MUNICIPAL MATTERS At the Museum of the City of New York, Henry Stern, a former New York City parks commissioner, kicked off a series of panels exploring urban issues. They are co-sponsored by the museum and New York Civic, an organization that Mr. Stern founded in 2002. Future panels will address subjects such as sanitation and waste disposal and transportation.

The first discussion, held last week, tackled municipal corruption. Speakers were commissioner of investigation for New York City, Rose Gill Hearn; journalist Tom Robbins, who has covered municipal and state corruption for the Village Voice and the Daily News, and Cooper Union professor and a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, Fred Siegel.

Ms. Hearn opened by saying that most city employees are honest. But, she said, vigilance is necessary in a city with a “huge inspectional workforce” overseeing licenses, permits, and the like.

In his remarks, Mr. Robbins mentioned a paradoxical kind of self-perception whereby expediters or “enablers” of corruption often “don’t see themselves as corrupt.”

Mr. Siegel said that New York has become a failed democracy. Given its economic geography, Mr. Siegel sees the city as an “El Dorado for shakedowns.” He described a genteel “internal exile” where many New Yorkers take an interest in national politics, rather than local politics. The latter, he said, was “for someone else.”

Yet parties, he said, are more secure with lower turnouts. Politics has become, he said, unfortunately “a private business,” with certain families and their “scions” running for office. A job in Albany, he said, can be a lifetime sinecure.

Another topic of Mr. Siegel’s talk was the “paradox of reform,” whereby well-intentioned reformers hand down changes that inadvertently result in new opportunities for corruption.

Mr. Siegel noted that there were few “reform currents” in New York politics today. Mr. Stern added that the two institutions that once developed reformers – universities and settlement houses – are longer productive sources. Settlement houses have contracts with the city to provide services, and many universities receive governmental money for research and have land-use and expansion issues before government agencies. “It would be ungrateful to bite the hand that feeds them and pats them,” Mr. Stern later told the Knickerbocker.

Mr. Stern also told the Knickerbocker, “The tentacles of the government octopus have, in the last half-century, ensnared many fields, which were formerly the province of reformers.” Reformers, he said, someday may be limited to “pensioners” – such as himself.

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CONFIDENT CROWD Friends and colleagues came out to the Time-Life Building to honor social scientist and Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter in celebration of her new book, titled “Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End”(Crown).

Chairman and chief executive of Time Inc., Ann Moore, and vice-chairman emerita of Estee Lauder, Jeanette Wagner, hosted the soiree, whose attendees included Hearst President Cathleen Black and CNBC President Pamela Thomas-Graham.

Ms. Kanter’s book contains a chapter about lost confidence and the ensuing downward spiral.

The author points to the Prairie View Panthers, a Texas football team, as an example. One year the team lost so often that its cheerleaders left the stadium at halftime, assuming they would lose again – which they did.

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PLAYBOY PRESENTS Agent Georges Borchardt; Playboy magazine Editorial Director Christopher Napolitano; Playboy Enterprises Chairman and Chief Executive Christie Hefner; Viking Senior Editor Paul Slovak; writer Art Winslow, and others enjoyed drinks and conversation as Playboy magazine hosted a party at Elaine’s for T.C. Boyle’s novel “The Inner Circle” (Viking).

Since the book draws on Alfred Kinsey’s controversial studies on human sexuality, it was appropriate that sex expert Dr. Ruth Westheimer was among the fans who stopped by.

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RIGHT AND WRONG Ruth Messinger, Queens college professor Thomas Bird, centenarian and Yidishe Kultur editor Itche Goldberg, Paul Robeson, Jr., Science & Society editor Annette Rubinstein, and Paul Buhle, founder of the Oral History of the American Left Archive at the Tamiment Library, were among those speaking at a memorial for “Jewish Currents” editor Morris Schappes, who died in June at age 97.

Long-time labor activist Henry Foner, a former head of the Fur and Leather Workers Union, also paid his respects.

In his remarks, Mr. Foner mentioned another Morris, namely philosopher and educator Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947), who appeared as a character witness for Schappes when the latter was tried for perjury in the wake of the Rapp-Coudert Commission, investigating communism at city colleges.

Mr. Foner described Cohen as the greatest mind at City College and related the following anecdote:

A student once interrupted Cohen in class to say, “You’re wrong!” “How do you know?” the famed philosopher asked. “I feel it in my bones,” the student replied.

Cohen shot back, “Why don’t you wait until it gets to your head.”