And you thought only fanboys could help set box office records. Thanks to an audience that was comprised of 80 percent women, The Twilight Saga: New Moon sunk its teeth into a ridiculous and record-setting $140.7 million to pace the field during what was the second most lucrative [...]
Monday: Heroes
When the dust settles and Heroes gets rightfully canceled (expect this to happen in the spring), it will be remembered as the Creed to Lost's Pearl Jam; this is a show that has degenerated so quickly into tedium, we find it hard to imagine Heroes was [...]
The city is moving to rezone a six-block area in the far West Village, a victory for local preservation groups and a potential obstacle for developers in the area.
The rezoning would affect buildings between Washington and Greenwich streets, from 10th to 12th streets. The effort is expected to [...]
The Senate voted to begin debate on health care legislation on Saturday.
Here's what could go wrong.
Lieberman on "Meet the Press": "I don't think anybody thinks this bill will pass."
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter settles a bet with Bloomberg.
Joseph Bruno, former State Senate majority leader, failed to testify at his own corruption' [...]
It might be just days before Thanksgiving (and, btw, when did that happen?), but if you head to a movie theater this weekend, don't be surprised if it feels a little bit like summertime. The box office is littered with big-ticket effects films (the second weekend of 2012),' [...]
Last night WABC (ABC's owned-and-operated station in New York) broke the story that Oprah Winfrey will be ending her broadcast talk show in 2011. She's decamping to cable, where she will run OWN, a cable network, jointly owned by her and Discovery Communications.
The Oprah Winfrey Show is the most successful [...]
It may turn out to be a red herring for the ages, but Thursday afternoon brought a report - citing a single, unnamed source - that Rudy Giuliani would within the next 48 hours announce his candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Kirsten Gillibrand.
Let's assume [...]
During its six years in the court of public opinion, this much has been certain about the planned Atlantic Yards project: It's not without drama.
Racing to meet an I.R.S.-imposed Dec. 31 deadline to secure financing, developer Bruce Ratner is scrambling to tie down all of the loose balloons [...]
Residents of largely non-white neighborhoods in New York City were far more likely to receive a subprime loan than those in largely white neighborhoods, regardless of the borrower's race, according to a new study from NYU's Furman Center.
The study, which controlled for differences in income and loan amounts, found that [...]
Tired of clicking around YouTube and iTunes for online videos of substance? Search no more! The Observer has your weekly handy guide to what's worth watching on the Web.
One in 8 Million series on NYTimes.com - How many times have you walked around the city streets [...]
So, Twilight Saga: New Moon. Where to start with this Twilight frenzy? Well, for starters, I--and the 13-year-old girl that will forever live inside me--totally get it! In the first film (and book) of the Stephenie Meyer series we were introduced to Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert [...]
Morning Joe may be losing its steam, but Chuck Schumer seemed well-caffeinated in a pre-dawn interview this morning, launching into long defenses of Harry Reid, health care, and Eric Holder.
The segment began with Mr. Schumer's least favorite subject: His desire (unstated, hypothetical, overwhelmingly probably) to be majority leader [...]
A year after his sweeping election victory - and ten months after he was inaugurated amid widespread public optimism - the new president's support is slipping in the polls, faith in his policies is vanishing, and the opposition is smelling blood.
That sentence could aptly describe the political outlook [...]
Anyone paging through the end of The Times' business section Wednesday might have noticed an unusual legal notice nestled in between the commercial real estate classifieds and a bank ad (a reader had to point it out to us):
NEW YORK LIBERTY DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION
Notice of Public Hearing
World' [...]
Five and half years ago, the Century Foundation's enormous brownstone at 41 East 70th Street nearly sold to Woody Allen and his wife, until he decided that renovating the place from offices into a house would take too much work. The house was asking $15 million.
Since then, the [...]
For the most obvious news of the fall, allow us to direct you to a recent Los Angeles Times article about dwindling television ratings. As it turns out, people aren't watching TV like they used to, unless it falls under the moniker of the NCIS franchise (how did' [...]
