lucky, and Linda Wells of Allure. Tom Florio, publisher of Vogue, and Walter Anderson, president of Parade Publications, were further from the power seats. Am I really writing this?
Si's power luncheon [New York Post]
Ken Auletta's explosive article on Harvey Weinstein in this week's New Yorker is sure to warrant Auletta an unpleasant visit from the fat man in blackand probably already has. Harvey insists that he's really lovable guy who just has a passion for movies and occasionally gets carried away. Very Michael Ovitz of him.
This week in the New Yorker [New Yorker]
Looks like the New Yorker is now posting the whole of Talk of the Town online. They used to put...
I hadn't realized Tina Brown — former editor of the New Yorker and Talk — had started her New York...
