I fell for Rob Martinez’s viral writeup of Bobo’s Farm upstate, where one drives up two hours from the city in order to eat roasted lamb and other homemade Northern Chinese dishes in a yurt, and the experience completely delivered. Jimmy, the proprietor, had an air of gentle befuddlement re: the overnight popularity of his farm-to-table side hustle; if you have the chance to go (and ~14 friends who can blow off work on a weekday), I highly rec the tofu skin & egg/chives dishes as well. Add it to your upstate bingo card along with Dia Beacon, Storm King and Magazzino come spring!

God I guess we have to talk about it. Do we have to talk about it? The rollout of the Olivia Nuzzi memoir-scandal (or is it scandal-memoir?), from the fawning NYT profile to the metaphor-heavy excerpt (at a newly serif-shorn Vanity Fair) to last week’s also-metaphor-heavy blog + scoop #1 from ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza (who just published Part 2 this morning, available for the low low price of a $9.99 monthly subscription, what a bargain for all of us as a society? has landed like a bomb, stirring up predictable outrage re: professional ethics, of course, but also a reallllll weird shitstorm that involves everyone looking at a grown woman’s teen wannabe pop star Myspace page where in her music, she once referred to herself as “jailbait.” (Someone sent me the MP3 file somehow, but sorry, you would have to hold that gun very close to my head…)

Well, if it is to be said, so it is to be: per what Marisa Kabas noted in The Handbasket, part of the strangeness of watching all this ego run amok is the shared Nuzzi/Lizza belief that there can be something to be gained from sharing it all: “Never have two people appeared more committed to the idea that you can write your way out of a jam,” writes Kabas. (Yet, interesting that Lizza didn’t expand on why he was fired from The New Yorker, which I personally would have gone with so as to create a “Listen, I know creeps” angle. But maybe that’s a move better suited to actually self-aware antiheroes. Also, what’s with the weekly drops? HBO can’t even keep an audience with that cadence dude. Might have been better off getting it all out within 48 hours, like a bad T. Swift b-side reveal?)

I would add to Kabas’s original point in noting that it tends to be the fundamental mistake of any journalist who suddenly finds themselves in the national spotlight to believe they alone possess powers of narrative-telling strong enough to successfully steer their own, much less gauge when people start to get sick of you (sooner than you think!). Many have tried, and many have failed that game! That riptide will do as it pleases. Good luck to everyone involved, I guess.

Meanwhile, “a lot of whispering about who’s really a writer and who’s just a ‘creative’ doing Zoom calls” is apparently roiling up Brooklyn’s Center for Fiction, wherein novelists are fighting over literal desk space. Now this is the niche writerly drama one can stomach for more than a 2 a.m. timeline binge.

TIL through Tina Brown’s turn on the NYT’s “The Interview” that she originally hired Jake Tapper and Tucker Brown as her political correspondents at Talk magazine; on the latter, she gives us a window into another world that could have been: “Tucker was a really good writer. I would have certainly had him at The New Yorker. He had such a wonderful gift of turn of phrase. He had a satirical eye. He was wonderful.” Sure!

Also has anyone else noticed the NYT doing what I can only describe as “Harry Potter pictures” — moving portraits/vibey videos in place of the usual glamour shot hero image that I suppose are designed to jump off the IG timeline (see: Nuzzi’s windblown hair, for one) and probably nothing else?

Elsewhere in reality, Slate sent Luke Winkie out west to suss out “the foreclosure of the Las Vegas dream,” proving that gonzo reporting is still alive and well and not just the purview of badly behaved big names. I really appreciated Luke’s patience in explaining the economics that drive the city, from the casino real estate down to the timeshare hawkers and literal table stakes that have changed since Covid. Incredible use of the word “chthonic,” lines I’ll probably think about every time I’m back in Sphere’s radius: “The scam gains velocity—the numbers keep going up—but only the dedicated hustlers are capable of identifying the crime;” “You need to be a true degenerate for Las Vegas to break your heart;” the image of a sidewalk Pennywise morosely gesticulating with his hand. Lotta wanna-be HSTs in media reliably take a crack at the mirage-like city as subject; Luke emerges as a rare victor.

And finally, you’re going to see Joachim Trier’s new film, Sentimental Value, and aren’t expertly versed on his whole complex-Oslovian-emotions thing, you should read Margaret Talbot’s profile of the director in The New Yorker not in the least because it explains the movie a lot better to the kind of person (me) who doesn’t do well with understated facial expressions as the primary driver of a plot. It also revisits The Worst Person in the World’s (deserved) success, and I especially enjoyed the bit about Trier’s creative partnership with director/screenwriter Eskil Vogt. Like tell me if this doesn’t sound like the Whole Point of A Creative Life:

The two still write together in the same room—these days, in a Bauhaus-style office building overlooking the hilly park … The friends still start on a new project the way they always have—by talking every day, for weeks, about what’s on their minds at that stage of their lives.

Before “Sentimental Value,” their touchpoints included the phenomenon of people growing up in the same family but with sharply different experiences of it. Before “Oslo, August 31st,” they discussed the grief and mystery of losing friends to suicide or drug addiction. Vogt called this process an “unprofessional” and inefficient way of working, and observed that it yielded screenplays that weren’t particularly plot-driven. The meandering informality of the approach used to frustrate him, but he’s come to appreciate it, both creatively and otherwise. He explained, “When I’m alone, there are times when I don’t write, or I end up spending hours on the internet, and I ask myself, ‘Ugh, what did I do?’ ” But he could go home after a day when he and Trier had talked about movies, music, and life without writing a word and still feel that he’d been productive.

Straight up the most romantic thing I’ve ever read…