I have seldom been as relieved to read an article as one that appeared last week by New York Times writer Andrew Das. It began: “In the moments after I felt the pop in my left shoulder, the sensation I felt was not pain. It was panic. How exactly does a 40-year-old man explain to […]

The Russian businessman I was having a drink with lived in London. “I prefer London to New York right now; in London not everyone talks about their depleted bank balance; in New York everyone does,” he said. I agreed. But then a friend took me for a late dinner at a restaurant I’d never heard […]

Details magazine has dictated that the sexiest woman on the planet is not Scarlett Johansson, or Gisele Bundchen, but Jennifer Aniston — who is 40.
Meanwhile, People magazine puts Italian actress Valerie Bertinelli, 48, in a bikini on its cover. Cindy Crawford, 43, is covered in soap suds in Allure.
There’s a celebration going on among all […]

My neighbor at dinner, a hedge-fund manager originally from Texas, was emphatic.
“If your only identity is in your job or your money then there is no point living in New York any more,” he said. “Anyone who thinks like that will leave.”
He had a point. This town seems to have become unhinged by the populist […]

These days it’s not just financial journalists who follow the movements of financiers. So, too, do the entertainment channels and press. Who could have predicted the day would come when OK! magazine would care what mode of transport Ken Lewis, Bank of America’s chief, uses? But according to the New York Times, these topics are […]

My English friend was worried. “I guess the next step is getting American-accent lessons,” she said over dinner the other night.
She is a peer of mine — we were at Cambridge together — and she has wound up in New York working in a senior position for an American bank on Wall Street. We frequently […]

Among the articles in Vanity Fair’s April issue is a report I did on the Noels, the infamously good-looking, gregarious family of Walter Noel, founder of the investment group Fairfield Greenwich, which had $6.9 billion—almost half of its assets under management—invested with Bernie Madoff. Now that that money is all gone, Fairfield Greenwich is being […]

New York’s latest financial criminal mastermind — and remember, we now have one a day being unveiled — is Paul Greenwood, 61, the bow-tied town governor of North Salem, New York’s horsey area. (Until recently it’s where the American Olympic equestrian team trained.)
Greenwood spent the alleged $500 million he is accused of siphoning off from […]

New York Fashion Week is here - and, as Lela Rose, the Texan designer, says as she threads her needle and fits her models, “the show must go on.” “We need a little pick-me-up,” she emailed me, “and I actually think the upcoming week should be a way to move forward. That doesn’t mean we […]

Another day, another one bites the dust. Friends everywhere are losing their jobs.
They’re bright. The New York Times described the growing ranks of the city’s unemployed as the new chic club in town. In part, this is because the people who are losing their jobs are the best and ergo the most expensive talent around. […]

“How much should a Wall Street CEO get paid?” The question got bandied around on Thursday night at dinner — by a bunch of Wall Street CEOs.
The question was the topic of the day following coverage of the extravagant ways of John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, who spent $1.2 million on his office […]

Every day turns up an astonishing new detail of the incredible story of Bernie Madoff and his $50-billion Ponzi scheme: aside from Obama’s inauguration, New York can talk of little else. And some of the new angles are very odd.
It’s just been reported that Bernie’s late mother, Sylvia, herself had stock-trading troubles. In 1963 the […]

Today prosecutors will make their case that Bernard Madoff should be jailed for violation of bail conditions. On Christmas Eve he mailed out trinkets worth more than $1 million to family members. His defense lawyer says Madoff had no idea he was doing anything wrong and that these items were sentimental. Prosecutors argue his act […]

I wish I could say that this holiday season has felt as cheerful as usual. But the emptiness in New York’s streets and stores both on December 24th and 26th merely amplified the depressing retail statistics. Eager sales assistants hawked their marked-down wares with an enthusiasm bordering on desperation. “I can hold any item for […]

“What recession?” shouted the front page of the New York Post last week, beside a picture of a blonde Swedish countess, Marie Douglas-David. Douglas-David, a former banker at Lazard, is divorcing her husband of six years, George David, former CEO of United Technologies and worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
She is reportedly refusing to accept […]

It began with the names of corporate victims who had lived high on debt, such as Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone, casino king Sheldon Adelson and Lehman president Joe Gregory. They lost houses, planes or boats worth millions. Who knew they financed their mansions with debt?
Now it’s our turn. Friday’s unveiling of Bernie Madoff’s alleged $50 […]

Just when I’d hoped Sarah Palin would disappear from public consciousness, it seems we can’t get rid of the former Republican vice-presidential candidate. She’s everywhere and so, too, is the controversy over her ultra-expensive Hollywood-style “makeover”. This weekend, the New York Times revealed details of the $165,000 the Republican party had spent on three stylists, […]

On the eve of Thanksgiving, just as I was about to go on TV to deliver a light-hearted spoof about what life would be like for Barack Obama without his BlackBerry, the screens filled with the terrible footage of the attacks on Mumbai. While we watched the gruesome spectacle, ticker-tape warnings at the bottom of […]

We’re told a global recession of almost Depression proportions is taking place, fragmenting the social hierarchy. At the bottom end there is tragic chaos represented by suicides and rising crime. At the top, there’s divorce, misery and a small effort to be less ostentatious about one’s wealth. Meanwhile, in the middle, according to New York […]

Given that it hasn’t yet got properly cold here, it feels like a very strange hallucination. In a naked effort to make us forget that we are living in an economic meltdown, the stores are full of Christmas trees and fairy lights. Their illusion makes you feel you are in some sort of dream world […]

