The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots

by The New York Observer

  FEBRUARY 5, 1996: BY ADAM BEGLEY

  BOOK REVIEW: Three Pounds of Literary Literature for Gen X: Go Ahead, Read Yourself to Death

  Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown & Company, 1,079 pages, $29.95

  INFINITE JEST IS A THREE-BRICK novel, a hernia risk, a forest slayer. The 1,079-page tome is brilliant, funny and dauntingly difficult, the magnum opus of a hitherto underknown 33-year-old wunderkind. But come February, when it lands with a thud in bookstores, what people will twig to is that it’s big, “the biggest novel of the year,” Little Brown confidently boasts. A teasing series of six postcards, sent out over the last eight months to reviewers, editors and booksellers, announced “Infinite Style. Infinite Substance. Infinite Writer.” A reader’s edition signed by the author; a nine-city reading tour; three more postcards, blurb-adorned; an advertising campaign—the hype is a kind of sign language meant to impress both booksellers and the media with the publisher’s unwavering commitment to the product.

  FEBRUARY 26, 1996 BY SARAH FRIEDMAN

  TALES OUT OF SCHOOL: NEW PRIVATE SCHOOL CRAZE: KIDS SNORT THEIR RITALIN

  ON A DECEMBER MORNING DURING finals week, an upperclassman at the private Dwight School and her friends were sitting at the back of an Upper West Side coffee shop. The table in the popular Dwight hangout was hidden from the street. The girl opened her bag and removed a vanity mirror, the barrel of a clear Bic pen and a tiny black and yellow tub of Carmex lip gloss, from which she extracted a small white pill. She placed the pill on the mirror and mashed it up with her driver’s license. The she leaned forward and, using the pen barrel, snorted the pulverized pill up through her nostril, Later that day, she had a history exam.

  The white tablet was not something she bought from a stranger on the street, nor anything smuggled across a border or manufactured in an illicit lab; it was Ritalin, the drug prescribed to sufferers, mostly preteenagers and teenagers, of Attention Deficit Disorder. Kids who have A.D.D. and swallow the prescribed dosage of Ritalin (usually from 10 to 60 milligrams) find it quells hyperactivity, helping them to focus, concentrate and calm down. But you’re not supposed to snort it. More importantly, the Dwight student didn’t have A.D.D., and neither do many of the New York private school kids who, mirroring a nationwide trend, have made Ritalin something of a trendy drug, used for its reputed ability to boost a grade and boost a party. In those who do not have A.D.D. and tend to double the dosage and snort it, Ritalin produces a burst of energy and euphoria, which can last for a few hours.

  On the Upper East Side on a recent Saturday night, several Riverdale Country School students were getting ready to go out to a club. Preparations included hair combing, collar adjusting and Ritalin snorting. The boys weren’t concerned with increasing their powers of concentration. “It juices you, it makes you really excited and happy,” said one. “It makes for a fun night and you can drink a lot.” None of the kids present had been diagnosed with A.D.D. Conveniently, however, many of their friends had, and had plenty of Food and Drug Administration-approved, physician-prescribed Ritalin to give away or sell.

  But it isn’t just kids who are abusing Ritalin; parents, too, have been accused of hauling uncooperative, misbehaving offspring off to the doctor and basically demanding Ritalin. “I cannot tell you how many times a child has been brought in diagnosed with A.D.D. and it turns out the mother’s just run away to Arizona and the father’s married someone a couple of years older than the kid,” said Dr. Miller. “There’s a kind of hysteria in which people want to explain away all sorts of other causes for what looks like rising A.D.D.” According to one teacher at Dwight, Ritalin at the school is “widely overprescribed.”

  Several Dwight students interviewed by The Observer estimated that, between licit and illicit use, about half the high school is using Ritalin. Whether or not they are exaggerating, their comments point to how deeply Ritalin has penetrated into the New York private school subculture. Dr. George Kamen, the school psychologist, said he knows of only five students with Ritalin prescriptions, but pointed out that students often have outside therapists who may issue prescriptions without notifying the school. “I’m not aware of that,” he said when asked about recreational Ritalin use. “I’m surprised.”

