press clips vol. 2 no. 5: throwaway speedball in e minor.
press clips vol. 2 no. 5: throwaway speedball in e minor.
*sound of someone opening up a new tab* *and getting vacuumed into it*
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| WHY ARE |
| WE STILL |
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| HELP ME??|
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/ づ
Okay, yep: Looks like we’re doing this again. For those of you just joining us, start here. For the rest of the class, you know the drill: Today, a brief Jeffrey Toobin update, superspreader Vogue fun, Matt Drudge getting weird, two Chalamet items, three Ben Smith items, a nearly 1,000 word Talmudic reading on GQ’s 2,000 word Man Repeller post-mortem, Kristov vs. Pornhub, @AliceFromQueens, ISIS, Red Scare, DeuxMoi, and most excitingly? The debut of FOSTERTALK reader email.
And this is a throwaway issue. There’s like, three things I love in this, two I like, and the other 22 take ‘em or leave em, but you monsters will huff them right up, so, whatever: We’ll play the hits.
The two things I hear about this newsletter more than anything else is that I should charge people for it and make it shorter. In response, I’ve become obsessed with figuring out how to “break” the platform (or at least expose its limitations) while also writing 5,500 words, an early 900 of which are dedicated to the tribulations of an esteemed strange man’s peen. I also, depending on how I feel, may unleash the other 8,000 words I have written in twelve seperate newsletters before Sunday.
Ask yourself: Is he joking?
You know I’m not going to do this forever, right? This is, how shall we say, ah, a limited engagement.
Until then, get in while it’s good. Your Press Clips for Friday, December 11, 2020 go like this:
Last Toob. So: A few weeks ago I told you we haven’t heard the last of L’affaire Toobin, that two reporters at a major daily were working up a big Jeffrey Toobin story.
Well, it’s in the final stages. I’m expecting we’ll see it in print in the next week or so. Do you have any idea how many puerile masturbation jokes I avoided in those last 53 words? So many. At least six. Five about “waiting to finish.”
The story won’t be in the section you’d think it’d be in. It won’t set the world on fire. Nor do I get the sense it’ll it leave Conde or Toobin scorched to a crisp. From what I’m hearing, the piece is, above all, an elucidation of the long-persisting rumors and verifiable scandal in Toobin’s past up to his peen’s star turn in a New Yorker Zoom call, but there’s likely to be some substance beyond a simple post-mortem (I’m imagining some interviews with Toobin’s colleagues at the magazine past and present, who were well-aware of some of his past failings — detailed here — despite having his bread buttered as a resident moralist). Reminder: The New Yorker is one of two major publications that have brought down more Shitty Media Men then any other over the last few years. Ask yourself: How will its editor — friends with Toobin as long as he’s held the job — field questions about the behavior of their own? Any wagers?
The paper was relatively mum when now-former New Yorker political correspondent Ryan Lizza was, like Toobin, unceremoniously canned. Lizza got dropped by the mag following a vague charge of sexual misconduct. Like Toobin, Lizza was suspended from his contributor gig at CNN. But then: Lizza was eventually returned to CNN once the network completed their own investigation of the accusations against him, finding no wrongdoing. This took about 45 days. CNN has stayed silent, so far, on Toobin’s status with them (another reason to look out for the upcoming piece on him, as it may affect his fate) but interestingly enough (!) The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos just joined CNN as an on-air contributor.
Fun fact: In the election wargame during which Toobin was now famously witnessed mid-autosmang, Osnos was playing the role of President-Elect Joe Biden (congratulations, Mr. President-Elect, on your first FOSTERTALK reference, in an item about a New Yorker writer masturbating — welcome to the big time). If you’re curious as to what Osnos is up to at CNN, don’t be, they’ve got him doing the same dime-store cable news bullshit ‘perspective’ pieces no different from what every New Yorker writer gets overpaid for when dumbing down their work for the gomers who watch the shouty loud tinnitus-triggering awfulness that is cable news. Sorry! But cable news is the worst, blech. Read your news. Or listen to it on NPR. Don’t get it SHOUTED AT YOU by a bunch of ANTHROPOMORPHIZED CAPS LOCKS in SHITTY SUITS. Every time I turn on CNN or MSNBC I feel like I’m watching the most boring version of Starship Troopers news reels imaginable except I’m learning, like, nothing.
