.@mikebloomberg says, because it can't be automated, becoming a plumber is a better deal economically than going to Harvard.

— Kate Taylor (@katetaylornyt) May 17, 2013

Bloomberg: "We would love to get billionaires from around the world to move here; they're the ones who go to the stores, spend a lot of $."

— Kate Taylor (@katetaylornyt) May 17, 2013

Good grief! I mean "at least he doesn't smoke crack" I guess?

This weekend is The Armory Art Fair in New York City. It is not currently held in one of New York City's fine dilapidated armories—these days, we've used some of those to house the large numbers of people made homeless by Hurricane Sandy! Oh and also the one on Park Avenue serves in part as a shelter for mentally ill women, did you know?!—but over on piers 92 and 94, which is basically where West 53rd Street runs into the Hudson. Yes, brr.

In this art fair, a couple of hundred galleries have wedged wares into little booths. People walk around and look at these things. And run into [...]

"During Dr. Sexton’s tenure, N.Y.U. has earned a reputation for lavishly rewarding its star faculty members. It bought a $6.5 million Upper East Side apartment for the head of its medical center, and it paid more than $4 million to help a former Columbia law professor stay in her turreted Upper West Side home when she joined the N.Y.U. law faculty. It gave the dean of N.Y.U.'s law school a $5.7 million loan to buy an apartment." —Turns out that perks for New York University's star faculty are as ridiculous as the very worst fiction has suggested.

If you are like many Americans (no offense), you are knee-deep in The Holidays and you don’t care about Fiscal Cliff. I mean, you know about Fiscal Cliff, and you know there are politicians and the president of the United States of America involved, and they are supposed to fix it, so fine, fix it, right? We are in the middle of The Holidays! What are We The People paying your salary for, with our taxes? I pay all kindsa taxes! I didn’t ask for Fiscal Cliff! It’s almost Xmas! Why are you ruining my The Holidays with all this talk about Fiscal? You make the stuff about the Mayan [...]

"A Tory donor avoided tax by flying outside UK airspace on his private jet at night, a lobbyist has claimed. The millionaire donor is said to have routinely flown out of Luton airport in the evening so he could sleep on his jet. Because he was outside British jurisdiction at night, this allowed him to extend the number of days he could stay in the UK without paying tax."

"The 'upper class,' as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Taken together, the experiments suggest at least some wealthier people 'perceive greed as positive and beneficial,' probably as a result of education, personal independence and the resources they have to deal with potentially negative consequences, the authors wrote."

Right now, many young summer campers are frolicking beneath the open sky, the wind on their faces perfumed by the rough fragrances of pine and their parents' jet exhaust; on the horizon, the mountains shrug, "whatevs." Their families will pay one-fifth of the median national household income so they can go "rough it." And The New York Times has been on it.

The modern tales are ghastly—and not just that now-infamous tale of chartered planes and rural runways. Because of the economy, some owners have to deal with lower enrollment this year; in July, the Times told the story of one camp that hit only 98 percent capacity [...]

"New Yorkers assume that we live in the most expensive city in the country, and cost-of-living indexes tend to back up that assertion. But those measures are built around the typical American’s shopping habits, which don’t really apply to the typical New Yorker — especially not college-educated New Yorkers with annual household incomes in the top income quintile, or around $100,000. According to a recent study by Jessie Handbury, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, people in different income classes do indeed have markedly different purchasing habits. That may not be surprising, but once you account for these different preferences, it turns out that living in[...]

How is 7.7% unemployment considered good news? When it's a little less than 7.9%, and people with money are ready to find good news wherever they look.

The housing markets are booming, where the rich people live. The stock markets haven't gone so high since Dick Cheney was in the White House—except for the NASDAQ, which still hasn't recovered completely from the dot-com bust of 2000, even though the tech companies are doing pretty well and NASDAQ stocks are at a 12-year high. Monthly rents in San Francisco now average $2,700 for a one-bedroom apartment. New car sales are back to pre-recession numbers.

And 12 million working-age Americans [...]

Stereotypical rich people of days gone by, with their brass-buttoned Navy blazers and exotic European sports cars, used to love to feast upon caviar. Why? Nobody knows, but it had something to do with caviar being a weird and expensive thing from a strange and threatening place: Communist Russia, or Red China—wild sturgeon were already in short supply by the 1950s, when Ian Fleming made his social-climbing civil servant an aficionado of the appetizer. By the 1960s, it was the show-off rich people restaurant appetizer of choice. Then humanity continued destroying rivers and fisheries and whole ecosystems until the Earth's caviar systems all collapsed. Wild caviar, that beloved snack of [...]

