Beware Seduction
NFTs, "Bad News," risotto
Good afternoon from the Paloma compound in Chinatown, where I have just fed the Fifth Column boys (well, two of them) on-the-fly risotto, and where Michael scrolled through some NFTs so beautiful I want to lick them.
I was at a dinner earlier in the year with a journalist I admire very much. She is one of the sharpest and most honest writers I know, someone open to changing her mind and putting scrupulously humane work into the world. We agreed that the Prosecco the chef sent over was delightful; that the lighting in the restaurant made everyone look 25. We were each at the time writing about issues that were making our fellow countrymen crazy, and we were watching them go crazy. As I said to my friend Nick Flynn earlier in the week, I often feel as though my crew and I are standing on the sidelines of a giant soccer field, watching two teams tear into each other. I understand why they think it’s imperative; why they believe the future of our children and our republic is at stake, and yet if they just looked up for a second, they would see clear skies just off to the side and maybe we can all walk over there?
“Or,” Nick said, “we could play soccer.”
Anyway, back to the dinner. The journalist and I gently disagreed on how exactly we would counter the insanity. She thought it imperative we fight head-on, issue by issue, person by person. I told her I did not want to play defense or go on the attack; that I did not want to get on the field at all; that I would be off in the sunshine baking metaphorical cherry pie. Because we need this too, and we need it after we tire of the taste of our enemies’ blood.
I thought about this the day after the Democrats took a shellacking, when even the New York Times editorial board was like, whoa, maybe the agendas we’re been push-push-cramming for the past few years, maybe they’re not that popular. Maybe people are going to vote based on the things they care about, as my dear friend Batya Ungar-Sargon writes about in her new book, Bad News, and which she talked about this morning with Brian Stelter (who tried to slap her down but, nuh-uh!).
I thought, too, how we need to be very careful about the ideologies and people we let seduce us. Why are we letting them? Because we are lonely? Scared? Because they claim to have found solutions to things we’ve yet to wrap our minds around? What do they want from us in return? Is that a price you are willing to pay? Does being on that soccer field, tentatively at first maybe, then with someone’s jugular between your teeth, give you definition? Or are you a bullet in someone else’s gun? (Ed: Maybe cool it with the metaphors?) As I have written, “anyone who tells you to hate swaths of people has their own agenda.”
The past five or six years have been about a handful of agenda - Trump-hating (or loving), racism (and anti-racism), COVID. Media institutions keep these items at the top of the roster because they know it gets people frothing - Batya notes in her book that in 2018, the Times published the word Trump 93,292 times - and keeps them engaged.
But I sense a sea change, in terms of how receptive people are to the same messages ad nauseum, an unwillingness to go against their own and their families’ best interests. Check out Matt getting quite rightfully stabby last week, with the CDC wanting to keep schools closed and people masked.
I’m not sure what makes people want to live in a state of high alert; maybe it makes them feel purposeful. Maybe they really are afraid. Maybe they think presenting as more fragile than they are will win sympathy, a topic of continual fascination for me, and one that came to mind when, while sitting at a publisher’s dinner for Batya, she and Jesse Singal asked me, “So what’s the next book?”
New York City at this time of year can be a whirlwind of parties, and you’d think my growing up here would inure me from being impressed when I get an invitation to, say, the New York Yacht Club but, nope!
Bridget Phetasy stopped by Paloma/my apartment for breakfast and we wound up in the studio for an hour, talking about weed addictions, eating disorders, butter cake (hey, we're full service!) and pregnancy.
Speaking of the studio, Google made a very sweet little video of our book party for Kat Rosenfield.
Sending congratulations to my friend and Reason editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward, who last week received the 2021 Kenneth Y. Tomlinson Award for Outstanding Journalism, and also to John McWhorter, whose new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black I will write about next week and until then I HIGHLY recommend you get on audio; McWhorter narrates, and his imitation of the Bill de Blasio alone is worth the price of admission.
As for the fly-by-night risotto: Half an onion, chopped and sauteed in some olive oil; add the 1 1/4 cups raw risotto and stir a few minutes; pour on a 1/2 cup white wine and let that burn off. Pour on hot broth, a half-cup or so at a time, stirring until risotto absorbs the liquid, and repeat. Do this with 6 cups of broth, stir in 4 TB cold butter and 1/2 cup parmesan. Season with salt and pepper. The whole shebang should take about thirty minutes. I topped it with some crisped-up prosciutto and more parmesan. We each had thirds.
Running off now to see The Songs of Big Star, in the church where I sang in the choir and on whose stage I graduated high school. Until then, extra parmesan for you xx