A niche thrill: I was waiting around at my usual coffeeshop for a little matcha treat this morning when a guy walks in who I could have sworn was Gabor Maté, he of the soothing voice as featured in many a viral TikTok clip if you happen to maintain a very particular flavor of psychology FYP (last month he did a big interview/therapy session with Hasan Minhaj that keeps popping up everywhere). He has such a distinctive face that I was 99.9% sure it was him, but then I was like, what if he’s just a regular Brooklyn dude, then I’m going to have to explain to this total stranger what TraumaTok is, and it’s going to be embarrassing for everyone. However! It was him! So actually it was very tasteful of me to leave him alone I bet.
The new Vanity Fair put a couple of compelling points up on the scoreboard: they got Olivia Nuzzi (has there ever been a more I’m baaaaAaaack :) professional headshot in existence? I’m honestly impressed) as west coast editor, along with a slate of new hires (Interesting to me that two were sourced from the NBC/SNL world). Minus a point for losing media reporter Natalie Korach to Oliver Darcy’s newsletter, but leaving a Condé title for a newsletter company is about to become de rigueur for current careerists, it simply cannot be helped.
Most importantly, though, it seems VF is managing to maintain its spot as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ outlet of choice, publishing the coveted TNC take on the whole Kleinification of Charlie Kirk discourse that of course you must read. Unfortunately my sassy little note on this otherwise great journalistic flex would be: surely they could have commissioned a quick custom illo for the piece? We have so few real intellectual giants in our time……perhaps they deserve more than a Getty Images pull?
Elsewhere at Condé, Wired seems to be thriving with its journalist-as-influencer model, though if Kylie Robison’s announcement of her firing today from the publication offers any clues on what it might be like internally over there, one imagines that keeping a stable of journalistic personas is…..not a chill time for anyone involved. (But isn’t the point of being affiliated with an institution the fact that you don’t have to market yourself all the time?)
Well it turns out this email is basically now the New York Review of Condé Nast, because there is also this essay from former New Yorker fact-checker Ismail Ibrahim that details his experience working at the magazine in the aftermath of October 2023; when read in conjunction with a recent feature (by the magazine itself) of the fact-checking department, the latter loses all sense of it’s “ha ha fact-checking, so specific and so cute” whimsy once the former piece lays bare how the stakes of such meticulous work aren’t always just quibbling for quibble’s sake.
An actual enjoyable thing to read about the whole deal with Sydney Sweeney, from B.D. McClay in the Catholic arts journal, The Lamp.
The “Ballad of Sydney Sweeney” goes like this: “They” wanted to exterminate beautiful busty blondes. “They” put ugly people in ads (sometimes). Now, however, here comes Sydney Sweeney, ending wokeness once and for all. The implication is that at some point in the past ten years, it’s been disadvantageous to be a curvaceous babe. The only sense in which that is true has not changed: Sweeney keeps showing up in ads in bras that don’t fit. But never mind that; thanks to Sweeney, it is now legal to be hot. The hot people have come out from the places where they’d been driven into hiding by the uggo police. Now they frolic freely in the sun. Very touching.
The Condé tie-in here is that this piece addresses what happened re: trolls digging up Doreen St. Felix’s tweets last month without you having to read any of the trollwork yourself. An excellent bargain.
Finally, another thing to actually enjoy: I finally watched Sorry, Baby last week and loved its sweet, dark humor, but also for Eva Victor’s excellent costuming as a young New England liberal arts professor, which of course GQ looked into for us. Thank you GQ.
