Doree Shafrir

Barack Obama’s presidential run has inspired an outpouring of enthusiasm and passion from all the predictable corners of New York City. From the stroller-pushers of the Upper West Side to the usually disaffected denizens of Williamsburg, leftward-tilting New Yorkers have for months now been hanging signs in their windows, holding bake sales in support of Mr. Obama and buying silk-screened T-shirts on Etsy with Mr. Obama’s likeness behind a pair of turntables. (“That’s My DJ,” the shirt proclaims.) If John McCain gets elected on Nov. 4, the city will just go back to the way it was before the campaign began—defining itself in no small way in opposition to a sort of amber-waves-of-grain patriotism defined by President Bush and his cowboy diplomacy.  read more »

Irina Aleksander called around to find out the costumes prominent New Yorkers are wearing this Halloween. Celerie Kemble's going to need a lot of hairspray!

Ms. Aleksander also moseyed down to Diane von Furstenberg's meatpacking district store, where the fashion empress was throwing a party for Paper mag's Kim Hastreiter's new book about Geoffrey Beene.

And Spencer Morgan rang his old friend Chris Wilson to find out the real story behind his scandalous tale of sexual deviancy on board an American Airlines flight. It's, uh, not what you think!

Spencer Morgan did a little digging and found out that when Marquee shut down over the summer because of a water main break, there were also some shady dealings going on there. Is Marquee owner Noah Tepperberg in a whole lot of legal hot water?

Irina Aleksander sweet-talked her way into Liam McMullan's 21st birthday party and discovered that the sons of society photographers like a good pair of Brooks Brothers pants just as much as the next guy.

Ms. Aleksander also got on the horn with socialite-slash-actress (aren't we all!) Annie Churchill to gab about her new online venture: a fashion retail website and online fashion-lifestyle TV show (ooh!) hosted by (you guessed it!) Ms. Churchill herself.

And wide-eyed Caroline Bankoff fell under the spell of Benicio Del Toro at a screening of his new movie, Che. Mmmm, more, por favor!

Spencer Morgan called up Armin Amiri of Socialista and discovered that Mr. Amiri is planning to turn the ground-floor space at the club into a 24-hour diner. One hitch: From 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., it'll be guest-list-only.  read more »

Irina Aleksander asks the tough questions at the Metropolitan Opera's Opening Night Gala: Will New York's benefit scene suffer because of the Wall Street meltdown? Julie Macklowe says yes! But Real Housewives of New York City's Alex McCord says, "Cutting back is self-defeating." Mmmkay!

Ms. Aleksander also infiltrates a very exclusive subset of the city's young social set: the headband girls, led by suddenly-everywhere 19-year-old Brit Peaches Geldof (she's married, lads, so stay away from her headband!).

Meanwhile, George Gurley heads to Doubles, the club in the Sherry-Netherland, which seems to be one of the few places in the city impervious to doom and gloom. It's where Debbie Bancroft's hubby first told her he loved her!

And we borrow the Media Mob's Matt Haber for the night to send him to the memorial service for Clay Felker, where his old friends like Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, and Lesley Stahl gathered to remember the New York magazine founder.

“I have zero investments, for better or for worse,” said 26-year-old Ben Zoltowski, a senior print project manager at the advertising agency McCann Erickson. “I feel like New York is already difficult enough to live in financially! I’m used to living paycheck to paycheck and living frugally, because we sort of have to. Most of us have to!”

Mr. Zoltowski, who lives in Williamsburg, went to Ithaca College and graduated in 2003; he moved to New York in July 2006. Like most of his peers, he seems to think that things can’t really get any worse, because he’s already living hand-to-mouth! But it probably hasn’t dawned on him that he might not even be able to afford last call at Greenpoint Tavern when all this shakes out.  read more »

One Fifth Avenue
By Candace Bushnell
Hyperion, 433 pages, $25.95

When Candace Bushnell started writing her “Sex and the City” column in this newspaper in 1994, Rudy Giuliani was mayor, the average price of a Manhattan apartment was $450,000 and very few people had Internet access at home. To judge by her latest novel, One Fifth Avenue, it seems likely that Ms. Bushnell is nostalgic for at least two out of the three.

