Girl on Guy with Aisha Tyler - girl on guy 178: frank bruni

Episode Date: April 2, 2015

join new york times' op ed columnist frank bruni as they talk food, books, love, criticism, drama, hate, fear, ideas, sex and death. plus frank kills a celebrity. figuratively, anyway. the rumors of girl on guy's demise are highly premature.

This is Girl on Guy. Hey, everyone, welcome to Girl on Guy 178. Welcome to the show. You guys are awesome for listening to my show. I've been getting a lot of really amazing letters lately, and I just want to let you know, even though I don't write you back personally because I'm buried under the weight of my own impenetrable commitments,

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girl on guy.net. And let's get into this show right now. This is with New York Times chief restaurant critic emeritus and current op-ed columnist, Frank Bruney. Frank was named op-ed columnist for The New York Times, obviously a very prestigious job in 2011, and he was the first openly gay writer to be named op-ed a columnist at the Times. He's also a pretty amazing writer who's written a bunch of books, and a lovely guy. He's a friend of mine, and I was really excited to get him on the show because he has a new book out called Where You Go Isn't Who You'll Be, which is really about, you know, kind of the pressure that family's face trying to figure out where their kid is going to go to school. But so much more than that, I think, about

this obsession that we have culturally with elite colleges and that selective schools define who you are for the rest of your life. It's a really smart book, and he's a really smart guy. He was nominated for a Pulitzer while writing for the free press. And he also has an incredibly complex and interesting background fighting for LGBT rights. talking about his own struggle with eating, an eating disorder that he had and bulimia. He's a really lovely dude, but if you've ever been curious about what it's like to be a restaurant critic or what it's like to try to get a job on the most prestigious newspaper in the world, you are about to find out. Frank is funny and lovely and smart and charming and a delight. I feel very lucky to know him as a friend and very lucky to have gotten him on the show.

And he's a charmer and he does not pull any punches. I think he tried to navigate the delicate line between journalist and podcast guest today. And I might have said a couple of things that he was like, I'm going to leave that where you put it, which he should have done. But I am not a journalist, and I will say whatever the hell I want. And he was wise to give a few of my statements, a wide berth. But he's just smart and really interesting. And I think you'll find a lot of parts of this conversation compelling. Like I said, especially what it's like to work your way up to writing for the,

biggest, most widely read, most prestigious newspaper on the planet. So this is Girl on Guy 178 with the op-ed columnist and restaurant critic emeritus of the New York Times, Mr. Frank Bruney, coming at you straight out of New York City and right into your face. Frank Bruny, welcome to my show. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to have you. It's so fun because a lot of times when I'm having people on the show, there are acquaintances or people I admired from afar, but I consider you. you a friend. So it's very, very fun to have you on the show. And you are an unusual friend with an unusual background. And so particularly because it's so varied and layered, we're going to

start at the very beginning from the very beginning. The very beginning. I'm a zygote, you mean. You are, you are a twinkle in your mother's eye. My memories are dim at that period. Just impressions. Impressions. Your sense of surrounding. Amniotic fluid. Very liquid. Where were you born? I was born in White Plains, New York, right outside the city. And so what is, what is White Plains like, I don't know anything. Upstate New York is a glob for me, not being from here. Well, this isn't really upstate. So this is Westchester County. Okay. Which, uh, you know, abuts New York City. Yonkers is the beginning of Westchester County. Clearly I don't know. If I have my geography correct, and I may not. Um, so it's essentially a bedroom community of New York. But White Plains is the sort of city

within the bedroom community of suburbs of Westchester. Oh, okay. And White Plains is an interesting place because there's some inner city there, but then I grew up in the part of it that bleeds into Scarsdale, and you've probably heard of Scarsdale, very affluent. So it was an upper middle class area of White Plains, but White Plains is a little bit more diverse than the towns right around it. Right. When you were...

You're a thinky fellow. Thank you. Yes. When you were a little kid, were you thinking? I was a Reiki kid. Yeah, I like this new vocabulary. I don't know if I was a thinky fellow. I was a reedy fellow.

Yeah, really? But I read strange stuff. So my mother, may she rest in peace. And I tell this story, and I think it's a story of a wonderful mother. And some people look at me like I should probably be spending a lot more time with a therapist than I have. But she would pass the book she read along to me. Oh, wow.

And so, and I hope this isn't reflected in my writing today, but I read a lot of Sidney Sheldon. So I was, no, I'm not kidding. When I was 13, I read the other side of midnight, or maybe 12. I mean, the whole, you know, rage of angels, windmills of the gods. I mean, you know, great titles. These kind of thick, juicy, substantial, very pulpy books. with probably more sex in them than a 12-year-old should have been reading. But that probably explains a lot as well.

No sense of irony or a... I remember... I can't remember the scene, but I remember there was a scene in the other side of midnight. That was a sex scene, and it's so perplexed me that for years, like I couldn't figure out what was going on there. And I'd like to go back now because it's probably clear as day if you have any familiarity... With the human body. Yeah, I mean, hopefully I've lived enough to understand what was going on in that scene, but maybe not.

Was it intriguing to you or was it just... The books? Or the sex scenes? Because I remember, like, I remember specifically the books that we had access to, like, around the sixth grade, any book that had any amount of sexual material in it was passed around the school like a joint. You know what I mean? Like, are you there, God, it's me, Margaret, or, you know, all, they were all Judy Blume books,

actually. It's all Judy Blume. I don't consider Judy Blum a blue writer, you know? I mean, you know, back then, you know, it was like a little bit of just a tiny bit of sexual content. There's a lot of yonics stuff going on. Yeah. So I remember us being very titillated and fascinated and potentially confused.

I don't think we did know other than we knew it was naughty. Right. But the fact that your mom was passing this stuff to you might have made it feel different to you. My mom sort of really in the best way, but also probably in a way that's not utterly ideal, like really saw her kids as friends. And actually I think there's much more good than bad to that. She's a wonderful mother.

And I think it was just she loved that I loved that. loved words. My mother did not have a career outside the home, partly because of her generation, other reasons too, but she was an avid reader and a beautiful writer. And I think she kind of picked up early on that I was going to maybe do some of those things in life that she would have liked to do if her time and her moment had been different. And so I think she just kind of enjoyed seeing, like, here, this is great, this is fun. I mean, she read great stuff too. Now I've painted her. I mean, she did Judith Krantz. They're delicious, you know.

Right. So I grew up on, you know, so my diet was like, you know, in school, Hemingway at home, Judith Krantz. I actually don't think I've ever read one of those kinds of books. Judith Krant's scruples was her big spes. Those are all like... I can't believe this is still on the mental hard drive. Well, but it's seared into the mental hard drive.

Yeah. It was very formative those times the books you read at that time. Yeah, yeah. Your mother was a writer. And you mean like, casual? I mean like... Casual. Or did she write?

No, no, she actually, she did things in a volunteer basis that were kind of indicative of what she would have done career-wise if she had a career. So she was always writing essays for the White Plains Women's Club Journal. Adorbs. And some of them were really, really beautiful. I remember one she wrote that was called Educate a Woman and dot, dot, dot. And it was a retort to some of the feminist rhetoric of the time that a woman, the college education was wasted if a woman went into the home. Interesting. And it was a really beautiful rejoinder to that saying, here are all the ways in which my college education is not wasted at all.

And a lot of it was about the conversations you have with your children. And it was very true in our home. I mean, our conversations were not just about chores and what you had or hadn't done in the yard. They were much more wide-ranging. And I think in a really sweet, wonderful way, she exercised her intellect and drew upon her education in her interactions with her kids. Four of us, lots of us. There were four of you? There were four of us, yeah.

There were, there are, yeah, we're all here. We're all still here. You said that she saw you as friends, and I think that's interesting because friends of mine who have been intellectuals and then become stay-at-home moms have often lamented the fact that they weren't having adult conversations for a large portion of their day, that like that was the big change for them when they stopped working was, you know, I just spend 16 hours a day talking baby talk and I want to like shoot myself on the face. Yeah.

So I think it depends on the kid's age. I think, I mean, I have enough nieces and nephews. That's very true. I can't really have an adult conversation with a three-year-old. But she probably, I mean, there's something about maybe being intellectually engaged that when your kids are old enough, it's much more interesting to have a conversation with them about literature than it is to have with them about chores. You know what I mean?

That you can create an intellectual life for yourself at home if you can kind of grow yourself, a book club. And she's sort of, my mother had a great appreciation for and take on almost the kind of the wonderful dialogue of parent. Like, she used to always tell a story about me, which I think she meant as accomplice. is I asked her at one point if there was a Santa Claus. And I was too young to be told the truth.

And she apparently said, I'd like to believe so. And she loved to recall my answer, which is, I didn't ask you what you'd like to believe. But she really, she kind of kept an interesting mental scrapbook of her dialogue with her kids and women. Out of the mouths of babes,

off time comes gems. She remembered every one of those gems and really kind of collected them, you know. You said that one of the reasons that she stayed home was because that was her generation and there were other reasons? What were the other reasons? Well, I don't know. I think the other reasons were a little bit who she was.

I think another reason was the speed with which she had us. I mean, part of it, I guess, part of it was generational. She married my dad. They were of an age where certainly more women were going in the workplace, but it hadn't yet become the norm. And it certainly hadn't become the cultural norm for

my dad of his era and from an Italian-American immigrant background and all that. But another reason was I don't think either of them came from an economic background where nannies were, I mean, they certainly weren't the norm, but they were pretty unheard of. And I think if you don't, if you just don't see things around you, you don't kind of contemplate those options. Right.

No, I mean, that's interesting. There is, even if you could have afforded it, it just wouldn't have made any sense contextually. Yeah. I don't think they could have afforded it either. Well, I mean, it's impossible to say because who knows what she would have earned. Right, right. I mean, certainly my father later in life was extraordinarily successful.

