By Chuck Ross

Here they are. If you didn’t catch the recent piece in New York Magazine by Michael Idov on Gawker founder Nick Denton, it’s a must read.

Sample: “The only interesting people are on the West Coast,” [Denton says], then launches into a series of classic shameless Gawker riffs on the old New York media titans. “People used to quake when Barry Diller picked up the phone. Now he’s laughable. That image of Murdoch dyeing his hair in the sink is indelible—though the coloring may not be. Sumner Redstone would only be of interest to Gawker readers if he were to soil his adult diapers—on-camera. But the hard truth is that the golden age of New York media is largely over.”

Next is James Kaplan’s exceptionally well-written piece from Vanity Fair, "The Night Sinatra Happened,’ which is an excerpt from Kaplan’s forthcoming book.

Whether you are too young to know why Sinatra was so big, but want to know, or are just interested in the early years of this cultural icon, this is a must-read.

Sample: "The Voice—might as well start capitalizing it here—was simply working its spooky subliminal magic. Did it help that the singer was clearly in need of a good meal, that his mouth was voluptuously beautiful, that his electric-blue eyes were attractively wide with fear and excitement, that he knowingly threw a little catch, a vulnerable vocal stutter, into his voice on the slow ballads? It helped. It whipped into a frenzy the visceral excitement that his sound had started. But the sound came first. There was simply nothing like it."