New York Magazine

The FeedBag's Josh Ozersky is reporting that Gael Greene has been let go by New York Magazine. Ms. Greene, a fixture at the magazine since its founding—she contributed a story to the magazine's 40th anniversary issue that chronicled her quest for The Single Best Meal I Ever Had In 18,814 tries and the magazine ran an excerpt from her memoir in 2006—sent out a release in which said, "I describe it as cutting off your nose to spite your face."

Mr. Ozersky writes

From our point of view, there’s no shame in any of this for either Gael or New York. Greene had a long and unforgettable run at the magazine, but Adam Platt is the chief restaurant critic now, and there’s no sense in trying to have two critics.

Ms. Greene continues to blog about food at Insatiable Critic.

- "Gladwell is pale skinned but famously Afro-haired."—Tim Adams, The Guardian, November 16, 2008.

- "Gladwell, who is slight of build, with an exuberance of hair and an oddly diffident manner..." Jerry Adler, Newsweek, November 15, 2008.

- "Slender, with elfin cheekbones and a distinctive bloom of spirally brown hair, Gladwell is one of those clever people who actually looks clever."— Lev Grossman, Time Magazine, November 13, 2008.

- "Gladwell was a soft-spoken guy with a cafe-au-lait complexion and a halo of frizzy hair."— Mary Ann Gwinn, The Seattle Times, November 13, 2008.

- "Gladwell is a poufy-haired showman with a knack for explaining anything to everybody, from dog whispering and fads to disposable diapers and snap judgments."—Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly, November 12, 2008.

- "Beneath the crazy hair, the slobby-chic clothes, and the buzzword-filled vocabulary is an old-fashioned guy who grew up among Mennonites in rural Ontario, didn’t have a TV until he was 23, and still prefers to do most of his research at the NYU library."—Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine, November 9, 2008.  read more »

Stop us if you've heard this one before... According to Page Six The Magazine, some Manhattan parents are so desperate to give their children a leg-up on their peers, they're sending them to Mandarin classes! (And Hindi! And French! And German!)

Page Six's Jennifer Rose quotes a parent named Brett Hauser, who pays $395 for his 6-month-old son to take 10 sessions at The Language Workshop for Children saying, "Mandarin is the language of our future. With China poised to become the world's leading economy sometime this century, I'm doing the only responsible thing. It's like reading to your kid or making sure he gets all the right foods. I'm helping him prepare for his future. Thirty years from now these kids are going to be translating for all of us."

The magazine calls this phenomenon "NYC's New Baby Talkers."

Talkers, yes; new, no.  read more »

Remember when Nicholas Carr asked in The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (Sure you don't: That was way back in July/August and we've all been using Google too much.)

If the planet-devouring search engine is bringing about the dumbening of mankind, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell might just be the last intelligent man, according to New York's profile of him by Jason Zengerle.

Writes Mr. Zengerle in this week's Geek Pop Star:

Beneath the crazy hair, the slobby-chic clothes, and the buzzword-filled vocabulary is an old-fashioned guy who grew up among Mennonites in rural Ontario, didn’t have a TV until he was 23, and still prefers to do most of his research at the NYU library.  read more »

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New York Magazine's Vulture blog is reporting that the magazine's television critic, John Leonard, has died.

In addition to writing weekly for that magazine (last week he wrote about returning dramas), Mr. Leonard, who was 69-years-old, wrote a monthly books column for Harper's. He also served as a contributing editor for The Nation, contributed to The New York Review of Books and wrote regularly for The New York Times Book Review, where he had previously been an editor.

Curious to see how CNN's Soledad O'Brien lives? New York magazine's S. Jhoanna Robledo took of tour of the newswoman's $4.6 million, three-bedroom, three-bathroom loft in Chelsea and brought along videographer, Jonah Green, so you can see it for yourself. (Before you make the joke, the apartment contains no Situation Room.)

At one point, the brokers show Ms. Robledo Ms. O'Brien's bathtub, teeing up the quip, "That tub can fit an entire news team." Even Lou Dobbs?

In this week's New York, Joe Hagan writes a portrait of the 27 members of the fifth-generation of Sulzberger-Ochs family, the part of the family who will someday run The New York Times.

The stakes are high, and these kids started the family business from an early age. Mr. Hagan writes:

Sulzberger has said that his clan starts going to family meetings when they’re 10 years old and by 15 they understand their roles as caretakers of the New York Times. There’s also a one-day orientation session for kids turning 18 or 21—or people marrying into the family—to learn about the legacy of the Ochs-Sulzbergers.

 read more »

New York just sent out its weekly release previewing stories. Next week's issue will feature "Bleeding 'Times' Blood." Sub-hed: "Has the prestige (and profitability) of owning The New York Times finally sunk below the level required to keep the interest of the Sulzberger clan?"

