"All along the East End of Long Island, a string of beach towns that represent a sort of New York version of the French Riviera, fund-raisers and their topiarists are suffering through a limp summer, with the rising price of oil and falling value of the Dow combining to cast a pall over the party-hopping set.

"Some fund-raisers say that it may not help either that the number of charity galas seems to keep increasing each year. 'In the past we’ve sold out pretty quickly, but this year we’re scrambling,' said Tangie Murray, director of the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, which was founded by Mr. Simmons and his brothers to expose children to the arts and is putting on the Art for Life event. While 850 or 900 people have typically paid the $1,500 minimum to attend in recent years, Ms. Murray said that this year, 'we’re hoping we can reach 700; it’s a different economic climate.'" [NYT]

“I do have clients who worked at Bear Stearns—husband and wife both worked there,” says Lynda Ireland of Prudential Douglas Elliman. “They’d finally found a beautiful home they loved, and they bought it.” The house is in Bridgehampton, in the $2 million range. “Now they may have to sell it. They’ve told me it’s not that they’re afraid of being foreclosed upon. But they’re frightened. They have a big apartment in New York, and they feel they have to choose between New York and out here—they can’t carry both. And they have small children, so they want to be in New York for the kids. It’s very sad.”

We can relate! Since our own recent budget problems, we have been forced to choose between pawning our complete Showtime Pizza animatronic puppet collection or giving up our controlling stake in Dreamworks.

But actually the $20 million and up sector of the market is still doing just fine, thank you, thanks mostly to a man who everyone thought was Tiger Woods but who turned out to be a different guy named "Tiger" and then turned out to perhaps be a shadowy LLC that may actually belong to Tiger Woods. Also Sag Harbor is filled with 100-foot mega-yachts (everything is so mega!), movie stars and James Frey are still hanging out in Amagansett, and various hermits and bloggers have a "colony" in Montauk. Some rich people even have (ironic?) double-wide trailers!

In conclusion, the market is still crashing but we haven't hit the bottom yet but maybe there won't even be a bottom because of Barack Obama but on the other hand the wealthy may just begin burning their giant houses to the ground, which will actually be pretty awesome.

It's all these Clinton-friending liberal rich people who keep getting into messes these days, isn't it? When's the last time you heard anything about rich Republican financiers and executives flying about the nation with models, fucking teenagers, and carrying on sex orgies with movie stars? Is it the liberal connection to godless Hollywood? Former United Artists CEO and Bush Super Ranger Jerry Weintraub stays out of the headlines. Ken Lay was busted for fraud, not massages.

Hell, maybe liberals just have more fun? That's the point of liberality, isn't it? Those European values, that subjective morality, the godless thing? Clinton was impeached for having too much fun in office. Nixon never had fun ever except when he got zonked on painkillers and insulted the Jews, which is not really anyone's idea of a truly good time. Epstein never saw anything wrong with what he did. He just likes massages!

But why the need to congregate around Burkle? To hang out with him? Why did Epstein and Chris Tucker need to fly around on Jeff's private jet? Why does Clinton need to fly around the world on everyone's private jet? Liberal types do like to improve the world, and the rich ones are narcissistic enough to believe that they can do it personally. So they network and party and fuck models while flying to Africa to cure AIDS! Conservative zillionaires just rack up huge profits, contribute money to candidates who can ensure that they'll continue to rack up huge profits, and mind their own fucking (criminal) business. The liberals need to have cake with Arianna Huffington and Bono, for some reason.

So it may just be that Burkle embodies these characteristics the most. The most narcissistic, the most convinced of his own rightness, the most desperate to network with powerful people in the hopes of reshaping the world.

And then they all get tied up in sex scandals and your house is foreclosed, the end.

Oh no, I don't read the blogs—you couldn't pay me to read the blogs. I don't want to know what people who can't even afford to eat in my restaurant, let alone know how to cook have to say about me, and the few comments I did read on Eater.com a few weeks back because my job asked me to read 'em. The best they could come up with was that I was ugly.

• "a nonsmoking Japanese man drinking his coffee with an alcoholic beverage—another slowing agent—would likely feel caffeinated 'about five times longer than an Englishwoman who smoked cigarettes but did not drink or use oral contraceptives.'"
• "(Unhealthy behaviors, too, tend to stick together: Fewer than 5 percent of smokers eat breakfast daily.)"