  Nationally, Ritalin prescriptions have increased more than 600 percent over the last five years, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency. More than 2 million children have been prescribed Ritalin. “Over the last 20 years, the diagnosis of A.D.D., with or without learning disability, has been widely recognized,” said Dr. Miller. Previously, he explained, “if a child was behaving badly or doing poorly in school, we looked at him as bad and stupid. It’s possible, if it’s gone too far, to claim all badness is madness, and everyone is mad. You’ll end up with every adult on Prozac and every child on Ritalin.”

  There is no definitive test for A.D.D.; a doctor bases his or her diagnosis on an evaluation of the patient, and on the subjective evaluations from parents and teachers. A.D.D. often coexists with other problems, such as learning disabilities and conduct disorders. Children suffering from other problems may end up with a Ritalin prescription at the behest of ambitious, worried parents. “It’s a quick fix for parents who want their children to get an extra edge academically,” said a Manhattan doctor who specializes in adolescent medicine. “If parents hear of something that’s going to help kids’ grades, they’ll want it. They press doctors to prescribe it.”

  JANUARY 8, 1996 BY WM FERGUSON

  THE OBSERVATORY: IN CYBERIA, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM

  IF THE WORLD WIDE WEB DOESN’T GO THE WAY OF THE CB radio—and it might yet—the autumn of 1995 will be remembered as the birth of a medium. It was certainly the first time that anybody was making any real money on the Internet—namely, a 24-year-old software Wunderkind. The day in September that Marc Andreessen’s Netscape Communications went public, Mr. Andreessen, who had developed the much-touted Netscape Web browser, made $58.3 million. And if you needed proof of a willing audience, The New York Times—on the front page, no less—elevated the World Wide Web to mass medium status. (The Times tempered its blow to its luddite readers, identifying the Web as “a newer-fangled medium.”)

  Those luddite readers received another jolt: Michael Kinsley, one of journalism’s glamour boys, was going to Cyberia! He was moving to Seattle! He was off to edit a Webzine.

  “Someone is going to produce good stuff on the Web,” Mr. Kinsley said, repeating his new-media mantra. “I’m absolutely, totally convinced of that. Whether it’s me…”

  However self-deprecating Mr. Kinsley’s remarks may be, they have a caustic edge: the assumption that there’s nothing of value on the Web. That would likely be contested by the hundreds of journalists who already publish in the datasphere. Some are from television; some from magazines and newspapers; more than a few come from absolutely nowhere. But because of his reputation, and the fact that he has chosen his digital exile, Michael Kinsley has been elevated to spiritual leader of the content providers (1).

  If a generalization must be made, it’s this: In Cyberia, it’s hard to tell who’s waving and who’s drowning.

  Before Mr. Kinsley, the perception was that online journalism was a graveyard. Much like the striking writers of the Detroit Free Press, whose final option was to put up a Web site, journalists in the datasphere were viewed as lost souls. If you were a cyberjournalist, there were two reasons: Either you couldn’t get work anywhere else, or you were in exile, like some deposed media shah (2) waiting for an opposing faction to be ousted so that you could go back to Quark Copy Desk and an office (with a door) at 350 Madison.

  Susan Mulcahy, who was Page Six editor at the New York Post and editor in chief of Avenue, was already in a sort of exile when Tom Phillips, previously publisher at Spy, called her in early 1994. He was interested in starting an online gossip service. Living in a small town in Oregon and not expecially enjoying the freelance life, Ms. Mulcahy accepted his offer. After expanding the gossip mill to
be a general entertainment service, she became editor and chief publisher—job descriptions are up for grabs in cyberspace—of Mr. Showbiz. Her colleagues in New York reacted two ways:

  “Some people recoiled: ‘Computers? That’s so sad.’ The other half of my friends were like, ‘That’s where things are going, that’s so smart, you’re in on the ground floor,’ But in New York,” Ms. Mulcahy said, “most people were in the Oh My God That’s So Sad camp.”

