New York

The New York Public Library announced a $1-billion renovation plan that aims to quadruple attendance at the flagship main branch by 2014.

For a building guarded by marble lions, projecting an air of welcome is not easy. That is why library president Paul LeClerc, who proudly spearheaded the successful new Bronx Library Center, wants to bring a cafe, information center, and lending capacity to the austere Manhattan branch. "This plan," an official told the New York Times, "is the further democratization of that building." MORE

David Paterson, the new governor of New York, has acknowledged taking part in a number of extramarital affairs.

During a memorable 1976 Playboy interview, then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter confessed to having "looked on a lot of women with lust." For Carter, a born-again Christian, merely looking on a woman with lust constituted adultery. But he also added that he was unwilling to condemn homewrecking philanderers, as it would be un-Christlike to, in Carter's colorful words, "consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife."

So it's safe to say that David Paterson, Eliot Spitzer's successor, can count on Jimmy Carter's continued support. Yes, Paterson tells us, he has screwed a whole bunch of women. (Paterson's wife also pursued a little sexual healing on the side during a particularly rocky time in their marriage.) But at least he's upfront about it. And after Spitzer's tawdry adventures as Client 9, New Yorkers can at least be grateful that no money changed hands.

Wall Street greets the resignation of Eliot Spitzer.

Republicans are gleeful at Spitzer's downfall, but if you want to witness real ecstasy, visit Wall Street. As New York's attorney general, Spitzer made his political career on attention-grabbing settlements with banks, insurance companies, and mutual funds, positioning himself as the only man willing to clean up Wall Street's mess. To Wall Streeters, however, he was a bully and a boor, less a legal eagle than a rogue prosecutor and one-man Star Chamber.

Many of the abuses he attacked were real. He went after the tendency of equity research to serve investment-banking clients, rather than the retail investors who were reading it. And his inquiry into mutual funds who were letting big clients profit by trading shares after market close ended a scandalous practice.

But his methods were deeply troubling. MORE

An FBI inquiry implicated New York governor Eliot Spitzer as an alleged client of expensive call-girls.

DC's Mayflower Hotel was grimly quiet last night, dulled by a silence befitting the undertakers' convention it happened to be hosting, or a wake for the political career of its most famous guest in the last month, Eliot Spitzer. In the bar, guests sank into velvet cushions and speculated loudly about what a $4300-prostitute looks like. But their conversation eventually wandered back to other matters, and before long the bar had no reminder of the Mayflower's newest notoriety, other than a single news crew outside the window, and a CNN ticker about a "DC hotel" in the background on the TV, with sound and subtitles conspicuously off. MORE

Michael Bloomberg decides against running for president as an independent.

So who cares, right? Isn't Bloomberg just a rich dilettante? Actually, no. He was, by a wide margin, the best qualified of all the imaginable presidential candidates. Granted, he's not the kind of political figure who sends reporters into crazed reveries, and as a mouthy lower-middle-class kid from Medford, Massachusetts he doesn't embody America's changetastic post-ethnic future. He is simply the best mayor New York has ever had. Bloomberg's two terms have been marked by impressive improvements in the city's fiscal health, the crime rate, education, and environmental quality. And he accomplished all this by charming and disarming the same entrenched interests his predecessors failed to break through direct confrontation.