In the early decades, I don't think they could have afforded that kind of child care, but maybe they could have because maybe my mother would have made that much. How do you know? What did your father do? My father was a certified public accountant, but he early on became a partner in one of the big accounting firms. And so he was a partner of a big accounting firm. Stop being an accountant and started running an accounting firm. Well, it's like almost any profession, not any profession, but it's like, you know,

the teacher becomes the principal and is no longer a teacher. I mean, so many professions, what you did to get in the door, you end up being a manager of the people who are doing that, you know. So your mom was this kind of engaged intellectual and trying to create that kind of engagement with you. Was your father the same way or as you were like a numbers guy? My father was at work so much and she was, I mean, it was really a kind of stereotypical, is maybe the right word, but he was the sort of. sort of remote disciplinarian who kind of came home at the end of the day. And you were supposed to be

on your best behavior for him. And she was the sort of, you know, more emotionally messy, sloppy. What has been amazing for me and really, really moving over the last decade and have two decades, my mother died when she was 61, so young. And that was more than 15 years ago. And getting to know my father over the last 15 years. In fact, I'm going to, I'm working on a book about it. it's interesting. I've learned so much about the person he couldn't be because of the team that he and my mother were in the roles they were playing. And since she died,

all these layers of his personality that I never saw before. I mean, we have an incredible relationship, and we didn't. Really? For a lot of our lives. He doesn't remember it that way I do, but it's been one of the great privileges of the last decade, I would say, is getting to know my father. And I think, and the book that I'm working on is called Finding Our Fathers.

That's my working title. Because I actually think my premise is that a lot of men spend their entire lives, paving a road, building a bridge to their fathers. And so much of the way a man behaves in his life, the choices he makes are about his fundamental misunderstandings and of and distance from his father. Interesting. And you see it in politics. I mean, once you contemplate that, and you begin to look at figures in the arts, figures in corporate America, certainly in politics, you see that pattern repeated over and over again.

That's so interesting. I mean, because I'm obviously not a man, but I'm just thinking about my father was very influential in my life, and he was actually around quite a bit. I find myself being him against my will a lot of the time. You're more your dad than your mom? Oh, yeah, 100%. And who knows how much of that is genetic and how much of that is conditioned, but he raised me. So, yeah, for sure. I'm him in ways, in fundamental ways that sometimes shock and delight and sometimes shock and disappoint.

You know what I mean? Shock and disappoint whom? Myself. And I'm sure others. Him, your husband, yourself? Yeah, me and him, yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, I just, it's just very interesting because these people who are formative, whether they're in your life or not. I mean, their absence is formative, their presence is formative, you know.

Oh, God, our parents are everything. Yeah. Yeah, even when you don't want them to be. No, we're either running away from them or we're trying to be them or we're trying to one-up them. Right. You know, it's just everything is in relation to that. What's interesting also is you're saying that a part of the reason why you feel like you've been able to connect with your father more is that your mom passed. But I also find, like, with my dad, and I wonder if you found this, my dad is just a more open, tender personality now than he was when he was younger.

That's so true. They just open. They literally men. just blossom like very late in their lives. I think especially men of their generation, I think they're allowed to let go of a whole lot of shit. You know, and just,

I mean, my father used to care about public appearances in a way that he's just let go of that. But also for me, you know, when I was younger, I mean, I came out,

I'm gay. I came out at a... Are you, though? Yeah. Aisha. Why haven't you told me saying... You and I have had cocktails together often enough

and the conversation and the looking around the room. Oh, yeah. We were looking at the same people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hilarity. No.

Is he for you or for me? We're trying to decide. That's a good thing. Can we share? Well, no, we don't think we have the same taste anyway. Luckily, the bisexual population is not so large that we're competing for the same people. No, no, no, no. I mean, we can express the same feelings about it.

These men are either going to be on Team Aisha or Team Frank. Pretty much. Anybody is who's in the middle. By the way, I think if you're a guy and you are bisexual, you still fall pretty hard on the gay side, because I just think. my suspicion is the same as yours, but we're treading into very politically dangerous waters here. Feel free to write in. My show runs with a constant ongoing, very muscular disclaimer.

So, yes, we'll move on from the fact that you and I just, well, we do spend a lot of time just conversating what we think is cute. Bisexuality is like the third rail. It is the third rail, isn't it? Even for bisexuals. Well, I walked all over it, so you can leave me here chart and Chris pressed against the rail. So you were saying when you came out Well, so I think when I was growing up I mean so I was I came out

I hate, by the way I hate that phrase I don't know why I hate that phrase It just it reduces it to such a cliche But I began to be honest with everyone in my life About my sexual orientation when I was about 1819 The minute I graduated from high school And went to college I decided this is the dividing line for me And that was in 1982

Quick question which is Because it was interesting about coming out is it is in a moment usually it's a process right right and the big part of that process starts for a lot of people it's an interior coming out like just coming to not even to terms or grips because that sounds like you're dealing with something that's traumatic but it is just like seeing yourself clearly sometimes it can be in that era yeah i mean if it was the late 70s early 80s when i was realizing i was a traumatic realization because you wondered how you wondered how curtailed or troubled your life would be right right whether you'd be accepted and how you'd

Do you remember? Was there a moment for you? Or was it like a gradual thing? Just for you, just to yourself. I remember, and I was aware of it at the time. I don't think this is just memory kind of plain. But I remember having feelings, a kind of fondness toward my male friends when I was 10, 11, 12, that I knew was a fondness too much, a fondness of a different color. Right, right.

And then I began in the way that, I mean, to be really blunt, and the way we all begin to have kind of sexual fantasies. I remember having dreams and sexual fantasies that all involved men. And so I knew that this was different. And I knew right away this was not like transitory. This wasn't like a moment or up. Right. So I went ahead and I dated girls and I made out with them and I felt their boobs.

And as I was doing all of that, I knew. this is not interesting me to the extent it's supposed to and I knew it was all a stalling tactic. I'm like, I'm going to do this because I'm supposed to now and I kind of hoped maybe I'll have some epiphany and all of a sudden this will be as exciting.

Maybe I just haven't given it a go. Right, maybe this will be as exciting as the fantasies I'm having, you know, and it never was and I kind of suspected it never would be. But the reason I mentioned in terms of my father is I grew up, I mean, I think it's even nine and ten I began

to know this. But so there's a whole span of life from nine to when I finally begin to be honest with people where I'm assuming my dad is going to turn on me just because that was the that was the era. He was a very socially conservative guy, not religiously conservative, but I mean really a traditional traditional guy. And then after I became honest about myself and my mother and I would talk about it all the time. And it was always like the kind of it was understood the best way to deal with my father was just to not make him talk about it. And I was fine about that because I'm not one of these people think everything needs to be talked about and talked about it. If he can know it, if he can integrate it still be good to me, that's enough for me.

But there's a distance that I had from him. He, once I realized maybe 15 years ago that he really was okay with this, once I began to bring my partner's home and he was lovely to them, it enabled me to let go emotionally with him in a way and to kind of trust him and to talk to him in ways I never. had before. And so that coupled with my mother's death really brought us close together. And now I think we're wonderful, wonderful friends. That's so nice. And there is, um, there is something about the unspoken that can be its own barrier. And I don't mean like there's an elephant in the room. I just, I just think like things can stay unspoken, um, in a way that is, uh, isolating or in a way that is conjoining.

Do you know what I mean? And again, you know, even if you never had like the big talk, once you kind of realize like he's okay and I'm okay, that unspoken becomes something completely different. Well, I was no longer afraid that I would lose him. Mm-hmm. You know, I didn't have to kind of,

I didn't have to kind of exist an emotional fear around him. Right. Yeah. You know what's interesting also is inherent in the idea that you can't talk about something with someone is the idea that they're like, emotionally frail. Would you like some more water? I'm okay. Thank you.

Do you know what I mean that they're... I'm sufficiently hydrated. That they have an emotional frailty, right? That they can't handle it. Right? And so you kind of infantilize this other person and you isolate them because you think, oh, this person can't deal with the complexities of life. That's absolutely true and very smartly said.

Yeah. I always thought my dad can't deal with messiness. And I have seen him, you know, over the years deal with a lot of messiness. I'm just, I'm his biggest fan. That's wonderful. Yeah. So you're reading pulp fiction, literally you're reading pulp fiction. Yes.

And sometimes, actually, it's interesting you mention the gay thing. Sometimes going to the bookstore and standing in the, there was always a very small sexuality section. And sometimes going there and there would always be just a very few almost academic books about like, you know, homosexual men. I remember one called alienation. affections. I remember standing in the stacks of a book. So I'm reading pulp fiction that my mom passes me. I'm also going to the bookstore and surreptitiously reading stuff to kind of figure out, are there a lot of other men like me? And then, of course, in school, we're doing Shakespeare. Alienated affections. Alien, it was a title of it. I actually, I wondered if my memory was

correct years ago, and I went back and found reference to it on the internet. It's out of print, you know. That doesn't sound like a promising title. Was it a positive book about homosexuality? It was meant to be a supportive one. Okay. And so alienated affections was meant in a sort of empathic, like, this is what you deal with. Your affections are outlaw affection.

Okay. That makes more sense to me now. I think that's an honest tape of what it was like at the time. That makes more sense to me now. It wasn't sounding utterly positive, but like somehow that your affections were being directed in the wrong direction. No, no. It was sort of saying you are societies alienating you by dint of your affections because of your affections. more sense to me.

Sexuality, it's so interesting because sexuality also, for all of us, straight and gay and everything in between, it's not everything you are, but it defines it, it defines you in spite of your best efforts. I mean, it's just so, it's just in you. Do you know what I mean? Like, I know that, like, I remember liking boy. I mean, like, at three, like, I just remember, like, I always just really liked boys. straight people never have to examine, like, the moment when they figured out who they were attracted to, right?

Or we don't necessarily do it. But I think everybody should be more thoughtful about thinking about when did I become aware of my sexuality, right? Whatever it was. Right. Because I always ask this question on the show when people get pissed to me because they feel like I only ask my gay guess when they figured out that they were gay. But I talk about the fact that I figured out when I was straight. I mean, you know what I mean? It was as much a discovery as any discovery, which is that's something that's such a fundamental aspect of who you are that will bleed up into your

worldview, even when you're trying to press it back down. You're just less likely, you or another straight person is less likely to be able to carbon date it, if you will. Right. Because that moment wasn't a fraught moment. Right. Right. It wasn't a startling. It didn't tell you something about the way your life was going to proceed. Right. Right. Right. Or it didn't feel that way. Right. When you graduated from high school, was there a moment that you, that made you say, okay, now I'm going to start to live my life more fully and be more expressive about who I am? I just, I just knew I didn't, I just knew I didn't like keeping a secret, and I didn't like keeping a secret that came with it the question, if people I know know all of me, are they going to turn away? Right.