Inge Reist’s father was not interested in the subject of money. A medievalist in the comp lit department at Columbia, he reserved a “certain disdain for business and the stock market,” according to his daughter, and preferred instead to spend his time thinking about more meaningful things. “I [...]
A repetitive refrain filled City Hall’s council chambers on Tuesday morning. For a good hour at a zoning committee hearing on the contentious plan to redevelop the Bronx’s Kingsbridge Armory into a mall, council member after council member battered the Bloomberg administration and the [...]
Asked to predict what sort of working relationship he’d have with Michael Bloomberg over the next four years, the incoming city comptroller talked about physics.
“An electromagnetic force,” he said, “it’s unlike gravity. Gravitational force is only one direction, it’s an attractive force. Electromagnetic forces can be attractive or [...]
Gherardo Guarducci and Dimitri Pauli, the two handsome Italian owners of Sant Ambroeus in the West Village, were sitting recently on a spacious leather banquette in the dining room of their latest venture, Casa Lever, under the watchful Technicolor gaze of 10 original Warhol portraits (Bob [...]
Jon Cooper says he saw “the first red flag” back in January, as he sat in his home in Glen Cove with his spouse, Rob, watching David Paterson introduce Kirsten Gillibrand as the state’s new junior U.S. senator.
“Rob said, ‘Isn’t that Al D’Amato standing next to Gillibrand?’”
For Mr. [...]
"Think of me as you with a vagina,” Vera Farmiga’s character Alex says to George Clooney’s Ryan at one point in Up in the Air, the new film from Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You For Smoking), opening in theaters Dec. 4. “It’s a killer line,” Ms. Farmiga said" [...]
New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor has secured a stunning seven-figure book deal this week with Little, Brown to write a volume on the Obamas.
The deal was the result of a heated citywide auction, and was brokered by independent lit agent Elyse Cheney. It comes on the [...]
Joe Scarborough held up a copy of The New York Times. It was Monday, Nov. 16, and earlier in the morning The Times had published a piece about Newsweek, which had recently laid off 13 staffers. Quarterly ad revenue at the newsweekly was down 48 percent versus last [...]
The frugality fad is fading fast.
Bidders are dropping multimillions on Warhols at Sotheby’s; Goldman Sachs wives are preparing holiday shopping extravaganzas in anticipation of record bonuses; and in the realm of commercial real estate, tenants are spending more than $100 a square [...]
A little over a month ago, as the second wave of the great H1N1 hysteria of 2009 began to swell, it seemed like vaccines would be made available to any New Yorker who’d decided he would rather not gamble on contracting the feverish, vomit-inducing, kinda-maybe-sorta-lethal porcine plague.
Things didn’t [...]
What a week! Or, should I say, “Wart a week!”
Yes, a horrid wart! In full view of my public? Can you believe? That’s what I get for trying to avoid the H1N1 virus. What the hell am I talking about? I’ll explain all about Mr. Wart in just [...]
Our favorite humble hometown reporters might be on the verge of TV stardom!
A documentary filmmaker has hit the Times Tower with camera in tow and is planning to make a movie focused on the Times media desk.
“I think that these writers have something invested in their stories that [...]
The City University of New York is slogging ahead with plans for a new, experimental community college, and has enlisted brokerage Newmark Knight Frank to find it a temporary home.
The broker leading the hunt is Howard Kesseler, a Bowdoin-educated executive managing director who has grown popular with [...]
The loudest voices on the right never tire of telling us that they are the truest patriots. They claim to be the deepest believers in our system, the strongest defenders of our Constitution, the most upbeat, bold and courageous Americans anywhere. But now that the government is finally [...]
ALBANY—With negotiations over how to bridge a $3.2 billion budget deficit stalemated, Carl Kruger—a primary contributor to the blockage—took to his bully pulpit.
"Part of being a New Yorker is paying taxes that are assessed upon you," Mr. Kruger, a Democratic state senator from south Brooklyn, fairly screeched at [...]
