Most Popular Stories on Observer.com

Ambitious twenty- and thirty-somethings in New York working in creative fields are living with their parents instead of getting a place of their own, reports Page Six Magazine. The magazine cites the celebrity examples of socialites Fabiola Beracasa, 32, and Charlotte Ronson, 31, who just this year left their respective parents' lush residences--socialite Veronica Hearst's on the Upper East Side and Ann Dexter-Jones's duplex in the West Village.

But since Ms. Ronson, a successful designer, and Ms. Beracasa, creative director of the jewelry company Circa, have in fact taken steps to establish their domestic independence, they seem to contradict the magazine's argument that this sort of thing is on the rise.  read more »

A few days ago, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Harry Reid phoned Rod Blagojevich in early December to discuss the vacant Senate seat that Blagojevich was about to fill by appointment. In the conversation, according to the paper, the Senate majority leader made it clear that he would rather U.S. Representatives Jesse Jackson Jr. and Danny Davis and State Senate President Emil Jones not be appointed.

On Sunday, Reid appeared on “Meet the Press” and, not surprisingly, tried to downplay the report, branding it “part of Blagojevich’s cloud.”

“He's making all this up,” Reid insisted. “I had a conversation with him. I don't remember what was in the conversation, other than the generalities that I just talked about.  read more »

Laura Bush will write a memoir for the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster, it was announced this morning. The book, which will include details of Mrs. Bush's eight years in the White House, will be edited by Scribner's editor-in-chief, Nan Graham, and is scheduled for publication in 2010.

No word just yet on how much they paid, but the two-day auction took place during late December. The soon-to-be-former first lady is quoted in the release as saying she is "very pleased to be associated with Scribner, the distinguished publishing house of many of [her] favorite books.”

Mrs. Bush's memoir was the subject of a recent  read more »

Monday: Confessions of a Teen Idol

So it's a little more lowbrow than we usually recommend, but we're feeling like watching Confessions of a Teen Idol might actually count as charity work. The eight-episode reality series focuses on a handful of 80s was-beens-including Christopher Atkins (remember The Blue Lagoon?), Jamie Walters (90210 crooner turned fireman), and Eric Nies (he of the original Real World and The Grind)-as they deal publicly with their status as ex-heartthrobs and even possibly attempt comebacks. Scott Baio, whose own Vh1 shows about fatherhood were surprisingly felt and charming, produces.  [Vh1,  6:30 p.m.]

Tuesday: The Biggest Loser

We suspect that this weight loss competition has more female followers than male, but shouldn't weeping and weighing in be for everyone? While we  can't recommend watching The Biggest Loser over dinner (unless you plan on chowing down on steamed chicken and broccoli, which are approved healthy foods) it's our DVR guilty pleasure.  read more »

Zar Property has snapped up another diminutive and lovely Soho building, this one an eight-story commercial edifice at 64 Wooster Street for $12.65 million.

Zar acquired the deed from former landlord William Hahn on Dec. 11, according to recently available city records.

Zar Property’s Dario and David Zar are apparently among those who think the downmarket is the time to buy, and who have the means to do so.  read more »

Bill Richardson withdrew his name from nomination for commerce secretary.  read more »

Today, The Huffington Post's Media Vertical has a huge, attention-grabbing above-the-scroll headline about The New York Times' announcement that the paper is now selling ads on A1, which reads, FRONT PAGE FOR SALE.

It should be noted that the Huffington Post, which was the subject of Simon Dumenco's Ad Age column today in which he estimated the aggregator and blog network's true value is considerably less than the $200 million figure bandied about last year, featured ads for the Blackberry Bold ("The fastest device on the 3G network," apparently), Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, an appearance by Arianna Huffington "And Huffpost bloggers" at the 92nd Street Y, and a rotating placement that has featured Classmates.com, Encore Wynn Las Vegas, Nike, and others.

Well, Ms. Huffington did tell The Times' Brien Stelter in March 2008 that her site aimed to be an "Internet newspaper."  read more »

While New York City's inadequate waste management system is one of my constant themes or perhaps obsessions, at the end of December, the New York Post published a wonderful "man bites dog:" story: The amount of garbage we are producing is going down! David Seifman, one of the Post's terrific political journalists reported that in New York City:

"Household refuse collections dropped 5.5 percent, from 54,205 to 51,250 tons per week, between fiscal 2005 and 2008. Recycling pickups fell 7.1 percent during that period, from 11,983 to 11,133 tons a week. Some of the decrease can be explained by the switch from glass to lighter plastics, by reductions in packaging materials, and by the decline in discarded newspapers and magazines.  read more »

Author and social fixture Jay McInerney's new book, The Last Bachelor, is being released in the UK this month; it's a short-story collection about the morally complicated relationships of middle-class Manhattanites. In a piece in the Telegraph, Mr. McInerney comes off as certainly "the last" of something--perhaps the last author to establish a writing career based on the hedonistic lifestyles of New York yuppies--even though his new collection of stories takes a look at a decidedly more current, post-9/11 city.

