Doree Shafrir

Every weekday morning at 7:42, the NY1 newsman Pat Kiernan does an eight-minute segment called “In the Papers” in which he summarizes important articles from that day’s newspapers. It is this portion of the newscast—not “Weather on the 1’s,” not “The Rail and Road Report,” not the breaking news from the station’s far-flung (in the five boroughs, at least) reporters—that has endeared Mr. Kiernan, who is 39 years old and has been with the station since 1997, to thousands of culturally literate New Yorkers who, it is safe to say, do not watch any other local newscasts. But ask them, and they’ll cop to a certain degree of sincere admiration, bordering on obsession for some, of Mr.  read more »

The biggest problem with Clover Club, the new loungey bar on Smith Street in Boerum Hill, is that it gets Brooklyn pretension all wrong.

Everything looks like it came straight from the Jazz Age section of a Restoration Hardware catalog: tin ceiling, dark wood paneling, etched-glass light fixtures, black-and-white photos of indeterminate provenance of mustachioed men at a bar, leather-upholstered benches, and an overly descriptive menu of cocktails like the "Hemingway Cobbler" and the "Highland Smash."

In other words, it's all just a wee bit too contrived. Other new bars on Smith Street have managed to tread the fine line between overly precious and just precious enough to satisfy the finicky tastes of the intellectual-hipster crowd (see: Brooklyn Social, the JakeWalk, Gowanus Yacht Club).  read more »

The end of June is upon us, and thus the annual migration of bright-eyed graduates of the country’s more prestigious finishing schools to the doorman-converted one-bedrooms of Murray Hill and the Upper East Side, the walk-ups of Boerum Hill, and the lofts of Bushwick—pardon us, East Williamsburg—is also in full swing.

Most of these liberal-arts-minded young people have spent the spring worrying, their former dorm-mates from Princeton or Penn taking it easy while looking forward to their analyst positions at McKinsey or Goldman, Sachs (pity those poor Bear Stearns hirees!), sending out résumés in response to every editorial job posting on MediaBistro and, usually, hearing nothing back.  read more »

This is how I found out a good friend of mine—we’ll call her Lauren—was engaged: I was at her birthday party, and I ran into this other girl I know through mutual friends, and when I asked her how she knew Lauren, she said, “I’m a talent manager and her fiancé is my client.”

I nodded and pretended I knew what she was talking about. When she walked away, I asked the guy I’d been talking to—we’ll call him Max—if he had heard the news. He looked wide-eyed. “Did you see a ring on Lauren’s finger? I didn’t even look.”

I went over to Lauren and smacked her on the arm with a paper plate. “You know how I found out you were engaged? From Brian’s manager!” She giggled and showed us her left hand. “It just happened yesterday! I was going to tell you guys, I swear.”  read more »

When I came back to New York in 2005, I moved into an apartment in Williamsburg in a house owned by a friend of a friend.  read more »

LOS ANGELES—Jeff Lewis is a 38-year-old real estate investor who, last year, agreed to have his life filmed by Bravo for a television show about flipping houses. The first season of his show, Flipping Out, showed audiences six episodes of a deeply neurotic man who treats his staff like a dysfunctional family and has managed to turn his obsessive-compulsive disorder to his advantage. “I’m very fortunate, because I found a business that validates and celebrates my disorders,” he told the cameras.  read more »

Last week, at a press conference at NBC headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Center announcing that he would take over for Conan O’Brien on NBC’s Late Night next year, when Mr. O’Brien moves into Jay Leno’s big chair, Jimmy Fallon looked just a little sheepish.