The story is written by Joe Hagan.  read more »

Earlier this month at a panel discussion at FIT, New York Magazine Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss fretted about the magazine's upcoming 40th Anniversary Issue cover. Referring to Esquire's 75th Anniversary publicity stunt-cum-new-new thing digital cover, Mr. Moss said:

It made us a little crazy... Because we have a fortieth anniversary issue coming out a week after Esquire's. We don't have an electronic cover. It just sits there.

So, how did that cover turn out?  read more »

Looks like CNN got taken by two of Howard Stern's employees this morning. Rather than the usual call-in taunt of "Baba-booey!" two Stern Show regulars, Richard Christy and Sal "The Stockbroker" Governale, went down to Lehman Brothers headquarters and pretended to make out with each other behind a CNN standup report by Allan Chernoff.

So far, the clip has made its way around the blogosphere: VH1's Best Week Ever started it; then Videogum picked it up, as did Dealbreaker and New York magazine's Daily Intel.

Only Towleroad seemed to know it was a Howard Stern-related prank.

This week's issue of New York contains the big "state of publishing" piece that the magazine's book man, Boris Kachka, has been working on for the past few months. Mr. Kachka leads with a charming scene in the HarperStudio office, where publisher Bob Miller and his staff are watching a video of unused books getting mulched in a shredder. Mr. Miller calls it "depressing"; marketing director Sarah Burningham says it it reminds her of Wall-E. Kachka goes on to suggests that it's only shops like HarperStudio—bold enough to try untested business models, eager to do a lot with a little, etc.—that can keep the publishing industry alive as technology continues to push paper further and further into the margins.  read more »

"The secret of all activities is that talent attracts talent."

That was the legendary art director and co-founder of New York magazine, Milton Glaser, speaking last night at The Society of Publication Designer's futuristically named SPD@FIT panel on New York's 40th Anniversary.

Above Mr. Glaser's head was a rotating slideshow of iconic New York covers. Most were from the magazine's heyday in the 70's—a fake newspaper featuring Tom Wolfe heralding "The New Journalism"; "The Undergound Gourmet" featuring a bagel with a whole fish; and some of a more recent vintage like the cast of Gossip Girl with the cover line "Best. Show. Ever." and Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe. (More on that later.) Seated next to Mr. Glaser were former art directors Walter Bernard (class of 1970's) and Robert Newman (class of 1990's), current New York editor-in-chief Adam Moss and design director Chris Dixon. The crowd for the hour and a half panel—mini Snickers and Peppermint Patties were helpfully provided to keep attendees alert through some of the longer anecdotes—was mostly students, with a smattering of magazine professionals and older admirers of the magazine.  read more »

Add another trend piece to the ever-growing 'Internet Porn Addiction Ruins Relationships' canon. This month, Details' Em & Lo offer Jerking Off Is the New Infidelity (subhed: "Is your secret habit causing your marriage to slip through your fingers?"), in which we learn that, "While some guys store everyday images and encounters to fuel their imaginations, many go straight for the porn."

Sadly, the article was released too prematurely (tee-hee) to include this month's poster boy for self-love, David Duchovny.  read more »

Last month, Gawker's Sheila McClear had some fun with an email NewYork's Jada Yuan sent out to freelancer asking them to stop using the magazine to gain entry to events they weren't explicitly assigned to cover.

Now, Andrew Goldstein, whom Media Mob was told is filling in for Ms. Yuan at the magazine, has sent out an email to about two dozen freelancers and staffers explaining how to not only to file stories for the Web site ("arty reports are due at 10 a.m. the day after the party. Fast turn-around is essential") but how to conduct an interview ("When something interesting is said... stay on the subject...")

After the jump, class is in session:  read more »

Let's say you're a magazine editor and you need to illustrate a special issue about office life: What do you do for art? If you're the editor of Businessweek and you're compiling a special Business @ Work issue in collaboration with readers (a first, according to the magazine's Web site), you just do what New York did in April 2007 with its "Office Life" package and slap Rainn Wilson of NBC's The Office on the cover and in a spread inside. Oh, and you might as well get photographer Chris Buck to shoot him, like New York did.

To justify that cover placement, do a short interview with Mr.  read more »

Los Angeles Magazine's August 2008 issue: New York's July 28, 2008 issue.

After Clay Felker passed away Tuesday morning in Manhattan, The Observer spoke to some who knew him well.

Robert Benton

The first time I ever screamed “fuck” in front of a room full of women was when I got mad at Clay at the Esquire offices. We were having this argument that went up and down the hall and I reached my wits end; I just said, “You fuck!” It came out of my mouth before I knew what I had said. Clay could drive you crazy, but you never stopped caring for him.

