It was the one item in the diary marked “DO NOT MISS”, scheduled for 10.30am on Thursday. What occasion merited such urgency? My children’s graduation ceremony … from nursery school. Given that my parents did not make it to my university graduation, I was amazed to receive emails from other (more involved) parents advising me [...]

I will readily confess to being a New York gym rat: I like to go for a run or workout on the elliptical machines. The only times it isn’t relaxing is if I happen to enter the gym at the same time as the “spinning” class is taking place; then, you can literally smell the [...]

Critics in the mainstream media scoffed, for the most part, at John Cusack’s low-budget didactic satire, War Inc., calling it heavy-handed and five years too late. The film struggled to get into festivals, finally making it into Tribeca this year. But on the Web, voices sang a different tune, calling War Inc. “prescient” and groundbreaking [...]

It was an intensely political evening. First, the premiere of the amazing new film Recount, starring Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary, turned the dry legal arguments about “hanging chads” in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election into fascinating drama. Then screens hung down at New York’s Four Seasons restaurant so we could watch the [...]

Guest commentators on the financial cable shows tend to be shouty men in striped shirts. But a rather different face has been showing up on CNBC lately, one that’s familiar to New York’s social and media types: Vicky Ward, Talk magazine survivor and current Vanity Fair contributing editor. Ward credits her new gig as a [...]

Last week, in a dash to get to a television studio, I lost a valuable ring. Devastated, I later narrated the story to a friend who works in finance. “The ring was worth X. How much was TV paying you? You clearly didn’t rationalise the situation,” he said. I was speechless at his words, but [...]

Jeffrey Epstein, the mysterious financier, absconded to Israel to escape charges of soliciting prostitutes? That was the rumor circulating at the Plaza last night, during the dinner that followed HBO’s premiere of its fabulous documentary about Roman Polanski. The whispers went that Epstein had followed in the footsteps of Polanski, who decamped to France in [...]

“D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey played a risky game in catering to Washington’s power brokers with her upscale escort service. Her suicide, this month, marked a tragic—and not unexpected—end for a complicated woman who believed she was unfairly victimized. Having talked to Palfrey for months and spoken with her mother after her death, Vicky Ward [...]

Those of us firmly in the anti-Hillary, pro-Obama camp are fed up with it. “I can’t read about it any more,” one Obama backer wrote to me over the weekend. But the endless press surrounding the inflammatory remarks pronounced by the Rev Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor of 20 years at Trinity Church in Chicago, [...]

Just a few hours ago, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the former owner of the Pamela Martin escort agency, was found dead in a shed near her mother’s house in Tampa, Florida. The authorities said she had hanged herself. And while the news was shocking, I cannot say I was surprised. The 52-year-old, known in the press [...]

I hate to rub it in, but in New York we are on the cusp of summer. The temperature has been in the high seventies; all around me I see girls in summer dresses. The season-change generally coincides with the Tribeca Film Festival, now a staple of the social season, and, for me, the first [...]

For me, no matter what happens in Pennsylvania, I’m done with Hillary Clinton. I have long felt that either Democratic candidate would suffice as President. Most New Yorkers (remember, this is a liberal town) have become so tired and cynical about the current administration’s screw-ups I think a frog might be welcomed as the next [...]

Fortune magazine is out with its annual ranking of America’s 500 biggest corporations, and only a dozen of the 500 have women at the helm. Watch the discussion here. Digg StumbleUpon Facebook

I recently interviewed actor, writer and director of War, Inc., John Cusack for CNBC. Watch my exclusive, one-on-one interview here. Watch the trailer for the movie here. You can also watch this on the Huffington Post here. Digg StumbleUpon Facebook

I had the pleasure of talking with Jared Kushner, owner of the NY Observer, about his possible purchase of NY Newsday and his battle over it with Rupert Murdoch. Watch my one-on-one interview here. Digg StumbleUpon Facebook

It is every celeb’s nightmare: Rob Lowe has hit the headlines with his $3 million lawsuits against a “blackmail” plot by two nannies and a former chef, allegedly seeking to extort $1.5 million from him. In response, Lowe has also accused them of wild behaviour, namely sex and drugs, in his California and London houses. [...]

This last week has seen a sorry-looking bunch of people in bars around our block. Many are Bear Stearns employees, whose life-savings just tanked. These (mostly) men are livid – mainly at 74-year-old chairman Jimmy Cayne, who could have sold the business a year ago at $200 a share instead of the measly $10 they [...]

I do not believe in Facebook. I know this sounds heretical, especially since I am a journalist and I live in America, pioneer of gizmos and wireless communications, but I can’t stand the thing. My husband, who is a tech-fiend, put me on it – and so, to all those people who have emailed me [...]

This year we ended up cancelling our Easter vacation, because I’d been away, filming in Los Angeles, and the husband had been to Tokyo, Hong Kong, China, Munich and London in the space of 14 days. He felt like he’d travelled enough. And anyway, he told me, he doesn’t have time for vacations in these [...]

Settling down didn’t come naturally to Simon Sebag Montefiore, the English banking scion with a playboy reputation who gave up finance for war reporting. Then he met the woman he knew he couldn’t let slip away, and started producing a series of acclaimed histories. Our correspondent drops in on the toast of London as he [...]

This month’s American Vogue begins with a letter by the editor, Anna Wintour, about Hillary Clinton dropping out of a cover photoshoot. Wintour writes that she found it “amazing” that “our only female presidential hopeful had decided to steer clear of our pages – for fear of looking too feminine. The notion that a contemporary [...]

