Most Popular Stories on Observer.com

When the journalistic pack bites into a tasty cliché they often refuse to let go, lazily chewing and regurgitating a phrase like “team of rivals” long after the flavor is gone. Derived from the Doris Kearns Goodwin book on Lincoln’s cabinet, that morsel had scant relevance to the cabinet being assembled by Barack Obama, as the president-elect bravely tried to explain when he introduced his national security team.

But as Mr. Obama learned many months ago, our leading media minds tend to be far less interested in real ideas and policies than in a fixed narrative about personalities. So his decision to nominate primary rival Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, with all the friction that would supposedly generate, became the focus of the news.  read more »

It's been three years since the Athena Group purchased the lot at 111 Central Park North, occupied then by a low-slung brick building that housed a hair salon and a parking lot.

In the ensuing years, the development company built a glossy condominium tower, outfitting its 88 units with marble countertops, Viking ranges and dramatic views of the Manhattan skyline and Central Park. Jill Sloane, an executive vice president at Halstead Property, broke a Harlem sales record when she helped sell a 4,000-square-foot penthouse for $8 million. And brokers, marketers, journalists, buyers and Harlem residents tested out a new label along the way: Central Park North.  read more »

Sheila McClear, one of Gawker.com's three writers, has been fired.

Ms. McClear told us her layoff was characterized to her as part of a budget cut at the Web site, and was told that her page-views were lacking. She learned the news after she heard rumors that there would be further cuts at the company (19 people were let go back in October, and a few more last month) and asked her bosses directly if she had anything to be concerned about. After that, she was summoned to a conference room and told that she'd be let go starting in January.

She said she was told there would be no more layoffs at the Gawker Web site in this round of cuts.  read more »

Yowza! In an email time-stamped 6:38 a.m., The Real Estate Group New York declared that Manhattan was now, for all intents and purposes, a tenant's market going forward.

"Landlords are feeling a lot of pressure this month," Daniel Baum, the firm's COO said in a statement. "I have heard everything from ‘anything for a lease’ to ‘just bring me bodies.’ Concessions have become standard and price drops are happening across the board."  read more »

Richard Fuld Jr., who recently sold off 16 works of art at Christie's, is not the only former Lehman Brothers executive selling off his assets. The financial firm's former president, Joseph Gregory--who has already sold his apartment at 610 Park Avenue for $4.4 million and the private helicopter that he used to commute to work every day from Huntington, N.Y.--has had no luck getting rid of the eight-bedroom Bridgehampton mansion he placed on the market in September for $32.5 million (half a million dollars less than his 2007 salary), reports Page Six Magazine. And now, desperate to make a profit off the property, Mr.  read more »

Christopher Buckley will continue to work through his daddy issues with a new book about the death of his parents, William F. and Pat Buckley, which he predicts will "land hard in some quarters." [P6]

Cameron Diaz made a big deal of avoiding ex Justin Timberlake's current girlfriend Jessica Biel backstage at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, but Ms. Biel was apparently too busy showing off her hot dad to notice. [Full Disclosure, second item]

It's probably not a coincidence that Madonna and Alex Rodriguez are both in Mexico City right now. [NYDN]

Samantha Ronson's half-sister, 20-year-old Annabelle Dexter-Jones, has been asking Lindsay Lohan for advice on picking an agent. [Page Six Magazine]

Orlando Bloom and model Miranda Kerr are not engaged, in case you heard they were. [Us Weekly]

Metallica drummer (and art collector) Lars Ulrich doesn't do drugs anymore, but he still likes "bonding" with friends in bathroom stalls. [P6]

Danny Shea of the Huffington Post is reporting that David Gregory has been chosen as the next moderator of NBC News' Meet the Press.

Mr. Gregory's name has been reportedly on a short list of possible replacements for the esteemed position since Tim Russert passed away of a sudden heart attack this past June.

When reached by Media Mob, an NBC News spokesperson said that the network "has nothing to announce."

Likewise, when contacted by phone, Mr. Gregory’s agent, Richard Leibner of N.S. Bienstock, said he could neither confirm nor deny the report.

