Some of the best reporting in the NYT has been the micro-histories by life-style reporters. Today’s story about the upper East Side restaurant Sette Mezzo is another great snapshot. The restaurant, which serves $40 for pasta and $30 for salad and water, is the family canteen for the likes of Si and Donald Newhouse, Tom Tisch, Jonathan Tisch, William Lauder, Saul Steinberg, George Soros, Lily Safra, Leon Black, Michael Schulhof, Mike Nichols, Donald Marron. Cash only. (Or you can throw it on your monthly tab.)

Even here, though, the recession’s cool breeze is blowing.

starting in November, when fresh black truffles arrive, they can be added to any item at $50 for the first flurry of shavings (subsequent shavings are discounted). White truffles bring any entree price up to $200. “I always cover the top,” Mr. Mania said, adding that at a certain other Italian restaurant, “they give you three slices.”

Not that there have been many takers lately. “Nobody ordered truffles this year,” Mr. Esposito added. “It must be the economy.”

I was wrong to that the Times isn’t conversing. Here’s some chat-back from another NY institution, the 92nd Street Y Tribeca. (Thank you Ken!)

The Germans are going to step in and backstop all Europe’s sloppiest economies. Imagine being a prudent budgeteer who is forced to pool a family budget with 20 of your neighbors, but having no voice in how they spend their money. How quickly do you think the credit card debt would add up?

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said euro-region countries may be forced to bail out other members of the 16-nation bloc that face problems refinancing their debt.

“Some countries are slowly getting into difficulties with their payments,” Steinbrueck said late yesterday in a speech in Dusseldorf. “The euro-region treaties don’t foresee any help for insolvent countries, but in reality the other states would have to rescue those running into difficulty.”

While declining to identify countries facing problems, the German finance chief said Ireland, which has a widening budget deficit, is in a “very difficult situation.” Ireland’s debt- rating outlook was cut by Moody’s Investors Service Jan. 30.

Beware to boobtube:

Brian Primack, a pediatrician at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who studies how teenagers’ use of media affects their health, analyzed survey data that followed 4,142 teenagers from 1995 to 2002. Teenagers who watched TV were more likely to report symptoms of depression, with the rate increasing 8 percent with every hour of TV watched.

Neil Postman’s “Amusing ourselves to death” was truer than he knew.

Usage of the term “since the great depression” among documents indexed on Google, now clocking in at 5,600,000, is up almost 10-fold since September.

We’ve got 90,400 instances of “worst since the Great Depression” and 9,160 instances of “longest since the Great Depression.” But zero instances of “weirdest since the Great Depression.” Until now, of course.

Reading James Surowiecki’s sneer about NYT’s bathetic advertising of its own product reminded me that I’d recently taken note of NYTimes ad running in the TV screen the back of my cab.

What unnerved me the most was the Times ad’s emphasis on “conversation”… “center of the conversation”… “get the conversation going”… and “be part of a great conversation.” All these phrases were uttered by hip-ish looking 20 and 30-somethings.

Clearly, the Times is desperately hoping to stay relevant to the under-sixty-year-olds who are turning their collective back on the Times, even as they consume and create giant new volumes of their own media (aka conversation.)

Advertising its ersatz conversations, the Times’ resembles a Baptist church trying to compete for the hearts and minds of indie rock fans by running ads declaring “hey, we’ve got great music too!”

In this month’s Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn does a great job of summing up the challenge for television networks.

On the “buy side,” the problem is what I’d call cultural attention-deficit disorder, which afflicts the consumer bombarded with choices: more TV networks (the Emmy Award–winning show Mad Men is broadcast on AMC, a channel previously known only for showing movies), more video games, more Web sites, and more ways to consume shows than ever before (VOD, DVD, PPV, etc., etc.). And all of this is compounded by the loss of the social effect: the fewer people who consume any given piece of media, the fewer people there are to tell you how awesome The Life & Times of Tim is and how you simply have to watch it. Amid the chaos, it’s difficult for a media consumer to care enough about any one thing to stick with it—and for a network trying to build allegiance to a brand, convincing anyone that what you’re showing matters becomes almost impossible.

I’ll continue to argue (as I’ve been doing since ’02) that blogs, as communities that create and consume news and opinion together, are uniquely positioned in this exploding universe as one of the few media players with centripetal force.

Robert Shiller, the great real estate bear, lectures…

Ever hysterically rational, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes this morning about European banks’ huge lending overhang to post Communist economies. The headline, “Failure to save East Europe will lead to worldwide meltdown,” seems to suggest there’s some alternative to failure. Sadly, Europe doesn’t have the capital, political will OR the political infrastructure to rescue either the west European banks or East European folks who have borrowed absurd amounts of money valued in other countries’ potentially much stronger currencies.