David Edelstein may well be the best movie critic around these days. And he's leaving Slate for New York Magazine. Scott Rosenberg writes:

Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment : My friend, the movie critic David Edelstein, has been writing wonderfully alive and intelligent pieces for Slate from its very beginning in 1996. That makes him a true Web old-timer. (He's also on NPR's Fresh Air.) But today the news broke that he is leaving Slate for Adam Moss's revamped New York magazine, which will begin featuring his reviews beginning in January. Congratulations to David -- the Web's loss is New York's gain, and those of us beyond the five boroughs now have one strong reason to point our browsers to http://nymag.com..

And his spouse Rachel Klayman--who is at least as sharp-eyed and quick-witted--is backing Barack Obama for policy and profit:

The Telegraph - Calcutta : International : Nine years ago, Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, was published to good reviews and lacklustre sales. The best estimate his publisher and agent can come up with is that it sold around 15,000 copies. But after his rousing keynote address at the [Democratic] convention [in August 2004]... the Crown Publishing Group [was] racing to ship copies of the book to stores around the country.... "What's really gratifying is that as the months have passed, we've seen him become more and more visible, with booksellers' enthusiasm rising and reaching a fever pitch after the speech," said Rachel Klayman, a senior editor at Crown....

[L]iterary agent Jane Dystel.... "The thing that struck me was his writing, which was unbelievably gorgeous," Dystel said.... [T]he young politician... caught Klayman's attention after he became the Democratic nominee in the Illinois Senate race. Klayman broached the idea of an Obama book a few days after he won the hard-fought primary. But she also had a dim memory... discover[ed] that her own company was the publisher of Dreams From My Father. But there was no copy of it to be found, not even on the Crown shelves -- something Klayman said is not unusual for a book published so long ago....

"I haven't read too many books by politicians that are as eloquent as his," Klayman said. "I told him that if I were his speech writer, I'd be intimidated."