The National Newsroom
The Latest (National)
It’s Who You Know
As banks start nosing around Facebook and Twitter, the wrong friends could sink your credit
March 1st, 2012
Let’s take a trip with the Ghost of Christmas Future. The year is 2016, and George Bailey—a former banker, now a part-time consultant—is looking for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for a co-op in the super-hot neighborhood of Bedford Falls. He has never missed a loan payment and has zero credit-card debt. He submits his information to the online-only PotterBank.com, but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn. The cartoon loan officer avatar begins to frown as the algorithm discovers Bailey’s taxi-driving buddy Ernie was once turned down by PotterBank for a loan; then it discovers his daughter Zuzu’s photo album, “Saturday Nite!” And what was this Tweet from a few years back: “FML, about to jump off a goddamn bridge”? Read more »
The Latest (National)
The Man With Two Brians!
Can NBC’s personality industry save the anchor from irrelevance?
February 16th, 2012
The three-month-old newsmagazine Rock Center, NBC’s prime-time bid to recapture an audience for TV news by offering a looser format in which to showcase Brian Williams’ formidable charisma. Williams’ sensibility is so deeply ingrained in the programming that Rock Center executive producer Rome Hartman likes to say that, when it’s working, it feels like “Brian’s playlist.” Read more »
The Latest (National)
Doyennes in Distress!
Oprah and Martha, queens of empowerment, unceremoniously dethroned
February 2nd, 2012
The news that The Martha Stewart Show was on the butcher’s block (the Hallmark Channel reportedly is replacing Stewart with Marie Osmond this fall) signaled the end of an era for the so-called Doyenne of Domesticity, a former Connecticut caterer who turned a monthly magazine and weekly half-hour how-to program into a publicly traded corporation, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, worth $1.87 billion in 2005. Read more »
The Week
Putting a Lid on the Internet Soup
January 26th, 2012
The Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) were crafted to make it easier to combat Internet piracy, but as the bills wended their way through Congress in recent weeks, many in the Internet community—from giants such as Google to dorm-room startups—have seen them as a threat to the very essence of the Internet. Read more »
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Birth of a Salesman
How brand whiz Steve Stoute made selling out almost… cool
January 19th, 2012
Around the turn of the millennium, Steve Stoute, then a successful record company executive, made a gutsy career change. He left his lofty position as president of urban music at Interscope/Geffen/A&M Records and dove into advertising and marketing. He is now the go-to guy for Fortune 500 companies chasing the youth and urban markets. Read more »
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Cooking the Books
Anthony Bourdain trades his tongs for an editor’s pencil
January 5th, 2012
Anthony Bourdain knows how he can come off. The chef-turned-TV personality has said it would be "entirely fair and appropriate" were he described as "a loud, egotistical, one-note asshole who's been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long and who should just shut the fuck up." But it takes only one meeting with Bourdain—the man who likes to pepper his prose with words like "fucktard" and who made "bad-boy chef" a resplendent cliché—to reveal that he is a perfect gentleman. Read more »
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Sigmund Says
Analysts expand their horizons by going beyond Father Freud
December 8th, 2011
Though his physical presence in the city was short-lived, New York has become Sigmund Freud’s cultural home in the United States 100 years later, the archetype of the neurotic, upper-middle-class Upper West Sider lying on the couch—perpetuated by everyone from Philip Roth to Woody Allen—is still how much of the public thinks of psychoanalysis. (“Tell me about your relationship with your mother…”) Several generations have been raised on the notion of psychoanalysis as New Yorker cartoon. Read more »
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Fighting for Legitimacy
Mixed martial arts remains illegal in New York, but the sport isn’t giving up the battle
November 24th, 2011
Some see issues other than health and safety behind New York’s ban on MMA, pointing to a union dispute in Las Vegas. The owners of UFC, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, also own Station Casinos, which operates several nonunionized casinos, which Nevada’s Culinary Union is eager to organize. The union is an affiliate of Unite Here, a national labor organization that has spearheaded opposition to MMA in New York. Read more »
The Latest (National)
Screw U.
College loans a rallying point in Occupy protests
November 10th, 2011
It is accepted wisdom that Occupy Wall Street has too many diverse concerns to be tied to a single catalyst for the movement. The New York Times has suggested that the sole common thread among the occupiers is “anger.” But an alternative common thread might be the ubiquity of student debt. Read more »
The Week
Of Cool Air and Fire
October 20th, 2011
The Indy cars were just 11 laps into the 200-lap race when the weekend shattered. On a track that racer Danica Patrick had earlier described as “friggin fast,” a single swerve turned into a 15-car, 220-mph crash. In an instant, Dan Wheldon’s black-and-white No. 77 open-wheel racer was airborne and in flames. Wheldon was flown to University Medical Center. His death was announced at 2:20 p.m. He was a two-time Indianapolis 500 winner with blue eyes and a ready smile and a sense of proportion about the meaning of glory and fame. Read more »