And I decided I would rather not get to know. I don't mean like not know, but not get to know, not become friendly with anyone who was going to be repelled by that. I don't remember, I just remember it as a kind of intellectual decision like that, and I remember very well when I was like, looking at colleges. My older brother had, so I spent my last couple years of high school in a private school that was half boarding, half day, I was a day student, had a campus. My older brother, who was a year ahead of me, he, all the schools he applied to look to me like kind of just upsizing carbon copies of our prep schools. So we went to Amherst, right? Yes. My parents were, always wondered, why didn't I not want to look at Amherst and Williams and where you went, Dartmouth?

And the reason was because I'd made a calculation inside that if I wanted to meet other gay people like myself in college, I either had to be on the edge over in a city or it had to be a certain size school. So if a school wasn't huge and it was rural, Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, I didn't apply. And my parents always said, I don't want those schools and they're like, why? And at the time, I couldn't say, because I'm not going to get laid there. Now, the truth is, I probably would have gotten laid there. You absolutely would have, yes. Think about it from back back.

No, I get it. Early 80s. I don't know how many people are out there. People told me not to go to Dartmouth because they were saying I wasn't going to get laid there. Did you get laid there? Oh, yes, I did. I was a machine. Do you talk about this enough that I should, you were a machine?

I was a machine until I met my husband. But yeah, I mean, I was like, I was on, on Han Han, very, had a very compressed, very busy period before I fell in though with my husband. I mean, I loved boys. I chose Dartmouth not, I mean, I really won. I think either reason two or three was that the, at that point, it was not a parody. It was like 60, 40 men. That was absolutely an enticement for me. And also the alienness of it.

So, like, for me, I was very intrigued by going to a place that was going to make me feel very uncomfortable. I am so glad you said that. No, because, so, you know, I have a new book out that's about college. It's about college admissions and how we choose. Where you go is not who you'll be. Where you go is not who you'll be. And that phrase, which is the title, is meant as a, as a absolutely truthful reassurance to kids who think that whether they get into Dartmouth or Harvard

is going to determine the trajectory of their entire life. And all of us, you're in my age, you're a little younger than I, we look around us, we know enough people who traveled enough different paths to success that we know that's BS. Right. One of the things I talk about in the book is how I wish people would choose college differently. You and I chose college in the same way. So I ended up getting in early to Yale, which was the destination of a lot of kids from my type of education. And I was in the Northeast. At this point, we had moved to the suburbs of Hartford. So Yale was literally only 50 minutes from my house and all that. But then I also got this thing called a Moorhead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One of the reasons I chose Chapel Hill

is like you, I thought I should go to a college that's going to make me uncomfortable. Because growing is about expanding your frame of reference and putting yourself in situations that aren't entirely familiar. And it really bums me out how many kids choose a college that based on what they think is going to feel most comfortable. If it's going to feel most comfortable, it is going to be a perpetuation of what you already know, and it's not going to be an expansion of your universe. It's going to inhibit both. If you grew up in the country, go to the city. If you grew up in the city, go to the country. If you grew up in the north, think about the south, vice versa. And I just wish college is such a great opportunity to just warp speed, expand your world. And too few kids.

to use it that way. It's a really good point. And it's a crucible, too. I mean, the thing is it's probably, you know, occasional, very dramatic occurrences on campuses as notwithstanding. It is the safest way to give yourself, to create a crucible for yourself, to give yourself kind of, to challenge yourself, but still with this safety net underneath you. That's beautifully said.

Yeah. It's a huge experiment, but with the most safety built. You're not yet you don't yet have a mortgage You don't yet have a job you have to show up to So you don't have all of those anchors and tethers of adult life You can experiment pretty freely Yeah with it's great it's it's kind of the last great laboratory you have I mean yeah go ahead

No I mean all of life is but but but once you get to a certain point Everything everything has tethers Yes and everything has yeah and the impacts can be more dramatic and more significant You know on your quote unquote real life. College is really like, you know, a challenge with training wheels. You know what I mean? You can, and also a place where challenges can be created for yourself that you,

that would be so much more difficult to set up on your own. I mean, yeah, you can live abroad for six months. I mean, there are all these things you can do. And you should do all of them. Every single thing. My, you know, people say, do you, did you make the right decision where you went to school? And I said, you know, I think ultimately that the mistakes I made were not, not looking

at my environment and ringing every experience I could have out of it. You know, and I wasn't. I mean, I did do a lot of things. I mean, I got my scuba certification. I mean, stuff that I think one should do. But, I mean, you said something very smart a moment ago, which is mistakes. Don't count as much. And it really is true.

Every year you get older, your mistakes count more. And I think in some ways it's mathematical because you've got less time left to correct them. But it is true. The stakes and the costs. There's a great, I wish I could remember the line, but there's a great essay in one of Joan Didion's early collections. And I think it's, I think it's the essay goodbye to all that, which is about her time in New York and how she once lived in New York and she was once very young and she could never live in New York again. And she talked about being young and thinking that nothing, nothing,

would have a cost or whatever. And then she says, but I realize later everything mattered all of it. But anyway, that notion of the price we pay and how it changes based on our age is very embedded in that beautiful essay. Well, this is really interesting. And I want to jump right back to college, but I have been personally exploring, and we explore on the show a lot, the value of mistakes, and the fact that we also become more risk averse as we get older and not as willing to take risks with those attendant consequences. And they do matter more, and they do have a deeper impact, especially if you are someone with a mortgage and a public reputation and children. However, I sometimes think that risk aversion doesn't serve us as we get older because

we're not, we don't live with as much abandoned either. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely. Yeah. No, I mean, that's a really tricky balance to strike. I mean, one of the, I've done so many things wrong, as we all have. Oh, yes. You know, and, and I think part of what we all try to do in the service of mental health is not dwell too much on what we've done wrong. One of the things I think I've done right is in my writing career, my journalism career, I have repeatedly chosen to do things which were foreign to me and thus scary. Right. Right. So, I covered a presidential campaign being kind of terrified about

whether I was really going to be fluent and I was a restaurant critic for five years coming from a background where they chose me for that job because they liked the way I thought and the way I wrote and I certainly was exuberant about food and a great eater with some knowledge but I'd never written a single food article or a restaurant article in my life

And I've tried to do those things that are scary and take those risks within the safer setting of continuous employment. Right. Because I agree with you. I think if we stop taking risks, we live without any abandon. Right. That's a great word. And then consequently no growth. Right.

Right. I mean, you need, I think you need some kind of trauma. And I'm not saying necessarily, like, injurious trauma, but you need trauma. You need dynamism to grow, period. Otherwise, you just kind of. You know, we talk a lot these days about inequality in the country, which, is a huge and important topic. And we talk about it almost entirely in terms of economic stuff, which is the root of the inequality. But one of the things that I think is important to note

about people who are economically comfortable versus people who aren't is even talking about how much risk am I going to build into my life, how many adventures am I going to have, that's such a privileged conversation. And one of the things that I think is saddest about people who are not being given the chance to succeed and to reach an altitude of economic comfort is they don't, they're not able to ask these questions about risk taking in the same way because there's no safety net.

You know, there's no wiggle room. There's no padding. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, yes, because those consequences are real and consequential. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the impact is dramatic. You go to University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Yeah.

that had to have been very, very different for you when moving to the south from essentially... Connecticut and New York. Yeah, I always been in New York. And like a lot of... I think like almost every state university, there's a state rule because of the funding of how many people have to be from in-state. And I think it's still this way.

But when I was at UNC, 85% of the people had to be North Carolina students because of the amount of state money it was getting. And so, yeah, that was very different because 85% of those people had spent most of their life in a state that I'd never set foot in below the Mason-Dixon line, all that, you know. And you're newly, or more robustly out. Newly homosexual. A newly homosexual and newly minted gay. And you, I'm like, you're like, like, it's shiny penny.

Not pre-owned, like I had that new car smell. You got the new gay smell. The new gay smell. Oh, here we go. I hope that's a T-shirt someday. And you're moving to a part of the world, part of the country that most people would paint with a very broad bush as being pretty socially conservative. So did you have any apprehension about that? And were those apprehensions born out?

I don't remember having huge apprehension about it. And I think because I had done enough research to understand that, A, like we're all at our most liberal during college age, it was a fairly liberal universe. I mean, I remember at the time, so do you remember the famously grouchy, incredibly conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms? Yes. It became very famous during AIDS. era. Well, he was around then, and I remember... He was everything, too. He was a big old racist, but didn't he have a black love child? Wasn't he the one with the black love child?

That's Tram Thurman, I think. Oh, there's so many old white guys with black love children. I don't want to malign. They're both dead, but I don't think Jesse Helms had a black love child, no. Somebody did. Or a black love nephew or niece. Anyway, they all had their hand in the honeypot. I remember at the time when I was reading up on the university, I tripped across all the stuff about how Jesse Helms was always railing.

about what a, you know, what a Sodom and Gamora, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I thought, okay, it's going to be all right. You know, if Jesse Helms is that exercised by it, I will find a home there. Right, right. Did you love it? I didn't love it, but I don't think I was the kind of person at that time of my life who would have loved anywhere I went. You know, I mean, I didn't go and think this is wrong.

I didn't go and yearn to be elsewhere. But I'm not the kind of, I wasn't the kind of person that would be like, oh, I love my school. This is the best place. I thought certain things about it were great, including. the education I got there. I was an English major and they had a fantastic English department.

But, you know, it was a different kind of school experience. I mean, I lived off campus. One of the things I appreciated about it enormously at the time, and I appreciate even more in retrospect is although it was not geographically diverse, it was much more socioeconomically diverse than the other schools I might have gone to.

So my older brother goes to Amherst, my younger brother goes to your alma mater, Dartmouth, and my sister ended up going to Princeton. All of them had friend groups at those schools where almost every one of their friends was even more well to do than we'd been. So I'm going off to my friend EG's ski house, you know, says Brother Harry. Mark goes down to his friend Chad's Beach House in St. Croix. My friends were working 20 hours a week to help pay living expenses or to contribute to tuition. They were more representative of the country and I really feel like I got a better education for lack of a better

word in how Americans live than my siblings did by going to a state university. And I think that was a great privilege. Did you want to be a writer at that age? Did you know that you wanted to be? I didn't know I want I'd always written in prep school or my private school was a prep school and I immediately went to work for the school newspaper and spent almost, you know, spent most of my extracurricular time there, you know, anywhere from 10 to 20 hours a week. So I was writing all through school and I did summer internships that were journalism ones. But I wasn't thinking this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. It was the only thing that interested me enough to do it. And then as I got near graduation, I thought, well, I guess people do this for a living.

