I met her in DC when she was around 22/23; she had a face like a snowshovel and was wearing pearls and a white dress shirt with the collar flipped up like a parody of a wealthy housewife. I got the impression that she dated older men because men her age found her alien if not outright repugnant. If Hilary had won in 2016, she be married to a Jetski salesman and live in Hagerstown, MD.
it is a gross misunderstanding of the world to think that Nuzzi would not enjoy similar success in a world without Trump. the structures that produce Nuzzi types far predate her and will persist beyond her, and there is no shortage of powerful men on either side of the aisle willing to exchange sex - or the possibility of sex - for access.
and men her age would absolutely fuck her! she’s an attractive woman! idiotic.
I'll top the comment: the worst part of all this is how it serves as an invitation for randos to indulge in a little misogyny as a treat. This "LOL she's ugly" shit is gross, regardless of the target, and both your evident glee in participating makes my skin crawl. Feel free to taunt me in reply: I know you know I'm right.
"if you point out that the woman portrayed as an irresistible sex goddess looks like she fell out of a tree and hit every branch on the way down, you are a WOMAN HATER" i guess you didn't get the memo that under Woke 2, we're shitting on everyone impartially.
One can read the book itself as a job application to be a billionaire's wife.
She understands narcissists much too well not to find somebody rich who needs the kind of thing she's offering.
The book passages advertise adoring yet massively cynical. She can make you feel loved even if you are evil. Women like this are not as easy to find as you'd think. 'Loving' is a moral quality. But what do you do when your sweet wife finds out you're a monster? You don't want a Godfather II situation on your hands.
Hardheatedness doesn't get masked that well as wide-eyed broken-hearted submissive femininity (though it can be).
Plus, she's super racist, hated Obama and environmentalism in her youth. She cannot be disillusioned by discovery of the rich man's black heart. No youthful idealism for her!
She's got a particular set of skills. She'll love you BECAUSE you're evil.
A friend of mine posted some excerpts from Nuzzi's Vanity Fair article on their Facebook page. To say the prose was incredibly bad is an understatement. Pretentious, bombastic, overwrought--I've seen better writing in dime store bodice-ripper romances. Hard and sad to think that Nuzzi is being paid (well) for this slop. Not funny at all just further evidence of our decline.
She did write an article in New York Magazine, before the debate debacle, that Biden was significantly affected by age and not fully there titled "The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden." She was really pilloried as I recall...but she got that one right.
Kind of mirrors my own reaction. Getting high on yourself for having an emotional affair with RFK Jr. is kind of like taking in the stench of a Camelot chamber pot and thinking it’s glamorous.
I'm going to sound stupidly moralistic, but can fame and rising fortune really make up for being a hack ? There's an hollowness in this that I hope for her she doesn't see. I'd never heard about these stories and seeing as they are indeed a bit more sordid than funny, I'll happily let them fade into oblivion as far as I'm concerned, besides this column and its enjoyable writing. Still wondering what on earth is going on at Vanity Fair and why they'd hire someone with this background, but upon closer look perhaps it's actually quite apt. Thackeray would be proud, I suppose.
Its all part and parcel of the transition of the media to gossip/entertainment and politics to spectacle.
This is a core component of the Hungarification (or Russianification) of our media. In an autocracy, the media is more for distraction than information and this is a really sold example of how that actually plays out imo.
Maybe some value can be scavenged from this debacle by a turn to abstraction: particular temperaments aside, I wonder what general rule we ought to have about the ethics of attention. It's a theme that's increasingly popular, I think, with attention a currency we become increasingly conscious of expending, and one sometimes puritanical, as when some insist we should not consume good art by bad people lest (implicitly) we become bad, as if through sympathetic magic.
It seems easy to say "material support is forbidden": don't buy the stupid book. Maybe even "don't give them clicks": at most, roll one's eyes at screenshots. It's more difficult to say how we should, say, safeguard ourselves from being numbed to the depravity and corruption on display here. Would the goal be to maintain our capacity for righteous indignation, to stay clear-eyed about how dissolute our ostensible elite have become? In what sense does paying attention to the wrong things taint us somehow, and what argument can be made that would not collapse into the vulgar puritanism mentioned above?
I don't know whether this makes it better or worse, but this is all so clearly a death rattle for an industry and scene that's been dead for years and is walking around not knowing it.
This is the first I’m learning of this person, but I want to add that she certainly seems like the type Dante would have “met” somewhere in inferno, perhaps amongst the chained men ramming into each other.
Hear, hear. I grew up in a conservative religious community, so as a young adult I wanted to shed any inclination to pass moral judgment of others that might tie me to my uncool origins. But now I find myself quite routinely appalled at the piggery of so many people we are supposed to admire because they have power or smarts.
I can still remember the sense of a nauseating disgust when I read a detailed story about the late-in-life DC debauchery of Ted Kennedy. A well sourced story about what Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodds used to do at a private room in a fancy DC restaurant was sickening. It included a depiction of an assault on a young waitress that I will never forget.
I met her in DC when she was around 22/23; she had a face like a snowshovel and was wearing pearls and a white dress shirt with the collar flipped up like a parody of a wealthy housewife. I got the impression that she dated older men because men her age found her alien if not outright repugnant. If Hilary had won in 2016, she be married to a Jetski salesman and live in Hagerstown, MD.
it is a gross misunderstanding of the world to think that Nuzzi would not enjoy similar success in a world without Trump. the structures that produce Nuzzi types far predate her and will persist beyond her, and there is no shortage of powerful men on either side of the aisle willing to exchange sex - or the possibility of sex - for access.
and men her age would absolutely fuck her! she’s an attractive woman! idiotic.
