FrumForum Water Cooler

Websites are run at an intense pace, but even at FF, work must pause sometimes. At 5:30 almost every afternoon, we take a cocktail break, just like Team America.

Websites are run at an intense pace, and the work ethic of the staff here at FrumForum would impress even the most associate-grinding law firm. Managing editor Meg Mali works about 27 hours a day (and still found time to win last week's Wall Street Journal news quiz - belated congratulations Meg!). Noah Kristula-Green handles technology and still writes pathbreaking stories like yesterday's on Republican Medicare reform ideas (absence of). Tim Mak is already emerging as one of the next generation's finest reporters. Summer interns Jeb Golinkin and Rachel Ryan and current intern Shawn Summers produce at a pace that would do credit to news veterans. Manager of the editor Danielle Frum somehow oversees daily operations while also finishing a book and running all her notorious morale-sapping Georgetown cocktail parties. (Wesley Heights really, but why linger over picky details?)

Even here, however, work must pause sometimes. At 5:30 almost every afternoon, we take a cocktail break, just like Team America. Mrs. Frum pours gin and wine, and we all chatter.

It occurred to me that it might be fun to share the chatter from time to time, at least on days when there are not too many "that's what she said" jokes ....

Yesterday, Danielle was reminiscing about the early days of marriage, when we lived in a Brooklyn Heights apartment owned (as we had no reason to suspect) by two of the richest people in the United States. He died in 1995, she in 1998, leaving an estate of $800 million, accumulated at least in part by a frugal disinclination to pay for household repairs. I wrote an obituary for them that became perhaps the single most widely circulated thing I'd written to that date. Twelve years later, it still made the staff smile. So here it is again, reproduced for a new generation ...

The millionaires next door? To me, Donald and Mildred Othmer the ''unassuming'' Brooklyn couple who recently left a staggering $800 million estate to charity -- were the millionaires in the basement.

In the week since reports were published about the immense fortune accumulated by this onetime Brooklyn Polytechnic professor and his wife, the Othmers have become paragons of thrift: save your money, invest carefully, and you, too, can become rich. And that's true, so far as it goes. But thrift is a virtue more comfortably praised than practiced.

You can read the rest here.