Some of the article's highlights include Mr. McInerney on his first novel, which he still enjoys re-reading occasionally:

"I hadn't thought about it. I recently re-read it. It's sort of like reading a book by somebody else. I thought, 'Wow, that's pretty damn good. Where did I come up with that?'

"Sometimes it seems an albatross, because it remains not necessarily my best but definitely my most successful book. When I die the words Bright Lights, Big City will be in the headlines. Probably not The Good Life, probably not Brightness Falls, probably not Story of My Life."

 read more »

The late Araxia M. Buckhantz's two-bedroom sprawl at the massively proper 834 Fifth Avenue is the kind of perfect little chunk of New York real estate that can make a very important and normally staid uptown broker cackle with excitement. "I absolutely am wild about this apartment," one agent who auditioned for the listing told The Observer last month. “I’d do anything to handle it."

Back then, three sources had said the auditioned brokers included, "Brown Harris Stevens’ Ann Jeffery (once a Harper’s Bazaar editor); Corcoran’s Leighton Candler (who is listing the Brooke Astor duplex); Serena Boardman at Sotheby’s (listing Aby Rosen’s $75 million limestone mansion); Stribling’s bow-tied Kirk Henckels (listing a floor of the old Nelson Rockefeller triplex at 810 Fifth Avenue); and Caroline Guthrie (reported to be taking co-ownership of Edward Lee Cave’s boutique brokerage, where she’s president)."

Reached on the phone just now, Buckhantz's daughter told The Observer that the estate has found its broker: Ms. Jeffery. "I met with a lot of wonderful realtors. I don't want to comment negatively about anybody else," she said, when asked why she made the choice. "No, I don't want to get into this. I don't want to."  read more »

Troubled singer Amy Winehouse is reportedly in talks with British fashion house Fred Perry to design her own clothing collection and has already begun sketching some of her ideas. [Vogue UK]

Gedalio Grinberg, chairman of the Movado Group (where he had worked since the '60s), died on Sunday in Manhattan at age 77. [WWD]

Women who have scored invitations to the inaugural balls have started "registering" their dresses on special websites to make sure no one else will be wearing their gown. [NY Daily News] 

Designer John Galliano has been appointed a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, previously bestowed upon Yves Saint Laurent and Azzedine Alaia. [WWD] 

Some obvious fashion casualties of the recession: young designers, celebrity lines, very expensive designer labels with limited distribution, and $20,000 handbags. [WWD] 

We have a well-documented love of Doctor Who here at the Observer, so we'd be remiss if we didn't comment on the announcement from this weekend that a replacement for beloved fop David Tennant, who will leave the show after filming a few specials this year, has finally been found. And the winner is.....26-year-old Matt Smith, a young man with a suitably angular face and slender frame to take over from Mr. Tennant (might he continue the pin-striped look?). No one seems to know too much about the guy—The Guardian reported on his slight on-screen history—though British folks seem to be up in arms anyway (apparently wishing that a woman or person of color were cast in the role).  read more »

Against all odds, the first book out of the gate on the 2008 election comes not from The Washington Post’s Daniel Balz, Time’s Mark Halperin, or Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, but Niall Stanage of Ireland’s Sunday Business Post, whose account of Barack Obama’s fight for the nomination and his victory in the general election has been available in bookstores on the other side of the ocean since early December.

Mr. Stanage, who regularly filed pieces from the campaign trail for this paper in addition to the reporting he did for the Sunday Business Post, said his book—entitled Redemption Song: An Irish Reporter Inside the Obama Campaign—is being officially released in the United States today.

How did Mr. Stanage get it done so fast?

"Around February, I realized that there was something fairly special going on with Obama," he said, "but I knew that no publisher would take it on until he was the nominee, or at least the overwhelming favorite to be the nominee."

In May, he secured an agent, and flew to Ireland to meet with publishers the following month after the primaries ended. A few were interested, according to Mr. Stanage, but in the end a decision was made to go with a relatively young but well-established independent house called Liberties Press.