“I’m very excited about this,” he told the crowd of reporters. “It’s just unbelievable to be in the building I used to work at! It’s gonna be a grind, is the advice I heard from everybody, and it’s gonna be really hard, and I’m ready to work really hard. I’m just excited about this. I hope to make this the best show, and the show to make everyone choose me to fall asleep during.” The crowd laughed politely. On the podium with him was his mentor, NBC comedy guru Lorne Michaels, who produces Late Night, which airs nightly at 12:30 a.m., and who had selected Mr. Fallon as its new host, just as he had anointed an unknown 30-year-old Conan O’Brien 15 years earlier.  read more »

Buzz Bissinger is the author of the Texas high-school football book Friday Night Lights and Prayer for the City, which is about Philadelphia under former Mayor Ed Rendell. Mr. Bissinger also wrote the Vanity Fair article on which the movie Shattered Glass was based. He is 53 years old, with a wide, almost froglike face and glasses, and on the night of Tuesday, April 29, he participated in a panel discussion on HBO’s Costas Now, hosted by NBC sportscaster Bob Costas, on the subject of sports and the Internet.  read more »

AUDITION
by Barbara Walters
Alfred A. Knopf, 624 pages, $29.95

Journalists are, by necessity, chameleons, or, as Janet Malcolm famously put it, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”  read more »

Think of a book club, and the image that comes to mind is one of a group of middle-aged women in a suburban living room, munching on crudités and sipping white wine, talking about The Kite Runner for 20 minutes and then sliding effortlessly into gossip about the markers of suburban ennui: children, husbands, lovers (always other people’s, of course), school boards, nosy neighbors, nosier bosses, and how Linda has lost so much weight since the divorce, maybe we should say something?

My mother has been in such a book club for over 20 years.  read more »

When Lifetime announced in early April that it had managed to yank Project Runway, for $150 million, from its longtime home on Bravo, the only people who seemed happy about the deal were Harvey Weinstein, Project Runway’s producer, whose production company will now get paid $1 million per episode instead of the $600,000 he was making at Bravo; and Lifetime, which saw the deal as the potential cornerstone of a massive rebranding effort. But nearly everyone else, it seemed, was not thrilled. The network better known for showing Golden Girls reruns and made-for-TV movies that usually involved some combination of a woman being stalked, a serial killer and/or a cheating/abusive husband was, not to put too fine a point on it, simply too Middle America for Project Runway fans.

“The thing that concerns us is that they talk about the show in terms of it being a women’s show,” said Tom Fitzgerald, 41, one-half of the blogging team behind the popular Project Rungay blog, which obsessively chronicles every episode as well as any and all behind-the-scenes gossip. “And we’re living proof that that’s not entirely the case. It has a very large gay viewership. It has a very large straight viewership that likes the fact that it’s an urban, intelligent, creative reality show. Our hope is that they don’t forget that.”  read more »

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The other day, I wrote a lighthearted piece about a new feature on Facebook called "People You Might Know," which showed Facebook users profiles of people they were connected to. (One writer I spoke to said, "I’ve been feeling like somehow Facebook knows to recommend the very people whose existence I try to forget.") As of last night People You Might Know appears to have been removed from Facebook. Working out the kinks, or stung by criticism?  read more »

The other weekend I went to a housewarming party that an editor I know was throwing in Prospect Heights. It was one of those parties where everyone there is someone you’ve seen at another media party but never hung out with one-on-one and the conversations tend to veer toward industry gossip (stuff like: “Well, I’m considering taking the editor-at-large position”), what I like to call byline stalking (“I loved your profile of Chelsea Clinton, but your blog post on your corner deli was hysterical”) and not-so-subtle undermining (“That Web site seems like a really good place for you right now”).

One woman, who is always wearing the types of dresses I wish I owned because they seem perfectly suited to media parties—simple, black, vaguely vintagey-looking, knee-length, very flattering—made a beeline for me.  read more »

“There’s not one path anymore,” David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins and former longtime deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said the other day. “Thirty years ago, you worked at a newspaper, you moved to a magazine, and then you wrote books or screenplays. Today you can be a blogger who writes books or you can be a stripper who wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.”

