Three Fun Things for June 9, 2024

Coverage of the British takeover at the Washington Post, rewatching Ab Fab, and a critic's skewering of the 50 Best Restaurants list.

Coverage of the Washington Post’s leadership implosion

1. Unlike many people who were glued to every detail of the Trump trial and verdict, I learned about it mostly by osmosis—I read the headlines, I listened to “On the Media,” I sent a schadenfreude-tinged text or two, but I just couldn’t glue myself to the daily stories and analysis. Since I already know the big picture—as Trump himself said, he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and people would still vote for him—I’m happy keeping the details in my peripheral vision.

The story I am obsessed with—and don’t understand why more people aren’t—is what’s going on at the Washington Post, because it has implications far beyond the Post’s newsroom. Big picture: The Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, hired a new publisher last year, Will Lewis—a Brit who was implicated in a phone-hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp about a decade ago.

The key reporter on this story is NPR’s David Folkenflik, to whom Lewis offered an exclusive interview about the future of the Post if Folkenflik would agree to kill a story about Lewis’ alleged involvement in covering up the hacking scandal. Folkenflik wrote the story, of course, and the “exclusive” went to Puck’s Dylan Byers, whom Josh Marshall (of Talking Points Memo) described as someone who “covers media but in a very corporate, rah-rah, mergery, no-actual-interest-in-journalism” way.

Meanwhile, Lewis tried to prevent his own paper from covering the allegations against him, prompting the paper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee (described by the Lewis-friendly Byers as someone who lacks “swagger”), to resign abruptly. Buzbee, the first woman to hold the top position, will be replaced by another Brit, Robert Winnett, who was Lewis’ deputy editor at the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Amid all this, it reemerged that while Lewis was editor, the Telegraph paid a source the equivalent of about $200,000 for a database that led to an influential, prize-winning series—something no reputable US publication would do, since it violates basic ethical standards and creates perverse incentives.

Anyway: The story is fascinating, and it raises questions about what’s happening to the news industry in the US and whether even the big legacy papers can survive with their dignity and ethics intact. A billionaire may seem like a savior when he buys a newspaper and pledges fealty to its journalism—better, at least, than the hedge funds that tear down journalistic institutions and sell them for parts—but there are obvious downsides, starting with the fact that none of these guys, for all their “swagger” (ahem), really seem to understand what makes a newspaper great.

Required reading:

NPR: New 'Washington Post' CEO accused of Murdoch tabloid hacking cover-up

NPR: Washington Post' CEO tried to kill a story about himself. It wasn’t the first time

Talking Points Memo: The Brass’s Take on the Shake Up at WaPo

2. Absolutely Fabulous, available on Hulu

Did you know that the Washington Post isn’t the only US newspaper being taken over by British leaders? The New York Times took note of this “British invasion” last week, quoting the editor of the Daily Beast, who joked—I think—that British journalists are “the ultimate trophies for American billionaires.”

My household has been experiencing its own British invasion for the past few weeks, as we’ve settled in to re-watch the full run of “Absolutely Fabulous,” the excellent 1990s-early 2000s series about two idle rich wannabe socialites (PR manager Edina Monsoon, played by Jennifer Saunders, and magazine editor Patsy Stone, played by onetime Bond girl Joanna Lumley) who abuse everyone around them (including Monsoon’s long-suffering, conservative daughter, Saffron) them while trying to stay rich, relevant, and fabulous.

I remembered this show being unstoppably funny, and it is—a late-series sequence in which Patsy puts on Edina’s “control body,” an infant-size shapewear garment, to disguise her sagging ass, is as funny as anything in the original 1992-1995 run—but what I had forgotten is just how much this show centers on women’s relationships with each other, and how little those relationships have to do with men. When guys appear in the show, they’re usually there as C-plot side gags—like Marshall, one of Edina’s three ex-husbands, whose overbearing American wife Bo is constantly enlisting him in her latest religious get-rich-quick scam. The show’s humor centers on Edina and Patsy’s relentlessly horrible behavior (Patsy, who wants Edina all to herself, is constantly hissing at Saffy), but it also highlights the bedrock insecurity that explains why these two women need each other. Not all of the jokes hold up, as you might expect from a show from 30 years ago, but the ones that do are a testament to the enduring brilliance of this beloved series.

3. Finally—and speaking of wicked humor—do yourself a favor and read NYT critic Pete Wells’ piece this week on “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants,” a list that has increasingly come to define the excesses of dubious “fine” dining worldwide. The question, Wells asks, isn’t “Are these the world’s best restaurants?” but “Are these restaurants?”

Gaggan, in Bangkok, was named not just the ninth-best restaurant in the world but the single best restaurant in Asia. The chef, Gaggan Anand, greets diners at his 14-seat table facing the kitchen with “Welcome to my … .” completing the sentence with a term, meaning a chaotic situation, that will not be appearing in The New York Times.

What follows are about two dozen dishes organized in two acts (with intermission). The menu is written in emojis. Each bite is accompanied by a long story from Mr. Anand that may or may not be true. The furrowed white orb splotched with what appears to be blood, he claims, is the brain of a rat raised in a basement feedlot.

Read the whole thing, then count yourself lucky that you aren’t among the rarefied classes clamoring to get on the guest list to eat at Copenhagen’s Alchemist, where the chef “pipes a mousse of lamb brains and foie gras into a bleached lamb skull, then garnishes it with ants and roasted mealworms.”