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Liveleak with Vivek
Pobody's nerfect! 🤷♂️
Screaming in out of nowhere with a late but strong entry for worst tab of 2023 is nearly forgotten archetypal poison-pen socialite party reporter Sally Quinn in The Washington Post with “I’m not Jewish but I love my mezuzah.” You might think you know exactly how this is gonna go off the rails but in fact it begins off the rails in that way, with the Old Testament God of the Israelites protecting Sally Quinn’s unmentionables until her original Jewish “spiritual amulet” was lost and “things began to go awry.”
Then came December. Ben and I threw a big bash for the holidays. Just before the event, the caterers called to say that two of their regular waiters were sick but they were sending replacements. I didn’t think anything of it. The party was a smash, and the last guest didn’t straggle out until almost 2 a.m. The next morning, having had a bit too much champagne, I staggered downstairs. To my consternation, several pieces of my underwear were hanging from the chandelier. Bras, panties, pantyhose — all had been raided from the dryer in the laundry room and festooned the crystal…
That did it. Ben called Artie [Buchwald “who was Jewish”] and told him he had to bring over another mezuzah right away.
Yes, your culture is her costume. Anyway, her son found a family link to “a Sephardic Jewish physician” in the 1400s, which by Daughters of the American Revolution math is totally legitimate. But Quinn transcends the entire concept of rails, absolutely departs our consensus rails-based reality, when she starts to consider who is the real victim of the war in Gaza, and who might be in the crosshairs of the Ivy League’s fanatical Hamas contingent.1
It was only then that I remembered I had a mezuzah on my door. I began to wonder whether I or my family could be targeted because of it. Would people who visited my house be safe?
If you’re not up on your Sally Quinn lore, this 2010 Vanity Fair profile by Evgenia Peretz is casually devastating.
Sally came to the Post in 1969 to report on parties for the Style section. In her employment interview, [editor Ben] Bradlee asked the 28-year-old if she could show him something she’d written. “Mr. Bradlee,” she told him, “I’ve never written anything. Not a word.” When he told his colleague editorial-page editor Phil Geyelin about this, Geyelin replied, “Nobody’s perfect.”
The next sentence mentions that Quinn “graduated at the bottom of her class at Smith.” Bradlee left his then-wife for Quinn by 1973, and they married in 1978. Pobody’s nerfect! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Like all newsletterers I desperately wish I could never mention Elon Musk again, but we all have to suffer in our assigned hell so it’s my regrettable duty to pass along the news that this weekend Musk got over that whole “firstborn child died in my arms” peccadillo and reinstated Alex Jones’ account on his white supremacist website, X dot com. Musk and Jones celebrated by having a Twitter Space with the Tate brothers, Matt Gaetz, and their whole associated clown car of fascists, where the high point was Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy taking a leak with his mic on. John Herrman considered five theories of what Musk might be trying to do with his white supremacist website X dot com:
In the beginning, it was possible, if already generous, to read Musk’s posts about the evils of woke-advertising as obscuring a more conservative plan to spin up a new subscription business while sustaining the company’s only real existing business. Classic mistake! Powerful men with posting habits should be assessed the other way around. The posts are the real deal; everything else is for show.
And Linette Lopez looked back at Musk circa 2018, “when he nearly flew Tesla into a mountain” to explain the vigorous public meltdown we’re seeing now. “He may find a way to ward off calamity, as he did then,” argues Lopez, “but this jam is much tighter than the last one.”
Like Vivek, Tucker Carlson also launched a streaming service. Tucker Plus (formerly HBO Max) sounds like a great replacement for your current media subscriptions. George Santos kept making unhinged Cameos and possibly recorded an interview with Ziwe. “Rumors are flying” about Eric Adams indictments but before you get too excited, consider who is most likely to replace him. Kelsey Weekman wrote about “slang overload,” and I am begging anyone who can’t handle “rizz” to read a single P.G. Wodehouse book. Jason Koebler: A “Russian Economist” arrived at LAX from… nowhere. Then who was plane? David Roth’s weird sandwich. And I don’t know what he’s saying, but this German priest’s flow is legit:
From The Archive: Gabriella Paiella’s classic “Oral History of the Folger’s Incest Ad” from GQ in December, 2019. Not technically from the archive because Tabs was on hiatus then, but it definitely would have been in the archive.
It’s not something I have a lot of memories about, outside of the fact that ultimately the commercial kind of seems like the brother and sister are going to have sex. That’s why we’re talking, right?
That is why we’re talking, yes.
Let’s Be Confused: The Browser today brought me Colin McGinn on “Macro and Micro Necessity.”
If X is necessarily human and is composed of micro entities that have certain properties necessarily, is Y also necessarily human given that it is composed of the same kinds of micro necessities? Are micro-modal duplicates identical macro-modally? That is, does the modal micro-world determine the modal macro-world? Do lots of little necessities fix the big necessities?
Maybe!
Today’s Song: Goldfrapp, “Twist”
It’s the last week before the holiday break and listen, I promise never to lie to you unless it’s fun so I’ll say up front I am not gonna try very hard this week. If you want to lock in that “I’ve been a paying subscriber since 2023” cred, get on it quick.
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