It’s there every time I look out my bedroom window on Roosevelt Island: Manhattan. Maybe 250 yards away. May as well be in France. The F.D.R. is a stone’s throw away but you have to hold your breath to hear it. I moved to Manhattan when I was 9. I’ve lived on Spring Street, MacDoug...

1 The good thing about the new Depression is that I’ve been in one for the past five years, so I’m used to it. Nice to have company.   2 Boom times are the worst in New York. I’d still like to slug this T-shirted guy at the Cub Room in Soho back in 1999 who told me all about his Internet star...

So the evildoers are gonna get us again. I can feel it; they’re getting ready. Leon Panetta for C.I.A. head? Were Warren Christopher and Richard Simmons both unavailable? Not to worry, I’m sure the incoming secretary of state will have the terrorists quaking in their boots, postponing plans to m...

Last week, I was at a party at the sophisticated Le Cirque restaurant on East 58th Street street for the HBO documentary Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven. I asked fabled Le Cirque owner Sirio Maccioni, a very elegant man who smelled great, what happens when his beautiful wife of 38 years, Egidiana, sees...

So I’m broke. I have a negative balance. Minus $9.44. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, imprisoned here on Roosevelt Island. Back in ’99 I bought a $400 bottle of wine at Raoul’s to impress what I thought was my girlfriend. Turned out I was merely one of three dudes she was nailing. And now I canâ...

Truth is I don’t cheat, don’t get laid extracurricularly, ever. Against the rules. Fine with it! It’s been many years since I said good riddance to the occasional late-night hookup and the once-in-a-blue-moon, drug-fueled marathon bang sessions. Three hours nonstop one late night circa 2000. N...

A toxic mixture of dread, fear, panic, paranoia and self-doubt was brewing in my head on my way out to the Hamptons the last weekend in June. On the train, I sat on a fold-up chair next to the bathroom and listened to the contents of the bowl swish and swirl around, like the economy and the Bush adm...

GEORGE: This a new couch? DR. SELMAN: So what brings you back? GEORGE: Well, it’s been six months. HILLY: Well— GEORGE: I’m a little groggy, I have to admit, because I had to work last night. Went to this benefit at the Central Park Zoo. What animal did you like best? HILLY: This huge porcupin...

At the Wildlife Conservation Society on June 3 at the Central Park Zoo, we found a creature with a steely gaze and a hefty, 235-pound-ish build: Al Gore . The Transom imagined that the former vice president was thinking the following: What am I doing here again? Oh, yeah, my daughter Karenna married...

I remember being 18 and watching three seniors dancing ecstatically to Talking Heads’ “Wild Wild Life� and feeling sorry for them. They were 21—their lives were practically over. Suckers. I’m five hours away from 40. When I turned 30, I was optimistic and totally deluded. So many possibili...