We can't wait for the Brunch issue!

What Good is Breakfast? [NYM]

“'I literally had to sit there and tell him that he had to tell his wife that she had to stop spending,' she said. 'He was actually scared she would leave him because their financial situation changed so drastically.'

"Interviews with the people who actually see the bank statements, like divorce lawyers and lenders, say their clients are definitely living on less than they did a year ago, regardless of how expansive the definition of 'less' may be. Hairstylists and private jet rental companies say the wealthy are cutting back on luxuries like $350 highlights and $10,000-an-hour jet rentals. Even nutritionists and personal trainers notice a problem. The wealthy are eating more and gaining weight because of the stress." [NYT]

Here's Scott Galloway, the NYU business school professor who now sits on the New York Times board of directors. He is dressed as a knight! Neat! Galloway, a.k.a. "The Trim Reaper," founded RedEnvelope, an online retailer that recently laid off everyone and went bankrupt.

And here's Philip Falcone's lovely wife Lisa living out every young girl's dream of grinding against David Schwimmer. Note: this may be a different Lisa Falcone! Though Lisa did "model," she says, and still sports the hideous orange glow of a soft-core star who married rich.

Top photo: New York Social Diary

Ladies and gentlemen, various Silicon Valley millionaires present, The Seastanding Institue, "an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities 'with diverse social, political, and legal systems.'" In other words, a project funded in part by PayPal founder Peter Thiel to create a libertarian utopia made of "vast clumps" of seafaring homesteads in international waters. And, of course, they've got a 300-page manifesto. They're not nuts, of course! Not like all those other people who want to start Utopian ocean micronations!

The brains behind the project are Google engineer Patri Friedman and former Sun Microsystems programmer Wayne Gamlich. The chairman of their "institute" is with Clarium Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund. ("There's a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that's not crazy," he says. Good luck!)

They plan to build "scaled-down" oil rigs called "spar platforms," only with houses on top instead of oil stuff. It's basically a big concrete tube with ballasts on the bottom. Once they build many of the spar platforms, with all their private money, they will have a lawless libertarian utopia ruled by enlightened self-interest, and money. They will support themselves with "aquaculture or tourism," which means fishing, probably?

We just need to quote a block of this now because it's too blindly stupid to summarize:

"Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry," [Friedman] said. "You basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one. That's a ridiculous barrier to entry. And it's got enormous customer lock-in. People complain about their cellphone plans that are like two years, but think of the effort that it takes to change your citizenship."

Friedman estimates that it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a seastead for a few thousand people. With costs that low, Friedman can see constellations of cities springing up, giving people a variety of governmental choices. If misguided policies arose, citizens could simply motor to a new nation.

"You can change your government without having to leave your house," he said.

Long story short, Peter Theil will give you half-a-million dollars for any batshit scheme you come up with. Let's all try it! I am going to build a giant Libertarian cloud city. The king and queen will be clones of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand I've been working on. Also, it will have lasers, and talking monkey sidekicks for everyone.

Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies [Wired]

In the video, she reveals that Smith blamed his high blood pressure when he stopped having creaky senior sex with her long ago. But she found a whole stash of condoms, viagra, and porn that he left in their place. What to do with them? The jilted Walsh-Smith calls his assistant and asks. [Vanity Fair]

The researchers found this to be the case all over the world in different cultures. In other words, young sluts are everywhere, people! Do with this information what you will. This was surprising to the scientists who believed that only poor people have no moral compass.

"It's remarkable to find these patterns in the students in the study," said Daniel Kruger, research scientist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. "We have seen many examples where people do this out of necessity, but we still see these tendencies in people who are already well provided for."

(For some reason, the study refers to sexual favors as "nuptial gifts." I like that because it sounds like a wedding gift. The next time a friend of mine is getting married, I'm going to ask them if they'd like a "nuptial gift." Then when they say yes, I'll sit on their face naked. It'll be hilarious!)

Another crunchy green poser ripe for slaughter when civilization takes a powder "is Alex Steffen, the executive editor of www.wWorldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability. With only slight irony, Mr. Steffen, 40, said he and his girlfriend could serve as 'poster children for the well-adjusted, urban liberal survivalist,' given that they keep a six-week cache of food and supplies in his basement in Seattle (although they polished off their bottle of doomsday whiskey at a party)."