Milton Glaser

We were once in Paris.  read more »

When I think of Clay Felker, which is often, it’s at the Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria. I had just come to The Observer in 1994 and I was scared and sweating. Clay offered to meet with me once a week and kick around story ideas. I used to bring a stack of napkins. They were, by the end of breakfast, black with scrawl: call David Garth, Milton Glaser, Mrs. Astor; water, Moynihan, women and money, Brooklyn as the new Paris, Columbia vs. N.Y.U., water mains, Murdoch, CBS News, power.

Clay would sit at the Waldorf and dictate. His Felkerian takes on the world, as many have said, added up to a nonfiction novel embodying Clay’s worldview: power was his subject, exuberance was his drive.  read more »

“The secret of a magazine is passion.”

So said Clay Felker, a giant of journalism who died Tuesday morning in Manhattan at age 82. And the passion which most animated Clay was New York, the city he loved and understood so much that he founded a magazine by that name and mentored more than one generation of the city’s best writers. And while the names he minted—Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin—may loom large, Clay’s true legacy rests in his tireless and electric commitment to young journalists; where other editors saw employees, he saw passion that could be plumbed for new ideas, and channeled into the deep gorge of ambition that rumbles day and night beneath the city.  read more »

Clay Felker, the editor who created New York magazine and sat atop the mastheads of The Village Voice, Esquire, Manhattan, inc., M., and New West, has died.

As far back as 2006, Forbes' James Brady was reporting that the legendary editor was ailing and had been moved to a nursing home. That same year, Mr. Felker's wife, the writer Gail Sheehy, wrote an article for Tango magazine wrote about their life together.  read more »

In an obituary for Mr. Felker on the Web site of the magazine he created first as a supplement to The New York Herald Tribune, then as a stand-alone magazine in 1968, Kurt Andersen (himself a former editor of the magazine)

In a signed editorial by Francis X. Clines in today's New York Times, we learn that gentrification is changing the Lower East Side. While Mr. Clines concedes that this is an old story—"Hasn’t that been the case ever since this sliver of Manhattan was laid bare more than a century ago as the crammed tenement haven for immigrants?" he asks—he does seem to feel that the changes in the neighborhood are once again a pressing crisis:

As gentrification rushes in, the neighborhood is fortunate to have the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, so tourists can still walk through the way things were. A preservationist urge is also evident on the streets — from demands for tighter zoning to an “egg rolls and egg creams” block party this Sunday by The Museum at Eldridge Street.

As coincidence would have it, the blog EV Grieve recently posted a scan of Craig Unger's May 28, 1984 New York Magazine cover story "The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood." (This comes via Gothamist.)  read more »

Will Leitch, editor of Gawker Media's popular sports blog, Deadspin, is joining New York Magazine as a contributing editor. In a farewell post, Mr. Leitch writes:

It is with heavy heart — yet mirthful disposition! — that we announce that our time as Deadspin editor is about to draw to a close. After almost three years of plugging away around here, we are leaving as editor of Deadspin on Friday, June 27. We have accepted a job as a contributing editor for New York magazine. We're excited about it, but, obviously, this has been our baby and our life every day for three years — which is about four decades in blog time — and we're too emotional about the whole thing to get into much more detail about how we feel about the whole matter.

Earlier this year, Mr. Leitch and Vanity Fair's Buzz Bissinger had a very public argument about the differences between journalism and blogging on HBO's Bob Costas Now.

"Brownstoner’s posts tend to read like the reportage of a particularly smart and opinionated community paper. The comment section, by contrast, has become a rolling transcript of the borough’s new anxieties, shameful prejudices, and secret fears. For a long time, those anxieties centered on being left out or pushed out—hopeful buyers or displaced renters thwarted by prices rising out of control."–The What You Are Afraid Of, Adam Sternbergh, New York Magazine, May 25, 2008.  read more »

Emily Gould's New York Times Magazine cover story hasn't even landed with a thud on front porches and newsstands yet, but it's already garnering a ton of criticism online.

Some of the critical outlets weren't surprising.

Like Gawker, for example, since Ms. Gould's article is in many ways a rebuke of the site.

Gawker's first post officially linked to Ms. Gould's Times Magazine story received 9,133 views and 170 comments.

A follow-up post clocked in at 8,814 views with 149 comments, while a post announcing comments had closed on NYTimes.com received only 4,150 views and 83 comments.

Sadly, another, about the article's photos, topped out at only 2,556 views and 55 comments.

Finally, it seemed, for Gawker, the horse had been kicked to death.

