"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, Cupertino in Silicon Valley, the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, part of Houston’s west side, the Chicago suburb of Barrington, Princeton, a suburban area north of San Diego, and the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland." READ MORE

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. "On Dec. 10, 1988 — after Sid divorced his first wife, society queen Anne, settling with her for somewhere between $200 million and $500 million — the couple married in a $500,000 gala at New York’s Plaza hotel." WAIT, AND THIS, from her married life with Sid: "There were originally four houses on the Texas property; the couple combined two of them, and Mercedes had a third, which she deemed unsightly, picked up and sent across town to serve as a home for single mothers." Here, for your informed reference, is New York magazine's Oct 20, 1986 piece: "Sid Bass and Mercedes Kellogg Stun Society." Society! Stunned! The Dinner Roll Shot Heard Around the World (of the Upper East Side)! Still delicious!

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. READ MORE

"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."

Back in the days before the great bull market began to charge in August of 1982, there was a soothsayer called Joe Granville. He was the Mad Money Jim Cramer of his day, a showman and exhibitionist whose performances included walking on water (across a swimming pool in Tucson, dressed in a tuxedo) and a piano-playing chimp. Despite that his demeanor wasn't what you would expect of a great financial brain, he attracted a large following of investors for his $250-a-year financial letter (about $615 in today's money), partly because, as People magazine explained, he had called four major stock-market turns in two years. His reputation grew to the point that when he issued a "sell everything" fax to his premium subscribers in January 1981 the market dropped 2½% on its busiest trading day to that point in history. READ MORE

The other night, I ate at JoJo, on 64th Street. It's a Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant, but one of those on the less fancy, more affordable side of his 14-restaurant empire. It's small and quiet, too, and so it was that much more noticeable when, about halfway through our meal, a man in a powder-blue fleece pullover walked into the dining room talking loudly into the earphone attachment thing of his cell-phone and—without ending his conversation—told the hostess who'd led him to his table, right next to ours, to bring him "the most expensive bottle of wine" she had. She looked embarrassed and opened the menu and showed him what that would be. "No, no, no," he said, "You know what you do? You tell Stephen"—Steven?—"to find something three times that much and order that, and I'll come buy it." The hostess giggled nervously. The guy said, "All right, bring me two bottles then. I hope you're thirsty. Because I'm not going to drink them all by myself. Bring two glasses, one of them's for you." READ MORE

“We found that people from a lower-class background—in terms of occupation, status, education and income level—performed better in terms of emotional intelligence, the ability to read the emotions that others are feeling.... You turn to people, it’s an adaptive strategy. You develop this sort of heightened independence with other individuals as a way to deal with not having enough individual resources.” READ MORE