Ronald Lauder's Golden New Yorker Portrait

Ronald Lauder scores a hagiographic 10-page profile in the current (Jan. 15) New Yorker (no link yet), which manages to avoid delving into any problematic areas, such as the possible conflicts among his roles as a Museum of Modern Art trustee, founder and president of the Neue Galerie, Nazi loot restitution advocate, and major purchaser of restituted art (most notably the $135-million Klimt).

But Rebecca Mead did tell me one fact about Lauder that I didn't already know: This former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations "is the kind of Jew who has celebrated Christmas throughout his life, even once impersonating Santa when his children were small."

She also tells me something about Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" that I didn't know, because it isn't true: The article gives the painting's date as 1903; it's actually 1907.

Where are the New Yorker's fact-checkers when we really need them?