Hot Chicks, Cold Takes, Vol. #1
Wherein the New York Times and Andrew Cuomo come in for some well-deserved flogging from some lovely ladies of media, and I explain why the damn peanut butter cookies are taking so long
Hello fellow campers, it’s blue skies here in Chinatown. If I look to my left, there are four mourning doves on the balcony getting ready, if summer 2020 is any indication, to nest and have three sets of youngins on my fire escape. To my right is the headset I will, at 1:45EST today, put on in order to be a guest on the Rubin Report; link is here.
Speaking of Chinatown, I was asked last week to write my first piece for the NY Post, ostensibly about the ghost town New York City has become, due to various pandemic rules and vicissitudes. I threw my editor a tiny wrench by writing something positive. A clip:
As the media sounded the alarm to limit contact with others, I detected little such avoidance in Chinatown. Fresh fish was still sold curbside, seniors still played chess in public parks and the bakery on Eldridge still dispensed 90-cent cups of coffee indoors.
This perseverance was not only the purview of those with deep roots in the neighborhood. A friend who’d moved from Austin to open a restaurant nearby would wind up seeing his opening date pushed from February to July, and then being required to jump through whatever hoops Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio came up with — edicts that cost him $1,000 a night and had him driving to Staten Island to pick up city-mandated sandbags. Yet he remained determined.
“I prefer finding reasons for joy,” he texted. “Even when two f – – – faces are meddling in my business.”
Me, too! Joy joy joy, sometimes I think it’s eternal jackassery of the sunshiny mind here at Paloma Media, and I apologize for none of it.
It occurs to me I might tell you a little about how Paloma Media came about. It was February 22, 2019, and I’d had a very bad month. The video below will tell you a little about that. (NB: I’d never heard of Prager when they contacted me. Yes, my politics in the main are quite different from theirs, but the people were lovely and generous, and, as I’ve said before, the New York Times did not come calling for the story. Actually, they did, but that’s a tale for another day.)
I had no way to control the situation in February 2019 but to write, to write and write and write. The day that LA Times piece published, I got an email from Matt, whom I’d known since, oh god, neither of us remember, something like 2002, and the email said, “I want to build something, and I want to build it with you.”
What would that something be? We didn’t know, only that we had a lot of enthusiasm and optimism and thought it would be fun to create a place to put new things. That place, after 406 conversations and Palomas (preferably the #trashfam version made only with Fresca and tequila) wound up being a little studio we built across the hall from my apartment. I’m sure I’ve linked it here before but here it is again!
It’s where I had the above lovely ladies in this week. First up, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Associate Opinion editor at Newsweek, for whom I’ve written two pieces about the Donald McNeil Jr. situation at the Times. Batya is brilliant and funny and opinionated and the next time we tape, we’re thinking we might hash out something we disagree on, which would be fun, right? Video below, audio where you usually stream podcasts, including Apple podcasts.
Liz Wolfe stopped in the next night, to talk about how yes, yes, yes, New York governor Andrew Cuomo should resign, if not for the reasons this week being talked about, namely the three women who’ve accused him of sexual harassment. Yes, this is gross, and reading Bennett’s allegations especially made me fume at the guy. You want to sleep with a woman forty years your junior? Have the fucking stones to tell her as much; instead his entreaties were appalling, thinking Bennett would somehow not pick up on them, insulting. And yet, as bad as all this is, the reason Cuomo has got to go is that he’s willing to lie, and make his staff lie, about the thousands of nursing home deaths he has on his hands. I understand it’s expedient, or expedient in the current climate, to use accusations of harassment (or racism) to pry someone out of his or her position of power, and certainly let them have their say, but that these will be what ousts someone as disastrous as Cuomo, rather than his repeated failings as a leader, is not good policy.
I have been crazily remiss on baking for you, especially those you due your quarterly baked-goods-thanks from me for being premium subscribers.
If you must know, there’s a reason why I’ve been avoiding doing so…
Do I now stomp through the apartment when approaching the kitchen? Flick the lights on and off before I walk in? Yes and yes. And yes, I bought traps, and yes, the critter ate the peanut butter off the trap and as far as I know is still inhabiting the space behind my oven. So you see why I don’t want to turn it on? Soon, soon…
Until then, something sunshiny and hopeful and know, I am dreaming those cookies for you in my mind xx