Right. So I guess I'll try. Yeah. And what did you do, but you graduated with an English degree? Yeah. Interestingly, you know, unlike Dartmouth or Amherst or Princeton, UNC does have a journalism a major. I didn't take a single journalism class because, and I don't know how I, I don't know how I came to this belief at the time, because it just, but I remember thinking I'm only going to have four years to study liberal arts. And I don't want my major to be something as vocational or kind of focused on the act of doing something. So I thought if I just spend all this time at the student newspaper, that will be my journalism training for the moment. But I want to use these precious few four years of the other stuff to study English and history and American studies. So I didn't,

I didn't take a journalism class, but I spent a lot of time at the paper. Right. When you graduated, were you like, okay? And did you go to New York with a shiny clipping folder? And I went, after I graduated, I actually went, my parents had moved from the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut to La Jolla, California. Oh, no. While I was in college. And dad had also moved, up in the world. So they had this incredible house in La Jolla that had a tennis court and a pool. What accounting firm was it? Well, it changed names of gazelle. So when he started, it was Haskins and Sells. And then it was Deloitte Haskins and Sells. And then it was Deloitte and Tush. Okay. And I think it's still, is it still, yeah, Deloitte and Tush. Yeah. So, but,

so I had never gotten as much time in Southern California, which was so exotic to me and so magical because it was only where I went home, you know, at Christmas, not every summer I had internships. So I ended up taking a year off after college and I waited tables and tended bar. Oh, fun. In, in La Jolla. Yeah. And lived at home because they had this sort of large home and the only kids still left around was my little sister who was great. And so you could live at home without feeling like you were living at home. You know, and I had, I had my own car. And I was a kind of beach bum for a year. How fun. I would never have, I can't. You know, no. knowing you in the iteration that I know you now and you seeming like such a like a practical

and this isn't a negative qualities because I'm practical too and a planner I can't imagine you just kind of like aimlessly like waiting like it just seems so I mean it wasn't that aimless because I was I I had gotten into the journalism school of Columbia and I had deferred it for a year so I knew that makes much more sense less I sound more adventurous and romantic that's much more bruny yes So I knew, and I just kind of, I wanted to, you know, I would get in the car and, you know, that was how I explored, like, Big Sur and Carmel. I just thought there's this incredibly gorgeous state, California, which you know way better than I do. And I just thought I have a really kind of nice opportunity to explore it a little bit before I return to the world of adult life or before I enter forevermore, the world of adult life. Was that a very freeing year?

Was that a year where you just... It was fun. And it was fun because I really, you know, I really. kind of didn't feel like there was going to be a big cost to anything. Yeah. I felt like I could really have fun. I mean, as long as I was bringing in a paycheck, and I didn't want to be taking money from my parents other than the utilities they were paying. Mm-hmm. So yeah, it was a great year. Great year. In fact, I wish it had been two years. Right.

Because once you get on the train, you can't get off the train without paying a big price. Very big price. So wait as long as you can to get on the train. Right. God, that's such a good point. I mean, we dream, we fantasize about getting off the train at all time. But I think for so much of us, and especially, unless you're in some kind of like, I would say in some kind of stable corporate job, but I don't think anything is stable or corporate anymore. You feel like I have, I've got to maintain momentum. And if I lose momentum, I will lose my spot. And even more so in a corporate job because there's no, they don't really give sabbaticals. No. You know, I mean, so I can't think of a single type of corporate job where if you said I want to take the next year off for some me time.

Right. They can guarantee you that what you were making and what you were doing and all of that's going to be there when you get back. I don't think they could even guarantee that they wouldn't laugh into your face. I mean, it would be so meaningful and so expanding to say, I'm going to take some time off to be a better human being, have more experiences come back, rested, and, you know, potentially with a different way of looking at the world and a broader scope, people would just cackle in your face. I mean, it's just, we're still not a culture that kind of believes in the value of rest at all. We don't really kind of, I think, pay, I don't think we really show a lot of respect to the inner life, if you will. And I don't mean to sound new agey. I'm the least new agey person you really are. But I mean, no, but I mean, how much do we talk about, now I'm going to sound both new agey and religious, but I think this is a valid phrase.

How much do we talk about the cultivation of the soul? And I kind of think if there's if there's one trajectory in life more. important than any other and I want and as I say this I I'm divorcing any religious meaning to whatever per se but the cultivation of the soul is sort of the work of a life mm-hmm mm-hmm that's what learning is ultimately about right in experience you know I mean I think the problem is and I know I suffer from this that like I think my time is finite but what that usually drives me towards is harder work my time is finite I must get more stuff done rather than my time is finite am I fully exploring what it means to be human my time is finite have

I read middle march right yeah I have read Redwoodal March. Or no, Middle Sex, not Middle March, different book. Very different books. Very different book. But yeah, my time is finite. Am I inhabiting this body

and this experience fully? You know, which I think... I'm watching too much Law & Order and Law & Order SVU. You really are! No, I'm like, well, that's kind of my white noise at night. Yeah.

What's funny about Law and Order is it's like McDonald's, right? It's just, it tastes the same every time you turn it on. It's satisfying and its own kind of empty way. I think for me, law and order is the equivalent of a baby sucking on a pacifier. It's just

the thing that calms me because the rhythms are so predictable. You know, you know Lenny's going to have a zinger right before the opening credits, you know. And if it's SVU, you know there's going to be a DNA element and seminal fluid. Yeah. Who doesn't

find seminal fluid comforting? I'm going to leave that one. I've just let it. Leave where I put it. I think it doesn't need a tag. So you come to New York? I feel like, I feel like, yeah. Poor Frank Booney. He's a journalist and I'm a professional clown.

No, no, but I'm seeing like, he's dancing around my... When you said, who doesn't find seminal fluid comforting, I'm like, I'm like coming up with your next book title, The Solace of Spirme. Seminole fluid in three easy steps. You come here to go to Columbia. That program is a two-year? No, one of the great appeals of it was it was nine months. What?

I mean, there's, I don't know exactly. I think you can still do it. But, I mean, at the time, it's like, where can you get a quote-unquote Ivy League master's degree? Yeah. In nine easy months. No, I can't even, that's extraordinary. So essentially, like a year, like a single academic year.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like late August and you're done late May. That's it. Yeah. And then you're getting a full-on journalism-focused. Well, then I went to work. Well, then I went to work for the New York Post. Fabulous.

What did you write about? Did you write rhymes? They love rhymes and puns there. Well, what was great about writing for the post is since everything was fairly short, right? There was no... It's like 75% ads. At the Times, there are all these style things. I remember when I got to the Times, like, you can't use the word facilities to mean, like...

The bathroom? The bathroom? The bathroom? My point is, The Times has a gazillion, or they've gotten looser, but a gazillion style rules. Right. At the Post, if there was a way to say something more successful, distinctly, it was, it was not only fair play, but it was preferred. So if I wrote an article about a crime, and I quoted who was then the police commissioner Benjamin Ward, you would never say

police commissioner Benjamin Ward, because that's a lot of letters. You'd say top cop Benjamin Ward. Oh, yes. You would never say mayor, um, uh, Dinkins or Giuliani, you would just say his honor. Yes. With two Zs because it's so much faster. Yeah. And here, and the, the great thing is also because everything was supposed to be in almost comic strip broad strokes. If you were a college student, could be community college, you could even be taking the semester off, and you were the victim of a crime, and you were not hideously deformed. You were a comely co-ed in the New York Post. You were always a comely. And if you had one light strand of hair, you were the blonde comely co-ed, you know. But there was this, I mean, you could use the word tabloid to kind of dismiss what the posted, but I, there's something else, right?

It was like this informality and this intimacy that felt that made the New York Post feel like the neighborhood rag, right? Like the, the block newsletter. No, and I'm not dissing it. I mean, there is, there's an art to what they, I mean, it's changed a lot over time. It's different now than it was then. It was different than it was before. And I, but I mean, there's an art to the way it did things and the way it does things. And it's not something everyone can do.

And it does what it chooses to do quite well. And I say that not in a patronizing way, but with genuine respect. How long were you? And what was your, did you have a beat? No. I was general assignment and I spent a lot of time doing rewrite because it was a fast writer. And so you'd often sit at a desk and you'd write three or four stories a day. You'd literally take calls from reporters who would dump their notes on you.

and we had, in that era, a post byline could be five names long. Because it would be like the person who got the quote from the, from the police, the person who was at the crime victims, whatever. But I also did reporting to, and I remember hunting down jurors after trials. I mean, a lot of it was the post-reporting at the time, and a lot of it was banging on doors, the classic banging on doors, calling up people, you know, using a reverse phone to do. directory to say, did you know the person in 2A who was just stabbed? You know, that sort of

right. Oh, wow. How long were you at the post? I was there for a year and a half. Okay. Because I knew that if I stayed there a long time, it would be difficult to move beyond tabloids. And I knew I didn't want to stay in tabloids or and, and so I went fairly quickly to a more mainstream, you know, which was? The Detroit Free Press. And did you, and did you, And you moved to Michigan. I moved to Detroit. Yeah. How was that?

And at that time, the Detroit Free Press was, it was one of the jewels in the Knight Ritter crown. And Knight Ritter at the time was, you know, hugely respectable newspaper chain. That was in the era when the Miami Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Didn't they have the Boston Globe as well? No, no. Boston Globe is different. But they were winning a slew of Pulitzer's every year.

San Jose Mercury News was one of their papers. And the Detroit Free Press was one of the kind of prides of the Knight Ritter chain. and so I went there and I was there for five years. How was that? I mean, I can't remember when Detroit was in its heyday, but it was a very long time ago. What was before, for both of our times?

Detroit's heyday at this point was like the Mesozoic era. Right, exactly. Detroit was well, well past its heyday. Right. So what was that like for you going there? Your standard of living goes crazily up. If memory serves me and I think it does, I remember I was living in a tiny two-bedroom apartment on Columbus and 80th on the Upper West Side that I shared with someone else.

