This summer, I profiled Jared Kushner in New York Magazine. Two days after my piece ran, Jared and Ivanka Trump announced their engagement. This past Sunday, Jared married Ivanka at a “star studded” gathering, which according to People, included Russell Crowe, Natalie Portman, Barbara Walters, Regis Philbin and Rudy Giuliani, among others. The couple released an “official” wedding photo. Back in July, Ivanka told me: “Another thing that I think is incredible about him…is every night when he goes home, he works for about an hour and a half and return e-mails he hadn’t had a chance to return before. He’s just very diligent … Even when we first started dating, I’d call him at 6 [a.m.] when I’m getting up, and he’d be awake; he’d definitely be awake when I was going to sleep. And all Sunday he’s in the office.”
The wedding was largely a Trump affair, held at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Tomorrow night, Jared’s parents Charlie and Seryl will hold their own party, a lavish gathering for more than 500 guests at the Puck Building, which Charlie bought in 1999 (In 2003, he leased three floors of the building to NYU at below market rates, just when Jared was applying to law school there).
Is being fat a political liability? That’s one of the questions I explore in the current issue of New York, in my a piece on the nasty New Jersey governor’s race between Chris Christie and Jon Corzine. Christie, the former US Attorney for New Jersey, is to put it generously, a large man. Corzine, who has been trailing in the polls until recently, has run a slate of television advertisements that show Christie’s unflattering girth. One ad even goes literal, claiming Christie “threw his weight around” as a federal prosecutor to get out of traffic tickets. From the piece:
Christie lacks the easy charm of a traditional front-runner. For one, he’s fat. In a state where dirty politics competes with the Jets as the favored spectator sport, Christie’s weight has become fodder during a race that has been intensely personal and nasty, at times comically so. “He looks hideous! And unhealthy,” says longtime Democratic state senator Ray Lesniak. “That doesn’t portray the discipline that’s necessary to lead this state.” This summer, the Corzine campaign ran an unflattering television spot that featured slow-motion shots of Christie’s massive gut after members of a focus group responded that they were turned off by his tubby physique. “They chose to run with the ad because people were appalled by his obesity,” one Democrat close to the Corzine campaign told me. In September, another Corzine ad took a more direct approach, saying that Christie “threw his weight around” as prosecutor. Comella says the ad “is clearly part of an overarching strategy to personally attack Chris Christie.” The Corzine campaign denies this. “The ad’s only purpose was to show how Chris Christie used his position as U.S. Attorney to get out of traffic stops,” responds Corzine’s spokesperson, Sean Darcy.
Back in June, I wrote a New Republic piece about Bob Woodward’s new book on the Obama White House. At the time, I reported that Woodward’s new project was causing agita inside the West Wing.
Now, Woodward is giving the White House reason to worry: his Washington Post scoop on Stanley McChrystal’s 66-page Afghanistan report. I’ve been covering the Obama White House’s relationship with the press since the campaign, and reporters have told me repeatedly that Obama’s message control is as tight, or tighter, than the famously secretive Bush White House. One thing reporters routinely mention is Obama distaste for “process” stories that explain how and why decisions are made. But Woodward–perhaps more than any reporter working in Washington–is the master of process: he can locate and document the internal power struggles that ultimately come to define every administration. The McChrystal Report is the first major national security leak of this nascent presidency, one of many more to follow…
In the current New Republic, I have a piece on the Obama White House’s special relationship with New York Times columnist David Brooks. The piece explores efforts by the Obama team to court Brooks, and why Brooks’ center-right views are so crucial to the White House’s selling of issues like healthcare and the economy. From the piece:
It’s easy to understand why the administration does this. Brooks’s sympathetic columns help to validate the key myth of this White House: that it is fundamentally post-partisan. Plus, Brooks appeals to a major Obama constituency: the latté-sipping Baby Boomers who were the subject of his 2000 best-seller Bobos in Paradise. These were among Obama’s strongest supporters in the last election, but their loyalty could be tested by spiraling deficits, botched health care reform, or a flagging economy. As much as any columnist, Brooks speaks to these left-of-center suburbanites.
After all, he is known for attracting liberal readers who normally can’t stand conservative pundits.
My New York Magazine cover story, “Testing Horace Mann,” which investigated a series of scandals at the prestigious New York City prep school, was nominated for a 2008 Livingston Award for Young Journalists. The piece was published in the March, 30 2008 issue of New York. On March 15 2009, I published an exclusive interview with Charles Stam, who was given the pseudonym “Jeffrey Robbins” in my cover story.
Here’s a list of all the Livingston finalists. And you can read the full Horace Mann piece HERE
I have a piece in the April issue of GQ on Barry Bonds. I report on his fate after leaving baseball and his experience being the target of baseball’s efforts to purge the steroids era from its past. The embattled former Giants slugger has been unsuccessful in his attempts to get back into the game. But more so, the piece is a portrait of a man whose life is at an inflection point, between his past and an uncertain future. And I also report on Bonds’ newfound passion: hunting. From the piece:
He pulls out his binoculars and surveys the field. Soon a giant whitetail emerges out of the woods, and Mogle gets excited. “This guy is big!”
“Oh, without question,” Bonds says as the camera remains fixed on the deer. “He’d be pretty tough to pass up right there.”
As he lifts his gun, his expression turns cold and clinical. Here’s a glimmer of the old Barry Bonds, the fearsome slugger who once wore this same look as he hulked over the batter’s box, daring pitchers to confront him head-on. He cradles the rifle in his shoulder and sights the deer through the scope. It’s strange, in one sense, that the most hunted man in baseball is now an avid hunter, but not so surprising that he still gets the jones to take aim at something. “He’s coming in, he’s coming in right now,” Bonds says as the whitetail approaches. “Okay, get ready.”
