Who

Roshan is the former editor of Radar, the pop culture magazine that was discontinued in November 2008.

Backstory

Roshan arrived in the U.S. from Iran in 1979 at age 12, settling with his family in the Five Towns area of Long Island. After high school (his religious Jewish family sent him to the Yeshiva of Flatbush) and college at NYU, he worked as a messenger at Details then briefly at Interview before becoming the editor-in-chief of QW, a gay weekly, in the early '90s. When QW was shuttered, he went to New York, where he worked his way up to deputy editor, generating buzz for pieces like the 1998 Vanessa Grigoriadis cover story "Power Girls," which introduced the world to Lizzie Grubman.

In 2001, Roshan left New York to become the editorial director of Talk, Tina Brown's much hyped magazine backed by Hearst and Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Talk took a nosedive after Sept. 11th and folded shortly thereafter, and Roshan went on to found the cheeky Radar in 2002.

Of note

Roshan's magazine hasn't had the easiest time—it had three incarnations in five years before it was eventually discontinued in 2008. The first iteration, which debuted in 2003, was funded by Roshan's friends and family as well as several high-profile angel investors including Harvey Weinstein, Michael J. Fuchs, and Benjamin Brafman. But despite plenty of buzz, Radar ran out of cash after two issues and disappeared from the newsstands.

The magazine was revived in 2004 with funding from Mort Zuckerman and Jeffrey Epstein, both of whom had been part of a consortium to buy New York in 2003. (Roshan had been the front-runner to take over New York as editor-in-chief if the bid had succeeded.) When the duo (and their partners) lost out to Bruce Wasserstein, Zuckerman and Epstein announced plans to invest $25 million in Radar. But a year later, after investing $10 million, they pulled out and Radar was once again shuttered. The franchise got yet another shot at life a few months later when Integrity Multimedia, a company founded by Yusuf Jackson, the son of Jesse Jackson, and purportedly financed by billionaire supermarket mogul Ron Burkle, arrived on the scene. But Radar's owners pulled the plug on the magazine once again in November 2008.

AKA

Although he was given the name Maer as a yeshiva student, his actual legal name is Ramin.

Personal

Roshan is gay. His boyfriend is Matt Dickenson, an actor and the son of Bob Dickenson, the former CEO of Carnival Cruise Lines. Roshan lives near Union Square.