In the current Spectator, Deborah Ross dismisses Black Widow in one paragraph - concluding, "This is, in short, a dumb film with an even dumber film trying to climb out." - and then devotes the rest of her review to The Truffle Hunters.
The pandemic brought a great deal of suffering, but not from FOMO (fear of missing out). Rory Sutherland, in this week’s Spectator, suggests that some people actually enjoyed the lockdowns because of ‘jomo’ (“the joy of missing out”). It seems a very English, or at least a very Speccie, concept.
On TV this morning the reporter doing a story on electric vehicles kept referring to them as EVs, but then the journalist in the studio, discussing the cost with him, talked not about the ‘price’ but the ‘price point,’ as if desperately trying to put more syllables back into the segment.
In 2007, Drew Barrymore was quoted on the cover of a magazine saying, “Screw Hollywood, I’m going to be a travel writer.”
Her comment touched a nerve. (I wrote a “Letter to a Young Travel Writer” for my travel section.) For nearly two decades I had worked at a job that was generally perceived to be something anyone could do. Yet I had specifically set out to become a travel writer – living abroad, learning languages, reading travel classics.
So I was always a little annoyed when people told me, as they invariably did, that they would love to have my job. They understood neither its workings – shoe leather reporting, often in places where you don’t speak the language – nor the lengthy apprenticeship I had undertaken to get it. That a famous actor had now joined the legions of the envious was, admittedly, somewhat flattering, but it reinforced the notion that mine was a profession devoid of qualifications.
Yesterday I turned on ‘CBS This Morning’ and saw Drew Barrymore sitting with Gayle King and Anthony Mason. She was not being interviewed by them; she was adding her voice to their discussion of the day’s news. She wore big glasses and a serious expression and, at one point, she conducted an interview with one of the correspondents. She was only a guest host, I eventually learned, and only for two days. But I sympathized with all the talented, experienced journalists who deserve a place at that table. And I say to them sincerely: I’d prefer she were writing travel stories.
In yesterday's New York Times, a paid obituary for Pierre S. du Pont IV, former Delaware Governor and Congressman, appeared below the staff-written one for Billie Hayes, an actor who played a witch on TV.