Sheryl Sandberg Leaves Work at 5:30 Every Day — And You Should Toomashable.com/2012/04/05/she…

— Caitrin O'Sullivan (@CaitrinO) April 9, 2012

"I mean honestly, people, if you don’t have a rich husband and a job that’s willing to be flexible with your hours, it’s entirely your fault." Oh sure. Though I'm pretty sure the Facebook COO is far richer by now than her husband. Anyway, I'll be leaving work today at 4:30 p.m., so you know, watch my moves, people.

NO. He asked for Aaron Carter. AWKWARD. RT @DONDAWorldwide: We found the "Nell Carter" that Kanye requested.

— DONDA Group (@DONDAWorldwide) January 5, 2012

The Twitter account for DONDA Group is most likely not the official Twitter account for Kanye West's new… space… design… science… cult… thing. (If you missed it, because you have a life, Mr. West announced on Twitter a new magical Santa's Workshop last night and is bringing Steve Jobs and Michael Jackson back from the dead, or something.) But it should be.

We lookin for a locksmith, a candlestick maker, the lil' Mexican exorcist lady from Poltergeist & a driving instructor [...]

For some reason I decided to take this fall TV season with terrible seriousness and I dutifully set my DVR for all the new offerings. Most of it was easily discarded by the second episode. (So thank goodness for some returning shows; "Bored to Death" is again absolutely awesome.) "Pan Am" is soulless and dreadful and slow. "Prime Suspect" is great to watch and incredibly edited and makes New York City look fun and gritty, but still when it comes up on the recorded shows list, it rings no emotional bells. "Charlie's Angels," good grief, I turned off the pilot 20 minutes in, it's despicable. (And so long forever!) [...]

In the passing convulsions of partisan government, it’s easy for our corporate lieges to depict themselves as victims. There’s always some legislative push, or Congressional leader, to bedeck with alarmist rhetoric about the “tax-and-spend” set in Washington—even as these same clever professional victims harness the supine Congress to tamp down the estate tax, extend regressive tax cuts and ensure that the regulatory state keeps weighing the financial industry’s various roulette wheels in the house’s favor.

But behind the all the public inveighing over the wild-eyed excesses of our Jacobin Congress and (more laughably still) an "anti-business" White House, our business chieftains are, true to management form, pursuing [...]

Reminder: You're invited to join Chris Lehmann and your other fellow rich people to celebrate the publication of Rich People Things, this evening, December 2nd, at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City, from 7 to 9 p.m. There will even be a brief chit-chat with Thomas Frank and Maureen "Moe" Tkacik.

There is no spectacle quite so stirring as the pundit swaggering to the bar of public opinion to deliver a good and shrill scolding. So let us tend to the chastisements of Washington Post columnist David Broder—recently heard hailing an invasion of Iran as an economic stimulus measure—as he now urges the stiff medicine of the Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction plan on a feckless American public. Broder is, after all, the dean of American political journalists (though I’ve always found this locution puzzling, since so few political journalists actually seem to graduate—and perhaps more to the point, when was the last time anyone reported an actual dean saying anything [...]

Americans, having seen the fruits of their productive lives waste away over the past decade in a free-market fantasia, have evidently resorted to the most efficient psychic adjustment on offer. They steadfastly refuse to believe that we live in conditions of dire wealth inequality—while also persisting in the belief that the comparatively level social order of their fond imagining needs to be more equal still. The sheer scale of this fancy calls to mind the epitaph that William Holden delivers for Gloria Swanson’s character in Billy Wilder’s classic study in Hollywood delusion, Sunset Boulevard: “Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream [...]

The Pavillion Agency's vice president Seth Norman Greenberg "has also known families to prize nannies who can steer a 32-foot boat, help manage an art collection or, in one case, drive a Zamboni to clean a private ice rink." —This "economy of nannies" story is amazing.

Cathay Pacific first class, JFK to Hong Kong: caviar and handwritten notes from the cabin crew.

We are a little obsessed with yachts, simply because they are floating piles of burning f-you money, the most astounding sort of consumption. When "Eclipse" was completed in 2009, everyone said, "wow, that's a big boat!" But then earlier this year, we noted that two even bigger boats were being built in Germany (including "Topaz" and another) and, oh no! Now it's time for the Monaco Yacht Show. MORE BIG BOATS. Get ready, the Times reports: "Sales of superyachts correlate directly with the rising number of billionaires in the world." Who would have thunk? Still, turns out they took a hit in the first dip of [...]

Apart from the sinister specter of socialism, the most common complaint raised against increased federal oversight of our financial markets is that it empowers aloof bureaucrats to “pick winners and losers” on Wall Street, and therefore defiles the essence of free-market competition.

But as Louise Story makes clear in a New York Times dispatch from the arcane battles over disclosures in the derivatives market, the real reason that investment banks resent government intrusion is that is too much, rather than too little, competition. They believe that picking winners and losers is clearly their job. Storey gamely tries to report on the doings of a nine-member conclave of New [...]

It’s that magical time of the year when brand preferences are being lodged in the consumer psyche by any means necessary, be it free online shipping offers or conventional “doorbuster” style shopper stampedes. (Plus, in an admirable show of advance conditioning, there are those sidebar Four Loko-fueled parking lot brawls.)