In real life, One Fifth Avenue is an imposing co-op building just north of Washington Square Park; its ground floor houses the Mario Batali restaurant Otto. By using the venerable address as the setting of this book, Ms.  read more »

Irina Aleksander is sad to report that the parents of charmingly kooky socialite Arden Wohl have separated, and dad Larry has been spotted around town with a woman who is not his wife Denise.

Ms. Aleksander also stopped by Barneys on Monday evening for a book party celebrating Graydon Carter's new tome, Vanity Fair: The Portraits, A Century of Iconic Images, where she asked champagne-sipping guests like Barry Diller, Richard Meier, and Fran Lebowitz how the latest financial news would affect the city.

George Gurley headed to the Soho Grand to hang out with the stars of the new film Ghost Town, where he found James Lipton gruff, and Greg Kinnear and Ann Dexter-Jones characteristically sunny. She loves orchids! And her kids!

And Spencer Morgan speaks to one of the partners of beleaguered downtown club The Box, whose liquor license is up for review. In this city, hell hath no fury like a neighbor who can't sleep!  read more »

Fashion Week—which ended Friday, Sept. 12, after eight full days and nights of parties, shows, and flashbulbs—has historically been an excellent opportunity for celebrities (and we use this term lightly) to get themselves photographed a whole lot over the course of a rather short period of time. Of course, designers rely on celebrities to show up at their shows to bring buzz (and photographers); just witness the mayhem that ensued when Jennifer Lopez showed up at Marc Jacobs's show. And indeed, some celebrities really are close friends with the designers whose shows they come to. Which is fine!

But canny sub-A-list celebs also know that Fashion Week can help raise their profile, if briefly; we saw so many photos of actresses like Michelle Trachtenberg, Joy Bryant, Jessica Szohr, Perrey Reeves, and Zoe Saldana over the last couple of weeks that it seems a bit of a stretch to think that they were truly, genuinely interested in all the fashion coming down the runways.  read more »

“I understand the Republicans are excited by her,” said 23-year-old Niki Castle the other day. “It’s why all my South Carolina friends have ‘I want to be Sarah Palin when I grow up’ as their Facebook status updates! She’s a mother of five and she’s making a run for the biggest house in the world.”

Ms. Castle, who grew up in Greenville, S.C., works in Manhattan as an assistant at a literary agency. “For all the faulting that Obama gets for being such a charismatic speaker, she’s got that same charismatic ability,” she said. “My conservative friends, who think abortion should be illegal, think Sarah Palin is on the forefront of standing by that policy in her own family, with her pregnancy and her daughter’s. The part where I sort of shake my head is that she doesn’t agree with birth control, but she does agree with forcing her daughter to get married?”  read more »

At the Entourage season five premiere Wednesday evening at the Ziegfield Theater on 54th Street, attendees would have been forgiven if they assumed, incorrectly, that the premiere was being filmed for some meta-meta-upcoming episode. There were screaming fans, and the boys—Adrian Grenier, Kevin Connolly, Kevin Dillon, Jerry Ferrara, and Jeremy Piven—were dressed in suits, and stopped to pose for photos and sign autographs. Two episodes from season five, which starts Sunday, were screened for an audience that included several guest stars from the upcoming season—Leighton Meester from Gossip Girl, Friday Night Lights producer Peter Berg, Sopranos daughter Jamie-Lynn Sigler, and rapper Bow Wow.  read more »

Irina Aleksander sat down with socialite and writer Tatiana Boncompagni, whose new book Gilding Lily may ruffle some feathers in her social set. Just don't tell that to Tinsley Mortimer, Lydia Fenet and Jennifer Creel, who are throwing her a book party on Tuesday.

Ms. Aleksander also put in a call to Gossip Girl producer Josh Schwartz to ask whether he really thought those CW Network ads were too racy. He says: No way!