It all sounds so … uncomplicated, doesn’t it?  read more »

“Ben looks like Beaker from the Muppets on the outside, but then inexplicably like a guy from Prison Break under his clothes,” said Mindy Kaling, the 28-year-old actress who plays Kelly Kapoor on The Office. “I think if I’m going to have a boyfriend who works out, he better be sort of embarrassed about it, like Ben is. Sheepish fitness is the only tolerable kind.”  read more »

LAST LAST CHANCE
By Fiona Maazel
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 337 pages, $25

Lucy Clark is a 30-year-old drug addict (downers, mostly) who grew up in a 7,000-square-foot New York City apartment, whose father killed himself after a deadly strain of plague disappeared from his lab under mysterious circumstances, whose mother is a crackhead, whose precocious 12-year-old half-sister is obsessed with plague and whose grandmother, Agneth, is convinced that reincarnation is possible and that she, indeed, has lived before. There’s also a best friend who married the only man Lucy ever truly loved, as well as Lucy’s current boyfriend, Stanley, an alcoholic seeking a uterus for his dead wife’s frozen eggs, and a host of other characters who make Fiona Maazel’s debut novel Last Last Chance alternately entertaining and frustrating.  read more »

The business-lunch crowd was beginning to trickle in around 12:30 p.m. on a recent afternoon at El Rio Grande, the Murray Hill restaurant where the gossip columnist Liz Smith is a regular (she lives upstairs). Ms. Smith, who is 85, has been writing gossip for nearly 32 years, and recently helped start a Web site for women over 40 that is, perhaps, where the mothers of the saucy lasses of the women’s blog Jezebel might hang out online. The site, Wowowow.com, stands for Women on the Web, and Ms. Smith’s partners in the venture read like a Who’s Who of the well preserved and the powerful: advertising guru Mary Wells; Joni Evans, who used to be the president of Simon & Schuster; Lesley Stahl, the 60 Minutes reporter; and Peggy Noonan, the conservative columnist.  read more »

Democratic bundler Robert Zimmerman was sitting in a conference room in the Great Neck office of his public relations and marketing firm a couple of weeks ago, musing over his quietly inexorable climb into the elite levels of New York and national politics over the past 20 or so years.

On the walls hung maps of Long Island, a pastel photo illustration of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and a poster of J.F.K. with John Jr. Mr. Zimmerman, 53, is a member of the Democratic National Committee and also a superdelegate, and is one of Senator Hillary Clinton’s top fund-raisers in the country. Though he himself does not have the wealth of, say, other major Clinton finance people like banker Hassan Nemazee and venture capitalist Steven Rattner, he has proven to be incredibly successful at convincing other people with disposable income to support his candidate.  read more »

The Media Mob just received an invitation to an April 9 launch party for a new InterActive Corp. Web site called RushmoreDrive.com, hosted by IAC CEO Barry Diller and RushmoreDrive CEO Johnny Taylor. But just what is RushmoreDrive? The invite claims that it will be "the web destination that will change the way the Black community Drives the Web." (Drive! Oh, we get it.) Currently, its Web site just says, "Discover More Here Spring 2008," and when The Observer called up Mr. Taylor to find out more, he was tight-lipped.

"Right now we're telling people what it's not," he said by phone from RushmoreDrive's offices in Charlotte, N.C. "I'm telling them it's not a content site. Most of the products you see in the black space are celebrity, sports or entertainment sites, like BET.com or BlackVoices.com. Then you have social networking sites like BlackPlanet.com. We're none of those."  read more »

It is probably only a slight exaggeration to say that to be an author of young adult books today is to have written, be writing or contemplating writing a book about vampires. But vampires are over! says conventional wisdom. It’s all about zombies and faeries (that’s faeries, with that extra “e,” signifying their paranormal qualities and that they’re not of the Tinkerbell or Tooth varieties) and ghosts and werewolves. Vampires are totally 2005!

But the conventional wisdom is, in this case, wrong. Like the necks they so greedily suck on, vampires have attacked the young adult market in such a way that editors, agents and publishers are throwing up their hands in surrender. Give the people what they want!

