(Photo by me.)
Ten years ago, when I got hired by Bloomberg, travel got easier. If a story might benefit from in-person reporting, I had permission to do it. The age of the expense account ended before I got into the industry; I would never, like a few of my mentors, pitch a trip around the world and hear an editor say “sure.” But at Bloomberg, I could head to cover basically any good political story, and when I was single I’d choose a trip over any time at home. By 2016, when I was regularly spending 10 days on work trips and falling asleep at friends’ dinner tables, the most popular icebreaker I’d get in Washington was: “What are you doing here?”
I never minded that — but oh boy, do I not miss it. The true story I told people, which they didn’t believe, was that I wanted to grind as much as possible while young and unentangled because eventually I’d be neither of those things. (Probably used a less monocle-adjusting word than “entangled.”) Once I’d drained myself in a few presidential elections and written stories from all 50 states, I’d let younger, hungry people do that. It was a perk of the job! And once I got a shape of the country in my head, I could be a little more strategic about when I traveled.
Not wrong. I made a quick trip to Las Vegas for some reporting on the caucuses, and was back in D.C. on Monday. NPR asked me to talk about the conservative embrace of Zyn, CNN asked me to talk about Nevada, C-Span forced me to find a nice living room angle for a talk about Joe Manchin, and CBS News brought me to the studio — that’s the picture above — to discuss how Republicans built a primary that Donald Trump couldn’t lose.
How was Vegas itself? Most people say something like “wow” or “nice” or “good for you” if you swing a Vegas trip for work. But I’m a careful yuppie gambler. Earmark at most $200 for the tables. Walk away if comfortably up. Don’t pout when it’s gone. I ended up playing just one game, blackjack, for a friend who was in the city for the first time, had never gambled in a casino, and got talked into it as we and another colleague kept failing to find a way out of the Cosmopolitan. Technically, I guess, I won $20 off my friend on her inaugural experience with gambling. Should I admit that? Too late.
My hobby — certainly since I started writing for fun every week, probably before that — has been confronting temptation and telling it “nah.” This is pretty easy in Las Vegas. The people you should be jealous of are hidden off in the high roller rooms, and the people you don’t want to be are gambling mechanically in, usually, the worst clothes you’ve ever seen. Middle-aged people who haven’t gotten drunk in years try to bring you in on the fun, slurring every word, as you laugh nervously. It took me a few weeks (in 2021) to quit drinking any kind of soda, and took longer to see a wall of booze — booze you can carry outside, because everybody else is — and say “no thanks.” It certainly helped that, in 2012, I agreed to one round with a few other reporters who’d just finished covering the caucus, and blacked out in real screw-up fashion — missing an important call, sleeping past the hotel check-out, missing a flight home, the works. The friend who got me home, a 6’3’’ Boston Irish guy who never wobbled, told me that I did nothing more embarrassing than look at some of the unhappy guys flicking their “DATE TONIGHT?” flyers (a sound you learn to hate, fast) next to women in leather bikinis and slur: “A MORMON just won this state.” Seemed like a waste of a blackout. Bad enough that I never got that sloppy again.
Thanks for putting up with the delays, but this new normal — I squeeze out whatever minutes I can to write, not married to the Sunday deadline — is working for me.
The Best Thing I Read: Frederik Pohl’s “Gateway,” the latest stop on my tour of classic science fiction. I picked it up blind, unaware of the sequels that expand the “Heechee” universe, uninterested in the sequels that answer its the mysteries. (Feel the same about Dan Simmons and his “Hyperion” saga.) This concept was good enough. A man named Robinette is born into a stratified future earth, recognizable from the sci-fi of this era, with exploding inequality and most of humanity working as wage slaves in dangerous industries. (Ha, imagine that.) He wins the lottery, twice; first literally, getting money that funds a trip to Gateway, a dangerous frontier asteroid built by a missing alien race. (That’s the Heechee.) Space crafts have been left behind with no instructions, and the potential to explore the universe. But you kind of need instructions. Otherwise, you load up your ship with food, travel to a random location — you can’t direct it — and discover it’s a dead end, with the food running out before you can return home. Most people die doing this adventuring, but Robinette doesn’t; the book is in large part about survivor’s guilt, not something I’ve read much sci-fi about.
That was the week’s one big read. I don’t want to bet that the news’ll slow down; I do know I can knock out more books on my trip home from New York, where I’m reporting now.
Books read
Frederik Pohl, “Gateway”
Apostolos Doxiadis and Alecos Papadatos, “Logicomix”
Books purchased
Lior Phillips, “South African Popular Music”
The Best Thing I Watched: I’m still avoiding screens, breaking an addiction that was much more socially acceptable than gambling, but far more pointless. But I did watch “Squaring the Circle,” Anton Corbijn’s documentary about the UK album design firm Hipgnosis, a perfect match of artist and subject. The Boomer Doc is one of the cultural trends I like the least. You know the format.
Pick subject that reminds people born between 1946 and 1970 of their youths.
Compile file footage of the subject - Joan Didion, Albert Brooks, He-Man, etc - and b-roll of the settings. Drone footage of the New York skyline is key.
Interview the subject and mix that with talking heads who the viewer might like and know already. What’s Neil DeGrasse Tyson doing here, talking about “Defending Your Life?” Who cares? He’s fun!
Don’t love it. Did enjoy this, pushing into territory I’d mapped for my book. Jimmy Page and Robert plant go on at length about the creation of the “Houses of the Holy” gatefold, we learn about the model who got set on fire for the “Wish You Were Here” pic — great stuff.
But I had more fun discovering that Grimy Ghost!, a lost-culture account I’d loved on Vine a decade ago, had been uploading stuff to YouTube. My advice: Spend some downtime and beat the hell out of the algorithm. We’re all being recommended junk like “AI voice explains movie” and “fat guy loses weight by dancing nonstop for three years.” (Maybe you’re not getting that one.) Enough of that. Watch this guy cut up a promotional video for a dreadful “Mortal Kombat” spinoff.
The Best Thing I Heard: Musically, I’ve still been listening to Sade, and I’ve poked around some of the 1960s South African pop reintroduced by that Phillips book. But the best audio was the special Messengerdammerung episode of “Love, Journalism,” which some of the outlet’s screwed-over team commiserating about what happened. Best line: Marc Caputo’s exhausted confidence that their publication, now offline, would only be famous for its failure. “What are the World Trade Centers famous for? Fucking collapsing!”
I caught that NPR interview on Zyn and thought it was refreshingly good analysis / perspective.
Seemed like you weren’t trying to prove a point, you were just covering a story and laying out the facts at a “just right” depth for an audience (at least me, anyway) that was unfamiliar with it.