The People on the Pedestals

For those with a boundless appetite for stories of the weird, relatively short-lived American aristocracy ­(i.e., most of us), the stateside Astor family – with its British lineage and its fur-trading origins; its glittering days as “New York’s landlords”; its invention of the luxury hotel; its passel of (rather wealthy) orphans; its Titanic drowning; its name still found up and down the streets, buildings, and boroughs of New York City; and, most recently, the scandal surrounding the will of perhaps its last famous member, extreme socialite Brooke Astor – is rich territory for seekers of both soap opera and schadenfreude ...

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Utopia, Every Day

Of the many (many, many) books on depression that have weighed down our bookshelves and clogged our Amazon searches in recent decades–the self-help guides, the memoirs, the debunked memoirs, the sordid tales by sort-of made-up authors–very few fail to share two assumptions. The first is that depression is a personal problem. The second is that it is a medical condition, often best treated by pharmaceutical drugs.

If that sounds oversimplified and unsatisfying, that’s because it is–not only for the millions of people who find themselves depressed–or as Ann Cvetkovich sometimes puts it in her new ...

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Her Aim Is True: Rebecca Dana's 'Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde'

Rebecca Dana won’t dish. Seriously. She has nothing but great things to say about the social circles in which she has trucked, mingled and reveled since she moved concertedly to Manhattan in 2007.

The pretty party people she wrote about as social reporter for The New York Observer? “Great, interesting, fun!” Controversial publishing legend Tina Brown, her editor at The Daily Beast, where Dana covered fashion and celebrity? “Incredible.” Sex and the City inspiration Candace Bushnell, whom she met at Brown’s glitzy-but-serious “Women in the World” conference? “Zen Buddha-like.” Girls creator Lena Dunham, smart-pop culture’s current whipping-girl ...

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