FIRST LOOK – NYTimes Magazine Cover Story: “Chris Christie Is Back” by Mark Leibovich:““If I fix this, you have to start the story with it,” Chris Christie told me, yanking the string of the venetian blind in the diner window. We were eating a late lunch at a place called Howley’s, next to a motor lodge on South Dixie Highway, in West Palm Beach. It was the last Sunday in October, nine days before the midterm elections, and the 4 p.m. twilight was beaming directly into the eyes of the governor of New Jersey. Christie’s communications director, Maria Comella, had already tried and failed to lower the blinds, inadvertently bunching them up even more. I had given it a shot, too. Finally, Christie rose and maneuvered himself across the booth to make his own attempt. Walking with a slight limp, which he occasionally does after sitting for a while, Christie grabbed the strings, one in each hand, tugged a few times and grunted. Then, after a final jerk, the blinds fell splendidly into place. “There’s the lead of your story,” Christie said, letting out a high-pitched laugh and lifting his arms in triumph.” [NYTimesMag] •Mag Cover Features Christie Kissing A Baby While Taking A Selfie [Pic]

MAYOR: NYC has $10M in pledges to host DNC 2016: “Mayor de Blasio crowed Wednesday that the host committee he’s assembled in hopes of capturing the 2016 Democratic National Convention has pledged $10 million of the $100 million cost of running the big show. Members of host committee include:Stuart Appelbaum, Lloyd Blankfein, Jeff Blau, Barry Diller, Jonathan Gray, Kenneth Lerer, Ron Perelman, Bruce Ratner, William Rudin, Jonathan Tisch, Diane von Furstenberg, and Robert Wolf.” [DailyNews]

STARTUP NATION: “The Story of Medved: An exclusive interview the Startup Nation’s leading venture capitalist: “My grandfather came to the US from the Ukraine in 1910,” recalls Jon Medved, CEO and Founder of the VC-equity crowdfunding investment company OurCrowd, in an interview at his Jerusalem office. His speech is a natural mix of English and Hebrew, with some Spanish colloquialisms thrown in. Dressed in an orange and red Hawaiian shirt ─ and with a style that conveys complete calm and confidence ─ Medved breaks every known stereotype about Orthodox Jewish American men who live in Jerusalem.”

“I spent my childhood in a seaside community in California called La Jolla. Later, we moved to Los Angeles, following my father who had become a nuclear scientist and entrepreneur. At the time, he was involved in establishing his first startup, which he later sold to Xerox. I grew up in a very liberal environment ─ very Californian. There was no Jewish element to it. We did not keep the Sabbath or eat kosher food… Nothing mentioned until this point in the life story of Jon Medved, born in 1955, provides any hint that one day, he would be considered by the New York Times to be “one of the ten Americans who has the greatest influence on the Israeli economy;” and that when this day would come, Medved would no longer define himself as a secular Jewish American but as an Orthodox Jewish Israeli.”[YediothAhronoth]

—RoundUp: “Can a creative British banker get Israel’s ultra-Orthodox to work?” [ToI] • Hackers Can Steal Data Wirelessly From PCs That Aren’t Even Online [Bloomberg] • “Israel, India Start To Equip Sea Forces With Barak-8 Defenses” [DefenseNews] • “Modi Revives India-Israel Ties as Terrorism Threat Grows” [Bloomberg]

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR WITH ODC: Some Creative Behavioral Solutions Helped David Schottenstein, Cofounder of Viewabill, Turn A Challenge Into An Asset — by David Zax in Fast Company: “As an entrepreneur, having OCD has been both a blessing and a curse (as anyone who claims it—jokingly or not—probably already knows). Schottenstein founded and sold a menswear company, Astor & Black, and then, with Alan Dershowitz, (created a billable hours tracker), Viewabill. OCD evidently didn’t prevent success, but in recent years, Schottenstein began to feel it getting in the way. After selling Astor & Black, Schottenstein treated himself and his family to a two-week vacation in Israel. But the whole time, he wasn’t able to stop looking at his phone. An Orthodox Jew who is supposed to set aside electronics on the Sabbath, he got in the habit of asking the family’s non-Jewish nanny to check his phone for him every hour. (“She wanted to murder me,” he says.)”

“Schottenstein and his wife visited the doctor in the fall of 2011. Schottenstein recalls that the doctor explained to him that his phone addiction was similar to any other—“I was just shooting up in a different way.” And the doctor was able to tap into something that Schottenstein prides himself on: “One thing I have a lot of is self-control,” he says. The doctor challenged Schottenstein to hand his wife his phone for two hours upon leaving the office, then to email him at the end of the ordeal. “He told me the first 15, 20, or 30 minutes, I’d feel miserable, but the last hour and a half I’d feel fine,” recalls Schottenstein. In truth, he recalls feeling miserable for 45 minutes. “But then my wife and I got talking, and I got engrossed in our conversation, and I didn’t think about the phone until the alarm went off.” Now, whenever Schottenstein and his wife go to dinner with friends, he wordlessly hands the phone off to her. The trick, Schottenstein has found, is to leverage the parts of your OCD that help you stay on task, while discarding the others, he says. “You have to be OCD about dealing with your OCD.” [FastCompany]

BUSINESS BRIEFS: “Local Iranian-Jewish banker and leader acquitted of federal fraud charges” [JJ] • Vikings Co-Owners Wilf Seek Reversal of $103M Judgement [NJ Law] • “Jack Sitt sues brother and demands a look at Sitt Asset’s books” [RealDeal] • Sam Zell: “There’s no tremendous demand for real estate” [HW]

BEHIND THE HEADLINES: “Behind the scenes of the Uber/BuzzFeed Ben Smith fracas” by Michael Wolff: “In an effort to argue its case with more care and professionalism, Uber has recently organized some background meetings with journalists and what are called in the PR trade, “influentials.” I was invited to one such dinner last week in a private room at the Waverly Inn in New York. In turn I asked Ben Smith, BuzzFeed’s editor in chief, if he’d like to come as my guest. I had understood that the Uber dinner, like other such media meet-and-greets — I’ve been to hundreds over the years — was off the record. I neglected, however, to specifically tell Smith this. In addition to Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, among the 25 or so guests were the actor Ed Norton, a friend of Kalanick, and his wife, film producerShauna Robertson; Mort Zuckerman, owner of New York’s Daily News; Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman; Huffington Post chief Arianna Huffington, New Republic owner Chris Hughes; and an executive at Ronald Perelman‘s company, Chris Taylor.” [USA Today]

CAMPUS BEAT: “Princeton Jewish Community Split Over Hillel Stand on Divestment” [Forward] • “With pro-Israel groups all but absent, UCLA student government endorses divestment” [JewishJournal]

Anti-Semitism Debate Roils German Left: “German leftists plunged into an emotional debate over anti-Semitism in their ranks this week, reflecting heightened worries here that rising anti-Israel sentiment could pierce decades of efforts to deal with the Nazi past.” [WSJ] • “German Town Tricks Neo-Nazis Into Marching Against Themselves” [WorldPost]