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BERJAYASilicon Alley

So Just How Big Has New York’s Tech Sector Gotten?

By Kelly Faircloth 4:30pm
Almost feeling nostalgic. (Photo by Steven Freeman/NBAE via Getty Images)

Just in time to hand the whole dog-and-pony show off to his successor, Mayor Bloomberg finally has some new numbers to rattle off at those chipper press conferences he’s always holding at startup offices.

Today, pegged to the closed-door Bloomberg Technology Summit, hizzoner’s foundation dropped a big report on the state of the city’s tech business. And, well, would you believe it? They found that it’s grown prodigiously since 2007. Read More

Viral Video

Saturday Night Live Starts Out Strong With GIRLS Parody (Video)

By Drew Grant 2:30pm

Video

'Girls'

This weekend launched the new season of Saturday Night Live, with six new featured players, a weird extended music video from Arcade Fire, and a lot of Jesse Pinkman. (Aaron Paul totally saved the cold open, let’s be honest.) But the best part of the entire show, hosted by Tina Fey, was the first sketch after the monologue: a parody of HBO’s GIRLS that crystalized the essence of “First World Problems” that makes up the majority of the show’s plot lines by introducing a new “girl,” the Albanian Blerta. Read More

theater

From Zero to Reagan: Theater Publicist Susan Schulman Looks Back on Four Decades in the Business

By Harry Haun 2:23pm
Yo Yo Ma & SLS

When Susan Schulman was growing up, she hung around outside stage doors. “I was a theater kid,” she said recently in her office in Midtown. “I always wanted to be in the theater, but I had no way in.” Eventually, she found one: For 40 years, Ms. Schulman has been one of the most respected publicists in the theater business. She has plenty of stories to tell (“behind-the-curtain stuff,” as she puts it), and finally she has told many of them, in Backstage Pass to Broadway: True Tales of a Theatre Press Agent, published by Heliotrope Books.

Ms. Schulman’s stories are arranged like life—helter-skelter—scattered within the perimeters of two seminal events in her professional life: from how she, a rookie of 23, reduced the famously ferocious Lauren Bacall to a contented purr, to the time she beat the mighty David Merrick at his own penny-pinching game. (“I don’t know if I got the best of him, but I got money out of him, and that’s unique.”) Read More

BERJAYARock You Like a Hurricane

Michael Grimm Calls Bill de Blasio’s Sandy Plan ‘Completely Asinine!’

By Colin Campbell 12:48pm
Bill de Blasio. (Photo: Getty)

Republican Congressman Michael Grimm is not a fan of Bill de Blasio’s Hurricane Sandy recovery plan.

Yesterday, Bill de Blasio outlined a plan to use federal Sandy recovery money to fix some of the “greater wrongs” of the city by creating living-wage jobs, affordable housing and community health care sites in areas hard-hit by the storm–aspirations that touch on many of the Democratic mayoral nominee’s campaign themes. Read More

BERJAYABloom and Doom

Mayor Bloomberg on Obamacare: ‘It Would Be a Sin Not to Try It’

By Ross Barkan 12:34pm
Mayor Michael Bloomberg today.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg trashed Washington Republicans today for pushing the country to the brink of a partial government shutdown in their effort to block President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law.

“This is an outrage. They cannot hold the country hostage to what is just plain and simple politics,” Mr. Bloomberg declared at an unrelated press conference this morning, raging at the concept of negotiating policy issues with the threat of shutting down the federal government. Read More

BERJAYA