Three Fun Things for July 21, 2024

An Amazon memoir, a restaurant critic's new chapter, and a review of the Incel Camino.

1. Exit Interview, by Kristi Coulter

This memoir, by Seattle writer Kristi Coulter, is a deep, dishy dive into what it was like to be an ambitious woman working at Amazon in the 2010s. If you’re a woman who has worked in, you know, a workplace, you’ve certainly encountered sexism and probably run into some version of the glass ceiling, but the situations Kristi encountered at Amazon are truly beyond. A boss calls her “stupid” in a meeting; a group of male trainees argues with her premise when she tells them to come up with ideas to promote gender parity at the company. For Coulter (and many women at Amazon), meeting the exasperating, excessive demands of 2010s hustle culture wasn’t just a matter of embracing the grind—it was literally impossible, because there was no path to promotion that didn’t include demands like “it’s easy. Change the world.”

I haven’t worked in corporate culture, so I can’t tell you how much Kristi’s experience differs from life in other tech megacorps, but her depiction—the constant reorgs, the seemingly senseless disregard for subject-matter expertise and institutional knowledge, the incompetent men blithely bopping up the corporate ladder—is hilarious, insightful, and infuriating.

2. NYT Restaurant Critic Pete Wells

Longtime New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells announced he's stepping down from the role he’s held for the last 12 years, and while I am definitely not happy about that, I’m excited to see what Wells—who says he’s sticking around at the Times—does next.

Wells’ approach to dining is ecumenical, taking him everywhere from the humblest hamburger joint to temples of haute cuisine most of us will never dream of affording. I know I’ll never visit a place like, say, ILIS, the four-dollar-sign “New Nordic” restaurant that features twine-bound clamshell drinking vessels and chopped whelk with potato foam, eaten with a birch stick—but I desperately want to know whether Wells thinks its “Okinawan sweet potato … presented in a fluted tart shell molded from beeswax” is worth the price tag. (He says it’s a good potato, but “the jazz-hands presentation oversells it.”

When he’s not writing about foam-based ephemera, Wells’ reviews are also useful; many of his “57 sandwiches that define New York City” are now on my must-try list, and his review of the $29 hot dog at Mischa (now closed) made me reconsider my instinctive distaste for dining stunts, because the dog—a “flagrantly expensive lowbrow-highbrow stunt out of the Jeff Koons catalog,” with a condiment tray that included whipped pimento cheese and chili crisp with bacon—sounds delicious.

Wells’ pans, too, are magnificent; I linked his takedown of the “50 Best Restaurants” list in a recent edition of this column, and his evisceration of 11 Madison Park’s vegan experiment is the template for fine-dining takedowns: A roasted, dehydrated beet wrapped in fermented greens and stuffed into a clay jar, which a waiter smashes at the table, “tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint”; a plate of heirloom tomato wedges “have a pumped-up, distorted flavor, like tomatoes run through a wah-wah pedal.”

After a dozen years on the job, Wells has a deep archive, and I can think of worse ways to spend a warm summer evening than opening up the NYT website and diving in.

3. Drew Magary’s Cybertruck Review

“I fit the customer profile” for Cybertruck owners, writes Drew Magaray, a columnist for SFGate .”I am tall. I am white. I am loud. I don’t really have many friends where I live. Most important, I desperately want people to think I’m cool. You can see my thirst from the f—king moon, so why not drive an equally conspicuous truck?”

If you haven’t read Magary’s “review” of the Cybertruck—which he calls “a loud and lonely car for loud and lonely people”—go fix that. It’s funny, but (maybe too) fair!