And Spencer Morgan, reporting from the Republican National Convention, spent a whirlwind evening with Matt Drudge crony Andrew Breitbart, who's launching a new website called (modestly) Big Hollywood.

A few months ago, at the beginning of a holiday weekend, I was waiting, for what seemed like hours, in a dingy Budget Rent-a-Car office on the East Side. I had a reservation, but there were no cars. I waited, and waited, stewing, periodically asking when my car would be ready and getting a helpless shoulder shrug.

Then a woman came storming into the office. “Is Jose here?” she demanded loudly. “Jose always handles my reservations.”

Jose? The other people and I looked at each other. Did this woman hold the answer to our rental car conundrum?

“Your manager, Jose,” she hissed.  read more »

DENVER—Wednesday afternoon at the Denver Art Museum, Jennifer Lopez, Capitol File and Viacom honored Marian Wright Edelman for her work with the Children's Defense Fund. Before the awards presentation began, the Daily Transom spied the singer Rufus Wainwright, wearing a plaid blazer, striped T-shirt and sandals.

"I'm gay and out and proud, but in saying that I feel that the gay community could be a little more engaged," Mr. Wainwright said. "You can even spell it out. E-N-G-A-Y." Har!

"I guess one of the reasons I'm so vocal is to get some of my community out there because especially gay men-and those are the only ones I can really speak for-they tend to get a little into the lush life and the dance, the DJs, the disco music, and it's fun and everything, but unfortunately I'm a huge pessimist right now.  read more »

What happens when thousands of politics wonks descend on one poor, defenseless mile-high city for a few days? Why, lots of Craigslist posts offering or soliciting politically minded sex, of course.

Take this 39-year-old man, who is offering a "free spa quality sensual massage for Obama supporters!" He adds: "Would love to meet and greet and touch a good energy soul in for the convention. Tall and fun with a great touch."

Or the 32-year-old man staying at the Aurora Hotel who was looking for a "cowgirl": "Are you a lady voting Obama? Are you looking for a little fun tonight during the convention? Perhaps you like to cum over and "Watch" with me? I'm serious about meeting up with a good-looking lady for the afternoon/evening and if you're serious about meeting up with a good-looking guy; what are you waiting for? Get back to me!"

Perhaps this  read more »

Transom correspondent Spencer Morgan is in Denver this week, talking his way into all sorts of political-slash-celebrity bashes. At the Creative Coalition event on Monday evening, he cornered Josh Lucas, Alan Cumming and the West Wing's Richard Schiff.

Meanwhile, in the Hamptons, George Gurley sunned his buns and found Russell Simmons, Stephanie Wei and Liam McMullan hanging out at an American Red Cross party at the estate where Mariah Carey got married a couple months ago. The songbird was nowhere in sight, but Ms. Wei and Mr. McMullan were more than happy to share their thoughts on the summer. "The Hamptons are like Disney World!" sniffed Ms. Wei.

Also: Meredith Bryan chats with model-socialite Elettra Wiedemann (daughter of Isabella Rossellini) about her new T-shirt line, whose proceeds go to help hospitals in Burundi, and Jonathan Liu thinks he may have found the real Gossip Girl—and she's wearing teal velour.

Irina Aleksander goes on the trail of Kirsten Dunst, who took up residence in her $3 million Tribeca penthouse in March and has since been spotted all over (down)town--hanging out near the DJ booth at the Beatrice Inn, wandering the West Village in her trademark Ray Bans, dancing at Bowery Electric. Is New York courting her, or is she courting New York?

And Spencer Morgan finds out that New York artist Brice Marden is trying to entice his well-connected (and wealthy) friends to make Nevis their next vacation destination. But as one snobby social put it: "It's a beautiful old place, but I mean, seriously, who goes to Nevis?"

