Tina Brown

Now that HBO has hired Tina Brown and Frank Rich for consulting gigs, Felix Gillette wonders, "So what’s next?" He also notes, "the truly free-range journalist-consultant—one with a broad editorial mandate to roam here and there gnawing lustfully on some projects while trampling others willy-nilly—remains a rare and exotic beast."

Speaking of television, Doree Shafrir meets Bravo's Flipping Out host Jeff Lewis, "a deeply neurotic man who treats his staff like a dysfunctional family and has managed to turn his obsessive-compulsive disorder to his advantage."

John Koblin looks at this past week's New York Times Magazine and writes, "Sex sells, of course—but this was not Maxim. And women writers in Manhattan could be forgiven for a slightly sickly feeling as they regarded the images. This again?" Plus: Slicing the SATC Pie.  read more »

Over the past few weeks, HBO has announced a series of moves to stem the tide of speculation that the network is faltering. After canceling 12 Miles of Bad Road, a series starring Lily Tomlin, HBO announced deals with Oscar winners Alexander Payne (of Sideways and Election fame) to develop a dark comedy called Hung, about a man who divines power from his generous equipment; and Alan Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under, who is working on not one but two shows for the network.  read more »

It seems like just yesterday—well, late October, anyway—Brijit.com, the website that read and summarized magazines, was launched. At the time, The Washington Post's Frank Ahrens profiled Brijit's founder, Jeremy Brosowsky, and wrote, "[T]he Internet is littered with good ideas that turn out to be bad businesses, and online publishing can be especially tricky: Do you go mass-market or niche? Subscription-based, or free and ad-supported? Original content or aggregation of other content?"

Yesterday, the site ceased publishing new content. In a farewell post on his own site, Brosowsky wrote, "Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we’ve run out of money, and can no longer afford to pursue our vision of adapting great long-form content for a short-form world, at least not as a stand-alone company. As recently as yesterday morning, we thought we had the funding in place to continue our work together. But as it turns out, we don’t."  read more »

At around 7:45 p.m. on Monday, April 28, writer Carl Bernstein was mingling at the cocktail hour before the PEN Literary Awards at the Museum of Natural History, Coca Cola in hand, looking very healthy. “I ride a bike and listen to a lot of music,” he said. “I mostly listen to classical but also rock.  read more »

Over at Radar, Neel Shah is reporting that Tina Brown is partnering with Barry Diller to develop what Ms. Brown called "a new take on an aggregator website."

Edward Felsenthal, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, will be the editor. There aren't many other details—Brown didn't give a launch date, or really any specifics—but apparently there will be no "ideological stance."  read more »

Did George Clooney pop the question? [Marie Claire UK]

All this while he avows that he is "gay, gay" (and not "gay, gay, gay"): "That third 'gay' was pushing it."[People]

Matt Damon's rep confirms he and his wife Luciana are expecting. [People]  read more »

Tina Brown, who edited The New Yorker during all but two of Bill Clinton's years in the White House, will write a book about the former President and his wife for Doubleday, it was announced today.

The book will be called The Clinton Chronicles--just like Ms.Brown's last one, which came out this summer, was called The Diana Chronicles. Maybe she is starting a franchise?

Phyllis Grann is the acquiring editor, just like she was on Diana, for which she paid a reported $2 million dollars. The book--which, according to the press release from Doubleday, will explore "not just the enthralling story of the Clintons themselves but the social, political and media context of the times"-- is scheduled for publication in 2010.

Tina Brown, having run magazines and briefly written a newspaper column, has a new venture. According to the Post's Liz Smith, Ms. Brown, the former editor of both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, has signed a deal to bring projects and story ideas to HBO.

Post-Sopranos, the cable network may need all the help it can get generating buzz and new ideas. And few are better at that than Ms. Brown.

This isn't Ms. Brown's first foray into television, of course. From 2004 to 2005, she hosted a weekly interview show on CNBC, which drew high-profile guests but struggled in the ratings.

Speaking of New Yorker editors, it sounds like Tina Brown has some suggestions for her sucessor at the magazine. She recently told an Indian paper: "I would probably redesign it again. I might make a shorter front of the book section."