And we paid $1,400 a month, which now seems like nothing, but that's, mind you, 89, 90. I go to Detroit and I have this massive loft-style one-bedroom apartment with exposed brick, 18-foot ceilings, huge windows. It included like a gym. It included a covered parking space. And I think I was paying $560 a month. Oh, Jesus. Which probably could actually get that. that same thing for the same place now.

And by the way, people listening to Detroit, I love Detroit. And it is finally going through this well-deserved and long-awaited Renaissance. Let me tell you. I will always have a special feeling about Detroit because, and you know this because of the places you travel, if you live in New York, if you live in San Fran, where I lived very briefly, if you live in D.C., if you live in L.A., you're around an enormous number of people who derive a lot of their identity from where they're. they live. And it's not even simple pride of place. It's almost a sort of a sort of geographic

snobbery. I'm a New Yorker and that means I'm sophisticated in a certain way. And a lot of people in those places live there because it's important to them to live there because of what they think it says about them. One of the things I noticed instantly about Detroit and that is so refreshing and wonderful is everyone who was there, including me, was there for what I kind of think of as a real world reason. They were there because that's where they found their best job. They were there because that's where their family roots were. And it meant the number of posers, you know, and the number of snobs that you were around so much smaller than anywhere else. Right. Right. I mean, it had chosen that place for a more passionate reason than this says something about who I am.

Right. Yeah. It's a city without vanity in the best way. When you were there, did the nature of what you were reporting on changed to the way that you wrote change? Well, I was writing, it was still in the sort of depths of the AIDS crisis, so I wrote a lot about AIDS. Since I was an out gay man and there still weren't a surfeit of us in journalism, now, you know, you can't throw a rock

without hitting an out gay journalist. But back then it was still a little bit different. So it meant you could report on things like the AIDS crisis in an easier way because your honesty about yourself gave you an access to them. served a lot about AIDS. I was all over the map, though.

I mean, I went for them to the First Persian Gulf War, you know, and ended up embedded with the third armored cavalry regiment of the army. Well, I spent five days with four soldiers, four infantry soldiers in a Bradley fighting vehicle. And a Bradley fighting vehicle, its actual usable space is probably less than that king-sized bed over there. Right, right. So what was it like? It was cramped. and we were moving slowly across southern Iraq for five days.

And this was before they kind of realized that Saddam Hussein, Zatri invaded Kuwait, that he didn't really have the firepower, the Republican Guard wasn't really. But they did believe that southern Iraq was heavily mined. So for five days, we not only confined our life to this Bradley fighting vehicle, but if you stepped outside of it, you couldn't actually step on the ground. So if you had to go number two. you hung off the side of the vehicle because you couldn't step onto the desert floor because there might be mines there.

That's a lot. That's intimate. So what was it like? It was unhygienic. It was not a... Smelly. Yeah. It was not a bouquet of flowers.

Right. Yeah. Were you... Did you fear for your life? No, because we actually didn't see any battle. But it's interesting because I remember being... taken by one of the army commanders. He took several of us journalists

who were assigned to the third armored cavalry regiment. He said, this is off the record, but your unit is one of the ones that if we meet up with the Iraqi Republican Guard, we think the third armored cavalry regiment is one of the units that's likely to. And so this is your chance with no shame or whatever to say, I want to trade this embedded space for something else.

And I cannot believe this, but I didn't do that. And that's so unlike me because I'm a total scaredy cat about... I can't even look at those ISIS stills for very long. I mean, I'm really... I have such a kind of chilled to the bone scaredness

of that sort of thing. To this day, I can't believe I didn't say, get me out of here. But I think I just kind of felt well, you know, like this is why one comes here, follow it through. But the truth is we never saw any sort of action. action is a horrible word for it.

We were never in combat, and so I kind of never really got scared because it never happened. We sort of moved around slowly for five days, did number two hanging off the side of the vehicle, and then got a radio piece of news saying the war such as it was is over. Right, wow.

So your experience was varied. I mean, what you were writing about was very diverse. Yeah, and in my last two years in Detroit, I was the paper's movie critic. Oh, okay. Yeah. And how did that happen? Was that they asked you to do so?

I've always, they knew I was a movie buff. It was sort of like the food critic thing at the times. They knew I was a movie buff. And they wanted to make a change. And so they said, have you ever thought of reviewing movies? And I thought, well, yeah, I'm going to review them in my head all the time. I did it at my college paper. And I thought, sure.

Right. So I did that. So that was the last two years at the Detroit Free Press. Yeah, yeah. And then. The Times. And then what generated that move again? I mean, was it always a slow inexorable move

towards the New York Times. No, no, no, I mean, I didn't have a grand plan. What happened was about two years before I got to the Times. I did a story that was the longest story the Detroit Free Press had ever published to that point. And it was one of the, every year with the Pulitzer's, there are three stories chosen as finalist for each category. And then there's one that wins when it goes up to the final board and two that are runners up. And when I was 28 at the free press, I was a runner up in the feature writing category for this story. It's the longest story the paper had ever published. And it was a profile of a profile. of a convicted child molester.

And it was told, it was titled Twisted Love, and it was told through his eyes about how like a pedophile sees and experiences that crime and that situation. And it was about his three years of abusing or having a relationship he would have said with the 10 year old across the street, who was the 13 year old across the street

by the time it ended. And this man chatted with me for about 25 hours in prison. Wow. I would just keep going back with a paper recorder and I ultimately talked to his wife, his two kids, the parents of his victim. And the Times and a lot of papers got in touch with me because there was this person who at 28 was a feature writing finalist, but the Times moved so slowly that by the time they actually hired me, it was two and a half years later.

I started writing about movies. I knew I didn't want to do that forever, but so that's, anyway, that's how that happened. Was that the idea for that story? Was it, did it come from somewhere else? You know, it's interesting. I had been writing a lot about gay issues. This is a fascinating reflection of how well-intentioned but politically incorrect people can be. I'd been writing a lot about gay issues. And the managing editor of the paper that time had gotten a letter from a prisoner who said I was convicted of child, sexual abuse, but I don't think I hurt. It was a very interesting

letter. And she sent it into her office to me and said, this is, this is, this might be up your alley, you know? And I mean, she was correct. I was very fascinated by it, but I kind of, when I read that, I winced because I thought she doesn't realize, like, what a sort of gaffe that's, what a gaff that is, because there's a big difference. Big difference. Yes. But it was up my alley in the sense that I was fascinated by the human behavior aspect of it. And I remember calling the man's, the man mentioned how ill served he'd been by his lawyer. And I called the lawyer and I said, this guy's letter was fascinating. Do you remember this case? And he said, do I remember it? He said, It never leaves my mind because his perception of what was happening with that kid and his perception of the relationship was so different from what one assumes it would be that I've never. And as soon as he said that, I thought, this is a story.

So you were wooed away essentially based on this story to the times. Yeah. When you got there, what, because again, like I just think about how diverse your career has been at some points. Like you were kind of writing about everything and your scope was very broad. and then, you know, becoming the movie credit became being narrow, when you got to the times where you, again, were you focused in a certain area? And I would imagine that people specialize.

The Times actually, so I wrote, emanating in part from the long story about the pedophile, I ended up writing with a friend right before I left the free, I mean, while I was at the free press, a book about child sexual abuse by Catholic priests because that was just coming to light then. And that taught me a lot about, like, the Catholic Church kind of branded me a little bit as a religion writer.

And I had also written other religion stories for the free press before I became a movie critic about the Catholic Church's mill for annulments, various things like that. So the Times kind of just wanted to bring me aboard. They thought I'd be an interesting person to have on staff over time. The slot they actually hired me for was as a religion writer on the New York desk, on the Metropolitan Desk. That's nuts.

Yeah. But then as soon as I got there, they ended up just kind of in a sort of spontaneous way assigning me to so many different things that I never really ended up doing the job they hired me for. How funny. What was the path that led you into becoming the first of food critic and then you were like the chief restaurant critic. Well we only really have one the restaurant critic is the chief restaurant we only kind of have one. The one. I mean we have someone who writes the the hungry city column it's called now used to be called 25 and under. But the restaurant critic is the person who's really doing. No, I mean, basically, when I began at the Times, one of the top editors said to me,

we don't hire people for jobs. I mean, in a very classically times haughty way. But in a true way, said, we don't hire people for jobs. We hire them for careers. Oh, well. And in my case, that turned out to be true. I mean, that was, so I was always given the sense and the feeling at the times that I could follow my curiosity in different directions. And in that same vein, I was often nudged in different directions. So when I was on the Metropolitan Desk, I ended up writing the long profiles for the newspaper of Ruth Messenger

when she was running against Rudy Giuliani, of Chuck Schumer, when he was running against Alphonse DiMato. And they really liked the way those turned out, so then they had me writing more and more politics. And I ended up in D.C. for a while and I ended up on the presidential camp. I mean, it was sort of like that.

Just one thing led to another. Then at a later point, they needed to replace the Rome correspondent, and they knew that I both knew something about the Catholic Church and thus the Vatican and they knew that I was Italian-American

and had a little bit of skill And did you move to Rome? And I moved to Rome for two years. Oh, your life. So excellent. Yeah, no, I was the, so we have a, we have a bureau in Rome and I was the, I was the,

and the title is Rome Bureau Chief, but really you're the only correspondent. Right, I was going to say, how, how, you're the chief of a bureau of you, your assistant and two clerical workers. Right, and did you have an officer? Were you just working out of your apartment?

No, we had an office. We still do, yeah. Right in, right on the edge of Campo de Fiore. That must have been fabulously delicious. Oh, I mean, I mean, you're on the road a lot, a lot. I mean, and on the road, not just in Italy, which was a lot of fun, but I mean, many times I was, you know, called at the last minute and told that, you know, there had just been some sort of bombing in Israel and the correspondent there needed help or was on vacation. And so, I mean, there were several times where I was on an LL flight, you know, five hours

after being told I needed to be on it. I was on an LL flight from Rome to Tel Aviv. You know, and I was in Turkey for a while. I mean, you bop around a lot, but when I was in the office, I mean, lunch would be walking out to one of the amazing cheese shops on Campo de Fiore and getting like a big wedge of sheep's milk ricotta and then going to the place that made the best pizza Bianca and then kind of going and sitting on the edge of a fountain, spreading the ricotta on the pizza Bianca. Yeah. Yeah. So when you were not on the road, you know, dodging Israeli tanks, you ate well. Yeah. Did you, did that life afford, I mean, without getting too personal, although this is a very personal question, did that life afford you the ability to have relationships? It did. I was involved with an American guy. So I also covered Greece from Rome. And I was involved with an American guy I met in Athens on my very first trip to Athens during my tenure. And so for about a year and a half, I had, I just love saying this because it sounds so, I had a Rome-Athens relationship. Oh, yeah. It's about a two-hour flight. So every other weekend, if I wasn't on the road, he would come to Rome. And so we'd see each other twice a month. And then he ultimately took a leave from work and moved in with me in Rome for the last, like, five months I was here.