Normally you have to be some kind of big shot—or perhaps familiar in the art of bit torrent downloading, which we are not—to get an Academy Awards screener. But today, everyone has the opportunity to go to their local Best Buy or Blockbuster (these places still exist!) and [...]
Last February, Anil Dash; the co-founder and “chief evangelist” for Six Apart, the company that creates the most popular blogging software in the world; was visiting his family in India for the first time in 25 years, explaining what he does for a living. Mr. Dash, 34, is [...]
Eliot Spitzer infamously dubbed himself "a f------ steamroller" in his early days in office - a description that didn't exactly hold up as the legislature stared him down and his popularity waned in the ensuing months.
But as a candidate for governor in 2006, Mr. Spitzer absolutely was a' [...]
It wasn’t all doom and gloom at Friday’s premiere of “The End of Poverty?” at Village East Cinemas. The film, which traces the origins of global poverty back to the Age of Exploration, offers a reason for hope: things might soon get so bad that the impoverished will [...]
Earlier this month, a very wealthy and very Republican slice of Florida society was thrown into a very sweaty panic when the multimillionaire attorney Scott Rothstein was accused of running a Ponzi scheme that could total more than a billion dollars. Even though Mr. Rothstein, a spiky-haired and [...]
Nerds, rev your browsers! Time Inc. has just launched a new site titled Techland. In his introductory post, technology editor Peter Ha writes: "Think of TECHLAND as the water cooler for nerds. Or, the way I see it, TECHLAND is the result of some weird orgy involving Jeff" [...]
Monday: House
It’s been interesting to watch the writers on this show try different things to see if they can breathe new life into a program that is plagued by complaints that it's the same week to week. We understand the argument--there tends to be a fairly unbreakable formula' [...]
You probably didn't need a Mayan prophecy to realize that 2012 was going to be the big winner at the box office over the weekend, but even the most optimistic projections didn't see this coming. The $65 million three-day salvo for 2012 was not only the biggest since [...]
Rudy Giuliani lives for weekends like this.
The Obama administration's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 defendants in federal court gave the former mayor a chance to showcase his Tough Guy act on three separate Sunday morning shows.
On "Fox News Sunday," ABC's "This Week," and [...]
Citigroup, Joseph Abboud, Kurt Salmon Associates, Pali Capital, and the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation are just a few of the bold-faced names who may have been paying rent to the Iranian government for their offices in a Fifth Avenue skyscraper, according to real estate sources, the tenants'' [...]
On Sept. 9, Bruce Ratner, the powerful developer scrambling to start building a new Brooklyn basketball arena for the Nets, gave a prediction: The credit ratings agencies would deliver ratings on about $700 million in bonds for the arena by the end of the month. [...]
"The beauty of this show is that it's got content from all over the NBC Universal platforms," said Matt Glassman.
It was Wednesday afternoon, and Mr. Glassman, a senior producer of content at NBC's local owned-and-operated station in Washington D.C., was on the phone with The Observer talking about [...]
File this under bad planning: it seems like every week Hollywood offers up yet another schlocky horror movie to the court of public opinion, but today—on the always-spooky Friday the 13th—there isn't a horror movie in sight. Someone cue up the Price is Right horn! As we do' [...]
Trader Joe's, oh ye of endless lines, Hawaiian shirts, eerily pleasant staff, and to-die-for chipotle-flavored hummus, finally you're coming to Sixth Avenue!
The store has signed a lease for the retail space at the handsome Mattel Building at 675 Sixth Avenue, the storefront formerly occupied by Barnes & Noble, [...]
We hope you're sitting down (preferably in front of a TV). In a study released by The Nielsen Company on Tuesday, it was revealed that the average American spends four hours and 49 minutes per day watching television, up four minutes from last year and nearly 20 percent' [...]
Tired of clicking around YouTube and iTunes for online videos of substance? Search no more! The Observer has your weekly handy guide to what's worth watching on the Web.
How to draw a New Yorker cover - Speaking of the last magazine standing, artist Jorge Colombo sketched [...]
The United Arab Emirates has dropped a princely sum on a stalled development site in midtown east.