"The family’s patriarch and matriarch keep a low profile, splitting their time between a large, lavishly furnished apartment on Paris' famous Left Bank and a 6,000 acre estate in the sought-after Loire Valley." —Don't you think there's something going wrong over at Forbes when they decide they have to apply descriptors to "Left Bank" and "Loire Valley"?

If you read just one piece of hysterical overheated lunacy today, although I certainly hope you read many of them, definitely make it third-generation rich man and Harper's magazine funder John R. MacArthur's rant about the Internet. The dot com bust didn't end my Internet travails. It wasn't so long ago—maybe eight years—that I found myself trapped in a corridor at Harper's, surrounded by a small mob of what I can't help but refer to as "young people." These youthful members of my editorial staff—one of them now the co-editor of Mother Jones Magazine—were imploring me, demanding even, that I meet the Internet revolution head on by posting [...]

"A drill-down to the zip code level shows that the zip code with the largest number of very rich households is 10023 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with 7,621 such households. That zip code, plus one other on the Upper West Side, one on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the Washington suburb of Potomac, Maryland, each have about 0.2 percent of all the nation’s very high-income households. Rounding out the 20 zip codes with the most very high-income households are several in Manhattan (on the Upper East and Upper West Sides, Midtown East, and Greenwich Village), the New York suburb of Scarsdale, Chicago’s Lincoln Park, [...]

"Their problem, which required a series of five architects to solve, was this: they had bought a 40-room Georgian manor house, and they wanted to occupy it as a family of six."

American straight ladies no longer wish for a white wedding dress the way they did when we had Traditional Values, before they were born, because "living in sin" is the new normal for a nation without a Vengeful God. Now that nobody believes in religion, U.S. women are shacking up at record levels—in the popular 30-and-under demographic, 77% of American girls have "shared an address" with their dudes.

While straight people have all but given up on marriage, gay people have become the only moral examples in a nation that has utterly turned its back on both decency and responsibility.

But some experts say it's not just the [...]

GREAT NEWS AMERICA. We might get a Jeb Bush candidacy yet! The news is a-flurry with Jeb Bush news, though actual flurries have canceled his flight to D.C. today so he will not be Making News at the Cato Kaelin Institute tonight, with his pronouncements about the future of our race wars.

Question: "Is Jeb Bush the Republicans' Hillary Clinton?

Answer: No.

Question: What does this mean? "I’m not saying yes, I’m just not saying no. I’ve accomplished some things in my life that allow me now to — to have that kind of discretion, to be able to think about it."

Answer: He made lots [...]

Google's Android phones are used by more people, yet Apple's App Store sells 400% more than Google's online store for Android apps. How is this even possible? Consumer tech experts say it's because Apple started early and has stringent quality control and also has a whole lot of iTunes account holders who typed in their credit card information before they even owned a smart phone.

Consumers are more willing to fork over their money for an iOS app, because they know they’ll probably get their money’s worth, says app developer Zak Tanjeloff with DLP Mobile. “The App Store has a higher proportion of quality apps, thanks to the [...]

I.

In June of 1889, Andrew Carnegie published his essay "Wealth" in the North American Review: a famous document, as remarkable for the author’s delusional self-regard as it is for the case he makes for private philanthropy. The steel baron launched his argument with the dumbfounding claim that until "the past few hundred years [of human history] there was little difference between the dwelling, dress, food, environment of the chief and those of his retainers." He then sails blithely along to insist that we should all welcome the changes in society that make violent wealth inequality inevitable, because the benefits of wealth must inevitably trickle down to the least [...]

Jonathan Franzen is in my estimation America's best living novelist (OKAY?) and a substantial number of people get upset whenever he writes or says basically anything.  It's interesting to ask why! In part it's because his ideas about novels and what people respond to in them are provocative and controversial, and sometimes, as in his recent essay about Edith Wharton, he projects his own responses onto "us" in a way that can be irritating, if we disagree with him.  Our opinion about his writing is also affected by of how rich he is and his gender and what he looks like, and that's very hard to talk about.  But [...]

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. [...]