Performance politics and PR theater

How does an elite Millennial politics reporter wind up having phone sex with and giving campaign advice to the 70-year-old emerging fascist she’s reporting on?

Most of that should stay between Olivia Nuzzi and her therapist. What we do know is that American Canto, Nuzzi’s new book, is a memoir (or maybe novel) made for the conspirituality age, in which raging toxic roided-up hypocritical male charisma is always the center of attention.

The domineering ghoul is the pole star of interest and fascination, always moving too fast and chaotically to understand—unless you know how fascism accelerates. We scavenge these pages for clues about Kennedy and how the hell this journalism disaster happened.

Show Notes

Zyn pouches and American Masculinity

The Olivia Nuzzi Comeback Is Everything Wrong With Modern Media

A Serious Journalism Scandal Hiding Inside a Frivolous Sexual One

The Scandalous Rollout Was the Best Part of Olivia Nuzzi’s Memoir

119: We Are Slenderman (w/Kathleen Hale)

The first-person industrial complex: How the harrowing personal essay took over the Internet.

A Q&A with Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine on her career, covering Trump and access journalism 

Guests urged to be vaccinated at anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr’s party

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