In an odd denouement to a development story that began in 2007, the Middle Eastern nation has paid $44.7 million to take the property at 313-317 East 46th Street, between First and Second [...]
About a week before Election Day, with little fanfare, the Bloomberg Administration announced its one hundredth zoning change since the mayor came into office in 2002. In New York City, zoning is one of the most important regulatory tools available to government in its efforts to enhance sustainability [...]
Today, CNN executives announced that John King will be the network's new 7 p.m. anchor. Mr. King will take over the time slot sometime early next year. For the time being he will continue to anchor CNN's Sunday morning public affairs show, State of the Union. According to [...]
Back in February 2008, when the doyenne real estate broker Sharon Baum announced that she'd no longer be driving a hunter green Rolls-Royce Silver Spur--upholstered in camel-colored leather, and blessed with her famous "SOLD 1" custom license plate--it was an early sign that the Upper East Side's [...]
Anthony Weiner is absolutely right when he says, as he did in Wednesday's New York Times, that Mayor Bloomberg and his re-election team were scared of him.
But Weiner is forgetting another perfectly valid point: He was scared of them, too. And he blinked.
It's no accident that he's not' [...]
Magazines are shrinking—smaller staffs, fewer writers, fewer stories written per writer, fewer words for each story—but The New Yorker continues to look, remarkably, about the same as it did five years ago, even as its parent company has cut hundreds of jobs and folded a handful of titles [...]
In a late September planning conference at N.Y.U., Vishaan Chakrabarti strode into the college's Kimmell Center a healthy hour after the event began.
Taking his place onstage, the former city planning official and development executive began to speak about his favorite project: the redevelopment of Pennsylvania Station-in the planning [...]
When the lights went up Sunday afternoon on a shirtless man next to a pantsless man—both American, both young—I knew that City Opera was back. It was the start of the second act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and the two men were playing the eponymous antihero and his [...]
Last month, Google announced that they had invented a "Street View trike." Their Street View car could roll down traditional roads and take pictures for their popular maps feature. But it couldn't document hard-to-access trails, parks, landmarks and sports venues. A Google mechanical engineer who did some' [...]
"There’s something in the air that makes people want to make pickles,” said Joya Carlton, 28, one of three partners in Brooklyn Brine, a local pickle start-up, sitting in a booth at the Greenpoint Coffee House with her two partners, Shamus Jones, 29, and Josh Egnew, 34, both" [...]
Earlier this year, the investor Christopher H. Browne put his 515 Park Avenue duplex on the market for $32.5 million, even though the place was basically a one-bedroom apartment. There was a guest room, to be fair, but it was smaller than the master suite’s walk-in closet.
The duplex [...]
The 104-year-old, 36-foot-wide, 17-bathroom, 15-bedroom, 11-fireplace mansion at 18 East 68th Street was the most expensive house in New York when it was listed last year for $64 million. Even when that tag came down in January to $54 million, the price was still higher than any Manhattan [...]
On the day before his first day as director and head curator of the Public Art Fund, Nicholas Baume took the ferry to Governors Island to admire a group show of emerging artists called “This World & Nearer Ones.” The show was a multidisciplinary affair that consisted of [...]
The Messenger
Running time 105 minutes
Written by Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman
Directed by Oren Moverman
Starring Ben Foster, Jena Malone, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton
The box office has not smiled on movies about the Middle East conflicts or the men who fight them. Stop-Loss, Grace Is Gone, [...]
It was Oct. 13, and inside the wood-paneled lobby of the Newport Office Center, which rises like a glass punctuation mark from the Jersey City shore of the Hudson River, Governor Jon Corzine was gleefully announcing a huge score in the Garden State's long-simmering battle with Manhattan for [...]
The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission backed off its effort to landmark a B.F. Goodrich Company building on West 57th Street, a rare retreat by the commission and one that follows aggressive pushback from development giant Extell, which plans a mixed-use skyscraper on the property.
The LPC on [...]
For City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, things are probably going to be less fun now.