And Now, Some Recent Reader Story Requests and Assorted Correspondence, Ranked:
1. “Who is @AliceFromQueens?”
[If you have no idea who @AliceFromQueens is, she’s some Twitter account run by a, uh, supposed “Alice” who lives in Queens? This reader explained that she’s this quasi-celebrity among “left media” and that her Tweets have gotten under people's skin. That reads to me like a bunch of Trotsky-tatted contrarian bros horny for hot takes from a LADY and someone who (rightfully) enjoys playing to them while occasionally infuriating them. There’s apparently a decent bit of speculation as to who she really is — one theory posited that “she” could just be Jesse Singal doing a weird performance art/identity politics piece, which god would I love that to be the reveal. Anyway, if you know who @AliceFromQueens is, you should tell me. Or @AliceFromQueens you could save us all the trouble and tell me yourself, I’ll find out anyway.]
2. “can you fostertalk about the SSENSE editorial operation? i mean for what it is it's fine but it's just funny that so many of the soi disant marxist personal essay literati are cashing those checks to write about the dialectics of lanvin. get that money, who am i to judge etc etc.”
[Loved this wildly bitchy email! It’s no secret SSENSE the magazine is a glorified advertisement for an eCommerce site. It also punches well above its weight. Durga Chew-Bose is the executive editor. They’ve got, like, Sam Hockley Smith on the ever-delightful Andrew Kuo and an essay by Hilton Als about wearing a one-piece swimsuit and taking ecstasy? (Related: Looks like Jia Tolentino really cracked open the seal on New Yorker contributors writing about taking E, lol.) Also, the S/S 2020 mag website is fucking crazy like mongoose and I love it, lol. Do they pay well? Sure as shit sounds like it! Does anybody actually read it? Who knows! What’s with today, today? Can’t say! But even if it is glorified advertorial, it certainly has as many interesting ideas about magazine-making in it than plenty of its Casa Magazines contemporaries. Also, reminder that glorified advertorial can be great: The Creative Independent. All of that said, “soi dissent marxist personal essay literati” is an wonderfully scabrous and situationally-appropriate painfully accurate burn I am here for. Love nothing more than a FOSTERTALK reader who can talk that FOSTERTALK themselves.]
3. “I need some NBA reporter to do a story about the 24 hours of text messages between players after the league announced no marijuana testing.”
4. “I totally missed that [former Observer editor and Jared Kushner stooge] Ken Kurson is a full criminal now. What a year. What an industry.”
[LOL. Right?!?!]
5. “this is not news about [newly-minted atlantic CEO] nick thompson but skinniest motherfucker in the game”
[Look at this Cillian Murphy lookin’ ass spicy beanpole. He’s no Jim Hamblin. Doctor! Also: Nice prop magazine for the photo shoot, Nick. How much was the eBay cop?]
6. “More Steve Kornacki content please.”
[No. We thirst better. See above.]
Retour à l'expediteur? Failed bar owner and proprietor of AirMail — the in-flight magazine of CAA agents who still believe the “Imagine” video from earlier this year was a work of misunderstood genius — Graydon Carter says he’s coming back to America from his self-imposed exile in the south of France now that Trump’s out of office. Page Six wrote a filing about it. (Seriously.)
I’m just noting it to remind you that in the Year of Our Lord 2020, Graydon Carter is not only still getting a yearly pension from Conde Nast, but that he actually talked about it to Ben Smith in April. Can we just enter into the record, here: Talking to the Times about your absolutely aspirational level of grift of a pension in a year where a record number of media jobs have been shed is just a monumental level of flex! If you have a pension for me — or anything on AirMail — god, please, christ, get in touch. Extra credit, class: Read this Hollywood Reporter piece from last year about Carter carrying water for his Hollywood friends with the words “Jeffrey” and “Epstein” in the headline!
