1 week ago
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Monday
We’ve all said things that didn’t come out right, and it’s my instinct – stand by for some counter-intuition! – that Donald Trump’s “quiet, piggy” admonishment of a female reporter on Air Force One this week was a very weird attempt at affection, or possibly flirtation. As with everything the man does, the effect was disastrous and totally inappropriate. But rewatching the video, I saw from the president less an example of his usual bigotry and more an attempt at what looked like “OK, kiddo” cuteness that, catastrophically, and before I could nip it in the bud, had triggered a tiny sprig of sympathy.
It didn’t last two seconds, obviously. The day after his piggy remarks, the US president sat in the Oval Office alongside the Middle East-based tyrant Mohammed bin Salman and sucked up to him for all he was worth. There was nothing affectionate in Trump’s response to Mary Bruce, the chief Whitehouse correspondent for ABC News and hero of the hour, when she asked the Saudi crown prince about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi – which, she suggested bravely, US intelligence agencies had concluded “you orchestrated” – then informed the Saudi leader that “9/11 families are furious that you’re here in the Oval Office”, and rounded it off with: “Is it appropriate, Mr President, for your family to be doing business in Saudi Arabia while you’re president?” (According to Forbes magazine, Trump’s extended family put through $50m in business deals connected to Saudi Arabia in 2024 alone.)
Trump’s explosive rage was well under way before she’d even finished speaking, and the same thing struck one about his language as it always does: that the babyish register of calling someone a “terrible person and a terrible reporter” is more unnerving – more sinister in a booky wook Clockwork Orange kind of a way – than someone who speaks like a functioning adult.
Tuesday
For a long time, Vanity Fair mattered and its annual Hollywood Issue was a big deal to those who remember it. Those people may be amused by the decision by its new editor, Mark Guiducci, to feature an all-male line up of actors this year, subverting the usual form and joining the awkward what-about-men lobby group keen to claim underdog status for that half of the population that still makes 19 cents more on the dollar than the other half. (In Britain, the gender pay gap is still going strong, too.)
Guiducci presented Glen Powell, Michael B Jordan and Andrew Garfield among others under the exhortation: “Let’s hear it for the boys!” Hard to think of a less enticing invitation, except perhaps one to join related discourse around the “state of masculinity” ignited by David Szalay’s Booker win this month, which has flushed out those plucky truth-tellers who believe male journeys aren’t celebrated and that women dominate publishing to the detriment of male writers.
The fact that, in the past 15 years, twice as many men as women have won the Booker, or that, like teaching, one reason salaries in publishing are so low is because it has historically been a field popular with women, does not, of course, get in their way.
Wednesday
Life isn’t long enough to dwell too much on the troubled journey of Olivia Nuzzi, the former reporter for New York magazine who was fired after what, unfortunately, must be described as a “sexting scandal” with RFK Jr – a man she had profiled for the magazine. I did, however, find myself pausing to read two related pieces this week: a long blog post by Ryan Lizza, Nuzzi’s ex-finance who was also fired – from the New Yorker in 2017 – in which his anger is so fresh it rises from the screen like mist, and the companion profile of Nuzzi in the New York Times.
Nuzzi, of course, has a book out – American Canto – and in Jacob Bernstein’s New York Times profile of her, I laughed out loud at the reporter’s absolutely noble effort to elevate a story of hideous people doing regrettable things to a state-of-the-nation piece.
Bernstein writes: “‘American Canto’ is far more about bearing witness to Trumpworld and about how she believes that warped her, just as it warped the country.” Yes, the centre was not holding, it was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings, and a 32-year-old publicity seeker who found a strong candidate for America’s least attractive man so powerfully alluring that she blew up her life for him.
“The book, which comes out Dec 2, paints a picture of a nation and a personal life on fire,” writes Bernstein, to which one can only rejoinder: bravo!
Thursday
And still the endless slide to the bottom goes on for the former Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson. Her new children’s book was supposed to be published today, postponed from October while the Epstein scandal played out and presumably in the hope that everyone would have forgotten about her involvement by now. Sadly for Ferguson, this has not been the case and this week the book and the publicity tour were cancelled.
As this paper reported, Flora and Fern: Kindness Along the Way is a book about “two rabbits learning ‘kindness and community’ during an adventure in the big city” – a lovely message we will never get to enjoy, along with the book’s sequel, in which Flora encounters a billionaire financier who offers to train her as a masseuse, while using a dumb, sex-addicted minor royal as bait, and learns kindness and community along the way.
Friday
Let’s cleanse ourselves with this: the publication of a novel that took 30 years to write, is in seven parts and unfolds over the course of a single day. The heptalogy On the Calculation of Volume is not, thankfully, by Karl Ove Knausgård, but by Solvej Balle, a Danish woman who against all commercial odds has watched her 30-year endeavour become a publishing sensation, culminating this year in an inclusion on the International Booker shortlist and a long profile this week in the New York Times. As the reporter noted after spending time with Balle on the remote Danish island where she lives, and in a phrase that falls like a balm after brushing up against Nuzzi, Ferguson et al: “She seemed happy not to have won the Booker prize.”