Yup, it's evolutionary psychology all the way down.
That comment is hard to top! Let me try. She'll lose her fuckability soon enough, and thus her career.
I'll top the comment: the worst part of all this is how it serves as an invitation for randos to indulge in a little misogyny as a treat. This "LOL she's ugly" shit is gross, regardless of the target, and both your evident glee in participating makes my skin crawl. Feel free to taunt me in reply: I know you know I'm right.
"if you point out that the woman portrayed as an irresistible sex goddess looks like she fell out of a tree and hit every branch on the way down, you are a WOMAN HATER" i guess you didn't get the memo that under Woke 2, we're shitting on everyone impartially.
One can read the book itself as a job application to be a billionaire's wife.
She understands narcissists much too well not to find somebody rich who needs the kind of thing she's offering.
The book passages advertise adoring yet massively cynical. She can make you feel loved even if you are evil. Women like this are not as easy to find as you'd think. 'Loving' is a moral quality. But what do you do when your sweet wife finds out you're a monster? You don't want a Godfather II situation on your hands.
Hardheatedness doesn't get masked that well as wide-eyed broken-hearted submissive femininity (though it can be).
Plus, she's super racist, hated Obama and environmentalism in her youth. She cannot be disillusioned by discovery of the rich man's black heart. No youthful idealism for her!
She's got a particular set of skills. She'll love you BECAUSE you're evil.
Hardheatedness! hilarious!!
What did Hagerstown do to you?
A friend of mine posted some excerpts from Nuzzi's Vanity Fair article on their Facebook page. To say the prose was incredibly bad is an understatement. Pretentious, bombastic, overwrought--I've seen better writing in dime store bodice-ripper romances. Hard and sad to think that Nuzzi is being paid (well) for this slop. Not funny at all just further evidence of our decline.
Time for the essay collection John.
She did write an article in New York Magazine, before the debate debacle, that Biden was significantly affected by age and not fully there titled "The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden." She was really pilloried as I recall...but she got that one right.
The death of the fourth estate is happening as cringily as possible
Kind of mirrors my own reaction. Getting high on yourself for having an emotional affair with RFK Jr. is kind of like taking in the stench of a Camelot chamber pot and thinking it’s glamorous.
Her persona is inseparable from her cataclysmically poor taste. Unfortunately it only ever seems to help her fail upward.
> When are we gonna stop indulging this?
Remember when Jon Stewart ended Tucker Carlson's career in 2004?
The immunity to shame is so prevalent it's going to take someone extreme like a Savonarola to pull the pendulum back.
I'm going to sound stupidly moralistic, but can fame and rising fortune really make up for being a hack ? There's an hollowness in this that I hope for her she doesn't see. I'd never heard about these stories and seeing as they are indeed a bit more sordid than funny, I'll happily let them fade into oblivion as far as I'm concerned, besides this column and its enjoyable writing. Still wondering what on earth is going on at Vanity Fair and why they'd hire someone with this background, but upon closer look perhaps it's actually quite apt. Thackeray would be proud, I suppose.
Its all part and parcel of the transition of the media to gossip/entertainment and politics to spectacle.
This is a core component of the Hungarification (or Russianification) of our media. In an autocracy, the media is more for distraction than information and this is a really sold example of how that actually plays out imo.
Maybe some value can be scavenged from this debacle by a turn to abstraction: particular temperaments aside, I wonder what general rule we ought to have about the ethics of attention. It's a theme that's increasingly popular, I think, with attention a currency we become increasingly conscious of expending, and one sometimes puritanical, as when some insist we should not consume good art by bad people lest (implicitly) we become bad, as if through sympathetic magic.
It seems easy to say "material support is forbidden": don't buy the stupid book. Maybe even "don't give them clicks": at most, roll one's eyes at screenshots. It's more difficult to say how we should, say, safeguard ourselves from being numbed to the depravity and corruption on display here. Would the goal be to maintain our capacity for righteous indignation, to stay clear-eyed about how dissolute our ostensible elite have become? In what sense does paying attention to the wrong things taint us somehow, and what argument can be made that would not collapse into the vulgar puritanism mentioned above?
H/t for the Rigoletto reference. It's especially apt here since all of the major players are clowns.
This is such a good time to be a left-wing moralist. Every day furnishes pleasurable indignation.
I don't know whether this makes it better or worse, but this is all so clearly a death rattle for an industry and scene that's been dead for years and is walking around not knowing it.
This is the first I’m learning of this person, but I want to add that she certainly seems like the type Dante would have “met” somewhere in inferno, perhaps amongst the chained men ramming into each other.
Hear, hear. I grew up in a conservative religious community, so as a young adult I wanted to shed any inclination to pass moral judgment of others that might tie me to my uncool origins. But now I find myself quite routinely appalled at the piggery of so many people we are supposed to admire because they have power or smarts.
I can still remember the sense of a nauseating disgust when I read a detailed story about the late-in-life DC debauchery of Ted Kennedy. A well sourced story about what Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodds used to do at a private room in a fancy DC restaurant was sickening. It included a depiction of an assault on a young waitress that I will never forget.
But, as dark humor, what he said. https://open.substack.com/pub/danieldrezner/p/no-reason-this-cant-be-fun-you-know?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email.
Hah, I'd forgotten all about her.