LINE EDITS, PT 1:
Like the rest of us, Matt Drudge has clearly entered the devil-may-care microdosing phase of his pandemic:
Man makes…god…in his image, or something:
Goddamn, another tough week for Dexter Filkins: Timothee Chalamet shouted out Doreen St. Felix and Vinson Cunningham as his favorite New Yorker writers in the new issue of Document Journal, in a story photographed by Hedi Slimane, at Slimane’s St. Tropez spot. If you can wrap your head around that sentence, please also try to figure out how the same guy whose glueheaded interview with Zendaya for a recent issue of Elle (control-F: “Timothee”) can pronounce the name “Vinson Cunningham” let alone name something he’s recently written.
Speaking of Timotheeeeee the galaxybrains over at the Daily Mail confused that kid who does SideTalk with Chalamet and wrote an entire filing about it. It was later deleted, but the Internet Archive remembers everything. Mad funny.
How many more profiles on Instagram gossip DeuxMoi will we have to read without knowing who DeuxMoi actually is? Are people even asking? Here’s yet another one from VICE with some vague details. If you know who she is, you know what to do. Also: DeuxMoi is now an overwrought publicist dumping ground, like every other tabloid.
Kristof, Pornhub, And A View From The Other Side: NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof’s massive recent piece on the human trauma of Pornhub and its ilk was some of the most disturbing shit I’ve read all year, and that’s obviously saying something. It is not for the faint of heart. The story: Pornhub and the consortium of sites it owns see sexual violence and child pornography regularly uploaded to them. When they’re taken down, the videos are uploaded again. Kristof uses individual stories of young victims of sexual assault and revenge porn — and their subsequent personal ruin — to illustrate this point.
The piece is stomach turning. Most people who read it will walk away viewing Pornhub as, to some degree, intrinsically evil. It also outwardly appears to be the Opinion section’s most substantive “win” in a year during which the Opinion section has been getting its ass handed to it from every direction (mostly, from inside the paper itself). Upshot: Earlier in the week, credit card companies said they’d look into their ties to Pornhub. Likely because of that (and to appease their true masters, Visa and Mastercard), Pornhub then announced a series of sweeping changes, including banning downloads, restricting uploads, and expanding its moderation processes.
It all reads like good news, right? But I was curious: Is there another side to this? After all, the entire piece trafficks in the diciest of territories, and at the very least, I’ve got questions about how it was reported. Not necessarily out of a knowing inkling that Kristov did anything untoward in the process, but some of the shit in there, my god. The legal clearance to have personally seen and attested to such wildly illicit material; what computers he used, how he worked with his editors on it, etc.
It didn’t take long to find some anti-Kristof sentiment on the piece itself. For example, an op-ed from porn industry trade XBIZ:
[The column is] a manipulative attempt to insert themselves in the complex debates around Section 230 — the so-called First Amendment of the internet — free speech online and sexual expression among consenting adults, including pornography. […] Everything about "The Children of Pornhub" is exploitative, from the testimonials, to the absolutely misguided photo essay taking advantage of a homeless teen to drive home a point and affect policy.
Also:
Not wrong. One person in that thread points to a 2006 piece in The Nation by Alexander Cockburn on Kristof’s writing on sex work from 14 years ago. It doesn’t seem like his crusade (and the criticisms against it) have changed all that much since. One of the primary knocks on him is that the conditions around what create these systemic issues are worth as much if not more column space than that dedicated to their manifestations (i.e. Pornhub).
Here’s how I read this situation: I can’t bring myself to give much of a shit about concern-trolling over censorship given the wide mass of what’s being censored, here. Pornhub isn’t a public utility. It’s Pornhub. And a bunch of the arguments about censorship or porn or sex work calling Kristof’s crusade puritanical conveniently ignore the wide swath of people who don’t fall within the scope of the systemic issues Kristof’s opponents claim to want to call attention to, but who have been victimized nonetheless (like revenge porn victims), to say uh nothing of all the people who do. As puritanical as Kristof’s charge seems, his naysayers are incredibly difficult to side with. It’s hard not to imagine he’s only showing us the tip of the iceberg, a point he makes well.
All that said: The argument that the Times presented a unilateral view on this which leaves out a massive swath of this story — and the wide-reaching ramifications of Kristof’s work — ultimately do read as very, very fair. Even one small example of where Kristof lacks nuance: He Tweets out a GoFundMe for one of the victims in his story. One Tweet below that:
And: Nothing from Kristof.