The Man Who Owns The News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch
By Michael Wolff
Broadway Books, 446 pages, $29.95

Among people in what’s called “traditional media,” a genre that today ranges in intellectual and commercial standing from the indifferent to the near-extinct, it’s a commonplace to think of Rupert Murdoch as the Great Satan—as a cur, a pig and monster of the lowest order, a vulgarian whose acquisition of The Wall Street Journal in 2007 may have been the greatest tragedy ever to befall the saintly business of Anglophone journalism. This prejudice disregards the perception held by many (myself included) that The Journal has become a much more interesting and essential paper than it was—notwithstanding that a form of clinical insanity still holds sway in its editorial pages.  read more »

“Tin Pan Alley is gone,” Bob Dylan wrote in the jacket of his 1997 album Biograph. “I put an end to it.”

The neighborhood that was once the hub of the American music-publishing industry in the early 20th century has undergone many transformations since it became known as Tin Pan Alley. Between 1893 and 1910, nearly 20 music-publishing companies moved to West 28th Street, according to the Historic Districts Council. Over the years, they have been replaced by furriers, florists and, lately, mass-market wholesalers, but the five-story, 1852 rowhouses at 49-51 still exist in much the same condition today as when the first songwriters, M. Whitmark and Sons, first moved there.

In October, however, it looked like the last remnants of Tin Pan Alley could be demolished to make way for a condo, when the Lost City blog broke the news that all five buildings were on the market for $44 million.  read more »

It's been fashionable to compare Barack Obama's presidential transition favorably to Bill Clinton's 16 years ago, which was supposedly a model of chaos and disorganization. This is somewhat unfair to the former president, whose popularity didn't really take a hit until after he was sworn in. But Clinton did make at least one blunder that Obama has avoided: getting involved in a Georgia Senate run-off.

In late November '92, weeks after eking out a victory of his own in the state, President-elect Clinton made a last-minute campaign appearance (after first dispatching Vice President-elect Al Gore) with Senator Wyche Fowler, who was facing Republican Paul Coverdell in a run-off.  read more »

At the Shop NYC bazaar Monday evening, sponsored by Gen Art, Heatherette designer Richie Rich was happy to report that he'd just won a court case over the right for him to use his own name as a designer. "How do I compete against myself?" he asked. "I invented Heatherette. A lot of greedy people out there, that's how it happened."

His CD will come out next summer. "I call it Fop," he said. "Fashion pop!" Fop it is, then. The fopper was dressed in a red-and-white striped circus jacket.

Jules, the designer behind Bijules, makes headbands and earrings featuring custom-dyed locks and braided strands of human hair; she uses the same colorist for her fushcia, bright orange, and peacock-blue hued hair accessories as musician MIA and rapper Rye Rye. "I was raised by hippies," she said, musing about her spin on the headband's recent popularity. "It's a new way to see hair—adding hair onto hair you already had."  read more »

The Associated Press' Hillel Italie is reporting that Rebecca Saletan, who became publisher of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt when the company's component parts were merged by the Irish multimedia firm in January, has resigned from her position and will serve out her last day on December 10th. Ms. Saletan's departure will come two weeks after Publishers Weekly reported that the editors who report to her had been told to stop acquiring new books because there was not enough room for them in the budget.   read more »

Last week, an upstart team packed its backs and traveled to play the conference-leading Tennessee Titans when few supposed it had any realistic chance of success. As it would turn out, the upstarts destroyed that Titans team, embarrassing it before its hometown crowd by a score of 34-13 and, in the process, securing for itself its new identity, equally coveted and dreaded, as “the team to beat.”

That team was the Jets. And after their celebrated destruction of Tennessee, it was said of the Titans that they had become too fat and too satisfied with their own success to appreciate the threat that a rising Jets team presented.  read more »

Via The Guardian: Import socialite, Brooklyn resident, model, clothing designer, Nylon columnist, and possibly desperate housewife Peaches Geldof will continue to expand her inorganic hipster brand with the release of Disappear Here, a new magazine she co-edits with James Brown (the GQ editor fired for including "the Nazis" in his list of the 200 most stylish men of the century).