What precipitated the move back to the States? The restaurant critic job. Oh, okay. So let's hear it. Or just that they knew that you were eating ricotta bufala every day on your pizza Bianco. No, no, they needed a new restaurant critic. They were not entirely jazzed by some of their obvious options, and they began to think outside the boxes they told me, and they called me and said, you know,

because I wrote my news writing tended toward news features and that sort of thing, and they said, would you be interested in talking to us about this? And I thought it was so absurd. You know, you and I were talking about adventures and risks. Yeah. And I thought, I went back and I read like an entire year, year of Ruth Reischel's reviews, an entire year of William Grimes' reviews. He was the one who most recently. And I thought, I think I see how this is done. I think I could do it. And then I thought

if they end up deciding they have confidence that I can do it, then I'm going to take a deep breath and do my best and have confidence that I can at least give it a good shot. I remember, and I probably don't have this right, because my memory never serves me rightly. but I remember Ruth Reischel talking about the fact that she had to disguise herself a lot to go eat meals. I wonder if your life evolved in that way, if in the beginning your anonymity was, you know, it was, you know, we're able to hold onto it for a certain period of time and then it slowly vanished. I mean, I could drop your name. I mean, I just use your name all the time even when we're not dining together, by the way. No, I'm joking.

But like I just, you know, now, I mean, you know, now you're in editing. People know who you are. There might have been a time where for very short. Well, when your restaurant critic, you make all your reservations and fake names, and you change the fake name all the time. Disguises, I think every restaurant critic has done a few disguises in certain situations. It becomes more of a mythology than it is truth. Because the truth of the matter is, when your job is to go out to eat every night. Every night, and was it like that?

Every single night? Every night. And when every restaurant that matters in the city has gone to great lengths to know what you look like as best they can. passing around photos, all of that stuff. The truth of the matter is you would have to wear a really good disguise for it to do you any good. And wearing a really good disguise takes a lot of energy and effort. It's not something you can do nightly. So I think Ruth disguised herself a little more frequently than others did.

And so she rightly kind of talked about it because it's great copy, so to speak. That wasn't what she did every night. That's not what anybody does. It's not what Pete Wells does every night. Now it's not what I did every night. it just isn't it's not a workable way to do a job that is a treadmill like that, you know. But as people discovered your identity and knew who you were, even when you were making reservations on Rainalia, so you'd come in and at least for the first few minutes.

Yeah. Yeah. For the first few, yeah, it was, I mean, it was, one of the funny things is you could, you could so tell when they figured it out. It was, I mean, the posture of everyone working in the restaurant. I mean, and I'm not saying this in a self-important way. I was often amazed by it, but the truth of the matter is, I'm just telling you how they look at the world. They cared more about me than anybody else that came into the restaurant when I was critic.

They care more about Pete Wells now. They cared more about Sam Sift. And it is the amount of power they attribute to the Times critic and the degree to which they care about trying to make sure for both reasons of business and reasons of vanity that that review comes out as well as possible. It's just intense. And you could, the moment they figured out who you were, every server, every employee of the restaurant's face changed. I mean, it was almost like the ions in the atmosphere, just changing entirely.

You always knew it. And I always used to laugh because they make a point of knowing everything they can about the critic. Music tastes. Like, I was leaked emails that would go back and forth between, like, publicists about, like, based on things I'd written or things they'd, like, heard or whatever, like, what music I liked so that they could maybe, like, if I was there and they had it on their playlist.

You know, so I was a big Bjork fan at the time. I'm guessing that during my tenure as restaurant critic, Bjork had better inroads into New York City restaurants than ever before. But, you know, but it became comical because if the meal began and they hadn't, didn't know who I was, and I had a, I mean, I don't mean this in a sexist way, I'm just giving you straight reporting or gay reporting. And I had like a 45-year-old female server. Right. The next course, it was suddenly the best-looking 27-year-old guy server they had because they just figured that's going to work out better. Now, of course, mattered not a wit to me. I'm there doing a job. But it was funny. I mean, that's the, that's the way they roll.

Yeah. I mean, in the end, service is problematic for every restaurant, right? But it's not, it's never the, it's the food. It's always the food. It is. Yeah. And they can't, you know, people say, well, how do you then have a correct appraisal of a restaurant? And the food. And the food. The menu is what the menu is. They can't change that. They can't change their ability. The suppliers are who the suppliers are. The recipes are what, you know, they can take an extra, they can make an extra effort to do things perfectly. But if their fundamental, like, approach is misguided.

If they're not getting good ingredients, all of that stuff, they can't change that overnight. Right. And if they're not, if they're not really up to service enough, they will be as spasdick when they're over-vigilant as they would be when they were under-vigilant. So you still do get a very, very accurate sense. of a restaurant. What has been the most operatic meal you've had?

And I don't necessarily mean the best. Well, oh, that's easy. That's really easy. Early in my tenure as restaurant critic, I did a sort of long article, like on the state of avant-garde food. And it was pegged to the opening of a restaurant in Chicago called Alinia.

This is a place for people out there who don't want to bother Googling where, like, they print their menus, on edible paper and they blow Well, there's like one dish kind of had something that was almost like pot smoke wafting up from Pine needles and they have a bar

by the way which is I actually love it's ridiculous It's a beautiful restaurant, it's a beautiful restaurant It's operatic is the right word I mean it's very extreme It's very like performance art of food But it was because of that So during that So that I could write about it

in relation to the sort of grandest temple of avant gar cooking I went to El Bully in Spain And in order to get in, that was not an anonymous visit. I wasn't reviewing El Bully per se. And the only way to get in because the wait list was like years long, which we'll recall and say, I'm frankly, when I'm the New York Times, I want to come.

You know, all the editors agreed that that was okay because it was on foreign soil. Right. Well, because of that, Faron Adria didn't serve us, as I talk about this, it's still bludson. He didn't serve us the longest tasting menu we had that night, which would have been like 18 courses. Right.

He wanted to serve that and a collection of his greatest hits. Oh, God. And we, I went with a friend from Barcelona. We were at the table for five and a half hours. Oh, God. And it was 36 courses. But that's punishing, though. How was that?

Did you... Well, first of all, courses in me like that are small. They're small, yeah. And there were dishes as we went along that I only had a few bites of. I don't know. You somehow get into your game. It's like, how does a football player in pain make it through the fourth quarter? You just kind of like go into game mode.

Now when I say it to you, it sounds impossible. And yet I've done 16 courses and wanted to kill myself. This was 36. It's insane. Maybe it was 32, but I have to go back and look, but I think it was 36. And then, I mean, like the 20th item, I mean, look, this is what you do for living. So your way of experiencing food is going to be different than the average person's way of experiencing a meal. And I am a pretty big foodie, so I think I'm pretty thoughtful about the way I eat.

You and I've eaten together. you're not more than a pretty big food. You're very educated. You're fun to eat with. Oh, I'm glad. She's fun to eat with. Thank you. Oh, God. Frank Brutie gave me a review. Four stars. Four star dining companion. Thank you so much. My posture's totally changed. But I find myself in a state of like intense fatigue, like 12 or 13 courses into a meal.

Like I can't taste anything anymore. I find the food oppressive no matter how delicious it is. So, I mean, again, you were doing it for a living. so probably your approach is very different. Well, you know, the other thing is you actually do, this sounds really stupid and obvious, but you really do learn. And you do this too, I know, because, I mean, you're a great-looking woman who has to be by dint of your business. Yes, I can't go crazy.

I mean, you take a five-mile run before dinner. Right, right. And you don't eat anything until dinner. Right. Because you realize, like, you know, the hardest thing, and it really is hard, is if you are someone who truly loves the whole dining experience, as you. doing as I do. You are going to be drinking wine during it.

You're going to have a cocktail. And you should, because if you're evaluating restaurants as they're supposed to be evaluated, you need to consume them with the exuberance that anyone else would. The hard thing about the 32 or 36-course meal is staying sufficiently sober to the end. Oh, yes. The biggest rookie move with a long meal like that, with like an extended kind of coarse meal is doing the pairing. And every time I've ever done a wine pairing,

I'm like, I can, I do it. I'm like, never again because you are just fucked up by the end. And there's no way around that even if the pores are tiny, even if you finish every glass. And it's mitigated a little bit by the amount of food. But, yeah. It just accumulates over time. I mean, the next morning, both because of that and because of the amount of food, I mean, I remember I did a meal at the French laundry where they figured out who I was.

And although they didn't say that, they said, would you like the chef to cook for you? And that's an offer made to a certain number of tables, as you know, every night at a restaurant like per se or the french laundry so saying yes is what any consumer would do it's not like saying yes i frank bruni would like i mean you're not really acknowledging yes of course yeah i mean you'd almost be drawing more attention to say no and i remember the french laundry doing like an 18 course meal i've done i had this exact and that was much richer because it's more traditionally french than el boulis and i remember the next morning kind of waking up and i don't think i was right for days oh yeah richness the wine pairings you know i did that i mean we probably

had a similar experience where we had the same thing and they cooked for us and when they do that, we got, I think it was the same thing, 17 or 18 courses, two iterations of an idea. So if it was a fish thing, my husband got a cold item, I got a hot item. And so you would swap.

Yeah, so we ate every, and we literally every bite. They're showing you their encyclopedic dazzle. Right, their versatility and the fact that they can execute on all these levels and we were doing a pairing, it was, and they don't typically do this in these restaurants, It was like a bottomless pairing. Like they just kept pouring wine

until we finished that course. I walked into the kitchen. I'm sure, hopefully I don't remember. I insulted everyone. I said, I literally think that was amazing. I'm about to have a food baby. They did not think that was a cute thing to say. And then I...

Well, they were hoping to do it. I mean, it was an accurate description of how I felt at the time, which was that my body was stretched beyond, like, you know, the point of breaking. And then I remember going back to the hotel and falling face down onto the bed and not moving until the morning.

