By Una LaMarche 7:10pm

Mothers Superior

Illustration by Kyle T. Webster

Rise of the Tigger Mom: A Hovering Parent Goes Free-Range

The other day at playgroup, my son, Sam, hit another baby in the face. He didn’t mean to hurt him—it was more like a wave gone awry—but still, it was open-hand, at point-blank range, like the first blow in the kind of slap fight you might see break out on Maury Povich. The other baby winced, and I swooped in from my crouch approximately two feet away to break it up. And then, from across the room, I heard the other child’s mother start to … laugh.

“Awesome,” she said, not making the slightest move to get up from her laid-back lean against the wall. I stared at her. Was she drunk? (Unlikely; it was noon.) Did she just not give a shit? Again, no; I’d seen her kissing her son and feeding him orange slices just moments before. As her baby shrugged off the attack and crawled over to investigate a nearby wall outlet, I had to accept the truth: in the world of helicopter parenting, she was the equivalent of a T-bird on blocks. And I was a military Black Hawk. Read More

By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 7:09pm

off the record

Mansion

WSJ’s New Real Estate

A man’s home may be his castle, but for Wall Street Journal readers, home is Mansion, the newspaper’s aspirationally titled Friday shelter section, which debuted last week. Because houses are all well and good, but, given the choice, aren’t mansions better?

“We all like to think of our home as a mansion, even if it is a humble abode, and we all have the license to aspire, so we have created Mansion to be the home of both aspiration and real estate realization,” WSJ managing editor Robert Thomson said in a statement announcing the launch.

The section bears a subhead with a quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that is uttered by the titular heroine about midway through the play.

“O, I have bought the mansion of a love, But not possess’d it,” reads the subhead. Read More

By Drew Grant 7:08pm

Digital Designers

The offices of Code and Theory

The Media Whisperer: Code and Theory’s Brandon Ralph is the Digital Designer Du Jour

“God, have you ever walked into a meeting and thought, This is not going to go well?” Code and Theory founder and creative director Brandon Ralph moaned. “That’s what it was like when we went to pitch to The Daily Beast.”
Sitting with him in his 5th floor SoHo offices, it was easy to imagine what the handsome and lanky 33-year-old was talking about. The Observer had come in to meet with the man who had been hand-picked by Tina Brown, Anna Wintour, Peter Brant, and Jason Binn to create their online platforms. With long, dark, wavy hair; leather bracelets; and a penchant for John Varvatos; Mr. Ralph looked more the part of a hip New York restaurateur. Read More

By Kevin Baker 6:50pm

Shrinking Brain

Photo illo: Ed Johnson

After Botching Central Park Five Case, City Goes After Filmmakers Who Told the Tale

It’s not every day that you pick up the newspaper and read that three of your friends have been subpoenaed—assuming, that is, that you don’t work for an international bank, the mafia, or the New York State Assembly.

The friends in question are the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, his daughter, the author and filmmaker Sarah Burns, and Sarah’s husband, David McMahon, who has worked with Ken for the last 14 years. I first met and worked with them all when I consulted on the updated version of Ken Burns’s Baseball series and wrote a new chapter for the accompanying book.

The subpoena involves a new documentary the three of them are making called The Central Park Five, an adaptation of the book Sarah Burns published earlier this year, The Central Park Five: Chronicle of a City Wilding, which revisits the brutal rape of Trisha Meili, the 28-year-old investment banker who would be known ever after as “the Central Park jogger.” Read More

By Maika Pollack 6:26pm

Review

6 Photos

Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Dora), 1941 (cast 1958)

From Brush and Palette to Printer and Cartridge: ‘Picasso Black and White’ at the Guggenheim, ‘Wade Guyton OS’ at the Whitney

IN ADDITION to being the most celebrated artist of the 20th century, Picasso is also the most difficult to pin down. So it is not surprising that an austere exhibition of his paintings, sculptures and drawings, ostensibly all in black and white, actually yields smudges of color: jade, olive, lemon-meringue yellow, midnight blue. Less surprising is the fact that the pieces on view—some 118 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, including 38 being shown for the first time in the United States and five displayed for the first time in public—are full of his signature muscular shapes. The show’s curator, Carmen Giménez, brought Richard Serra to the Guggenheim Bilbao in 1999, and her taste for the sculptural is evident in this exhibition. Read More

By Harry Huan 5:53pm

theater

Hodge in 'Cyrano de Bergerac.' (Courtesy Joan Marcus)

Douglas Hodge, From Z to C: His Zaza and Now—God Nose—His Cyrano Are Packed With Panache

Broadway buffs who know Douglas Hodge only from his Tony-winning turn as Zaza, the drag-queen diva of Saint-Tropez in La Cage aux Folles, may be startled by his Spartan British past in Shakespeare, and by the decade he spent at the feet of, and in the works of, Harold Pinter. True classical training is slow to show through layers of Max Factor and flamboyant flourishes—not to mention the prosthetic schnoz he’ll adorn to play the lead role in Cyrano de Bergerac starting Oct. 11 at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater—but it’s there.

His is a very different career back home, just as he is a very different person offstage. The chameleon occupying the theater’s second-floor star dressing room opened his door a crack at first knock, smiled tentatively and politely endured that awkward moment during which his visitor determined if he was indeed the star-in-residence. Read More