  The perception of digital exile may be dependent on geography. “There’s a complete East Coast-West Coast split on that,” said Dave Talbot, editor of Salon, a literary Webzine. “In some ways, it was desperation that got us here. But San Francisco, for the first time since Rolling Stone and Mother Jones [started], is feeling like a publishing center.” So when Mr. Kinsley announced that he would be vacating the East Coast power corridor for Seattle, where his Microsoft magazine will originate, his news was greeted by his colleagues as visionary—or the equivalent of going over to the dark side of the Force.

  Ms. Mulcahy, like most of the content providers who have been laboring in obscurity, views his intentions with genteel skepticism. “I think some of the people in the industry were sort of stunned by the statements that Kinsley made,” Ms. Mulcahy said.

  Suck, a Webzine, was a bit more explicit: “[Mr. Kinsley’s] recent public musings that ‘Someone is going to create the first great magazine on the Web—maybe it could be me’ tends to reinforce our initial impression that we’ve got another vainglorious newbie (3) on our hands.”

  NEW(BIE) JOURNALISM?

  Even alongside that most Dylan Thomas of adjectives, the word newbie is a tip-off to the digital myopia of Web writing at the moment. To anyone who isn’t an aspiring computer geek, the term—derogatory Webspeak for neophyte—has about as much pejorative power as sillyhead. No matter. The lexicon is about to be rewritten. The content providers have arrived.

  Whether any of them know what they’re doing is another question entirely.

  Maybe Mr. Kinsley is vainglorious, but he’ll also admit to not having a clue. He has expressed a disdain for hypertext (4)—only the raison ’d être of the WWW—and all the bells and whistles of multimedia. In fact, he tends to play up his lack of technical savvy. When asked if he’s seen anything on the Web worthy of cribbing from, Mr. Kinsley replied: “My computer’s all packed up,” this being the month of his cross-country move. “What I’ve been doing is writing down on little scraps of paper the names of Web sites that people recommended,” he said. “I’ve got a lot more browsing to do.” It’s a charming image—little scraps of paper!—and it clearly positions Mr. Kinsley as a writer among the technophiles.

  “I think he’s gonna have his head handed to him,” said Joshua Quittner. Mr. Quittner is the editor of The Netly News, a site on Time Warner’s pathfinder service. Pathfinder (http://pathfinder.com) is not so much a Webszine as a sprawling database comprising selections from virtually all of Time Warner’s media holdings. While most of the sites listed in Pathfinder are simply archives of repurposed text—Sports Illustrated, People—The Netly News has no print counterpart. Mr. Quittner wrote about the digital world for Newsday, Wired and then Time, where his proposal for a Webzine was approved. If he comes across as a bit of a digital zealot, it is because he’s found his niche. And he digs the technology. “There are all these new devices that will fit into the journalist’s bag of tricks. And Kinsley best learn how to use them. It makes no sense to come online and try and reproduce a magazine. They do not survive the transition to a computer monitor.”

  “If The Netly News has a strength, it would be that Quittner has a history of doing pretty decent pieces,” said Joey Anuff, the editor of Suck. “But his strength is not in operating a Web site. He doesn’t know shit about operating a Web site.”

  * * *

  If a generalization must be made, it’s this: In Cyberia, it’s hard to tell who’s waving and who’s drowning.

  * * *

  Technological mastery is a sore sport for the content provider. Reasonably, many Web-tempted print journalists argue that they aren’t expected to know the ins and outs of printing presses or the distribution networks of their publications, so why should cyberjournalists have to be familiar with every facet of their medium?

  “Kinsley has said that what he’s going to do is not a technical but journalistic thing. So what’s the point?” asked Jon Katz. “It doesn’t play to the strength of the Web.” Mr. Katz, who writes for Wired and whose book about the war between the literary and computer cultures, Virtuous Reality, is due from Random House in October, predicts a mass migration back to print in a couple years.

  “The journalists who have gone online don’t have a clue,” he said. “I do some work for the Web. I have no desire to do it full-time. As a writer, I would be very anxious about not being in print.”

  But even for those who do know how to operate a Web site, the hype of the new technology is well beyond its availability. As yet, multimedia is a solution in search of a problem.