But the romance of the brand is a notoriously ephemeral thing, as any casual survey of thrift-store Tickle-Me Elmo and Tamagotchi displays will promptly demonstrate. To do the job right, in this as in so many other realms, we would do well to heed the example of the Germans. As Bloomberg’s Chris Reiter reports, Deutschland’s [...]

While other overclass miscalculations spark bailout after bailout, dissolving alpha-grade marital bonds is a far trickier business. There is, for instance, the matter of shielding your liquid assets from a grasping ex, to say nothing of the messy personal details that tend to come out in bitterly contested divorce proceedings.

Most of all, though, there’s the great preoccupation of the wealthy in every unpleasant public scrape: the question of one’s legacy. That’s the gist of an epic dispatch from the Financial Times’ Jane Croft and Michael Peel, explaining how the once-swinging precincts of elite London have found themselves in a sort of legal limbo, so [...]

For people saddled with unsustainable mortgage payments, foreclosure proceedings come with a heavy emphasis on the "closure" part-since they mean eviction, devastated credit and near-permanent status as a financial pariah. But the purveyors of the fraudulent debt instruments behind the nation's present foreclosure tsunami play, as always, by a different set of rules. For even in managing the wind-down of home loans poisoned by their own special brand of recklessly securitized debt, American banks continue hewing to the same fee-seeking, asset-stripping mode of enterprise that originally jeopardized the U.S. housing market, and much of the broader economy along with it. Now, as then, they've distorted the housing market with [...]

Oh dear, here we go again: “Wall Street is a meritocracy, for the most part,” an irate but of course unnamed onetime Citigroup executive confides to junior father confessor Gabriel Sherman in this week’s hallucinatory New York magazine cover story, “The Emasculation of Wall Street.” “If someone has a bonus, it’s because they’ve created value for their institution.”

In the jumpy, suggestible universe of Gabe Sherman, Wall Street sleuth, things really are that simple: The beleaguered financial overclass creates value, in a rationally ordered system of maximally awarded talent. And the clueless public sector, intoxicated on post-meltdown regulatory prerogative, meddles with the primal forces of nature, skews executive [...]

The New York Post account of the Sid and Mercedes Bass divorce is PHENOMENAL. So well done! It's the greatest thing ever, ever, EVER. Don't miss the part where the young Mercedes Tavacoli Diba Kellogg Bass is described by rich person chronicler Charlotte Hays this way: "When she met the ambassador, she was heavier than she is now, and, of course, she’s no great beauty. But she was the ultimate geisha." AND: "And so nine weeks after Mercedes, then 41, lobbed that fateful piece of bread, she called her husband, Ambassador Francis Kellogg, from her five-star Parisian hotel suite. 'Goodbye, darling,' she said. 'I’m marrying Sid.'" OH YES. [...]

Here's the most needlessly dramatic sentence you'll read today: "The curtain is slowly coming down on the lifestyle of the old Western world establishment, and the impact on the art market is spectacular."

NO, NOT THE CURTAIN!!! COMING DOWN! On the old Western world establishment! Aaaaagh!

Anyway, there is something of a mini-debacle in auction-land? All of the old garbage from the Lyons Demesne, in County Kildare, which is itself for sale, built 1785, was sold, but not for very much money! And this sale is rendered in the most vicious phrasing imaginable! "The monumental portrait of Mrs. Thomas Edwards Freeman done around 1778 made a laughable [...]

Who says wealth doesn’t trickle down? As the nation’s redundant masses tremble, Oliver-Twist-style, before the spectacle of a Democratic-run Congress deciding whether merely to reward quarter-millionaires or the full-scale kind with lavish tax cuts, they might do well to consult the sobering tale of billionaire enclosure of central California’s water supply. It’s hard to see just how the nation’s owning classes will produce additional helpings of gruel (or at least low-wage service-sector jobs) if they’re so deeply averse to spreading around something as essential to agriculture, health and sanitation as water.

This saga, retailed in dogged and gruesome detail by Alternet’s John Gibler, concerns the enterprising private [...]

The great social prophet in consumer society is the bearer of taste refinement. This is a figure who can assuage our innermost disquiet over the dizzying rounds of having, holding and re-leveraging that make up our economic lives. Sure, we might, from time to time, inspect the great storehouse of disposable junk and value-free financial instruments that sustain the fictions of our pecuniary well-being, and find a still small voice offering variations of the great existential questions “what does it all mean?” or “why bother?” But tastemakers can briskly smooth over our worry-ravaged brows; they realign the often brutal prerogatives of the market with the heaving tremors of the [...]

Happy Election eve, everyone! We’ve already been solemnly instructed on how tomorrow’s vote is a referendum on a poncey New Elitism, the hardy, head-stomping virtues of the Tea Party, and our ever-precarious national sanity. But the 2010 midterms are really the coming-out party for the political bagman class, fortified by the Supreme Court’s 2009 Citizens United decision knocking down the last anemic remnants of campaign finance regulation. With a final infusion of GOP money down the homestretch, this year’s midterms are the most expensive history, clocking in at around $4 billion, outpacing the $3.1 billion price tag for the 2000 presidential cycle, and possibly inching toward [...]