Who else will provide forced labor while we munch up their tasty supplies? "Joyce Jimerson of Bellingham, Wash., a coordinator for a recycling-composting program affiliated with Washington State University... ma[d]e her yard an 'edible garden,' with fruit trees and vegetables, in case supplies are threatened by oil shortages, climate change or economic collapse. 'It’s all the same ball of wax, as far as I’m concerned,' she said."

Okay, friends. We've got names and locations. The List has begun! [NYT]

Sometimes it can be sad to be newsworthy. Sorry, Charlie!

Oh, but what about school head Thomas Kelly, the guy who fired Andrew Trees and Mr. Janice Minn? Turns out, he's a bit of a schmuck.

Tom Kelly was selected to run Horace Mann by the school's board, over the protest of the school's staff. He came from a public school background, and had done admirable work with mentally handicapped kids, but he also allowed a construction companies to dump their toxic garbage all over school grounds.

Here are the dumps in question. Kelly justified this by pointing out that the companies were nice enough to place brand-new athletic fields on top of the landfills. Critics counter that these fields will give the kids cancer and also they are illegal. The State of New York closed the fields and the taxpayers were stuck with the bill for cleaning them up.

Here's a fun factoid: the toxicity of the fields was revealed the same fall that Kelly started at Horace Mann. Then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is a Horace Mann alum. His wife Silda is on the board of trustees—and was on the search committee that picked Kelly.

Spitzer only sued one of the three towns that took the cancerous construction garbage through illegal no-bid contracts. It was Eastchester, not Kelly's town of Valhalla. Take from that what you will!

In 2006, the Valhalla field finally reopened, mostly safe for use. Mostly.

The soil was analyzed for PCBs, pesticides, metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and volatile organic compounds. Most chemicals for which testing was performed were not detected in the soil, according to the DEC. But of the chemicals that were detected, most fell below state safety guidelines.

Levels of PAHs above state guidelines were found only in sample TP-7, which was the soil taken from the steep slope on the western side of the athletic field, facing Columbus Avenue. In that sample, the DEC acknowledged that levels of PAHs exceeded state guidelines, but concluded that "routine exposure to soil on the slope is probably unlikely." The agency noted that the District should maintain the grass cover on the slope to further reduce the potential for exposure.

(During Kelly's Horace Mann tenure, the school got artificial turf for its athletic field, which is not located on top of a cancerous dump.)

The Alligator Sunglasses Lady

This mysterious lady is a Horace Mann trustee. Her daughter started the offensive Facebook group that caught the attention of history teacher Peter Sheehy. So, naturally, one day she marched up to Sheehy and teacher Danielle McGuire (the target of the Facebook group) and had an insane argument with McGuire about how the teacher invaded the daughter's privacy and read daughter's secret journal by browsing the public Facebook group the daughter started. Then alligator sunglasses woman accused the teacher of calling another kid a Nazi, which almost got the teacher fired, even though it didn't happen. So—let's meet Alligator Sunglasses Lady!

Her name is Wendy Siegel. She's on the right. Her husband is Stephen B. Siegel, chairman of Global Brokerage for CB Richard Ellis.

"Jeffrey Robbins"

This is the little boy who harrassed Danielle McGuire for being a liberal who tried to talk about minorities in class, which upset young Robbins very much. He accused McGuire of calling him a "Nazi" and even claimed to have a tape. Of course, he didn't. His personal hero is Horace Mann alum Roy Cohn, though one wonders if he knows about the closet queer thing. The spoiled little shit also ended up class president! According to a tipster, the charming young Upper East Sider has two doctor parents, got early acceptance to Columbia, and recently "cancelled a meeting of the women's issues group at HM because he didn't like them." Here he is in the Horace Mann yearbook!

Confidential to Columbia: this kid? Really?

Young Jared is still thought by some to be but a pawn of his parents, specifically felon dad Charles. But his folks surely wouldn't have approved of his relationship with noted not-Jewish person Ivanka Trump, and that whole newspaper-buying thing doesn't have much to do with the family's occasionally-legal business. Regardless, the family remains in business together.

