The recent photo of Elon Musk standing in a cabinet meeting in T-shirt and ballcap brought back an unpleasant memory for me.
In the spring of 2008, I was summoned to the managing editor’s office to discuss a redesign of the Travel section, which I had been editor of for 18 years. The m.e. sat quietly at her desk while a ballcapped young man I had never seen before explained his plans for my section. These involved discontinuing long travel narratives – three of which had landed in The Best American Travel Writing anthologies – and diminishing my presence. My column, he noted blithely, would now appear below the fold and jump inside.
I had no idea who this man was. I wondered, naturally, about his background – his knowledge of travel writing, his experience of travel. I assumed they were slim, and that he had been given the job of remaking the section primarily because of his age and his presumed ability to connect with younger readers (an oxymoron even back then).
I sat mostly speechless, and with the sudden realization that the world had changed, at least in the newsroom, and that people like me were no longer welcome. A few months later, I was laid off.
We got home last night at 9:30, just in time to see my three favorite parts of the Academy Awards: Best Live Action Short, In Memoriam, and Best Foreign Film.
This meant that my surprise and outrage at an undeserving winner came before most people’s. I Am Not a Robot was, in my opinion, the weakest of this year’s shorts, a slight story that starts out with promise – a woman unsuccessfully clicking the “I am not a robot” box on her computer screen – and then fizzles into pointless absurdity.
I have not yet seen any of the foreign films that were nominated, though, because I love Iranian cinema, and know that The Seed of the Sacred Fig was filmed in secret in Tehran, with great risk to the cast and crew (many of whom now live abroad), I was pulling for it. But I was happy for the Brazilians.
I love seeing the dead remembered – CBS Sunday Morning now pays homage to the recently departed every week – and there’s something about seeing actors, pictured in their celebrated roles, that’s beautifully uplifting: the realization that, through their movies, they will live on. It is the evening's greatest demonstration of the magic of cinema.
I still go to the movies, and I always sit through the closing credits – unless I need to use the men's room (I’m looking at you, Oppenheimer). I like sitting there as the room slowly – or these days, quickly – empties and letting the power of the movie sink in. Roger Rosenblatt, back when he reviewed movies (I think for The New Republic) stated that one should never talk about the movie, or even express an opinion on it, until one gets outside the theater.
Last night I was rewarded watching the credits roll for A Complete Unknown, not just because they were accompanied by Timothée Chalamet singing “Blowing in the Wind,” but because, in a beautiful voice, the woman in front of me sang along with him.
In the evening, we usually stream something on Netflix or Prime because there’s nothing of interest on network TV. Yet Sunday night there were three things we wanted to watch: Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special on NBC, PBS’s All Creatures Great and Small, and the first episode of the new series of The White Lotus on HBO. We watched SNL, knowing we could stream the other two later in the week. Last night we watched All Creatures Great and Small, which quoted lines from Lewis Carroll and Hughes Mearns (“I met a man who wasn’t there.”) You don’t get nonsense poetry from The White Lotus.
The New Yorker is observing its 100th birthday at the same time that “Saturday Night Live” is celebrating its 50th. The former institution has paid tribute to the latter – with a long profile of Lorne Michaels – while the latter has not reciprocated. Though, according to Maureen Dowd in yesterday’s New York Times, Michaels offered an office to William Shawn in 1987 when he was ousted from the magazine after 35 years as editor.
I have always liked John Dickerson, but as a news analyst, not a news reader. Putting him behind the desk of CBS Evening News seems like a massive misuse of talent. And there’s another man sitting next to him, Maurice DuBois. Can’t he do it himself? Two people delivering the news is not as odd as two people writing a book – “like three people having a baby,” one wag once said – but it is wasteful. It means not only an extra salary, but extra time in the daily news meeting, as decisions must be made on who is to read what.