Waverly Inn turns out to have been only the first salvo in Vanity Fair staffers' heretofore successful effort to colonize the West Village. In this month's issue, Vanity Fair's Aimee Bell's bio reads: "Occupation: Deputy editor, Vanity Fair; co-founder, Greenwich Village High School... Causes: Greenwich Village High School (gvhsnyc.org), the Food Bank for New York City (foodbanknyc.org)." The Daily Transom had never heard of Greenwich Village High School, so we checked out the school's Web site. It's a green background with the words "Work Hard, Be Kind, Take Risks" in big letters, and an e-mail address and phone number to call. When we called the phone number, a woman's voice said: "Thank you for calling the Committee for Greenwich Village High School.  read more »

The rain didn't deter Hamptonites from making their way to Bridgehampton for the polo matches, but when they got there, the fields were muddy and the games had been canceled. Fortunately suave polo player Nacho Figueras was there to make everyone feel better, Irina Aleksander reports.

Then Ms. Aleksander muscled her way into ZoneHampton, a gym frequented by the likes of Alec Baldwin, Kelly Ripa and Matthew Broderick, and spent an hour huffing and puffing with Gregg Cook, possibly the East End's most motivating spinning instructor.

On Sunday evening, the Transom's favorite tippler George Gurley found himself at the afterparty for a premiere of a film about wine, but there was very little alcohol to be had! Also, no one seemed to even be interested in imbibing. We hope this does not portend a fall season of sobriety.

Finally, the Transom met up with the comely Anisha Lakhani, former Dalton schoolmarm with a new roman-a-clef who might find that her fancy new friends turn on her once they discover the subject of her next novel. As Ms. Lakhani says, "Wink, wink!"

Well, that didn't take long. When the New York Post reported today that Mary-Kate Olsen was refusing to speak with investigators about Heath Ledger's death unless she was promised immunity, the unsubtle implication was that Ms. Olsen knew something about Ledger's death that she wasn't telling. Maybe, some speculated, she had even supplied Ledger with drugs! Or at least, knew where he got them. This afternoon, though, her lawyer put the kibosh on those assumptions, telling Us magazine's website that Ms. Olsen "had nothing whatsoever to do with the drugs found in Heath Ledger's home or his body, and she does not know where he obtained them.  read more »

Fancy summer camps, it turns out, are expensive. On NYTimes.com, women's issues blogger Judith Warner decries the "affluenza" afflicting those who send their children to $10,000-a-summer overnight camps. Of course, in the universe of wealthy Manhattan parents, $10,000 to send the little ones away for eight weeks is practically pocket change. But which camps can get away with charging that much?

In the summer of 2007, Gawker compiled a list of some of the most expensive summer camps; we can only assume that tuition has gone up since then. Some examples: Camp Laurel, in Readfield, ME, which last summer charged $10,000 for the season; the girls-only Camp Matoka, in Smithfield, ME, at $8,700; and the boys-only Camp Cedar, in Casco, ME, which was asking parents to cough up $8,900 last summer.  read more »

Yesterday, in Los Angeles, a bunch of people tried to figure out what to do about overzealous paparazzi. It's one of those problems in L.A. that--like freeway traffic, body dysmorphia and too many struggling actors--seems to come with the territory, but the paps' antics in the past year seem to have gotten more than the usual number of feathers ruffled, according to The New York Times. The hearing, which was convened by a city task force spearheaded by a city councilman named Dennis Zine who has been trying to pass an "anti-paparazzi" ordinance for months, attracted a number of celebrities, including Eric Roberts and John Mayer.  read more »

“It’s one of the last fabulous things about New York,” a dark-haired young man nursing a drink at the nightclub Splash, on West 17th Street, said the other night. He was referring to Musical Mondays, a weekly event at which a VJ plays video clips from Broadway shows—plus films based on Broadway shows, films featuring Broadway stars, Broadway tribute shows, and Tony Awards shows—to an audience of mostly gay, mostly young men, and a smattering of theatrically inclined young women.

A clip from the musical Wicked, featuring the actress Idina Menzel, came on. A cheer went up from the crowd.  read more »

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 »