“I thought vampires were over at least two years ago, and I was completely wrong,” said Trident agent Jenny Bent, who represents Lynsay Sands, author of best-selling mass-market paperbacks with titles like Bite Me If You Can and The Accidental Vampire. “These trends come and go, but vampires aren’t going anywhere.”  read more »

New York has always been about jockeying for position, and being named to the board of the New York Public Library remains one of the jewels in an ever more exclusive crown; the current Board of Trustees counts among its members New Yorker editor David Remnick, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., humorist Calvin Trillin and former Harvard president Neil Rudenstine, not to mention several captains of industry, chief among them Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman, as well as socialites such as Annette de la Renta. The annual Library Lions gala took in $2.6 million last year. Its 33-member junior board—the Young Lions Committee—is headed up by actor Ethan Hawke, and board members include film director Wes Anderson, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, author Malcolm Gladwell and novelist Marisha Pessl, among other budding social and literary luminaries.

Absent a famous last name, or a fancy job, or an award-winning book, or simply a boatload of cash, a New York Public Library board position is a long shot for even the most devoted bibliophile. But what about … Brooklyn?  read more »

Waiting at the new Second Avenue Deli, 23 blocks north and one and a quarter avenues west of its original location at Second Avenue and 10th Street, just down the block from Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, is not easy. Visible through the glass separating the vestibule from the restaurant is the takeout counter, and those sides of meat—pastrami, corned beef, tongue—are so tantalizing that when cash-and-carry customers emerge triumphantly (are they smirking?), sandwich in hand, it’s hard not to think: If I grabbed the bag and ran, they probably wouldn’t catch me because they are at least 75 years old.

Customers waiting for tables at 6:30 on a recent Wednesday evening: daughter—huge Louis Vuitton bag, highlighted hair—and father, portly, refuse seats at counter. Mother-daughter team, eyes roll when told it would be a few minutes. A man—fiftyish, tall, black leather jacket—turns right around and declares, “I don’t wait!”  read more »

The other day at this spinning class I go to sometimes, the instructor fiddled with the CD player as he told us to “crank it up five full turns,” which is really huffing-and-puffing stage for me. “Keisha, I’m putting on a song for you! You’ll like this one!” he said, indicating a woman in the second row of bikes. He pushed some buttons. Nothing. One woman in the front row turned around and squealed, “Keeeeeeisha!” Unfortunately the CD player wasn’t cooperating. “Keisha, I am so sorry,” the instructor said. “I left Mary at home! I’ll bring her in next time!”

Mary, in this case, being Mary J. Blige; Keisha, in this case, being the woman who sits on the same bike every time I’ve been to the class, next to the spiky-haired Asian woman. Then in front are the long-curly-haired woman who’s moving out of town; the super-buff woman who whoops and hollers throughout class; and the other woman who whoops and hollers throughout class. When one of them misses a class, the other ones ask them where they’ve been.  read more »

First-time authors looking for a book deal could do worse than to have a piece published in Modern Love, the New York Times Sunday Styles column that tends to provoke eye-rolling among the chattering classes—if they admit to reading the thing at all.  read more »

The events of the week of Sept.  read more »

“It was the most shaming experience of my life, talking to these people,” said New Yorker writer George Packer the other morning, sitting on an antique sofa in the living room of the Prospect Heights townhouse he shares with his wife, writer Laura Secor, and their 4-month-old son, Charlie. Mr.  read more »

When the 21-year-old Internet entrepreneur David Karp was 17, he moved himself to Tokyo for five months—he prepaid the rent on his apartment because he was under 18—where he continued working as the chief technology officer of UrbanBaby, the New York-based message board and e-mail list for overprotective parents with a lot of disposable income and free time on their hands. He had been home-schooled since he was 15, after dropping out of Bronx Science, and had been taking Japanese classes at the Japan Society on 47th Street.  read more »

On a Sunday afternoon in late December, Elna Baker stood in front of a class of around 20 young men in ties and women in skirts. Ms. Baker, who is 25 and has red hair and a bright red vintage coat, was wearing a plaid miniskirt, a black turtleneck sweater and black suede high heels. These shoes had replaced the black low-top Converse she had been wearing earlier, before she stepped through the threshold of the Union Square ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Ms.  read more »

This time last year, it would have been difficult to fathom that as 2007 came to a rather inexorable end, there would be no new episodes of The Office or, hell, even Desperate Housewives to get us through what promises to be another long, cold, slushy New York winter; that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would be doing their shows on their own; and that in a world when one man, Rupert Murdoch, owns a scarily increasing percentage of the world’s media, a one-woman Web site would show that feisty journalistic independence isn’t  read more »

“Buenas noches!” exclaimed Congressman Anthony Weiner to the mostly Dominican crowd gathered on a recent evening in an all-purpose room at the Isabella Geriatric Center in Washington Heights. The congressman bounded to the front of the room, where Councilman Miguel Martinez, who represents the area, was waiting.