We're sure David Remnick appreciates the advice.

And on that note: Happy Thanksgiving!  read more »

After spending the better part of last year penning The Diana Chronicles in relative isolation at her beach house, erstwhile New Yorker editor Tina Brown is, at least for the time being, happy to soak up the odd wingding.  read more »

Everyone who’s tripped over, say, any section of The New York Times lately knows that Tina Brown has written a new biography of the late Princess Diana. She celebrated it at the Sony Club, the penthouse of 550 Madison Avenue, on Monday, June 11.  read more »

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Tina Brown’s new biography of her apparent longtime girl crush, the doomed Princess of Wales, is that one doesn’t feel totally embarrassed reading it.  read more »

Last night, Al Gore mingled with muckety-mucks at Harry and Tina Brown's.

Tonight, he'll be at Town Hall with at least one of the aforementioned muckety-mucks. (That would be Laurie David, the wife of Larry David, who appears in this announcement from the Town Hall website with the alternate spelling.)

Date: (Thur) May 25 at 8 pm Event: AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: A WIRED TOWN HALL DISCUSSION ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS Description: Al Gore in conversation with James Hansen, Laurie Davide, Lawrence Bender, moderated by WIRED contributing editor John Hockenberry. Ticket Price: $20 orchestra & $15 balcony Where to get Tickets: On sale now at The Town Hall Box Office and Ticketmaster

Producer: Wired Magazine

At what point does the movie promotion end and the run for president begin?

When I met him at the Times Square offices of The New Yorker, Roger Angell—who’s just pu  read more »

My old colleague Greg Sargent says that Tina Brown and Harold Evans will be (re)introducing Al Gore to a bunch of fancy-pants media types at a private dinner party at their place next Wednesday.

The idea of the dinner, Greg quotes one source as saying, is to showcase Gore to these opinion makers in a "different light" from the "dutiful, cautious veep" they saw in 2000.

Reviewers have been noticing a certain resonance about the fiery-tressed femme fatale portrayed on the cover of Maureen Dowd's new book, Are Men Necessary?.

Is the "bombshell in a clinging red dress" or the "flame-haired bombshell in a clingy crimson dress and matching pumps," described by Katherine Harrison and Joy Press in The New York Times Book Review and The Village Voice, respectively, meant as a stand-in for the author herself? Dowd's vampy hose-and-heels full-page portrait accompanying a recent New York Times Magazine excerpt from the book—and her portrayal in the noirishly headlined New York magazine cover story The Redhead and the Gray Lady—reinforced the notion that the two redheads are one and the same.

But there's another reason Dowd's cover girl looks so familiar: She's virtually identical to the woman gracing the cover of the June 26, 1995 'Fiction Issue' of The New Yorker

The two paintings, both by 40-year-old East Bay, CA illustrator Owen Smith, are near mirror images. The earlier woman has slightly lighter hair and a slightly less clingy dress, but both women are reading a book with one hand and straphanging with the other—while a fellow passenger in the foreground looks up and studies her curves with what undergrads might call "the male gaze."

"She wanted me to do this woman I'd done, this archetypal 40s dame," Smith said by phone. The woman was never meant to specifically reference Dowd, he said, but the two share some qualities: "She's a redhead and she's attractive... She's a strong woman, but she's comfortable dressing like a woman in a traditional sense."

Initially, Dowd had wanted to buy the New Yorker cover outright, but Smith offered to update it for her. "We did a lot of sketches. It was weeks of sketches. [Dowd] had a lot of input and it was a back and forth. She was a little more hands on."

Earlier versions of the cover depicted the redhead in different locations, sometimes reading, sometimes writing. After twenty versions faxed back and forth, the cover of Are Men Necessary? wound up resembling the original New Yorker one—albeit, in reverse.

According to Smith, the original illustration prompted a some letters to then-editor Tina Brown "from little old ladies in New Jersey" complaining that "This isn't Playboy magazine. I expect more from The New Yorker." (In hindsight, one is tempted to ask these writers, "Still? Under Tina Brown? Really?")