Last year, Charles and Jared sold a bunch of their Jersey properties to refocus on Manhattan. They bought some buildings for ridiculous sums, just before the market slowed to a crawl, and now the Post regularly updates us with news of Kushner's "credit crunch" and complicated real estate stories we don't quite understand that seem to imply that Kushner's crumbly buildings are costing him lots and lots of money.

But now Jared's making a play for Newsday! So maybe he's confident about things! Or maybe he's making a play for another paper to appear to be confident and independent, like when Barry Diller pretended to want to buy Yahoo! He's dumping his girlfriend and buying newspapers because things are just so awesome for him he can take risks. Maybe he'll run for Governor!

Or maybe Ivanka just found someone richer?

UNATTACHED [NYP via NYM]

Alexa stats must be taken with a grain of salt, but the trend is striking.

ASmallWorld.net, three years of pageviews:

Facebook.com, three years of pageviews:

• 'My 3-year-old, John, went to his Italian class on the Upper West Side early last month.'
• 'One morning, I returned to the building after walking my 10-pound shih tzu-poodle, Humphrey.'
• 'I took my car from our upper West End Avenue apartment house garage.'
• I ended up in the wilds of the South Bronx. At first I thought the street I was on was deserted, until I noticed a group of rather burly youths...'
• 'My response was: “You are one of the smartest supers in New York. I know you’ll understand it.''
• 'Some years ago, two very tall N.B.A.-looking men stood face to face, talking, on the narrow New York sidewalk near Macy’s, as I, a petite 5-foot-3, approached.'

Burly Bronx youths! N.B.A.-looking men! Gasp. Let's hear some other Diary one-liners. You can make them up; it's not as though these things are fact-checked.

A tipster asks, "will the spawn have Kucz's real nose?" And we want to know: is Alex really incapable of carrying her own child to term or does she just not want to? An unfair question perhaps, especially to ask of a 40-year-old woman (is it also unfair to mention that? Pretty sure her birthday was a couple weeks ago!), but a look at the Kucz's work and public statements presents a character who might just not want some sort of fattening, nutrient-sucking monster gestating in her toned stomach.

Back in 2004, Alex presented us with one of her trademark anecdotal investigations into the things her rich friend talk about at lunch. The subject: Pregnancy Paranoia. Did you know that you have to give up certain of life's pleasures during the nine months of pregnancy? It's true! Rich women have read as much on the Internets!

''Well, you know you can't wear an underwire bra,'' one young mother announced.

''No thong underwear,'' said Cricket Burns, the style director of Quest magazine and a mother of two.

''Or Botox,'' chimed in another young mother.

Mushrooms, said Jessica Friedberg, a mother of two perfect ZIP-code-10021 children.

The warnings tumbled forth: Tanning spray. Hair dryers. Acrylic nails. The J. Sisters. Cellphones. Then the waiters delivered dessert, a gooey chocolate soufflé with a mousse center and a side of crème anglaise.

Ms. Burns looked down, and in a voice lowered to the tone a Norad officer might use to announce the approach of nuclear warheads, said: ''And . . . no . . . chocolate . . . mousse.''

And salmon! And sushi! Why on Earth would any person ever want to do this to themselves? Especially where there are fools out there willing to take that fetus off your hands until its ready to be cooed over and swaddled in diamond-encrusted imported silk blankets.

Congrats Alex and Charles!

Journo Awaits Stork [NYP]
The Nine Months of Living Anciously [NYT]

The Year in Parties [Style.com]

Crowe would like to dispel the ideas that his Vanity Criticism enterprise is a) a po-mo art prank joke, b) making fun of the kids or c) A Sad Commentary On The State of Our Culture and the Vanity of the Rich but it really does seem to be all of those things, and more.

Or as he puts it: "The idea that it is actually getting to the crux of what their work is about is ludicrous and if that was what I was selling then the world would have a right to be angry. I think that a lot of people won't get it - they will think that it's a metaphor for how much money there is at the moment."

Here is an excerpt from his essay on the painting reproduced above:

It is tempting to interpret Isabel Rosen's work, particularly that from her recent blue period, exclusively as abstract art, but this would be wrong. In fact it would be rude. Certainly a painting like Important Items in the Sky, 2007, (right) shares a surface similarity with Miró's later abstract works. But while Miró drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry, Rosen adapts from the world around her, using ready made materials from her every day life. In the work we see a My Little Pony, and realize immediately that Rosen shares Plato's understanding of the ideal society. In this sense Rosen has more in common with Picasso than with Miró, but it must be emphasized that neither Picasso nor Miró possessed Rosen's sparkling pallet, or had a range of stickers anywhere near what we see here.

