Peter Norton

Late last decade, Peter Norton, the Buddhist monk turned software pioneer turned art magnate, was modest and enlightened enough to choose a Manhattan apartment so unassuming that his architect, Maya Lin, complained it was too small and dark. After all, the place was a ground-floor duplex, partially below ground.

Mr. Norton’s tastes have apparently changed. According to a deed filed with the city’s Department of Finance just this week, he paid $6.8 million for a penthouse at the Greenwich, a huge prewar luxury loft building on West 13th Street, late last year. The condo has at least 23 windows facing north and west, according to the Corcoran listing, but then there’s a 10.  read more »

In The Transom: Mike Leigh and Scott Elliott lunch at Balthazar; Judy Dench, Joan Collins, and Kathleen Turner consider the war in Iraq; When Is a Chair Not a Chair? When it's at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Peter Norton is buying them. Plus! Our East End Correspondent Taffy Winesap Settles in for Winter in Sag Harbor in our new Sag Harbor Diary....

Wall Streeters prop up the real estate bubble in anticipation of juicy year-end pay-outs; not since before 9/11 have finance folks been compensated for their troubles so handily.

Fine, we'll say it: Brooklyn Is The New Philadelphia, the sexy suburb that could. No longer the sadsack spot where losers go when they fail out of Manhattan, Brooklyn finally has it all going on.

Aaaaaaaagh, George Gurley and his lover Hilly are back in couples therapy.

Even Bush I isn't afraid of Al Jazeera any more; Here comes Al Jaz Int'l.

Back to Canada with ya, eh? Michael Ignatieff says see ya to America, off to save his homeland.  read more »

Harvard Law School, a hungry hungry hippo for conservatives.

Nerve.com sex columnist plans to wed! But what of the lust in the dust?

As the Whitney Biennial launches this week to the usual hyperbolic chorus of yays and nays, behind t  read more »

On July 29, Maxwell Anderson was named director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, replacing Dav  read more »