Diary

On Friday night I arranged for a group to meet at Butterworth’s for a small dinner. I joke that I’ve become the Butterworth’s Whisperer, chaperoning curious and skittish liberal friends to DC’s Trump-era living museum for lamb tartare, cozy lighting and dissident ambiance. I needn’t waste too much time describing the scene. The restaurant has been profiled more often than the new Pope. Suffice it to say the fries are sliver-thin and seed-oil-free, the martinis flow like water and there are always at least a couple of Republican who’s-whos to point at in the dining room. Nothing to be afraid of. Some nights there’s even a party if you show up at the right time, as I did a couple of months ago during the Conservateur’s “Make America Hot Again” event.

You’ve got to be careful what you put in your mouth in Los Angeles. In a gourmet ice cream parlor near Venice Beach, my ten-year-old daughter grabbed a small tub from the freezer. Halfway through eating it, she noticed the label indicated that it was HUMAN GRADE and featured a pawprint motif. This was a flavor meant for dogs. In a part of the world renowned for enhancement and augmentation, one finds many foods and beverages that have had a little work done: soft drinks boosted with collagen, cappuccinos laced with chaga (an anti-oxidant mushroom), granola fortified with “adaptogens” (herbs that combat stress), or salad dressings infused with CBD. “California sober” is a new phrase I learned this week from an old friend, Judd Weiss.

New York "Black Sheep.” Not a nickname I expected, but my friends and family get a kick out of the Daily Mail’s moniker for me following a series of viral CNN moments. It’s more accurate than “Lonely Scott,” which Bill Maher applied after watching our network’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention. I am anything but lonely these days. In the wee hours following Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harris, I impatiently wait my turn on CNN to explain what happened.

Los Angeles, California The Italians take their holidays very seriously. We live in California, so winter isn’t really tangible; we pretend we’re freezing when it’s 60 degrees out. For food, the Italians always would prepare the Feast of the Seven Fishes. But since my grandma and dad are gone, we’ve shied away from a lot of the tradition; it’s a really heavy load to make that meal. We do some of it; I’ll do a pasta with a lobster sauce. Some Christmases we’ve made a Genovese sauce, with meat that’s cooked for about eight hours with like thirty onions and butter. We would cook for forty-five people on Christmas Eve and then thirty people on Christmas Day. On Christmas Day it was always lasagna.

The skies above Europe On a human level, I probably should have felt some sadness watching Sleepy Joe chew his way through the first debate like he had been on Hunter’s pipe. But professionally I was full of burning rage. Two weeks previously I broke a story about the precarious president horrifying allied powers with a somewhat avant-garde performance at the G7 summit in Italy. In fifteen years as a hack, I’ve never dealt with a ruder or more dishonest press operation than the Biden White House; they went public with their criticism of the story and privately ranted at me like Joe on a particularly bad evening. Yet now their lies were coming home to roost on the podium.

The Midwest Notre Dame is not an Ivy League university and, in what I assume is some sort of intentional point, its buildings tend to be ivy-free. Perhaps it is the absence of ivy, perhaps I am just flat after a long day’s drive across Ohio and Indiana, perhaps it’s just winter, but the campus seems more sterile than I had expected. It’s Good Friday, and my friend Margot is studying classical architecture here. She’s showing me around the grounds. I don’t really know what I’d hoped to see. Amy Coney Barrett? Multiracial friendship groups, skipping across the green? As soon as I see the stadium, though, I am transfixed. Margot is visibly disappointed when I say that I adore the stadium above all the other buildings.

Washington, DC I just finished wrapping the Christmas presents. Every year I consider just putting the boxes under the tree and leaving the papercuts to my five children. To date, I have not won this battle with Mrs. Lectern Guy. The onslaught of holidays late in the year used to end with Champagne and a kiss. All the indulgences of overeating, overspending and overworking would be forgiven on January 1, and I could rest until chocolate and flowers day. But my calendar now holds an additional holiday with new traditions to keep. Just days after New Year’s, I will be forced to relive the darkest day — well, four hours — in American history. January 6 was the end of our country as we know it.

Maui, Hawaii It’s been almost eight weeks since the wildfires devastated Lahaina. Within a few days of the fire, I went to West Maui, visiting the community, friends and people I’ve known and worked with for years. Lahaina was once the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It was a lush wetland, a destination that everyone wanted to go and visit. But thanks to a long history of plantation owners and corporations diverting water and streams away from their natural course to benefit their business interests, it’s now a community that is dry, arid, struggling with drought and brush fires every year. People around the world have seen the devastation, but the images don’t do it justice.

Finally I found an authentic bite of Americana. Or so I thought. The rodeo. A blaze of bucks and broncos, boots and bulls, shining golden in the dusk of the Teton mountain range. Jackson, Wyoming, far away from the raging culture wars and as unapologetically American as a bald eagle’s middle finger. A proud, if out-of-tune, “Star Spangled Banner” stirred me enough that for a moment I forgot I was English. The crackle and hollering, the stirrups and steers. This was real, I believed. Weeding through an air-conditioned continent of screens, plastic and corporate advertisements, I had found her at last: America. But then slipped the veneer. The rodeo barrelman — a ringmaster in clown maquillage — squawked at us down a dusty PA system. “Where are you from?...