“Immigration isn’t just a problem for people in New York,” said Mr. Weiner, who is 43.  read more »

On far West 18th Street—past the housing projects and the parking lots and the auto-body shops, where the High Line is home not to condos but homeless people—the new, $100 million international headquarters of Barry Diller’s company, InterActiveCorp, rises like an undulating, reflective space station. The lobby is home to the largest video wall in the world, and another video wall, behind the security desk, that shows statistics from various IAC Web sites.  read more »

As the fall benefit season transitions into the holiday party season, few New Yorkers can lay claim to having attended as many events of late as Sir Salman Rushdie.  read more »

Judith Regan has theories of who drove her from HarperCollins; here are some: Kerik, Ailes, Giuliani, Murdoch, Jane Friedman; retribution is her plan.  read more »

Bruised and battered by The New York Times, the restaurateur is coming back for more.  read more »

We found out this morning from Jeffrey Chodorow that the uber-restaurateur will sign a 7,000-square-foot lease today for a 140-seat restaurant in the Empire Hotel at 63rd Street and Broadway.

Mr. Chodorow tells The Observer he's planning to make the restaurant "a classic American steakhouse."

It felt like a huge sorority reunion at the party before Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year Awards at Avery Fisher Hall on Monday, Nov. 5.  read more »

Last evening, as the writers' strike got into full swing and late-night talk shows halted production, one comedian found a venue for his work. Stephen Colbert was tapped to introduce House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at Glamour's Women of the Year awards, where she received special recognition from the Conde Nast title. So for one night, the only people watching Mr. Colbert were in the packed Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. To read the text of Mr. Colbert's introduction--in which he displays a suspiciously comprehensive knowledge of current women's fashion--click through to the jump.  read more »

In a small storefront on Broome Street, where Little Italy gives way to Chinatown, an old-fashioned candy maker called Papabubble has set up shop. On a recent sunny afternoon, two raffish young men, each wearing work gloves, their hair secured in matching black do-rags, stood behind a marble counter, kneading and pulling several gelatinous blobs. One was white and doughy-looking; another was yellow-brown and looked like a huge molasses spill. It was almost iridescent.  read more »

Philip Gourevitch is young, attractive, socially ambitious and successful. And it’s his job to make George Plimpton’s magazine remarkable again in an era that no longer produces George Plimptons.  read more »

Last evening, the cozy Tribeca offices of The Paris Review were packed in celebration of the magazine's Fall issue, which features a photo dossier of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and an interview with the Israeli author David Grossman, who is working on his first novel in several years. New Yorker fact-checker Jonathan Shainin, who conducted the interview in and around Grossman's home outside Jerusalem, told Media Mob that he interviewed Grossman over the course of several days, resulting in around nine hours of tape. "Mercifully, Paris Review interns typed it," Mr. Shainin said. "It was a 50,000 word transcript! I definitely had my favorite bits that didn't make it in to the final version," which is around 11,000 words. Well, novelists are wordy!

Paris Review has a long tradition of throwing open its office parties to the greater literary community of New York, a tradition begun by the magazine's late founder George Plimpton, when the magazine was based in his Upper East Side townhouse. When the current editor-in-chief, New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch, moved the magazine downtown after becoming editor in 2005, the tradition of the parties continued. And thus, at times it seemed that every editorial assistant in town (or at least, those at the better publishing houses) was there, swilling from the open bar and dipping their hands into the potato chips.  read more »

Does the Adam Moss formula know no bounds? The latest spin-off from New York magazine is set to hit newsstands Nov. 15, and will be a twice-yearly fashion magazine called New York Look, helmed by fashion director Harriet Mays Powell. (First reported on in August, the magazine will be released at a launch party on Nov. 13.)

