Recently in New York City Category

The Nouriel Roubini profile (Wikipedia; Roubini's blog; blog RSS) in the Sunday NY Times was fascinating.

Roubini, a respected but formerly obscure academic, has become a major figure in the public debate about the economy: the seer who saw it coming. He has been summoned to speak before Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum at Davos. He is now a sought-after adviser, spending much of his time shuttling between meetings with central bank governors and finance ministers in Europe and Asia. Though he continues to issue colorful doomsday prophecies of a decidedly nonmainstream sort — especially on his popular and polemical blog, where he offers visions of “equity market slaughter” and the “Coming Systemic Bust of the U.S. Banking System” — the mainstream economic establishment appears to be moving closer, however fitfully, to his way of seeing things. “I have in the last few months become more pessimistic than the consensus,” the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers told me earlier this year. “Certainly, Nouriel’s writings have been a contributor to that.”

At the end of the article Roubini muses that, “This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.”

Is that a bad thing? If it is, then we had the wrong guy at the helm for the last 8 years.

I read that Fotolog has been sold to Hi-Media for $90 million.

Congrats to John Borthwick (whom I know from his time at AOL), Scott Heiferman (whom I met once during the iTraffic days.)

Fotolog is one of the few East Coast, nay, New York City-based Internet ventures and so it's great to see them doing well. While I know that NYC will never equal Sand Hill Road, it's nice to see good people doing Internet work and their work being valued in NYC.

My sister, Aya Kanai, is profiled at Worship Worthy,

"an all female-authored daily newsletter and lifestyle blogsite targeted toward women, featuring continuously updated news, images and analysis of New York’s hippest fashion, trends, events and products to tastemakers and fashion forward city dwellers."

I had to look up a word, "louboutins", that my sister used in her interview.

It looks like Mujirushi Ryohin, the fashionable no-brand brand in Japan, is making a serious entry into NYC.

I predict they will do better than UNIQLO, because MUJI has something to offer (the no-brand brand zen thing) that UNIQLO doesn't.

� MUJI Flagship Store @ The New York Times Building - FRESHNESS

Great profile of the Firefoxflicks.com contest in the NY Times.

What is probably most surprising about the Firefox ads is how much they resemble the traditional work of the ad world's high priests. Firefox is considering buying air time for some spots. Interestingly, the open-source company still believes in some old-school strategies; it once even collected donations from its fans to buy, of all things, an ad in The New York Times.

Free Advertising - New York Times

Brilliant! Brilliant! Brilliant!

David Rees of mnftiu.cc and more famously for Get Your War On presents at Columbia's Political Union.

TOPICS COVERED IN THIS LECTURE INCLUDE:

# The Thomas Friedman Metaphor Illustration Service

# David Horowitz vs. Michel Foucault

# The Council on Foreign Relations, wizard-related truth behind

# Dennis Miller, role as official spokesman for NetZero dial-up internet access

# Clipart, aesthetic beauty of

# Christopher Hitchens, ubiquity of

# Afghanistan, self-immolation of girls therein

# A gazelle

# Political cartoonist, exciting lifestyle of

# MOST IMPORTANT: My five ideas about foreign policy and politics that I wrote down in the park before my lecture!!! David Brooks I'm coming for your job!

Foul language but quite funny. It's great to know that Rees is as funny in real life as he is with his comics.

CPU: Videos: David Rees

I've recently learned about what looks to be an interesting documentary about the internment of Japanese-Americans and the crisis of nationality that the experience created.

The documentary will be screened in Berkeley on October 29th and in NYC on Nov. 13th. If anyone of my readers attends either screening, I'd love it if you could send me your thoughts.

From a Silk Cocoon is a true story based on the actual letters exchanged between a young Japanese American couple, Itaru and Shizuko Ina, while imprisoned in two separate American prison camps during World War II. Labeled as "disloyal" and deemed "enemy aliens dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States," they struggle to prove their innocence and fight deportation. With the discovery of their censored letters, diaries, and haiku poetry, their story tells of the frightening and tragic outcome resulting from wartime hysteria and racial profiling. A story of love and survival, Shizuko and Itaru renounce their American citizenship in protest and then must face the reality of raising their children in war-torn Japan.

Technorati Tags: Berkeley, documentary, Japan, New York City, NYC

Rafat Ali has the exclusive (yet again) that Jason Calcanis has sold Weblogsinc.com to AOL.

This is actually a good fit in many ways: content for a content company, blogs for a company that doesn't have any high-traffic blogs, and an NYC media company buying an NYC Internet startup.

Exclusive: Weblogs Inc Being Bought Out By America Online

Technorati Tags: AOL, weblogsinc

The Village Voice has a nice profile of one of my favorite DJs who now lives in my hometown. Nicholas Matar is a New York native who was a resident at the super-club Pacha on Ibiza for over 6 years, the only non-Spaniard to do so.

"Nightclubs historically have been owned and operated by people that are in it for the wrong reasons. They're in it because they're seeking notoriety. They're trying to buy in to a lifestyle that they weren't a part of."

"People in this country talk about Studio 54 being a legendary club, but Pacha opened in 1967, and it's still open today. As far as I'm concerned, it's the most legendary nightclub that's ever existed. I was fortunate in the early '90s, in the heyday of the club, to have worked as a resident DJ there for almost a decade, and I also got involved as a consultant at that time for them. It was like the Harvard Business School of nightclubs. That big club New York City underground experience died for me when the old Sound Factory closed."

Cozy Club: Meet Cielo's Nicolas Matar, the non-club owner club owner [villagevoice.com]

Discogs.com is down right now (has been for a few days; I hear the site owner's on vacation?) so I'll point folks to Amazon, where you can find Matar's mix CDs, including the new 2CD set "Cielo Club 9" which is awesome!

Amazon.com: Music Search Results: Matar, Nicolas [no affiliate]

Technorati Tags: Cielo, house music, New York City,

Go get it! I'm reading it now...

Crooked Timber » » Internet blag of the year - “Wall Street”