Like clothes on, no brushing of teeth, just spent. I mean, this is a very Western set of experiences, you know. You know, it's a good problem to have. It is. I mean, it's interesting because I think everybody out there has fantasized about being a food critic or being a movie critic. And you'd done them. I've dabbled in both.

You know, I got to sit in for Roger Ebert at the movies when he first got ill. And I remember always thinking, you wouldn't be so cool to see movies for a living. But again... I thought it was cooler to eat for a living than see movies. Really? Yeah, because I don't... The legacy of the years I was restaurant critic

is I don't very often by volition. I mean, you and I have gone to Sushi Nakazawa together. When it's my choice now, I tend to dine in a frumpier... I mean, good places I still love. But I tend not to do the higher iteration levels of formality or length meals because I had a little bit of my taste for the four-hour meal bled out of me. Yeah, absolutely.

But I didn't lose my love of restaurants at all. Oh, good. I love them just as much. And I love going out to eat. My years as a movie critic, it took me several years afterwards to regain my movie buffdom. Because when you're seeing seven movies a week, and four of them are terrible. Right. And sometimes three in a day.

I mean, it just, yeah. It really, it definitely leached my love of movies for many years and took me a while to get that back. Where for some reason, maybe I just love food more, being restaurant critic to not do that same thing to my love of restaurants. There's nothing, I'm going to a new city. You know, I'm immediately hopping online and figuring out where I want to eat. You know, I find that so much fun. I think it's such a great, it's such a great organizing principle for travel. It's such a great way to experience a place. You know, it's a wonderful prism. None of that has changed for me. That's fascinating. And I mean, that's wonderful, too, because I think you and I probably

feel similarly about eating out, which is every, when I'm going to a new place that everything else is organized around that focal point. Where am I going to eat? Yes. Yeah. Everything else kind of falls out of that. Yeah, and probably where you choose to take your trip. I mean, there are places you and I probably haven't traveled because we can't build in the kind of eating component we'd really like to. Oh, right. I'm actually very sad that El Bully is closed, but like I want to go to Copenhagen just so I can eat at Noma, right? I've been to Noma. Have you? Did you like it? Um, you know, yes, it was, it was, it's a, you know, it's a wonderful, wonderful place and it's, it's also just like El Bully and like the best restaurants. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

a discrete experience unlike any other. It's on this sort of wharf, on the water. You know, you can see a bunch of Copenhagen from the... It just, the whole... It's a kind of organic, discrete, contained, perfect experience. Well, good, because I'm going to go to Copenhagen just to eat there. In the cities, have you been there? No, I haven't.

It's... I'm not a huge Scandinavia fan. Oh, I know we talked about this. I love Scandinavia. You love Stockholm. Yeah. And I do not. Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Copenhagen, I don't know if I'm saying it correctly. I liked enormously.

It had a lightness of spirit that Stockholm doesn't. Interesting. I'm very excited about going there. Completely off-paced, and we're getting back on. What precipitated you stopping being the food critic? Or is that a job for everyone that just comes to a natural end at some point? Because people see you coming. No, they seldom get rid of a restaurant critic

or restaurant critics seldom get rid of themselves for that reason. Interestingly, I was the critic for five and a half years, and that's about a normal lifespan. My successor, I think, only did it for two. But my predecessor had done it for four and change. Ruth had done it, I think, for five and a half or six. Her predecessor done it for like six or six. You know, it's a normal time.

In my case, it was really simple. I had a memoir I wanted to write, and I had committed to writing it. I had committed to a due date, a publication time. And so a year and a half, two years before I ended, I had sort of kind of fixed that end date because when my memoir came out, I wanted to do the normal things one does to publicize it. I wanted to go out and talk about it. And that required being photographed, going on TV, doing all those things that you don't do as a critic because you don't make it

easy for people to recognize you. Right. And so, you know, when my memoir came out, I was on nightline talking about it. I was, you know, Good Morning America. I was doing all those things that an author wants to do, and I could not have done that if I remained in the job. You're too young and beautiful to write a memoir. So what was it that... Young and beautiful. It sounds like a Lana Del Rey song. Are you a Lana fan?

I'm not a Lana fan. I'm a fan. And I saw her live at the Austin City Limits Music Festival, the most recent one, which, by the way, is just a really fun time. And she was so terrific. And as she sang, there was a cigarette holder, like, attached to her. She looks so vintage, you know. Right, yeah.

And retro. And there was a cigarette holder with a cigarette attached to the microphone. And the way she would just take drags on it and the way she sang, I thought, this is just sex at a microphone as possible. I think she's singular. That's interesting. I mean,

it's also, you need to see somebody live to really get a sense of what they are as an artist, I think. And to know if they, I kind of feel like they've got to, like, that's when they got to put up or shut up. Right. Right.

When they perform live. Legitimate, you know, legitimize whatever kind of image they've created for themselves. I mean, I didn't, I'm not a big fan of that music, but I was blown away by Lady Gaga.

at the Oscars because I love her I didn't love that kind of music so much I don't I don't like the music and that's not my music yeah but but I mean I knew that she had a voice but I thought that was a high wire act yeah I just thought I mean the the boldness mm-hmm you can't hide when you're performing a medley you can't vocally no no no no you're performing a or auto tuning that's yeah yeah and and and it was also a big hard right turn for her so it's very exposing in that way as well right it was so different from how people it was the first time I kind of really, I mean, I've admired her success for lack of a better verb, but it was the first time I really admired her.

I thought, wow. Right. You, no matter what your motive, you're taking a leap. Right. Good for you. Yeah, good for you for being brave. And, boy, you got some metal. You got some, you got some, you got some, yeah.

I mean, she's, I knew she was also, she could play the piano and that she was actually kind of legitimate artist with, like, real skills. But I just hate that kind of music so much that I struggle through that part of the show. Hate is a big word, but, you know, I don't, people, you know, there are many ways in which I, I, I, I, I punch the, the gay ticket perfectly. I hate musicals. I hate Broadway musicals. People always look at me. I find them repugnant. I just, I just, I mean, there are a couple over time I've enjoyed, but by and large, if you said to me, you shall never, ever again see a musical in the theater, I would do a cartwheel. Yeah. Assuming I could get my, you know, Ovoid body into a cartwheel. We can do it together as a team. I can spot you. I've only, they're only two. In Book of Mormon, And once.

I liked Book of Mormon. I loved Book of Mormon. But I didn't like it as much as everybody else. Right. Because my anti-musical factor. So intense. Yeah. Well,

anytime someone sings the word cunt at the top of their lungs, they have me. That's very, yeah. So what have we learned about Aisha? We've learned that you find semen comforting? Who doesn't, though? I'm going to carry that one with me for a long time. I was going to ask you, before we talk about your newest book, what precipitated the desire to write the autobiography.

Was it some things, because a lot of times that's precipitated by life experience. Something specific happens. I had a specific story I wanted to tell because that was already late enough in the kind of memoir that I didn't mind like, oh, I'm going to write a memoir. I had struggled earlier in my life with eating disorders. I had a period in college when I was bulimic.

I had a period in my 30s before I went to Rome when I got really heavy. And so when I was asked to be the restaurant, the first reaction when I started talking to friends about I'm considering this was like, oh my God, how could you do that? How could you, given the roller coaster with eating, you've ridden over your life, how could you? And I remember saying to myself at the time, if I'm correct, and if this doesn't go to hell,

if I'm not 400 pounds at the end of this, it's because I figured some stuff out about my relationship with food. And I just also thought it's just, that's a story, you know? A person who's been tormented by food and has never been able to control his consumption very well, who's been in a binge, purge rhythm his whole life becomes restaurant critic, that felt to me like a story I would read. And it was my story, so I went to write it. Did you struggle with food as you had to write about it and eat it constantly?

I found it. I was at my life thinnest in a most sustained way when I was restaurant critic, because when you are lashed to food like that, you are forced to behave responsibly. Because when you can never say to yourself, I'm going to go on a three-day fast, when you can never promise yourself, a purge and a kind of stringent diet

because your job is to keep eating and eating, you never go off the deep end of gluttony. Right, right. And you know another meal is coming in a lot of ways. So you don't feel that panic, like I'm going to start dieting next week, so I'm going to have this. this steak and some of yours since you didn't finish it.

No, because there's a bad or a good meal, but there's food around every corner. Wow, that's incredible. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, we're recording at the Soho House, and right around this time of day, a lady comes around. They're trying to turn down service?

Oh, no, no, and there's a lady out there with a bar. There's a rolling bar that comes around. And you sent her away? Did she knock? I didn't hear her knock. Oh, she knocked, sweetheart. Oh, no. But I didn't know there was gin on the other side of that.

Do you want a cocktail? Do you have to go to the gym? I'm going to the gym later. Oh, how awful. Because I was, my previous podcast did want whiskey, and that was what we had for lunch. Yeah, this is a lovely thing here. They bring them, and it's a little free card. They'll make you a cocktail right in your room.

Like dim sum cocktails. I love it. Service with a smile. You stop being the critic, and now, what is your title now? So now I'm an op-ed columnist. Okay. I was going to give you some kind of at-large. No, no, I'm on staff.

I'm one of the staff op-ed columnist who writes a twice-a-week opinion. Do you get to write anything about anything that you like? Technically you do, but I think if you got really, really strange, they would come and say, you know, your choices are bothering us. I mean, I mean, they want me to write a certain amount about politics because I've covered that in the past. They want me to write a certain amount about culture. I don't mean a prescribed amount, but they want me to occasionally write something that's a little bit cultural because I have that in my background. They want me to occasionally write or more than occasionally things that have politics in them because I've done that. I've covered a campaign.

I've covered the white house, that sort of thing. You seem to be doing some religion, some pieces on religion as well, or religion and culture. I do some religious stuff. I do some gay stuff. I mean, I talk a little bit. I mean, occasionally I write columns that are reflective of the, you know, incredible change in this country over the decades that I've been an adult, you know, in what it means to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered. I don't know what it's like to be transgendered. But my point is... There are three or four more letters in that acronym now that I... Q-Q-I-Q-Q-A. Yeah, it's an alphabet soup.