The mayor whose wagon she hitched her fortunes to spent $100 million to win reelection by less than 5 points against a member of her own party whom she endorsed late and with undisguised [...]
ALBANY—Next Thursday, Sally Minard will commit an act of political courage.
Ms. Minard, a strong presence on the Democratic donor circuit in New York and a supporter of Hillary Clinton and the DNC, will host a breakfast at her Upper East Side house in honor of David Paterson. It [...]
Crown Acquisitions chairman Stanley Chera, owner of 15 million square feet of real estate, may have recently added a few of New York's most valuable retail properties to his portfolio: three exclusive Fifth Avenue storefronts occupied by Bottega Veneta, Pucci and De Beers. But that hasn't stopped' [...]
Within hours after the House of Representatives approved health care reform by a narrow margin, Republicans predicted retribution at the polls next fall. They promised to make every Democrat regret that historic vote as the first step toward the reversal of power in Washington. And as the current [...]
A software development company is in contract to buy two commercial condominiums in a Time Equities building, and it’s able to do so thanks largely to a bit of lexicographical acrobatics buried deep within the 2009 stimulus plan.
In short, the verb “to manufacture” no longer means what [...]
Michael Bloomberg's embarrassingly narrow victory margin last week may embolden Democrats to do in his third term something they largely refused to do this year: attack him.
With all the world assuming that the mayor was coasting toward a re-election landslide - and with polls showing him running even [...]
ALBANY—David Paterson arrived late for his big speech, and before an Assembly chamber that featured over a dozen empty chairs, delivered a blunt message: "Frankly, we are running out of money."
"At this moment, all of us assembled in this chamber stand as the last defense between our state" [...]
A few weeks ago, Hearst Corp's Esquire announced that they'd debut a snazzy new "augmented reality" issue and be the first publication to take the relatively new technology into its pages. AR, the hot new trend in iPhone apps, layers data, images and video that users can interact' [...]
Extell Development's skyscraper planned for 57th Street and Broadway will face a big test Tuesday, as the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission is set to decide the fate of two connected buildings built by the B.F. Goodrich Company in 1909.
Just what that fate will be is unclear to [...]
SoHo Properties has invested in Chelsea.
Sharif El-Gamal, chairman and CEO of the real estate investment group, has dropped $45.7 million on the property at 31 West 27th Street, which PropertyShark describes as a 12-story, 108,594-square-foot office building.
"We just bought it for the income," Mr. El-Gamal told The Observer. "It's'" [...]
Pushing a health care reform bill through the House on Saturday night was a trickier task than Democrats anticipated.
But it still wasn't that suspenseful: Somehow you knew that party leaders - and the White House - would manage to squeeze out the necessary 218 votes, something they ended' [...]
Christmas came early at the box office this weekend as A Christmas Carol bah humbugged its way to $31 million in ticket sales and a first place finish, ahead of newcomers The Men Who Stare at Goats ($13.3 million in second) and The Fourth Kind ($12.5 million in [...]
Monday: Gossip Girl
There is some wear on these treads—specifically with regards to Blair, who has been spinning her wheels in a swampy mess of weekly plotting and scheming for no real reason other than the script telling her to do so—but those breathlessly wailing about the demise of [...]
Joe Halderman, the CBS News producer accused of attempting to extort $2 million from CBS Late Show star David Letterman, will be headed to a Manhattan court on Tuesday morning for the first hearing in the criminal case against him.
Will Mr. Halderman, as it is widely assumed, try [...]
The main $3 billion mortgage for Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village has been transferred to a "special servicer," according to the rating agency Fitch, a significant step taken when loans are in default or on the verge of default.
The owners of the giant 11,200-unit Manhattan [...]
Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch told his staff this afternoon that he will be stepping down in April after five years on the job.
Mr. Gourevitch, who is also a New Yorker staff writer, said in an interview that his decision to resign was motivated by a desire [...]
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Google Books has just launched a digitized magazine stand. In their never-ending quest to archive all media, from Web sites to books, Google is taking on the publishing world and scanning entire issues of magazines, ads and all. Most issues are two or three years old--or [...]