He puts his finger on the trigger. The image goes split screen—Bonds on the left, the buck on the right. The picture closes in and steadies on Bonds before suddenly turning dark. Silence. And then…CRACK!
About a year ago, I published an essay in Slate titled “Running With Slowpokes: How Sluggish Newbies Ruined the Marathon.” While the headline was incendiary, observation, not provocation, was my aim.
This month, the serious medical danger of marathon running surfaced again during unseasonable warm spells at some of the country’s biggest fall marathons. In Chicago, temperatures freakishly climbing in the 80s propelled event organizers to cancel the run three-and-a-half hours into the race, after a 35-year-old man collapsed and later died. In Minneapolis where temperatures reached into the 70s, Twin Cities Marathon medical director Steve Sterner told the Associated Press that 250 runners were treated for heat exhaustion, dehydration and heatstroke, compared to 160 treated in the 2006 race.
On the Internet, many folks derided my piece as elitist and hypocritical, assailing my argument as an attempt to be an arbiter of just who should and shouldn’t run a marathon.
They miss the point.
My corrective to the exponential slowing of marathon running since the 1970s is an effort to call attention to the severe toll that marathon running exacts on the human body. What these latest heat-induced health scares show us is that there are a lot of people out there running marathons who aren’t physically up to the task…yet.
Marathon running was formerly a pursuit of seasoned endurance athletes. Now it’s the domain of the masses. All extreme endeavors are being democratized, oftentimes with unintended and unfortunate consequences. Once fringe sports like mountain climbing now populate corporate retreats and the brochures of package tours for overworked urbanites eager for an escape. A cottage industry of magazines, self-help books and gurus exhort us to tally “Life Lists” and push our limits. And yet, as the amateur ranks multiply and new, untested participants practice extreme sports like marathoning, the danger is that these newcomers are jumping in without sufficient preparation with the potential for fatal results. The question, then, is not that these sports are only activities for the elite, it’s that our Instant Gratification culture lionizes achievement over preparation. Running a 5K and building your endurance step-by-step isn’t going to earn you points around the water cooler, but it should.
I have a piece in the debut issue of Conde Nast Portfolio. In “The Paper Shredder,” I profile Bruce Sherman, CEO of Private Capital Management. He manages $24 billion, and is the enigmatic asset manager who forced the breakup of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain in 2006. Sherman’s coup sent ripples through the newspaper industry, which has since seen the sale of the Tribune Co. to Chicago billionaire maverick Sam Zell, and Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s very public and messy campaign to unseat the Sulzberger family’s control of the New York Times.
This is the first public interview Sherman has granted since he became the scourge of American newspaper journalism. Oh, and his cousin happens to be Judge Judy. From the piece:
Sherman (no relation to this writer) is the mysterious investor who forced Knight Ridder to sell itself last year to the McClatchy Co. in a $6.5 billion deal. Journalism has since suffered what might best be described as a collective panic attack. After all, Knight Ridder, owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, and 30 other daily papers, had been the second-largest newspaper publisher in the country, with 2005 revenues of $3 billion, and it was bought by a company half its size. Moreover, it was the first time that an activist shareholder had successfully engineered the breakup of a publicly traded newspaper company, and it left Knight Ridder C.E.O. Anthony Ridder reeling from the rope-a-dope tactics Sherman used to oust him. Sherman, it turns out, is a guy who doesn’t like surprises but who is adept at springing them.
…
Still, the McClatchy deal, which involved 60 percent cash, 40 percent McClatchy stock, and $2 billion in assumed debt, may not have been what Sherman was hoping for. Ridder speculates that Sherman’s gambit may have been fueled by his hope that Gannett, the giant owner of USA Today, would jump in with a premium all-cash offer for Knight Ridder—giving Sherman a face-saving exit for his clients with Knight Ridder holdings. Indeed, Ridder asked Sherman why he had singled out his company for a forced sale, given his huge investments in other newspapers’ stocks. The reply (according to Ridder): “You’re not big enough to buy Gannett, but they’re big enough to buy you.” Sherman does not recall giving this response.
This weekend, our unflappable black lab, Cody, passed away. He was nearly 12 and the best dog anyone could hope for—always smiling no matter what. He had a lot to teach about registering the simple joys in life.
These are some big paws to fill. Today, my folks are bringing home Jackson, who comes from the same litter as our new puppy Summer. As the saying goes, grief has been (somewhat) replaced with chaos…
My foray into the blogosphere stalled with Apple’s web software, which is designed for an 8 year old, and is about as sophisticated as one, too. I’ve since upgraded to WordPress. Hopefully this go-around will work better…
This summer, I profiled Jared Kushner in New York Magazine. Two days after my piece ran, Jared and Ivanka Trump announced their engagement. This past Sunday, Jared married Ivanka at a “star studded” gathering, which according to People, included Russell Crowe, Natalie Portman, Barbara Walters, Regis Philbin and Rudy Giuliani, among others. The couple released an “official” wedding photo. Back in July, Ivanka told me: “Another thing that I think is incredible about him…is every night when he goes home, he works for about an hour and a half and return e-mails he hadn’t had a chance to return before. He’s just very diligent … Even when we first started dating, I’d call him at 6 [a.m.] when I’m getting up, and he’d be awake; he’d definitely be awake when I was going to sleep. And all Sunday he’s in the office.”
Is being fat a political liability? That’s one of the questions I explore in the current issue of New York, in my a 
Back in June, I 
In the current New Republic, I have a 
My New York Magazine cover story, “Testing Horace Mann,” which investigated a series of scandals at the prestigious New York City prep school, was nominated for a 2008 Livingston Award for Young Journalists. The piece was published in the March, 30 2008 issue of New York. On March 15 2009, I published an exclusive 
I have a 