There’s a 2018 episode of Reply All by PJ Vogt that was a dive into Backpage.com, the infamous de facto prostition forum once owned by the Village Voice’s former holding company, and the congressional vote on FOSTA-SESTA, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act that took Backpage down.
By the end of the episode, Backpage — which Kristof campaigned against for years — is destroyed. That’s not where the story ends. These are the final words of the episode:
As we were finishing the story, I got an email from Caty, one of the sex workers I spoke to. She says that one month after [the vote that ended Backpage], the community is already feeling the impact. Thirteen people have gone missing. Two more were found dead. Two have been sexually assaulted at gunpoint. And one woman took her own life. And those are just the ones she knows about.
I’m not saying Kristof is wrong in his crusade. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It would behoove the Times to remind their readers of this, or at the very least, to ensure their star columnist isn’t building his own highway.
LINE EDITS, PT. 2:
New York Times media columnist and chief correspondent on the Ben Smith beat Ben Smith’s column on Trump and Jared’s new media lapdog of choice, Newsmaxx, and its CEO, former New York Post reporter Christopher Ruddy, had some pretty great stuff in it ( TLDR: They’re totally shameless and have absolutely zero fucks to give in the race to the bottom, and are well on their way to making Fox News look like PBS Newshour. Money quote: “Nobody I’ve ever covered treats an audience with the blithe disdain of Mr. Ruddy.” Only thing I found missing in it? No mention of the fact that it is now the place of employment for a post-Me Too Mark Halperin. Dark!
Speaking of Ben Smith what the fuck is this absolutely proctological asskissing of him running over at The New Republic? “Let’s be honest, Ben Smith is the best media columnist The New York Times has ever had” begins Ryu Spaeth’s drooly take. The last line: “When we look in the mirror, the person staring back at us is a grinning Ben Smith.” Imagine whatever goes in the middle and you’re probably right. TNR Executive Editor Ryan Kearney, come get your man. Ben Smith, come get your…new transcriber?
More Ben Smith? Sure, why not, Ben, congrats, you got a whole goddamn section dedicated to your ass in this one, now please don’t want anything again until 2021, I do not have enough column space (I can literally write an infinite amount of words and clearly have a compulsion). This week’s Media Decoder column is on the NewsGuild’s (ostensibly progressive) new, younger leadership…and it’s slow action against one of its older member’s longstanding sexual harassment issues. Shit is wild. Of note: Smith isn’t a member of the guild. He’s not in management now, either, though he’s been in negotiations with the unions on the management side before, when he was editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News just last year. He’s now antagonized the media unions from his pulpit twice in a year (the first one poked fun at journalists’ inability to literally walk a picket line in a circle, lol). I wouldn’t be surprised to see more like this. Fair’s fair: A journalism union is a power structure within a power structure dedicated to dismantling power structures — in other words, a pretty rich story.
Meanwhile, the NY Mag Union is back at the bargaining table this week. Honestly, their campaign (“Reasons to Love NY Mag: The People Who Make It”) has some nice cheek to it.
[NY Mag union members: Leak the negotiations. I wanna run the play by play.]
Frances, Meh. This month’s Vogue cover, of Frances McDormand, dropped on Thursday. Great! Except: How about this line, about McDormand’s adoptive family?
The family moved around the Midwest and the South. Vernon and Noreen had trouble with fertility, so they took in strays.
Some people, who are adopted, or who have adopted children, may, hm, take umbrage with this? Like Variety TV critic (and relatively new dad! Of an adopted child! Currently on paternity leave) Dan D’Addario.
Neither am I! This strikes me as the appropriate reaction, coming from a properly calibrated level of sensitivity by D’Addario, who has — among his contemporaries — a very well-honed barometer towards sensitivity, over or under. Also, (see above) skin in the game.
Does this seem like small pickings? It’s not. (A) Put yourself in the shoes of the parent of a newly-adopted child. (B) If it were a singular instance it’d be one thing, but it’s not. It’s yet another comically unforced error for Vogue, which is kind of par for the course more and more often this year (control-F: Vogue Portugal). It…should be going the other direction, no?