The artist, whose retro work has adorned everything from Aimee Mann's recent concept album The Forgotten Arm to a mosaic in the 36th Street subway station in Brooklyn, knew that some might see his illustration as a portrait of the author: "I think she was worried that it would look like she was showing off. But I think it needs to look like her a little bit. That was just a concern: We're not illustrating her, but we're illustrating a type."

After all the back and forth with Dowd and her publisher, that 'type' coalesced: "They want to make sure she didn't look just like a streetwalker. They wanted her to look like a working girl of the time. That kind of 40s 'getting out in the world' woman: she's got a brain but she's also attractive, she's got a job, she's going some place. Maybe she's a writer."  read more »

—Matt Haber

At 1:46 p.m. on Nov.  read more »

In The Transom: Donald Trump slanders Don King and Don King praises George Bush; Jessica Coen spends an afternoon at cocktails with everyone's favorite Huffpo and Maxim UK editor wackjob Greg Gutfeld; and we go inside the scary at Heidi Klum's Halloween party.

Yesterday, Prince Charles and his new wife Camilla hit New York and met with some die-hard Camilla-resentment, as well as the indomitable Tina Brown.  read more »

Get your hot Judy Miller action on: Sag Harbor is a-buzzing with Judy's pals like Felix Rohatyn, Mort Zuckerman, and Peggy Noonan. And her little dog's named Hamlet.

Meghan Daum gets appointed to the Los Angeles Times opinion page -- but hey, wasn't she hiding out in Nebraska? Say what now? Julian Schnabel is desperate to grandfather his West Village home into the old rezoning -- and boy are his neighbors pissed.

The invitation- my invitation-to the relaunch party for Radar magazine arrived in the form of Martha  read more »

Officially, there is no such thing as the New Yorker masthead.  read more »

My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale, by James Atlas. HarperCollins, 240 pages, $25.95.  read more »

Can't anybody just savor a metaphor anymore?  read more »

Harold Evans and Tina Brown are, famously, editors.  read more »

Political consultants from central casting: intense Bostonian, blond Alaskan; ex-bosses-Bono, Tina B  read more »

Bang!  read more »

On July 21, 1853, New York City made the wisest move it has ever made and purchased over 700 acres o  read more »

You may have read that renowned political observer Tina Brown has written a characteristically weigh  read more »

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People , by Toby Young. Da Capo Press, 329 pages, $24.  read more »

Before Tina Brown makes her next career move, she must first settle her contract with her defunct Ta  read more »

Ten years ago, a red-hot Tina Brown left Vanity Fair   to become the editor of The New Yorker .One  read more »

Wednesday, Feb. 13 Say goodnight, New York Central .  read more »

This has been a rough season in the print media, but among thosewho watch closely, few were surprise  read more »

Was there a more appalling election-season spectacle than that of Talk editor Tina Brown strolling i  read more »

People were surprised a couple weeks back when word trickled out that former Glamour editor Bonnie F  read more »

Who knows how many readers are going to paw their way through all 370 pages of Tina and Harry Come t  read more »

Hollywood movies and glossy magazines–they go together like peanut butter and chocolate in this to  read more »

Henry the K Loves OThe Literacy Partners cocktail party at Le Cirque 2000 on March 28 was slogging a  read more »

For years now, we've been watching Bill Clinton's approach into New York–fund-raisers and friends,  read more »

Tina Brown did not look like a target as she stood in the vast East Fifth Street loft of Martin Amis  read more »

Everything You Know , by Zoë Heller. Alfred A. Knopf, 203 pages, $22.  read more »

A few months ago, I reviewed in these pages a book of memoirs by Michael Korda, in which I turn up a  read more »

Dear students of New York City:Once again, we've come to the end of another century.  read more »

Dear students of New York City:Once again, we've come to the end of another century.  read more »

What happened to Tina Brown's power over writers and editors?  read more »

While the kids at Columbine High were being given preschool sensitivity training in order to prevent  read more »

It's a … magazine.Part Life , part Sunday newspaper silky, part Disney-Miramax house organ, part S  read more »

The narcotic bassline of Eric B.  read more »

What's in a word? Or, rather, Who?"Curmudgeon," for example.  read more »

God is watching you.  read more »

Back in the days when George Bush-remember him?-was flailing about in search of his missing vision-t  read more »