"I started actually writing the book on the weekend of July the 4th, and by election day I had everything but the final chapter and the preface written," Mr. Stanage said. "Those were submitted exactly a week after election day."  read more »

Oh, it's ugly out there for commercial real estate and its investors. The Times' Vivian Marino ran down the national picture over the weekend, including this dismal statistical gem about '08 investment sales nationwide:

From January through December, there were just 1,410 transactions nationwide, valued at $49.3 billion, versus 4,410, valued at $207.2 billion, for the corresponding period in 2007, according to the latest data from Real Capital Analytics, a research company. It predicted that sales would total $53 billion to $55 billion for all of 2008, further below a recently reduced forecast of $61 billion.

At the same time, demand for offices has softened as companies have cut back or consolidated operations; many of them are already subleasing space that they no longer need. Office vacancies nationwide rose to around 13.5 percent by mid-December from about 12.5 percent, on average, in 2007, according to Reis Inc., another research company.

Part of the fallout from ebbing demand, of course, is falling rents: Ms. Marino notes that in Manhattan, "rents are expected to plunge 10 to 20 percent by 2010, and nationally by 5 to 15 percent, according to Cushman & Wakefield..."  read more »

Everyone's favorite Upper East Side teenagers return from their holiday break tonight, as Gossip Girl gears up for the second half of its sophomore season. For those keeping score at home, our cable guide says the episode is titled "In the Realm of the Basses", a probable play on the controversial 1976 Franco-Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses that deals with death by erotic asphyxiation and castration. Yikes! We doubt any such shenanigans will take place at Constance Billard, but fans can expect to see Chuck's Uncle Jack show up to help the younger Bass in the wake of his father's death. (Here's guessing he's just as nefarious as every other Bass man that we've encountered thus far.) Meanwhile, Uncle Jack won't be the only person visiting the friendly confines of Manhattan in the upcoming months. Michael Ausiello over at Entertainment Weekly is reporting that Michelle Trachtenberg has signed on to return for multiple episodes as the duplicitous cokehead Georgina Sparks.  read more »

When Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States on Jan. 20, all of this "change" we've been hearing so much about will be measurable by a number of factors: His race. His persona. His vast departure from the policies of George W. Bush and his superior ability to form a complete sentence. But perhaps more than anything, we'll be able to measure that change by the fact that seminal indie rockers Ted Leo and Tortoise (plus a handful of other performers who are not quite as hip) are headlining a big inauguration bash in Washington D.C. the prior evening, because let's face it—that SO would never have happened for the Bush Administration!  read more »

Are you ready for all Lincoln all the time? Do you worry that you’ll need some help in cutting through the bicentennial blather? If you’re looking for a quick refresher (as opposed, say, to the two-part, six volume mythologizing biography Carl Sandburg completed in 1939), try The Best American History Essays on Lincoln (Palgrave Macmillan, $16.95), a selection of 11 essays from the past 60 years edited by Sean Wilentz for the Organization of American Historians. All the essays (with the exception of a chapter from Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore) are by eminent professors of history, among them Richard Hofstadter, David Herbert Donald, John Hope Franklin and James M.  read more »

Some bright news on an otherwise gray Monday afternoon: this coming weekend, Neil Patrick Harris will be hosting Saturday Night Live! We used to dream about Mr. Harris when he played Doogie (in fact, yours truly mentioned this in print a few years ago). We loved his speed-freak cameos in Harold and Kumar. These days we laugh so hard we cry at his portrayal of Barney Stinson, the over-the-top-but-still-believable womanizing scotch-swiller-catchphrase-maker on CBS's How I Met Your Mother. (And yes, yes, we know Mr. Harris plays for the other team.) Fingers crossed he drags HIMYM co-star Jason Segal on for a few sketches. The two are known to do duets now and then; we'd like to see what they'd whip up with Andy Samberg for a digital short. ‘Jizz In My Pants' part two?

This morning, fans of The New-York Ghost, the weird and frequently wonderful little "Newsletter You Print Out at Work," were treated with a new issue, Vol. IV, No. 53.

But instead of calling itself a weekly, the digital-only paper of McSweeney's-like squibs, poetry, essays, and fiction (with occasional contributions from writers like The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones) is now calling itself "seasonal" due to its semi-erratic publishing schedule.

Started in 2006 by Believer co-editor and Personal Days author Ed Park, The New-York Ghost went from mini cult to the subject of a New York Times 'City' section profile by Sani Knafo in 2007, which dubbed Mr. Park The Wizard of Whimsy.  read more »

Michael Bloomberg, fresh off his one-day trip to Israel, was in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn this morning filling in a pothole.  read more »