Opening night at New York City Opera felt like New York City Opera can sometimes feel: like the Metropolitan Opera, but scrunched up. Rather than unfolding majestically along Lincoln Center like the Met's, City Opera’s red carpet was crammed into the lobby. Then, when the gala ended, those' [...]
Back in April 2008, Abigail Disney, the mogul's grandniece, put her two 300 West End Avenue apartments on the market for a combined $13,445,000. It was an ambitious thing to do, considering that a year and a half earlier she'd paid the singer Harry Belafonte just $10.75 million' [...]
It looks like all it took for some movies that you actually might consider seeing to get released into theaters was a flip of the calendar. The first full weekend of November arrives with no less than five new films, and, as usual, there is something for everyone. [...]
New York University is in the process of resolving a landmarks violation, issued after the school placed new signs on the landmarked Silver Towers, just south of Washington Square Park.
The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation first complained to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in June, after the [...]
If one Googles the term "Soviet Style bureaucracies," Assemblyman Richard Brodsky owns the top four results, each with quotes of his that refer to New York's public authorities--his favorite term on the topic.
The Westchester Democrat has long been pushing a bill to reform such public quasi-agencies--including the M.T.A., [...]
Bill Rudin, the civic-minded real estate billionaire, admired in New York for his family’s remarkable success, apparent functionality, and steadfast devotion to New York civic life, made a startling declaration on Wednesday morning at the Harvard Club.
“I got a call the other day from an Albany politician,” said [...]
Kyle Pope, formerly the number two editor at Conde Nast Portfolio, has been announced as the next editor of The New York Observer.
Observer publisher Jared Kushner announced the appointment today. Editor Tom McGeveran, who announced last week that he will be leaving the paper at the end of [...]
The New York State Senate's chief information officer team just launched an early version of their Open Legislation Portal today.
The site allows users to search for bills by sponsor, committee, recent actions, and recent votes. You can also search by keyword, like, say, "bicycle" and find [...]
Tired of clicking around YouTube and iTunes for online videos of substance? Search no more! The Observer has your weekly handy guide to what's worth watching on the Web.
The New York City Marathon in video form - Brooklyn photographer Mehmet Dokumcu created this beautiful time lapse [...]
Condé Nast announced today that it has poached Susan Plagemann from Hearst and has made her the new publisher of Vogue.
Ms. Plagemann has spent the better part of her career at Hearst. She's been the publisher of Marie Clare since 2004, she was the publisher of Cosmopolitan before [...]
After the sleepy Modern and Impressionist Art Sale last night at Christie's, the gallerist Tony Shafrazi and John Herring stood outside and beamed at each other.
"Is this guy a living legend or not?" Mr. Herring said, pointing to his friend. "It's not a question. That's academic."
Mr. Herring and' [...]
Mayor Michael Bloomberg now has the time and the mandate to create a legacy of LaGuardia-like proportions. His reelection after a catastrophic economic collapse on Wall Street, leading to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, is a tribute to the high regard New Yorkers have for [...]
Don't look now, but the Oscars just got interesting. No, not because of the ten potential Best Picture nominees—as we've already discussed , this has a chance to be the worst field of Best Picture candidates since ... well, last year—but rather because of the actual telecast. The improvements [...]
For a brief while in the Hilton Trianon Ballroom Tuesday night, there was a collective feeling that somehow, the widely held expectations of an entire city might actually be wrong.
The Hilton was host to Comptroller Bill Thompon's post-election party, where a healthy set of elected officials, Democratic Party [...]
So there we were somewhere around 10 o'clock on Election Night, watching as county after county reported devastating news for Jon Corzine.
New Jersey's governor—for whom Barack Obama made two splashy campaign appearances in the home stretch—was going down, the first Democrat to lose a statewide race there in 12 years, [...]
SARANAC LAKE—Doug Hoffman and his supporters gathered here to proclaim a great victory, the first peak in a populist right-wing movement that would sweep the ruling class out of office starting with a win in this Congressional district. Instead, they came up short, settling with a campaign that [...]