I'm constantly trying to just not put my foot my own mouth. I'm failing miserably at every turn. What brought you to education, though, because specifically your latest book is about education. Right, and I've been writing quite a bit in my column about higher education. Because I just think it's a fascinating moment right now. So, I mean, part of it is I have 11 nieces and nephews and the oldest of them. Catholic family? No, no, no.

No. No. My parents were married in Catholic Church. My mother converted from Methodism to Catholicism to Mary. to marry my father, but they were very lax. Okay. It was, you know, if everything lined up perfectly, maybe we'd go to church on Sunday, if not, no big deal.

It was not a home in which there was a lot of Bible and God or anything like that. 11 kids amongst three siblings. That's a lot of kids. Well, one has a Brady Bunch situation. So four of those kids are in a... Blended family. And then my, well, my younger brother had four kids, but it wasn't a Catholic thing.

I just think he and his wife liked kids. like kids still, I hope. And we're economically able to have that number without worrying about it. And my older brother has three. But the oldest of my niece and nephews got to college admissions age. And that coupled with the fact that like you, I read a lot, it became clear to me just how crazy certain segments of our country have gotten about college admissions and getting kids into the right school.

And that struck me, but it also struck me that it's a mirror right now for a lot of stuff in the country. I mean, we're a country that is obsessed right now with brand and status. And the just ridiculously feverish desire to go to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, is a reflection of that. I mean, there's always been an order to go to those places, but it's at a level now that says something about that. I also think we've become a country where as the division between rich and poor has become larger, I think there's a sense among a lot of parents and their children that making the decisions that get you on the rich side of the line are more important than ever because there's such a chasm between the two. And that has raised the currency of the quote-unquote elite schools. All of that I just found fascinating.

And I thought it said a lot about our country and so I began writing about it. And then you went and you were like a guest professor and you taught at one of these. I taught at Princeton last year. Yeah, yeah. I was invited to do a sort of teaching fellowship thing. have, you know, four of us a semester, three of us maybe, who teach journalism slash writing classes as visiting professors. How did you find that experience?

Did that help inform the book? It did. It did because it gave me, here's the thing that really kind of struck me and was part of a prompt for the book was because I was teaching a food writing class. I gave Princeton several options and they said, oh, food writing, kids are going to love that. it was oversubscribed. So they limit these seminars to 16, and I think I had 4850 applicants.

When they suspect that it's going to be more than you can accommodate, they have them all write a long letter to you and submit a writing sample. Basically, like, here's why I should be in your class. And so I read all of those. And I read them and I remembered them somewhat, and then I assembled the class. And less about who were just the best writers,

but I wanted to make sure I had a couple of people who were like, I only eat organic and I'm really into that and a couple people who were much less. I wanted a really diverse class. I didn't want all people who were, you know, cooking in their dorm rooms, five-course meals, whatever. And about halfway through the semester, it occurred to me that I would say the majority of kids in the class had never written anything as an assignment.

That was as lively and elegant and whatever as their letter about why they should be in the class. And I just thought that was really odd. And I started mentioning that to fellow, I shouldn't say fellow faculty members because I was kind of a fake faculty member. But I started mentioning that to professors at Princeton who'd gotten to know who were there all the time. And almost to a person, they said, well, that doesn't surprise me.

And I said, well, why? And they said, well, because they're at Princeton because they're really good at getting into things. And they're at Princeton as kids are at Harvard, whoever, because they prioritized getting in. So once they got into your class, that was half or three quarters or all of what was important. And they even took it further and said,

one of the reasons so many of them ended going to Wall Street is because that's the next culling. That's the next thing where you compete to get a slot, and that's what they've been trained to do. And it made me think that this exaggerated value we place on the obstacle course of getting into the most selective schools teaches a set of values that are not really great values. It teaches that this is all a game about getting through the door.

And if that's what you're focused on, you're not focused on what you're doing in the room that you just entered, which is so much more important. Yeah, there was, I don't know why I'm going to quote Will Smith, but I just read an article with him in Asquire and he was saying he started focusing more on path than less on goal. You know, that like, and I think that probably in some ways embodies what the book about is about, which is that it's really about experiential path. And, like, you know, obviously the path leads to a goal, but it's not about, like, knocking things off your list. This is about, like, building a set of experiences and that those are going to be much more important and much more impactful than just that, because after a while, whatever name was on your resume is not going to matter anyway. No, I mean, you know, the older you get, I mean, I can't remember, you know, right away. I mean, as soon as I started getting clips and as soon as I started being judged by, like, what I was writing, no one ever asked me where I went to. Where you went to school.

Undergrad, graduate. But, you know, Princeton, amazing school, Dartmouth, where you went, amazing school. And you can get the most amazing education there. But they're amazing not because it was so hard to get in. They're amazing because of the wealth of the things you can do there. And to lose sight of them as theaters in which to do all the stuff and to focus on it mainly as this credential you've attained. I mean, you're being shallow in a way that you're really short-changing your, yourself in your own life. Right. And you're not exploiting what, like you said, even your experience

at Chapel Hill, did I exploit this for everything it was worth? Yeah. And I think every experience, you can look at every experience in your life like that, regardless, college, a job, you know, a sabbatical. Any, have I sucked every bit of opportunity out of this moment that I could. Sucked the marrow from the bone. Deeply. Yeah, no, I mean, but I mean, so one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was I really wanted to say to kids, loud and clear, and to their parents, like, these, four years are not about, it's not a prodig. Right. It's not, it's not just a kind of logo and a brand that you have, that you've attained.

These are four years that, that are for you to kind of like, you know, just rummage around and roam around in a way that you'll never do again. And so stop, stop focusing on the name of your school and start focusing on the quality of your time there. Right. Because, you know, state university, small private college, almost all of them, because of how bless this country is in terms of almost all of them have an astonishing spectrum of experiences for you. I don't want to run out of road. So we should do self-inflicted wounds. Now, do you have a story

that you want to tell based on what we were talking about? Well, I'm going to go back to when I was in college and I was doing summer internships. I did two internships in a row at Newsweek, which was then, you know, a force much larger than this today. And I guess I got a little too comfortable my second summer there because I was fooling around a little bit and one of my fellow interns, an intern who had a very chirpy voice in a very kind of naive manner, which is why you wanted to sort of goof on her, sent me a message one day saying that she was responsible for fact-checking a column called Transitions that took note of who got married that week, who died. And one of the things she was supposed to do for the writer was collect options. Like here's who had milestones this week

that you might want to put in. So she messes. messaged me on what was then like an email, the A-text message system, and she said, if anybody's died this week that I might not know about, let me know. And it just seemed like a comical, absurd question. So I said, well, Mary Tyler Moore kicked the bucket this morning, but of course you know that. Then I waited for the message to come back saying really, really. Actually, right away, she said, really, and I said, of course. And then I waited for one more, really. And then I was going to, well, that set off a chain of events that by the time, Like within an hour, Mary Tyler Moore's publicist was apparently, within the next hour, this had traveled so far that before I corrected the error, the Newsweek Powers that Be had called out to Los Angeles Bureau to get them to work on the life of Mary Tyler Moore because maybe she was such an American icon that should be a cover story. At the least, it should be several pages. After that, apparently Mary Tyler Moore's publicist was routinely calling the media to dispel the rumor that she died.

Oh my God. Which, thank God, what saved me is no one on the outside ever knew where it had come from. Right, right. The next day in the New York Post, there was like a page three or page five story headlined, Mary dispels death rumor. And it was about how Mary Tyler Moore had to beat back this bizarre rumor. And I remember getting called in by the woman who was in charge of interns and being read the right act. And I thought, that's it.

Right. I've like in one fell swoop with one stupid joke, I've ended any possibility of a journalism career ever. But somehow that self-inflicted wound was not fatal. Yes, it was not a fatal wound. You persevered. And by the way, this chirpy intern should have fact-checked it. Well, she did, but what happened was after I had said,

no, I'm not kidding, one time, thinking I'd get another one, she had messaged the writer who had stepped out of her office, and said, oh my God, Mary Tyler Moore died, and thus the game of telephone began. Right, right. Or the chain or the link of chair, whatever the right metaphor is. There's some, there are some aphorism about whispers,

but I don't have it in my head. No. And I'm a Mary Tyler Moore fan, so I feel bad about this. I mean, you could have picked any celebrity out of the ether, but I don't even know why I picked, like, to this day, I've no idea why that name, you know, why I didn't say Charo or, you know, or.

Thank you so much. This was a great conversation. Thanks for having me. Thank you. was my conversation with the lovely Frank Bruny, which we did in Manhattan, same place that I recorded the Dean Winters episode at the Soho House. I love New York. I go there a lot.

And part of the reason for that is because I have a lot of friends there. Part of the reason for that is work. And part of the reason is that Curgeon Stone has some key and critical elements in place on that side of the country. So it's cool because I get access to people over there. I wouldn't get access to in L.A. And I'm always trying to find great, interesting people to talk to and bring you on this show. If there's an apologia for this episode, it's,

that I was such a naughty doggy while Frank was so well behaved. I mean, he really was circumspect, and I was my normal, sloppy, cursing, ridiculous self. But I don't really apologize for that. You know that. You know the Uploja isn't even a real apology. Not legitimate in any way. The Uploja is the Latin slash podcast equivalent of I'm sorry you feel that way. So not an apology in any way whatsoever. But a fun way to spend a few moments at the end of every podcast. Amusing ourselves, you and me as a team. You are my army. You are Legion. You know what to do. go visit me, follow me, friend me, Facebook, like, Twitter, follow, Instagram, Tumblr, all of the things.

Come say hi at girl on guy.net. Come get your army gear. Get ready for our annual fan appreciation event at Comic Con this July. I know it's only just April now, but that is going to come at us so fast that it will fly by whizzing at the speed of sound and making our ears pop and our eyes water, both with speed, wind, and maybe the tears of our own failure. not prepared to pick up that phone on the 4th of July and call in to get those tickets. So be ready for that. That is coming. Lots of fun things coming down the road this year. And I will continue

to keep you posted. You know whose line is it anyway? Season 3 premieres on April 17th. And you can always enjoy me every day on CBS on The Talk and in season 6 of Archer, which I have to tell you, has shaped up to be pretty fucking monster. Kick ass in every single possible way. So I hope you've enjoyed this season of archer because we are very proud of it and there is more to come you guys are my army you are delightful you are expansive you are magnanimous and you are legion and i will talk to on the next one late girl on guy is a production of hot machine blowing shit up since 2009