  For example, ex-Rolling Stone editor and writer Michael Goldberg’s Addicted to Noise sports some of the most vivid graphics of any Webzine; consider that both a draw and a warning. Addicted to Noise literally vibrates on your screen. In fact, as with any site so loaded with visuals and hyperlinks, partaking in ATN requires a remarkable commitment. Never mind the 2 minutes, 18 seconds it can take to download the eye-numbing contents page even with a fast modem. As for content, Mr. Goldberg has corralled some big rock writers—Dave Marsh, Ira Robbins, Greil Marcus. But considering the pace at which information travels through telephone wires, Mr. Goldberg’s boast that Addicted to Noise is “90,000 words of rock-and-roll a month” sounds like a veiled threat. So the technology is not there—yet. Yet is important. It is the hope of all content providers.

  1 Content provider is the new media term for…those who provide content! It describes both a Webzine and its writers. Its current vogue reflects the shift away from repurposing text—taking a Time article and dumping the words online, for example—to providing original material.

  2 After less than two years as Time Inc.’s editor of new media, Walter Isaacson abandoned the brave new world of online journalism for a more conventional role, managing editor of Time magazine.

  3 Despite the Webzine’s adolescent moniker, the Suck newbie critique is not to be taken lightly. In interviews for this story, virtually every person held up two Web sites as examples of “doing it right”: their own venture and Suck.

  4 Hypertext is the language of the World Wide Web. Short for Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, it works by linking documents on the WWW. For example, certain words in a Web document will be underscored, signifying them as links. By clicking on a link, you are sent to information germane to the highlighted word—usually.

  MARCH 18, 1996 BY MICHAEL M. THOMAS

  THE OBSERVATORY: SOCIETY SAFARI

  AS WITH SO MANY CONSEQUENTIAL events in my life, the tale begins with a phone call from My Beloved Stepmother, or M.B.S.

  “Darling,” she said, “I want you to join me on a safari.” “Gee,” I responded, “I didn’t know they had safaris to Taillevent.”

  Well, it turned out Paris wasn’t what she had in mind. Africa was. It seemed like the Wildlife Conservation Society, on whose board M.B.S. sits, was sponsoring a bunch of trips to East Africa in celebration of its 100th anniversary. She felt that a fortnight out under the wide equatorial sky looking at nature pure in instinct and deed might do wonders in relieving me of an entirely unhealthy preoccupation with the socioeconomic or cultural parasites responsible for the way we live now.

  How could I but agree? Not only had I never been to Africa, I had never traveled as part of an organized or affinity group. The late Robert Benchley had observed that there were two classes of travel: first, and with children. I had long suspected, and was curious to see for myself, that even lower than the latter in the descending circles of Travel Hell must be “Group”—when 10 or more
adults are brought together more or less randomly into the metaphorical equivalent of the sealed railway car in which—in 1917—Lenin was transported across Germany to the Finland station.

  I am someone, mind you, who bears the scars of family ski vacations, where many are always at the mercy of the one who forgets mittens, or ski pass, but such slips are, if irritating, inadvertent.

  MARCH 25, 1996 BY ALEX KUCZYNSKI

  THE NEW YORK WORLD: OVERLOADED NEW YORKERS HOOKED ON HIGH COLONICS

  IN THE REPORTS FROM DIANA’S impending divorce from Charles, the list of her annual expenditures includes: $153,000 for clothes, $6,400 for hair treatments and $15,3000 for psychotherapy, aromatherapy and…colonic irrigation.

  “They take all the aggro [aggravation] out of me,” the Princess of Wales has reportedly said about the process. Now, an increasing number of New Yorkers, who certainly have their own share of “aggro,” are turning themselves over to practitioners who shoot between 15 and 20 gallons of distilled water through their bodies in 45-minutes sessions.

  It should come as no surprise that these high-powered enemas are catching on here. For this is the city that pours too much into people, a city that overloads the senses, a city of food and smoke and booze and taxi exhaust. A good colonic is meant to give residents of this thankless town a chance to let it all out.