Monday<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve all said things that didn\u2019t come out right, and it\u2019s my instinct \u2013 stand by for some counter-intuition! \u2013 that Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cquiet, piggy\u201d admonishment of a female reporter on Air Force One this week was a very weird attempt at affection, or possibly flirtation. As with everything the man does, the effect was disastrous and totally inappropriate. But rewatching the video, I saw from the president less an example of his usual bigotry and more an attempt at what looked like \u201cOK, kiddo\u201d cuteness that, catastrophically, and before I could nip it in the bud, had triggered a tiny sprig of sympathy.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t last two seconds, obviously. The day after his piggy remarks, the US president sat in the Oval Office alongside the Middle East-based tyrant Mohammed bin Salman and sucked up to him for all he was worth. There was nothing affectionate in Trump\u2019s response to Mary Bruce, the chief Whitehouse correspondent for ABC News and hero of the hour, when she asked the Saudi crown prince about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi \u2013 which, she suggested bravely, US intelligence agencies had concluded \u201cyou orchestrated\u201d \u2013 then informed the Saudi leader that \u201c9\/11 families are furious that you\u2019re here in the Oval Office\u201d, and rounded it off with: \u201cIs it appropriate, Mr President, for your family to be doing business in Saudi Arabia while you\u2019re president?\u201d (According to Forbes magazine, Trump\u2019s extended family put through $50m in business deals connected to Saudi Arabia in 2024 alone.)<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s explosive rage was well under way before she\u2019d even finished speaking, and the same thing struck one about his language as it always does: that the babyish register of calling someone a \u201cterrible person and a terrible reporter\u201d is more unnerving \u2013 more sinister in a booky wook Clockwork Orange kind of a way \u2013 than someone who speaks like a functioning adult.<\/p>\n
Tuesday<\/p>\n
For a long time, Vanity Fair mattered and its annual Hollywood Issue was a big deal to those who remember it. Those people may be amused by the decision by its new editor, Mark Guiducci, to feature an all-male line up of actors this year, subverting the usual form and joining the awkward what-about-men lobby group keen to claim underdog status for that half of the population that still makes 19 cents more on the dollar than the other half. (In Britain, the gender pay gap is still going strong, too.)<\/p>\n
Guiducci presented Glen Powell, Michael B Jordan and Andrew Garfield among others under the exhortation: \u201cLet\u2019s hear it for the boys!\u201d Hard to think of a less enticing invitation, except perhaps one to join related discourse around the \u201cstate of masculinity\u201d ignited by David Szalay\u2019s Booker win this month, which has flushed out those plucky truth-tellers who believe<\/a> male journeys aren\u2019t celebrated and that women dominate publishing to the detriment of male writers.<\/p>\n The fact that, in the past 15 years, twice as many men as women have won the Booker, or that, like teaching, one reason salaries in publishing are so low is because it has historically been a field popular with women, does not, of course, get in their way.<\/p>\n RFK Jr: so powerfully alluring to Olivia Nuzzi that she blew up her life for him. Composite: AP, AFP via Getty ImagesWednesday<\/p>\n Life isn\u2019t long enough to dwell too much on the troubled journey of Olivia Nuzzi, the former reporter for New York magazine who was fired after what, unfortunately, must be described as a \u201csexting scandal\u201d with RFK Jr \u2013 a man she had profiled for the magazine. I did, however, find myself pausing to read two related pieces this week: a long blog post<\/a> by Ryan Lizza, Nuzzi\u2019s ex-finance who was also fired \u2013 from the New Yorker in 2017 \u2013 in which his anger is so fresh it rises from the screen like mist, and the companion profile of Nuzzi in the New York Times.<\/p>\n Nuzzi, of course, has a book out \u2013 American Canto \u2013 and in Jacob Bernstein\u2019s New York Times profile<\/a> of her, I laughed out loud at the reporter\u2019s absolutely noble effort to elevate a story of hideous people doing regrettable things to a state-of-the-nation piece.<\/p>\n Bernstein writes: \u201c\u2018American Canto\u2019 is far more about bearing witness to Trumpworld and about how she believes that warped her, just as it warped the country.\u201d Yes, the centre was not holding, it was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings, and a 32-year-old publicity seeker who found a strong candidate for America\u2019s least attractive man so powerfully alluring that she blew up her life for him.<\/p>\n \u201cThe book, which comes out Dec 2, paints a picture of a nation and a personal life on fire,\u201d writes Bernstein, to which one can only rejoinder: bravo!<\/p>\n Thursday<\/p>\n And still the endless slide to the bottom goes on for the former Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson. Her new children\u2019s book was supposed to be published today, postponed from October while the Epstein scandal played out and presumably in the hope that everyone would have forgotten about her involvement by now. Sadly for Ferguson, this has not been the case and this week the book and the publicity tour were cancelled.<\/p>\n As this paper reported, Flora and Fern: Kindness Along the Way is a book about \u201ctwo rabbits learning \u2018kindness and community\u2019 during an adventure in the big city\u201d \u2013 a lovely message we will never get to enjoy, along with the book\u2019s sequel, in which Flora encounters a billionaire financier who offers to train her as a masseuse, while using a dumb, sex-addicted minor royal as bait, and learns kindness and community along the way.<\/p>\n Friday<\/p>\n Let\u2019s cleanse ourselves with this: the publication of a novel that took 30 years to write, is in seven parts and unfolds over the course of a single day. The heptalogy On the Calculation of Volume is not, thankfully, by Karl Ove Knausg\u00e5rd, but by Solvej Balle, a Danish woman who against all commercial odds has watched her 30-year endeavour become a publishing sensation, culminating this year in an inclusion on the International Booker shortlist and a long profile this week<\/a> in the New York Times. As the reporter noted after spending time with Balle on the remote Danish island where she lives, and in a phrase that falls like a balm after brushing up against Nuzzi, Ferguson et al: \u201cShe seemed happy not to have won the Booker prize.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Monday We\u2019ve all said things that didn\u2019t come out right, and it\u2019s my instinct \u2013 stand by for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":586112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-586111","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115591623903302084","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}