from InCharacter.org
ETP attended a party in celebration of the new issue of In Character, "A Journal of Everyday Virtues" at the The Library Hotel in midtown Manhattan last week, and there was a clutch of media and literary types in attendance on the rooftop bar, enjoying cocktails, conversation, and, yes, character, though the particular virtue being celebrated in this issue — self-reliance — was thankfully not required in terms of enjoying an assortment of beverages (translation: literary types love an open bar!). Editor-in-chief Mark Oppenheimer, author of Bar Mitzvah tome Thirteen And A Day and contributor to such publications as Slate, Salon, the WSJ, the NYTBR and The Forward, welcomed a crowd of people from all those publications and more, plus many, we suspect, who had enjoyed that special rite of passage at age 13. We'll get to the boldfacing in a moment, but first, another kind of clutch: As the party wound down, ETP and assorted others could not help but notice a couple attached at the face on a bench in a secluded area on the enclosed patio, if by "secluded" one means "on the patio, and at least six feet from the coatrack from which people were retrieving their coats." The couple remained suctioned to each other for a goodly quarter hour, at least, after which they came up for air and the lady in question tottered out, lipstick a tad smeary. Now. WE know who they are, and lots of people at the party know who they are, but we're not sure their respective husbands and wives know who they are. So we'll just leave the anecdote at that, and launch into the list of attendees below. Ahem.
In no particular order: The Forward's art and culture macher Alana Newhouse plus writers Jennifer Siegel, Nathaniel Popper, and Elissa Strauss; New York's chatty Jesse Oxfeld; the NYTBR's Rachel Donadio and Jennifer Shuessler plus NYT Op-Artist Lauren Redniss (also the author of "Century Girl" about the last living member of the Ziegfeld follies - who last danced on Broadway at 99); high-booted and warmly-coated Daily Show writer Rachel Axler with her husband, playwright Ethan Youngerman, whose critically-acclaimed "The Sublet Experiment" comes to Soho next month; the New York Sun's Amanda Gordon and Gary Shapiro; the New York Post's flame-haired Eve Kessler; Scientific American's John Rennie; thinktank The Century Foundation's Leif Wellington Haase, because when you think that hard, you need three names; Slate's Meghan O'Rourke; Robin Cembalest from Art News; the WSJ's James Taranto; the New Yorker's Sarah Larson (and former New Yorker-ite and fiction writer Boris Fishman); Dwell founding editor and current Metropolis contributing editor Karrie Jacobs; and the ACLU's Ben Wizner and Rachel Goodman, sticking up for everybody else's right to write filth. (Just kidding, but seriously, have you seen the NYTBR lately?). We're not sure who of the In Character masthead was there (but here they all are), nor would we recognize Alain de Botton if we saw him, but he might have been there using philosphy to console people about their status anxiety since he's one of the mag's top-shelf contributors, along with Niall Ferguson, Myrna Blyth, NYT Metro-guy-cum-Baghdad correspondent Damien Cave, ETP's favorite giggly Constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen, plus numerous other people with the word "scholar" in their title. Still, smart as all these people may be, they still get all giggly when two people make out all sloppy in public and they may be married to other people. And that is all we are going to say about that.
In Character: A Journal Of Everyday Virtues [InCharacter.org]
