Dear Reader,

Welcome to O2 on the Web!

Readers of The New York Observer in print already know the section as the newspaper's special section for features, columns and reviews about New York life: society, culture, film, music, dance, theater, books, fashion, food and drink and more.

Now, we've breaking it out into its own homepage on the Web, so you can find all that good stuff put together in one place.

Is this what you're looking for when you come to observer.com? Then be sure to bookmark www.observer.com/o2 and come back every day for constant updates on New York style and culture.

Were you a regular reader of The Daily Transom and now can't find the old 'style' channel where the column used to live? Bookmark www.  read more »

Dear Reader,

Welcome to O2 on the Web!

Readers of The New York Observer in print already know the section as the newspaper's special section for features, columns and reviews about New York life: society, culture, film, music, dance, theater, books, fashion, food and drink and more.

Now, we're breaking it out into its own homepage on the Web, so you can find all that good stuff put together in one place.

Is this what you're looking for when you come to observer.com? Then be sure to bookmark www.observer.com/o2 and come back every day for constant updates on New York style and culture.

And keep an eye on this page, which in the coming months will be the site of many of the innovations we've been working on behind the scenes to make our site the engaging, urgent, witty, urbane place New York City needs it to be.  read more »

Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor Lorin Stein has been wanting to publishing Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin for years, but until now could not find a work of his that could be translated easily enough into English.

That changed this week, Mr. Stein told Media Mob, with FSG planning to publish a short volume tentatively titled A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik in the near future. Mr. Stein compared the book to A Clockwork Orange, describing it as a satirical novel set in 2028 that follows a protagonist who's basically a henchman to a Putin-like dictator ruling over a Russia which has walled itself off from the rest of the world.  read more »

Kate Moss is collaborating with London textile designer Liberty—not to be confused with her ex Pete Doherty's band The Libertines—for her upcoming Topshop collection. [WWD]

There is a rumor going around that Si Newhouse flew to Paris to meet with French Vogue's Carine Roitfeld about replacing Anna Wintour come January. [Gawker] 

Gabriella Risatti, owner of the Gabriella New York bridal salon in the Meatpacking District, will make reproductions of the Vivienne Westwood wedding gown featured in Sex and the City for $15,000. But there is still an air of exclusivity as she will be taking measurements for only two days—tomorrow and Thursday—and will create a maximum of 30 dresses. [P6]   read more »

In a story in its January issue, Vanity Fair delves deep into the saga of El-Ad Properties, the Israeli company responsible for buying the Plaza Hotel and converting its well-loved, if aging, rooms into super fancy condos. The building's high-profile buyers (who signed on for the apartments sight unseen), have been complaining about "small windows, low ceilings, obstructed views, buckling floors, trashed carpets, glacially slow elevators, and frequent interruptions of running water," among many, many other things. And that's just the obvious stuff. A Vanity Fair source "with knowledge of the materials used in the hotel rooms" uncovered a host of cut corners:

"Instead of Italian marble for the bathroom floors and walls, El-Ad used low-density marble from China (about 50 cents a square foot).

 read more »

All ballet galas are unbearable, but they’re unbearable in different ways. In the bad old ABT days, we got a deluge of war-horse pas de deux tackled by war-horse dancers. Then there are the “theme” galas, in which a bunch of disparate ballets, or snatches of ballets, are thrown together under the pretense of making an artistic point. And then there are “celebration” galas, in which a person or an anniversary or an event is the declared focus of interest.

Once in a (rare) while there’s a real point to a City Ballet gala: the opening of the State Theater; the first night of the 1972 Stravinsky Festival; the salute to Lincoln Kirstein.  read more »

Hillary Clinton: powerful, reliable, classic. These are the ideas that Ms. Clinton seems to want to convey about herself with her Facebook profile picture. In the black-and-white headshot, she’s looking off to her right, and all of her signature attributes are there: Big smile, pearl necklace, American flag pin. This picture presents the ur-Hillary. She had changed her photo briefly last March—during the Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont Democratic primaries that would make or break her presidential campaign—to a snap from a February rally in El Paso, Texas, in which she towered in her tan suit, looking unbeatable; red, white and blue confetti rained around her.  read more »

Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, which has made a very welcome transfer to the Booth Theatre on Broadway, couldn’t be timelier.

Mr. Foote’s gentle, comic parable about self-interest and desperation over the fate of a family estate in the playwright’s imagined small town of Harrison, Texas, first premiered at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in 1989. With the rising anxiety about our economic future, the celebrated play and its genteelly feuding Southern characters have become more poignant. But only the prescient Mr. Foote, who ranks among America’s greatest playwrights, would make his point so charmingly in the unobtrusive manner of Chekhov.

 read more »

Last night at Citrine on West 21st Street, the former boy-band idol and Dancing With the Stars contestant Lance Bass (sporting a cargo jacket, gelled hair and faded loose-fit jeans), was surrounded by a small crowd of tan and buff partygoers who were there to toast him on the occasion of his third-place finish in the dancing competition.

After courteously posing for photos with a gaggle of thirtysomething female fans-who had slipped into the giggly exuberance of their youth-the former boy-band idol, who famously came out on the cover of People magazine in July 2006, was glad to talk about what had changed since the 1990s, when he was a member of ‘N Sync.  read more »

Ah, now that Michael Wolff has released his new biography on Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, it was just about time for him to babble some highly quotable comment and drum up some press for it: like, say, "MySpace users are [expletive] cretins."

His friend, Jon Fine of BusinessWeek, took the author out to dinner and discussed a subject he doesn't go into depth in his new book: MySpace.

Apparently, Mr. Murdoch and pals aren't too happy with it.

MW: ...I think it is--if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor.

 read more »