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- Notes From The Slump
Boy I’m in a slump. It’s a slumpy time of year. Wet snow slumping off the roof and mud slumping into the gutters. Slumping out of bed in the dark and slumping home from work in the dark. Is anyone else in a slump?
Donald Trump is in a slump—that rhymes, so you know it’s true.1 I guess the national political correspondent group chat finally decided that a decent interval has passed since Joe Biden died because Natalie Allison, Dan Diamond and JM Rieger in The Washington Post, as well as Frank Bruni in The New York Times and David Graham in The Atlantic have all recently discovered to their surprise that the current President is extremely old and demented. Whoever is posting to truth social for President Peepaw would like them to stop mentioning that and also (President Peepaw absolutely insists on saying) that he has taken three dementia screening tests this year and his scores absolutely beat the crap out of the great majority of other Alzheimer’s patients. They’re saying it’s the least visible decline into senescence maybe of all time. Maybe ever.
Exclusive national political correspondent group chat screenshot must credit TODAY IN TABS
While the man in control of America’s nuclear arsenal is drawing a clock at Walter Reed, Olivia Nuzzi’s comeback tour is in a slump too. It was going so well2 but regrettably her book did have to be released, and it turns out that Jacob Bernstein barely mentioning it was an early clue that it was very bad. This was a rare treat for reviewers—a well publicized book that’s both genuinely awful and also carries no professional or social stigma for savaging it. As usual Becca Rothfeld did it best, in the Post, writing that:
…at its worst, Nuzzi’s prose is not just stilted or repetitive. It is ostentatiously mannered, itching at every turn to announce its showy lyricism. It reads like a Joan Didion pastiche — but it is worried and overworked in a way that Didion, a master of taut precision, would never have countenanced.
Honorable mention to Scaachi Koul, whose review for Slate pointing out that the book is deeply boring was itself weirdly long and kind of repetitive but who supplemented it with a flawless newsletter post that probably should have just been the review: “Sentences From American Canto That Sent Me To The Hospital.”
8) The movie star, not a fraud at all, in fact a shock of honesty in this weird little town, approached and grabbed my face. “Olivia, the secret to life is to be rapeable,” she told me. “You are rapeable.” (page 102)
Get well soon Scaachi! I always hate to say this but thanks also to The New York Post for providing a glossary of Nuzzi’s blind items, of which “the movie star” is the only one a literal baby couldn’t readily decode. Apparently it was Uma Thurman? One wonders what her idea was here. Vanity Fair decided to “part ways” with Nuzzi when her contract expires at the end of this year, after all the no work she has done for them. Nuzzi previously parted ways with New York Magazine in 2024, and is excited to find out who she will have the opportunity to part ways with in 2026. Tragically Nuzzi’s friend and the author of “Three Women” Lisa Taddeo read American Canto and lost the ability to write a single coherent sentence.
Finally, I defend Olivia because her story—not necessarily her book, which, by the way, I could not stop reading, and provides an intimate understanding of matters of importance that should also be read between the lines, but her story—could be an opening salvo to dismantling the corruption that is so baked into our world that we barely see it anymore.
Get well soon Lisa! And if any of you are still considering reading American Canto you have to ask yourself: is it worth it?
Also Today in Slumps: Meta is somehow still losing heaps of money on “the metaverse.” Remember the metaverse? Yeah, me neither. Legs are coming soon. Ensure-for-tech-bros Soylent is in a slump, according to SFGate’s Ariana Bindman. But don’t worry, podcaster Chris Black of “How Long Gone” just launched a collection of wearable Soylent called Hanover. It’s a clothing brand carefully curated to make people forget what you’re wearing while they’re still looking at you. Tabs is in a slump because we didn’t make the Bloomberg Jealousy List this year. It’s fine. It’s whatever. And The Washington Post, increasingly sweaty to escape the slump it’s been in since steroid addled owner Jeff Bezos decided to wreck it, launched an aggregator called Ripple. Many claimed that this was the least widely desired experiment in news of all time, but the Post immediately proved them wrong by launching AI podcasts too. Theoretical media scientists are currently studying whether a newspaper’s circulation can ever go negative, and if so what that would look like in practice. Former subscribers angrily bringing old copies of the paper back to the Post’s offices, maybe? I guess we’ll find out.
The Verge’s Hayden Field reported that A.I. companies have taken:
…a key step toward building a usable ecosystem of AI agents that might actually pay off some of the enormous investments these companies have made, and it all starts with three letters: MCP.
MCP essentially tells AI models which external tools, data sources, and workflows they’re able to access, then allows them to connect and perform tasks.
It’s an API. These motherfuckers reïnvented the API.
Also in AI: Cory Doctorow’s “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI.”
“Is Saturated Fat Actually Good For You?” No. “Oprah Pursues Dr. Phil On Ship Through Arctic.” Charles Pulliam-Moore: “We talked to the guy running the Mad Men puke hose.“ Frogposting in Hazlitt. Outgoing NY Mayor and deranged person Eric Adams warned Zohran Mamdani about “the ghost.” ????
Today’s Song: LCD Soundsystem, “New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down”
I was in New York last weekend. If I saw you, it was lovely to see you! If I didn’t see you, it basically ruined my trip. So you know, do better next time I guess.
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1 Wipe off those smirks, that’s how it works.
2 In hindsight.
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