Of note: The writer of the McDormand piece, Abby Aguirre, has been handling a decent swath of cover story work for Vogue in the last year — so somebody over there likes her. She wrote up last year’s September issue’s Taylor Swift cover story, but you may better remember her from that Rihanna cover debacle two months later — wherein Rihanna had to jump to the defense of Aguirre, after people lost their shit, reading in the story that Aguirre didn’t have time to come up with questions for the interview (no, really, this is actually in the story). True story: I once edited a Rihanna cover story, and her flacks pulled the same bullshit, gave our writer barely any time, was about as forthcoming and interesting as the goyim during those first four visits to therapy. But we didn’t edit into the piece just how miserable the circumstances writing it were because that is bad editing and distracting for readers because the publication is doing prewrite on excuses for a mediocre end result! Also, quite frankly, it’s on us for not being more aggressive with the flacks in terms of making them give us face-time with the celebrity, but very few media outlets have the stones to demand anything of substance from A-listers. Womp womp.
Anyway: Rather than simply apologizing for offending someone, Aguirre tried to defend use of the verbiage by claiming McDormand used the term “strays” herself. D’Addario responded by pointing out that the line wasn’t in quotes, and goddamn if you want anything in quotes it’s calling adoptive kids “strays.” That said, to belabor a point, when was the last time it was clear that Vogue gave a shit about the words going with the pictures? Reminder: Anna just handed the magazine over to Beyonce for the 2015 and 2018 September issues (one had no interview, the other was run by her camp) so, uh: How surprised can we all be? “Not,” by the way, is the answer you’re looking for here.
oh wait oh my god I almost forgot this one, I know it’s old news but deserves space here:
Superspreader Vogue vs. The Vineyard Gazette: So, Vogue posts a wedding story:
“This Outdoor Martha’s Vineyard Wedding Was All Fall Elegance.”
Like, in 2020. Last month. 1,000 words. A 68 photo gallery. ‘Whole thing.
You know how this ends:
[The story] made no mention of the subsequent 10-case coronavirus cluster that apparently stemmed from the event, and the article was removed without explanation from Vogue’s website at approximately 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 17. Earlier the same evening, an Island summer resident had emailed a letter to Vogue editor Anna Wintour excoriating the story and informing Ms. Wintour that the wedding had been responsible for the coronavirus case cluster.
They can’t keep their Chanel ballet pumps out of their own asses at Vogue this year! And really, love the way a Martha’s Vineyard resident can just cut the shit and go right to the top. What I wouldn’t give to read that email. But even better was that it was the Vineyard Gazette — a 176 year-old newspaper with a circulation of about 8,000 people — that embarrassed Vogue and everyone who works there in the pages of Page Six, the Boston Globe, the Daily Beast, etc, etc by writing and reporting the story. This, to me, is so much less a story about Vogue screwing up in 2020 (a given, at this point) and more about local news telling America I ain’t dead yet, motherfuckers. 🥰
Mazel, Max On The Mend! Daily Beast media reporter Max Tani is back on his feet after getting lightly knocked on his ass with a ‘bout of the Covie. If any of his colleagues can corroborate the rumor that his antibody-rich blood is sweet, and tastes of Barry Diller’s accounts payable, that’s great, but not the kind of tip we can run here without verifying ourselves. If you have a line in, literally, get in touch. Remember, FOSTERTALK is free.
Quelle Repeller. Last Friday brought an early holiday treat: GQ fashion critic Rachel Tashjian’s wonderfully crisp (if not inevitable) 2500ish words on the death of Man Repeller, a relative larger player in the post-Tavi world of Hey There Are Bloggers In The Front Row! sites (ahem). I am assigning all you some homework. Read it.
Tashijan, early in the story: “It isn’t an overstatement to say that Man Repeller changed the way that millennial women dress.” Two ways to read that line. The first, at face-value, would have you believe Man Repeller’s influence was a good thing. The other is how I read it: A smirk under a mourning veil. Tashjian is a fashion institutionalist and Conde near-lifer (save a short two-year spell at Garage) with the words “Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair” in her Twitter bio (lol). Nowhere in the entire piece is there anything by characterizing this change as good.