Described by the pair as a "women's mag that appeals to men," the first issue--which will be distributed for free this Thursday at 50 record shops, bars, boutiques and clubs in London and New York--includes a column by British Socialist Tony Benn, prank ("wind-up" in British!) calls to the right-wing British National Party, Ms.  read more »

We dropped on you this morning the gong-rattling pronouncement that Manhattan is now a tenant's market by the two most important measures: rents (they're dropping across the board) and vacancies (they're up and climbing).

But there's more to the math.

According to The Real Estate Group New York, which released its November report just before sun-up (PDF here), the number of Manhattan apartment vacancies may be higher than signified. Why? Because some owners of higher-end rentals don't want everyone to know about all their vacancies: "[V]acancies, may actually be even higher than reported, particularly in doorman buildings, as many landlords are not releasing their full vacancy list."

Why would some landlords play their vacancies so close to the chest? More empty apartments might further drive down rents and demand of landlords ever more concessions and incentives to lure tenants.

Despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 5-year-old ban on smoking in bars, patrons are still lighting up after hours. If you've ever been to the Beatrice Inn or Rose Bar at Gramercy Park Hotel last at night, this isn't exactly news. But rarely is it pointed out—with 1,800 or so words devoted to the topic—as it is in this week's Page Six Magazine.

A spokesperson for the Rose Bar told the magazine, "The Rose Bar is extremely vigilant in preventing smoking by our patrons. There is a full-time staffperson whose sole responsibility is to monitor and prevent smoking within the bar." But Page Six's Sara Cardace, visiting the bar on a Thursday, spotted several patrons puffing, and quoted other sources pointing fingers at celebrity-hosting places like Citrine, SubMercer, and GoldBar.  read more »

Never mind the campaign.

That's Barack Obama's once-and-for-all line on his former differences with Hillary Clinton, who he just announced as his secretary of state at a press conference this morning introducing the Obama foreign policy team.

Asked why he thought Clinton, who was standing just behind him, was qualified for secretary of state now after he once equated her trips to foreign countries as first lady with sipping tea with the powerful, he said, "This is fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated in the course of the campaign – no, I understand – and you’re having fun, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  read more »

What else do you call a day when the comedic actress and writer is seemingly everywhere all at once?

First up, Vanity Fair, which enlisted The Times' Maureen Dowd to profile Ms. Fey, whom the magazine's cover trumpets as "A New American Sweetheart!" (Punctuation theirs.) The magazine's Web site also features one of those behind-the-scenes videos of Ms. Fey's photo shoot that all magazines' Web Editors are convinced Internet users love. (In an example of too-weird-to -ignore/too-geeky-to -explicate life imitating art, a very Maureen Dowd-like character played by Christine Lahti once wrote a profile of the protagonists' of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a show, like Ms. Fey's 30 Rock, set behind the scenes of a sketch comedy show very much like Ms. Dowd's launchpad, Saturday Night Live.)

Ms. Dowd's story was dutifully picked up by The Daily News, The New York Post (whose Page Six also had an item about Ms. Fey today), and The Associated Press, and TMZ. (Apparently a lot of people have been wondering why Ms. Fey has a scar on her face.)  read more »

Project Runway contestant Christian Siriano has signed a deal with Payless to design a line of affordable shoes and handbags. [NY Post]

Designer Roberto Cavalli has been cleared of all tax evasion charges brought against him in Italy in 2002 when he attempted to write off taxes on renovations to his Tuscany home. [Vogue UK]

Louis Vuitton is re-releasing Marc Jacobs' collaboration with graffiti artist Stephen Sprouse for a new limited edition collection that the designer will advertise by posing nude painted in Mr. Sprouse's graffiti. [WWD]

Heidi Klum's father, Gunther Klum, who also acts as her manager, has sent a $275,000 bill to a German party promoter who used the supermodel's image on a flyer and on his Web site. [Vogue UK]

Italian video artist Francesco Vezzoli has created a fake ad for a perfume he named Greed, starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams filmed by Roman Polanski. [NY Mag]

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 »