F or a moment last week, around midnight on Tuesday, we all went mad with joy. Mad in a way I’ve never seen or heard. As I went to bed around 4am I could still hear the screams from people in the street: “We did it!” Emails came in from friends the next day: “I’m […]

We’re finally here: tomorrow is Election Day. You could cut the tension with a knife. Many of my friends have been stumping in swing states for Obama over the weekend, terrified that at the last moment a “Bradley effect” could rob him of the victory the polls predict. I don’t think this will happen. H […]

The other evening I went as a guest of friends to a dinner to raise money for a hospital in New York. This was the same hospital where my twins were prematurely born. On entering this world they weighed only 2lb and 3lb respectively, but went on to thrive. So I was glad to be […]

Back before the fall of Lehman Brothers and the global economic collapse, I had a dirty little secret: my weekly addiction to the TV series Gossip Girl, about the absurdly rarefied lives of a fictional group of wealthy New York teenagers. Now ratings for the show are soaring: more than ever, people want cheap escapism.
I […]

“How poor are you?” That’s what formerly rich guys ranging from hedge-fund kings and tech pioneers to bankers and trust-fund heirs are now asking each other at dinners around town.
This group doesn’t care who ends up buying Wachovia. That’s all background news; just one more sorry piece of detail in the carnage of a lost […]

L ast week saw not just the initial failure of Hank Paulson’s bail-out bill but also the death of the $800 bottle of wine.
“It’s just not OK to have that on your expenses at a time like this,” one restaurateur says he has been told by banker clients. In this cut-throat world of mergers and […]

Alberto Vilar once promised so many millions to both New York’s Metropolitan Opera and London’s Royal Opera House that his name was engraved in both places — only to be removed in 2005, when prosecutors charged him with stealing most of his fortune.
But the former financier said that what has hurt him most in the […]

F or some reason, in the last week or so I’ve had a series of lunches and dinners with friends who are male, single, over 35 and never-married. Men like this were traditionally labelled playboys, a term implying they possessed a rakish charm and a wariness of settling.
New York is full of them, since this […]

T he phone has rung off the hook all weekend. “Are you OK?” I’ve asked friends whose husbands have been at Lehman Brothers. No, of course they are not. They just saw everything they’ve worked for go down the drain. A lunch barbecue with a Lehman executive who has been there 16 years was cancelled. […]

Like 37 million Americans last Wednesday night, I sat transfixed as I watched the previously unknown figure of Sarah Palin turn herself into the angel of the Republican party. But the burning issue in my mind was: what is a hockey mom?
As a New York mother, I don’t believe the subject has ever come up […]

J ohn McCain made a brilliant move in choosing Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska, to be his running-mate. This appointment ought to make up for all his own deficiencies. Palin is young. She’s female. She’s attractive; she’s got some celebrity, having been the runner-up in a Miss Alaska beauty pageant.
She also wins our […]

T he story I’d been hearing for some time has finally come out in the open: Hillary Clinton, Bill, and many of her major financial supporters, known as “bundlers”, are so livid at what they see as underhanded play by the Obama team that they intend to eviscerate what ought to be Obama’s coronation at […]

In New York, the pre-movie hype about Woody Allen’s latest movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, had all been about the kiss between Penélope Cruz, onscreen and real-life girlfriend of male lead Javier Bardem, and America’s modern version of Marilyn Monroe, Scarlett Johansson.
So as I shovelled down popcorn at the New York premiere last week I was […]

F or women, dressing for summer here is a whole lot easier (and cheaper) than in London. You know that stepping outside will feel like walking into a blast furnace, so you choose pretty light sundresses and then you buy a cardigan to battle the freezing air-conditioning inside.
But for the men? I have long pitied […]

T he light-bulb went off while I was driving home last weekend. From the back seat of the car, my twin five-year-olds burst into song: “I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker …”
I have no idea where they heard such unsuitable lyrics (well, actually I do - their father will be spoken […]

Last week, in the wake of the near-implosion of mortgage insurer Fannie Mae, and with rumours swirling about the fate of Lehman Brothers, where the stock has plummeted 70 per cent, I got an email from a friend. Instead of his usual pithy jokes, he sent me his investment fund’s second-quarter report. It read: “Even […]

New York’s billionaires, it seems, have not really noticed the downturn. They still spend their summers on lavish yachts in Europe, and are still flying in their own planes. Hearteningly, they also continue to give philanthropically on a vast scale.
Earlier this year, Blackstone Group chairman Stephen A Schwarzman gave $100 million to the New York […]

The headlines here recently seem to have all been about sex - and costly, illicit sex at that.
First there are the lurid details exposed in the divorce trial between model Christie Brinkley, 54, and her fourth husband Peter Cook, 46, who allegedly cheated on her with an 18-year-old and had a penchant for looking at […]

It’s muggy here - a point emphasised by the increasing number of sweating brows I’ve watched on TV the past week. These brows mainly belong to men in suits who are on their way in and out of courthouses on charges of white-collar crime.
One theory, according to prosecutors and TV pundits, is that desperate economic […]

A friend saw Laura Bush recently and told me how “poised” our First Lady was: “petite” and “gracious”, a “listener”, not a talker. These are the traditional qualities we are supposed to admire in a First Lady. Feisty Democratic women have had a harder time fitting the mould than their Republican counterparts, except for Jackie […]

For the first time in a year I have spent the week in London, working and seeing friends. It has been an eye-opening experience; after all, it has been 11 years since I lived here.
I was expecting to complain about the weather. When I left New York the temperature was in the high nineties. But […]

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 that […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.
All […]

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 wanting […]

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 […]

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 woman […]