New York magazine's Daily Intel had a wonkishly incisive post in which its editors calculated how many dollars Ms. Gould was presumed to have been paid for the words "I" and "me" in the 7,937-word article. (Eight hundred and sixty dollars, by Daily Intel's math. One wonders how many I's and me's were in New York's equally controversial first person cover story this week.)  read more »

A "Make Ready" of this week's New York Times Magazine just arrived, featuring the much buzzed about cover story by former Gawker editor Emily Gould. The story is headlined Exposed and features three photos of Ms. Gould excluding the cover. (One photo shows just her hands at a laptop, an Instant Message window and a web page on the screen.)

The article is heavily diaristic; for a magazine that exists to explain "The Way We Live Now" every week, it's light in sociology or cultural grasping, focusing instead on the writer's relationships and her job.

Samples after the jump:  read more »

Yankees slugger Jason Giambi admitted to Portfolio's Franz Lidz that when he goes into a slump he wears a lucky thong. Not a jockstrap. A thong. Sometimes when other Yankees go into slumps—like Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Johnny Damon, Robinson Cano and Robin Ventura—they've worn his tiger-striped thong too.

And here's how the papers and blogs headlined it over the weekend:  read more »

A little after 6 p.m. at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Condé Nast president Richard Beckman was sharing a drink—vodka, olives—with Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend. The two were discussing the same thing everyone in the lobby of Jazz at Lincoln Center at the Time Warner Center was talking about: What the National Magazine Awards can do, or not do, for a magazine.  read more »

New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh is leaving the newspaper to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, according to an internal memo distributed yesterday. (Radar had reported a rumor to this effect.)

Also heading over to 4 Times Square is New York Magazine contributing editor and writer Ariel Levy, who has already posted the news to her personal web site.

David Remnick wrote in an email to Media Mob that they are both expected to "write reported pieces."  read more »

Byron Dobell, one of the most respected and accomplished editors in New York magazine publishing history, is also a painter, and his seventh solo show, “Recent Works,” is currently on view at Chelsea’s First Street Gallery (526 West 26th Street). Mr. Dobell, who’s 80 (but doesn’t look a day over 65!), worked as an editor at many important magazines in the city, including Time, Esquire, New York and American Heritage, and edited writers like Tom Wolfe and David Halberstam before they were household names. But 17 years ago, Mr. Dobell left the media world to pursue a lifelong passion: portraiture painting. Over the years he’s painted many friends and colleagues, including New York magazine founder Clay Felker; Tim Forbes, chief operating officer of Forbes, Dominique Browning, editor in chief of late House & Garden, and feminist icon Betty Friedan (the Friedan piece now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery).

At his Recent Works’ opening last week, Mr. Dobell dressed in a sharp navy jacket, an eye-catching tie and round, thin-framed spectacles. The room was noisy and bustling with his friends, mostly graying folks from the magazine business, who braved the biting cold to make it to the party. They held their hands behind their backs and considered Mr. Dobell’s small, sketchy “Life Study” chalk drawings of his less famous models lounging, seemingly in mid-air. There are also serene landscapes inspired by his travels to Scotland, Rome and New Hampshire. In some paintings, little trees sway in front of fuzzy bushes swirled with strands of India ink.  read more »

How did this go unnoticed for so long?

In Kurt Andersen's New York magazine column, published Monday, he casually spills the beans on Roger Ailes' preferred method of press control. Mr. Andersen writes that the Fox News chief "once threatened to send a camera crew to stalk my 3- and 5-year-old children in preemptive retaliation for a magazine story I was writing about his man Rush Limbaugh."

Thanks to Gawker for reading to the end.

Because here at Media Mob we never miss a trick on the Rather beat...here are a couple of the best revelations from former Observer reporter Joe Hagan's New York magazine piece about the Category-5 newsman's $70 million lawsuit against his former bosses at CBS, and what he hopes to get out of it:

Most notably, Mr. Hagan reports that within months of leaving CBS, Mr. Rather hired a team of three investigators to try to shed light on the ultimate mystery surrounding CBS's September 2004 flawed story on President Bush's National Guard service--that is, the origin of the documents at the heart of the controversy.  read more »

Adam Moss stood with a glass in champagne in one corner, Look Book's Amy Larocca was in another, and social princess Ally Hilfiger was sitting on a plush couch catching up with old high school friends ("We took retarded math!" exclaimed one. "Like, we did decimals" she replied). But as for familiar editorial faces, there was only a handful last night at the Bowery Hotel, as Mr. Moss' New York magazine celebrated its newly published Look Magazine with a party for fashion and advertising types.

New York publisher Lawrence Burstein, who went much of the night without a drink, and didn't look to be having much fun, said that his magazine goes without any competition, but also said that he reads Vanity Fair, The Economist and The New York Times Magazine.

Lockhart Steele and Nick Denton were sitting at the bar as the free drinks came to an end around 8:30. Asked about the lack of familiar media faces, a New York spokeswoman said, "Well, we can't invite everyone."