With a triumphant second exhibition at his Venice Museum, Francois Pinault, the self-made french tycoon whose holdings include Gucci, Christie’s, and the Chateau Latour Vineyard, has found a new role: Champion of Contemporary Art. On Friday, June 8, 2007, the thousands of art aficionados who had made the pilgrimage to the 52nd Venice Biennale experienced [...]

This year marks the 21st anniversary of the death of Frances Elizabeth Kent, more widely known as Sister Corita, the Andy Warhol of Hollywood. Sister Corita was a nun, a member of the West Coast’s Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, under whose progressive roof Corita developed and taught her art, a cutting-edge populist [...]

Since Brooke Astor’s grandson, her powerful friends, and her longtime staff alleged that the 104-year-old philanthropist’s son, Anthony Marshall, and his wife, Charlene, were taking advantage of her failing health, a New York court has removed her from the Marshalls’ care. The Embattled couple tell their side of the scandal. On Friday, September 29, early [...]

It was a blisteringly hot afternoon in September. A friend in her 30s had hauled herself out of bed after suffering from a painful inner-ear problem to go to her husband’s annual office barbecue. This takes place at his chief executive’s stunning house on the beach in the Hamptons, America’s summer playground for the wealthy [...]

At 81, Leila Hadley Luce, widow of TIME Inc. heir Henry Luce III, is being sued for sexual abuse. In exclusive interviews, Luce, her daughters, and her granddaughter chart the disintergration of a family, in which money, madness, and drugs led to charges of attempted rape, incest, and betrayal. Leila Hadley Luce enters, leaning on [...]

The president of the world’s richest art institution, the $9 billion J. Paul Getty Trust, Barry Munitz is on the ropes, with the press lambasting his tenure, California’s attorney general investigating, and former Getty antiquities curator Marion True on trial. In a tearful interview, Munitz tries to set the record straight On an unusually hot [...]

To some very wealthy architecture-lovers, including Calvin Klein, Nicole Kidman, and Martha Stewart, the idea was a dream come true-a customized apartment in one of two glass towers designed by the renowned Richard Meier. Four years later, the buildings have generated more nightmares than far less glamorous New York addresses: leaks, heating problems, security lapses, [...]

Richard Clarke’s apology to America for 9/11, and his best-selling book, Against All Enemies, which criticizes the White House’s obsession with invading Iraq, have made him famous, wealthy, and a hero to many. But the former “counterterrorism czar,” who went into government three decades ago to help prevent another Vietnam, is still grappling with a [...]

When Sita White, 43-year-old daughter of the late British industrialist Lord Gordon White, dropped dead in her Santa Monica yoga class last May, her life was in complete disarray. There were the drugs she used and her questionable “nancial advisers.” There was her child with Pakistani politician Imran Khan (now divorced from heiress Jemima Goldsmith). [...]

After London’s Daily Mirror ran front-page photos of Uber-model Kate Moss doing cocaine, the 31-year-old style icon lost contracts with Burberry, Chanel, and H&M reportedly totaling close to $4 million. But while the tabloids screeched about her decadent image and damaged career, the fashion elite rallied to her defense. Was she the victim of overzealous [...]

London society is up in arms over a threat to civilization as they know it: the civilization embodied in Mark Birley’s exclusive clubs-Annabel’s, Harry’s Bar, Mark’s Club, George, and the Bath & Racquets-which the ailing 75-year-old perfectionist wants to hand over to his son Robin and daughter, India Jane. The menace: American shipping-and-luxury-hotel tycoon James [...]

No one denies that Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim’s controversial director, has put the museum on the map-literally, guratively, and, some say, dangerously. His global expansion began in Bilbao, included branches in Berlin, Lower Manhattan, and Las Vegas, and continues with talk of a mammoth building in Singapore. But he’s clashed with two powerful donors, Ronald [...]

Eager to seal their $10 billion merger, Morgan Stanley C.E.O. John Mack handed Dean Witter’s Philip Purcell the reins of the combined nancial behemoth in 1997. A few years later, or so the plan went, Purcell would hand them back. Instead, he tightened his grip, while the company hemorrhaged top talent, saw its stock plummet, [...]

One of the world’s oldest and most prestigious private investment banks, Lazard Freres has been gripped by a clash of civilizations. In one corner is the aristocratic chairman, Michel David-Weill, who regards Lazard as his patrimony; in the other is the brashly brilliant American C.E.O., Bruce Wasserstein, who wants to take the bank public. Probing [...]

Lately, Jeffrey Epstein’s high-flying style has been drawing oohs and aahs: the bachelor financier lives in New York’s largest private residence, claims to take only billionaires as clients, and flies celebrities including Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey on his Boeing 727. But pierce his air of mystery and the picture changes. VICKY WARD explores Epstein’s [...]

A botched coup by mercenaries last year against the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea ensnared Sir Mark Thatcher, son of Britain’s former prime minister, whose business dealings have made him controversial before. Though he denies involvement, he was arrested by the South African government, and faces charges of having helped finance the plot. Reporting from [...]

As Neil Bush went from one venture to another, tarnished by his role in the 1990 Silverado S&L scandal, his wife, Sharon, couldn’t understand why she had to worry about the grocery bills. Wasn’t he the son of America’s 41st president and brother of two governors? Then Neil divorced her last April to marry Maria [...]

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and his wife, C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame, are at the center of controversy over President Bush’s bogus claim, in last year’s State of the Union address, that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Africa. The Justice Department is investigating who leaked Plame’s covert status—a federal crime—to columnist Robert Novak, [...]

When Simon de Pury needed a C.E.O. for his struggling Phillips auction house, he hired his millionaire girlfriend, Louise MacBain. Ten months later, after she warred with his partner, she had to leave. But MacBain, now owner of Art & Auction magazine, hasn’t gone quietly. There were those who pronounced the first weekend of August [...]