On the campus of the University of Missouri, graduate student Jonathan Butler has been starving himself in an effort to remove the school’s president Tim Wolfe from his position. Today, on the seventh day of his protest, Butler won.
The working man's author decided it was time to take out the iconic Mark Twain for being a bourgeois phony. But maybe old Tom is just upset that he was never able to write The Great American Novel himself?
White-all-over author Tom Wolfe has a new, extremely well-compensated (we imagine) short story in Vanity Fair. He decided to write about the wealthy this time! Yet he retains that flair for authentic dialogue he displayed in I Am Charlotte Simmons.
Dan Baum chronicled the loss of his New Yorker gig on Twitter. His story—and the New Yorker's own reaction—is a great reminder that America's best magazine still runs itself like a secret society.
Chris Martin, the husband of Gwyneth Paltrow and lead singer of Coldplay, turns 32 today. Author Tom Wolfe is 79. Lou Reed is turning 67. Restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow is turning 59. Jon Bon Jovi is 47. Daniel Craig is 41. Hockey player Henrik Lundqvist is 27. Writer John Irving turns 67. Mikhail Gorbachev is 78.…
Well, partly in the third person. The famous youth culture expert wrote to complain about critic Alex Ross.
Friend of the commoner Tom Wolfe is all white on the outside. But don't judge. The Observer caught up with the fancy author and had him explain what the rappers are talking about (SEX):
Google somehow contrived to include full digital images of old New York magazines in its new magazine search service on Google Books. Sadly, the archive is missing key issues, containing such classics as "Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny's" and "Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night." But both of those are…
Alberto Rottura is the man who cuts Michael Bloomberg's hair. (His cuts cost $35.) He's also the man who tends to the locks of Betsy Gotbaum and Tom Wolfe. One person who used to be a client but no longer shows his face around Rottura's salon any longer? Eliot Spitzer. "Then he got entangled in an escort scandal,…
Last week the Observer, Tom Wolfe said the truly rich would be protected from the Wall Street meltdown because all the smart guys had long since decamped for hedge funds, leaving investment banks staffed by "real second-raters." This weekend in the Times, the author of Bonfire of the Vanities clarified that statement…
So Tina Brown's job as creative consultant to troubled HBO—"If I collide with some interesting material, I’ll call or e-mail them"—has finally paid off. The former New Yorker editor is to produce a movie version of Tom Wolfe's college novel I am Charlotte Simmons. It's not as much as a stretch as one might think. The…
♦ Financial news outlets are performing well, not surprisingly. CNBC's Closing Bell saw ratings increase 70% last week. [AdAge]
♦ HBO has optioned the Tom Wolfe novel I Am Charlotte Simmons with Tina Brown producing. [Variety via NYO]
♦ Furniture mogul Eric Villency is teaming up with Cotton (yes, the industry…
Halfway through a cranky discussion with the Observer on New York real estate development, Tom Wolfe turned with relish to the topic of the ongoing financial panic. The enthusiasm was understandable from an author who wrote an epic novel, Bonfire Of The Vanities, psychologically centered on Wall Street. First thing to…
You're invited, space permitting, to a memorial service this evening for the beloved New York magazine founding editor Clay Felker. It's at the New York Society for Ethical Culture and starts at six. Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem and Lesley Stahl will pay tribute to the man who taught a city to talk about itself at a…
Uh oh! Remember when Time magazine solicited questions for Japanese author Haruki Murakami? Ask him anything, and the 2.0-tards did, wondering "How would your own funeral be like?" etc. (It also generated some pretty hilarious questions from y'all.) Since they didn't learn their lesson about the idiocy of…
Writes author Tom Wolfe on New York magazine's late founder, Clay Felker: "One afternoon I came by to see Clay at his Xanadu on 57th Street and found him sitting at a desk going through a date book to put together some income-tax data. 'Look at this,' he told me, riffling through the date book, 'I only ate dinner at…
Tom Wolfe has been fighting the plan for a new building at 980 Madison, near his home on the Upper East Side, for a while now. Yesterday, he made it quite clear that he didn't want an ugly new building: "980 Madison is in the heart of the Upper East Side historic district and it does not need this additional…
A year and a half after Tom Wolfe took to the Times Op-Ed page to mock Aby Rosen's tummy and assail his plan for a shiny Sir Norman Foster-designed skyscraper at 980 Madison, he's picking up the hatchet again. At a hearing of the Landmarks Preservation Commission last night, Wolfe lit into Rosen and Foster's…