So there you have it, absolutely no kid-mocking or art pranking or metaphoring for all the money burning a hole in our culture.

Kinbote's Bespoke Art Commentary Service
Is this a Matisse? Er, no, it's Mattie's [Times of London]

Even with the recent dip in the credit market, lawyers show plenty of hedge fund and private equity envy. Who can blame them? Literally and figuratively, lawyers live in the shadows of those financial gods. They share the same upscale neighborhoods, eat at the same trendy restaurants and relax on the same stretches of white sand in the Hamptons. The difference is that Wall Streeters will buy three or four apartments and combine them, and pick up choice properties by the water. "Our place is on the poor side of town — north of the highway [away from the water]," says a lawyer, sipping a drink poolside at her East Hampton weekend retreat. "Only the bankers can afford the south side."

Report Says That the Rich Are Getting Richer Faster, Much Faster [NYT]

Consistency is the hobgoblin of Atoosa's small mind, however: "Chic boxes would be a great add-on to their wonderful offerings," she later says of Amazon.com's packaging. That didn't stop her from buying her husband a Kindle, however. One Kindle has been sold!

But the holiday season isn't just about buying friends and family completely useless luxuries wrapped in gaudy packaging from sites with some sort of "green component." "Drumroll please. ... The U.N. Refugee Agency is where I did 90% of my 'shopping.' As an immigrant, I realize how lucky I am to be in the United States and to be writing a column about 'luxury online shopping.' Giving this as my main gift is a way of showing my gratitude." Showing and showing and showing, yes.

Interviews conducted by the Wall Street Journal with classmates suggest that Knight, like John McCain and a million other aging "successful" dudes, has an adolescent Hemingway crush. He's working on a novel that will probably be about a misunderstood, hard-charging corporate exec fighting for what he believes in against weak-willed naysayers and child-loving labor activists.

Also, he's on Facebook! "He appears in a photo posted there," according to the Wall Street Journal, his arms around two undergraduates, with a third student holding what appears to be a drained margarita." Someone want to send that in?

Ironically, Knight's financial gifts to the school are going to develop the "Knight Management Center" at Stanford's business school, where each year hundreds of fresh-faced future CEOs will be subject to the burning resentment and scorn of Knight's English student peers.

Stanford Mystery: Who's the Old Guy In the White Nikes? [WSJ]

All that worrying was for nothing, as bonuses split among employees of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns will in fact add up to about $38 billion, beating last year's record. And all that despite each firm (besides Goldman) losing all their market value!

Oh: With the exception of Merrill Lynch, all those banks listed end their fiscal years in November, and according to these bloggers, those investment banks "could lock in their bonuses at the end of November and announce writedowns in December," which would screw the banks with fiscal years ending in December.

In other words, many of the assholes who are dooming us all will get much richer regardless, like always, while others of them will get not-as-rich, or richer at a slightly slower pace, or maybe even marginally less rich.

And then all the banks will collapse and we'll be carrying around wheelbarrows full of worthless dollars and RON PAUL WAS RIGHT SAVE GOLD IN YOUR MATTRESS.

Wall Street Plans $38 Billion of Bonuses as Shareholders Lose [Bloomberg]
Some Wall Street Bonuses To Be Cut In Half [CNN]
Bonus Advantage: November! [Milka Samora's Reality Journal]

There are quite a few other connected kids at media jobs, like Cate Edwards, Gus and Theo Wenner, Christina Huffington, Evan Springsteen, Max Spielberg, Meghan McCain, Jade Frampton, Liz Hanks and Chevy Chase's kid.

Doonan pines for olden times, when "many offspring were allowed to do nothing. This latter was the best option: The intern and assistant positions were left wide open to us lumpen losers from nowhere." (Last night at the Bowery Hotel he told Josh, "Why can't it be like the old days when rich kids would take over the family business?" Josh reminded him that the Observer is owned by a prodigal son who switched the family business from committing felonies to running a paper.)

Maybe this is just a thinly-veiled admonition to the city's event planners: Please seat Simon at the grownups' table next time!