Now, read that line up there again. Does it now clock to you as a nice-to-know-you! qualifier thrown in (about an upstart fashion media site that just couldn’t deliver on its promise as an insurgent against fashion media’s stalwart institutions) promptly before defenestrating said site’s legacy? It does to me! Whee!
Maybe I’m just seeing elitism where I want to. And sure, a line like “For a generation of women who grew up reading Jezebel and watching Sex and the City reruns, it felt liberating to think about fashion in this way” can read like a tacit acknowledgment that its author is one of these women. Maybe she read 2007-era Jezebel and watched Sex and the City (in its first run). Tashjian is an impeccable style eye and is a first-chair in a new class of fashion critics (coming hot in the rear-view mirrors of Cathy Horyn, Vanessa Friedman, and Lynn Yaeger). In other words: Doesn’t strike me as the type. I choose to read it as a motherfucking second-degree burn, in the pages of GQ, something Tashjian might have an eye for herself. We — and I can’t stress this enough — love to see it. And we’re not even halfway through this item!
So: Man Repeller abruptly shuttered in October after a rebrand to just “Repeller” (lol). The rebrand, of course, followed titular Repeller herself Leandra Medine Cohen resigning from day-to-day operations in June. The resignation came after backlash from POC employees, current and former, aghast at the site’s Black Lives Matter messaging, which allegedly didn’t line up with its treatment of employees of color.
So, what actually killed Man Repeller? GQ’s story quotes one former employee dishing that the business didn’t know how to handle the money it was making. Other sources reason that the site got crushed by the ad market this year, which compounded the effects of a failing attempt at a merch program as well as that laughable rebrand (both of which cost the business both time and money). This is less sexy than the “killed it out of SPITE!” story I kinda wanted to be true, but it all sounds about right.
Tale as old as time: Over-investment in a slow-footed digital media business unable to adapt to the market it was once a disruptor within colliding with the 2020 ad market equals rip ur business ded. But really: Nowhere besides the players’ side of a casino floor is there worse business acumen than in media. Man Repeller or Repeller or whatever could’ve survived had it, I don’t know, not been so explicitly tied to a single person’s identity for so long, instead of — and here’s a point Tashjian only parenthetically hints at — being unable to adapt to moving with changing cultural trends like the fashion media institutions it set out to disrupt. In other words, very little distinguishes the fuckups of Repeller and the fuckups of Vogue, to a degree, besides scale.
Media businesses are absolutely trash at scaling appropriately (too much ego) or downsizing (too much sentimentality) in order to stay afloat. This is the very reductive but also fairly accurate story of how so many media businesses end up deep-sixed. Another thing to consider: The majority of the media industry’s businesspeople are uh not the brightest (sorry!). The margins in media are so small, the only reason to be in this business are (A) if you love it or (B) if you’re not competent enough to cut it in any number of other industries where they actually make money. Anybody who’s in media because they just want to make sweet cash money are truly the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. If you know some of these people, please send them my way, FOSTERTALK won’t take sponsorships but we will offer you an exclusive chance to play this game we just invented involving three cards and a milk crate.
ANYWAY. Tashjian’s kicker laments the site’s ignoble attempts at being needlessly woke as “a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of asking too much of our clothes, attempting to spin every idea into a politically-charged movement”) while empathizing with the pitiable but (sorry) naive staffers who had higher hopes for the thing. As for the erstwhile Repeller herself? I checked in, and she’s been busy doing exactly what you think she did: Starting a Substack and abandoning it after three posts. You hate to see it. Also, I get it. Tashjian’s story is great, read it, NEXT.
LINE EDITS, PT. 3:
Let’s see here, oh yeah: I’ve got two items about Dasha Nekrasova and Red Scare? First: Apparently the Times was going to profile her but then according to her they “pulled” it? Reality isn’t as scandalous: I heard it just didn’t “come together” all that well. She wasn’t, like, persecuted or anything. Second: The new Red Scare graphic design scheme is being accused of taking some cues from yet another beleaguered media operation, ISIS. Yeah, the washed caliphate. That one. The guy who designed it:
the red scare shirts have nothing to do with ISIS. they came from a body of work i was making about the magabomber.