Since taking over New York in February 2004, editor-in-chief Moss has gradually remade the magazine into a sometimes overly clever compendium of What It Means to be a Mossian New Yorker. (It doesn't hurt that owner Bruce Wasserstein seems to be willing to sink an infinite amount of money into the operation.) Mr. Moss' information-heavy formula—composed of equal parts think pieces and charticles—focuses on the verticals of fashion, real estate, food, politics, and culture.  read more »

The brand is you! The new new new Journalism thrives on the new anxiety in journalism: avoiding redundancy. Hey, kids, they’re hiring at the Times!  read more »

On Friday, Oct. 19, Gourmet magazine threw a gala at the Time Warner Center, heralding a “Gourmet Institute” weekend during which “foodies” pay $1,400 each to hear hero-chefs like Anthony Bourdain, Thomas Keller and Charlie Palmer speak and demonstrate their craft.  read more »

Yesterday’s news that Us Weekly blogger Noelle Hancock (a former Observer staffer) is jumping ship to the soon-to-relaunch PageSix.com got us thinking about what the Post’s plans are for the new Web site. (We understand that the Post—through photo editor Dave Boyle; not Page Six editor Richard Johnson—has made offers to at least five Us staffers, though Ms. Hancock is the only one to jump ship thus far.) Gawker reported that the site is trying to staff up, especially on the West Coast, where TMZ currently has a stranglehold on the minutiae of what goes down every night at Les Deux.

However! A quick glance at the Nielsen/NetRatings stats for the past three months shows that the only celebrity site that’s shown growth is People.com, which had 6.5 million unique U.S. visitors in September, up by more than 1.5 million since July. TMZ’s growth appears to have stagnated in the same time period, though that site’s traffic still dwarves People’s: In July, TMZ recorded nearly 10.3 million visitors, which dipped to 9.4 million in August and jumped back up to July levels in September. By contrast, UsMagazine.com’s traffic has stagnated at around the 1 million mark since July, and Perez Hilton’s uniques have gone from 2.4 million in July to 2.2 million in September.

Taken together, the numbers point to what can only be a worrying trend for celebrity news and gossip sites: there is, perhaps, some audience fatigue. TMZ recently laid off one of its New York-based staffers, who was writing for the Web site; this staffer was told that the site was restructuring. Of course, TMZ also has its own successful venture in TMZ TV, for which Web site managing editor Harvey Levin serves as executive producer. Mr. Levin created the tabloid TV show Celebrity Justice in 2002, and some have speculated that since the show was canceled in 2005, Mr. Levin has been plotting his triumphant return to tabloid TV—an outlet that is ultimately much more lucrative than a Web site. Still, a TMZ spokeswoman told us that both the TV show and the Web site will continue moving “full-steam ahead” for the foreseeable future.  read more »

Stephanie Creaturo, Angela Clark and Christina Hatgis are setting up shop 10 blocks from their former home, Area Yoga.  read more »

In the Times’s new online book club, Reading Room, participants (including author Francine Prose, and frequent Book Review contributor Liesl Schillinger) and moderator/Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus are debating a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Another participant is Times executive editor Bill Keller, whose thoughts on the novel seemed not irrelevant to how he perceives the paper and his role there—and reveals more than a little bit about his personality.

“Somehow I managed to make it through college and into late middle age without having read War and Peace… W&P was always too intimidating in scale, and too show-offy to bring to the beach.”  read more »

At Brooklyn grocery L’Epicerie, you can have a dream homemade meal—just make sure to bring your friends.  read more »

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has 13 recordings of Richard Strauss’s opera, two cats, a husband and a new book.  read more »

At the New York Film Festival’s opening night party, which was held on Friday, Sept. 28, at the elegantly faded, labyrinthine Central Park restaurant Tavern on the Green, the actress LeeLee Sobieski approached an outdoor table and asked if sh