if you’re dumb enough to clamor for censorship and too stupid to recognize references with degrees of remove from one cultural moment to another, yr malformed and delusional hostility is exactly the energy groups like ISIS capitalize on. so shut the fuck up.Um, I don’t know, looks kinda ISIS-y? And also, parody-of-ISIS-y? In the threads above if you click you’ll find the predictable pearl-clutching that they were obviously aiming for. But this is all suuuuuper on-brand for this stripe of Patreon Podcast Leftist Edgelord schtick. Yawn. I’ve lived in Williamsburg since everyone wore keffiyehs and did key bumps in the back of Royal Oak/Studio B all night before drunkenly lumbering over to Oasis for shawarma they wouldn’t eat and none of them could gauge their own level of irony at any hour of the day. Sorry. Wake me up when you all do K with Stephen Miller or something.
The Seymour Hersh of TikTok, NYT internet reporter Taylor Lorenz had her eating habits documented for the Discount Grub Street Diet over at Zagat. Spoiler: Could do worse. She ate at Ceveceria Havermeyer when she lived here, which is good enough for me. Speaking of great nights: Miss u, Milagrosa.
Oh, and: Remember how I told you former Vulture writer Hunter Harris had an episode of How Long Gone removed by hosts Chris Black and Jason Stewart for reasons unknown? One FOSTERTALK reader writes in: “it’s still available online! and the interview is...bad? Eh idk couldn’t listen to the whole thing even tho I was interested to hear if there was anything” Reddit seems to agree.
“What did Bon App do now?” goes the perfect hilarious headline by Zoe Haylock. The answer: Marcus Samuelsson culturally appropriated a soup, or something. Look, all you need to know is that Eddie Huang told all of you what a clown Samuelsson was way back when. So did I. Marcus Samuelsson is exactly that dude: He’s loved by white people because they make them feel okay being white in Harlem. They butter his bread, always have. Dude doesn’t care about wokeness, never did. NEXT.
Speaking of New York Mag, what’d we all think of this accusation that New York Mag had an underage girl topless in the first three pages of the “covid parties” issue? I reached out to Sabrina Fuentes, who posted it. Through a rep, she declined to comment more. Didn’t get around to the magazine but I will! If you know anything more about this story, happy to hear it.
Finally, here’s some weird shit you can’t unknow:
Yeah the media industry’s doing just fine thanks for asking.
Like I said: A throwaway issue. I had a ton of stuff to get through. For those of you who made it all the way down here, I’m sincerely grateful for you, and also, genuinely want to know who you are. Also, if you read this much, you obviously have some stuff to tell me. Elsewhere, we’ll resume the normal “way” of things soon. Did you read the interview with Jonah? You should.
By the way, this is a normal way of writing for me, the spray-and-pray method of playing the numbers game and hoping something good happens. It’s not that I don’t give a shit about what’s happening here, and please don’t mistake the self-sabotage and commitment to unreadability with antipathy. I want this to be good (mostly, to me) and care, quite a bit, about throwing strikes. I just haven’t figured out how to do it without doing something to convince myself nobody’s reading it. Like, for example, writing it in 5,000 word installments. Not you, of course. I want you reading it. The rest of them, not so much.
I think it’s safe to say that this is a bargain, everyone’s getting far more than what they’re paying for here. It might seem unvarnished, and that’s because it is, and I can’t really imagine doing it any other way right now. [And by the way: Please don’t think that anyone on Substack is taking any kind of professional risk by “jumping” ship to the platform. Most of the people jumping to Substack from major pubs are being paid and more than a few have money apportioned for editors. Meanwhile, I’ve already potentially cost myself one line of income by refusing to commit to giving this up just yet!]
Anyway, this issue was the experiment in “let’s see what happens when we just let the wheel loose.” Your feedback, as ever, is appreciated. Do not say “too long.”
Coming up soon: Way less stuff about media, the big Who’s Getting Paid What On Substack discourse, a whole thing about Adrienne Lenker and seeing and being seen, some year-end stuff, oh, I don’t know. Whatever’s clever. This is a feeling I have often:
Anyway: I hope you enjoyed this, or laughed at it, or had something resembling a good and informative time. I have no idea if I’ll ever do this again. I might do it tomorrow. Thank you for your continued support of FOSTERLETTER. Stay warm. Be kind. Stay safe. As ever, -F.