Interview

Wednesday

Cockburn

Has Katie Porter just tanked her chances of becoming California governor?

How do you give an interview so bad that it tanks your chances of winning an election by nearly 40 points? Ask former California congresswoman Katie Porter, who until yesterday was the presumptive favorite to become the state’s next governor.   In a sit-down with Porter that resembles an old-school satirical Daily Show segment – before TDS turned that show into another partisan screed-fest – CBS News California Investigates correspondent Julie Watts asks Porter, simply, how she plans on winning Republican votes. “How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” Porter sneers. "I have stood on my own two feet and won Republican votes before.

Porter

Friday

Damian Reilly

CNN can’t kill Tim Dillon

“I’ve been researching comedy,” CNN’s Elle Reeve announces grimly at the start of her hour-long interview with comedian Tim Dillon, released this week more than a month after it was recorded. What follows is an extended whine about the manner in which legacy broadcast media in America has ceded its status as the gatekeeper of the American cultural narrative to podcasters. Is it the most satisfying piece of television I've ever watched? Possibly, yes. The irony – and it’s almost too perfect to articulate – is that had Dillon not demanded, while appearing recently on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, that CNN release the interview in full rather than packaged into a tightly edited segment to fit a specific narrative, it probably would never have seen the light of day.

Dillon

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Don’t expect much from Dana Bash’s tag-team Harris-Walz interview

The last time the country saw Kamala Harris give a meaningful live interview, she was sent out as cannon fodder to clean up Joe Biden’s disastrous debate night. She has yet to explain to the country which she is hoping to govern, in any capacity, what she knew beforehand of Biden’s clear cognitive decline due to age or some other undisclosed ailment. That is the kind of question she should have to answer when she speaks to the media… but don’t expect that, or much else, when she sits for a tag-team interview with her running mate Governor Tim Walz tonight. The entire point of being interviewed as a pair is to blunt and neutralize any remotely tough or revealing question with which CNN’s Dana Bash might present them.

Harris

Thursday

Christopher Bedford

‘Maybe I have the healing I need’: speaking to Father Paul Wierichs

It used to be you had to get in close to hear Father Paul Wierichs speak. For two years the former FBI chaplain couldn’t talk above a whisper. Now he is a little louder, but very hoarse; though he still struggles to swallow you can at least hear his voice. Bell’s Palsy keeps him from moving the left side of his face, and he has a difficult time seeing out of that eye. His scalp is bandaged where the doctors removed a growth. There’s cancer in his prostate, too. He’s still held onto a good amount of hair for his age and his troubles — but he expects to lose it to surgeries by the end of the month. “I wore my collar on 9/11,” Father Paul recalled on a frozen January morning in Queens. “I had to throw them out, because they were covered in dust.

Wierichs
von Teese
Cat Woods

Dita Von Teese, the once and forever burlesque star

She’s the Glamonatrix who looks equally as comfortable luxuriating in a Champagne glass, emerging from a giant shell, perched upon a cake or astride an oversized lipstick bullet. She’s the Rhinestone Cowgirl, the Bird of Paradise, the star of Strip, Strip, Hooray! and Dita’s Crazy Show. She’s a star. In contrast to OnlyFans influencers, Dita Von Teese comes from an older, spectacular style of tease, and at fifty-one, remains the world’s best-known burlesque dancer. She’s the most famous striptease showgirl since Gypsy Rose Lee and perhaps the world’s leading erotic celebrity. She’s come a long way since she was simply a Michigan-born girl named Heather Sweet.

Ripert
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Meeting Eric Ripert, chef of America’s best restaurant 

For Eric Ripert, cooking is like jazz. Ad-libbing, balance, motion. “One day the garlic is very pungent, one day it is not pungent. One day the onion is very juicy and sweet, one day it’s less, so you have to adapt all the time,” says the celebrated chef, who is the co-owner of Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, a close friend of the late Anthony Bourdain and a TV personality in his own right. “So, it’s very similar to music — I do not play the same notes all the time, I take a lot of freedom and liberties. Because I can.” Ripert is French but has — like his storied restaurant — become a New York institution. The chef lives on the Upper East Side with his glamorous, dark-haired wife Sandra (a real-estate broker who is Brooklyn born-and-raised, of Puerto Rican descent).

Tuesday

Christopher Sandford

John Densmore on protecting the Doors’ legacy

The once-explosive accusation that a rock ’n’ roll band is a sell-out, aimed at artists who make an accommodation with industry, has come to seem a little naive since it was first bandied about in the 1960s. Whether it’s that well-known monument to prudence Iggy Pop extolling the virtues of car insurance, the Zombies promoting Tampax or Bob Dylan shilling for Victoria’s Secret, they’re all at it these days. Elton John wants you to dial UberEats, the Stones will start you up with a $139.99 Keurig coffee machine, and by now it might be easier to list the names of rock stars who haven’t chugged Pepsi on TV than those who have.

densmore

Friday

Christopher Sandford

Danny Bonaduce’s guide to survival

It’s just after nine on a gray Pacific Northwest morning, and Danny Bonaduce, the once winsome redheaded child star of TV’s The Partridge Family, is dispensing life advice on Seattle’s 102.5 KZOK classic-rock radio station. “My ex-husband has a gambling problem and won’t ever show up for our two kids,” one distressed young woman announces. “Keep a journal. Write down what he does wrong, it’ll be useful one day in court,” says Danny, speaking in his familiar rapid-fire, gravelly voice. “He has to perform if he’s ever going to see the kids. You’re not a bad person, he is. The kids know that. Be strong. Hang tough.” “My twelve-year-old son is cool,” the next caller says, “but he’s rude to his mom. Should I intervene?” “Intervene?

bonaduce

Monday

Kara Kennedy

Caroline Calloway sets the record straight

As I was on FaceTime with Caroline Calloway, the Washington Post published a review of her memoir, Scammer, alongside one of a book written by her archnemesis, ex-best friend and former love interest, Natalie Beach. From her squealing — and the way her phone was blowing up with calls from friends who’d read the piece — I could make an educated guess about its contents. “Beach is a talented essayist with a promising career ahead of her. Calloway is a lunatic who has already written a masterpiece,” Calloway read, with an emphasis on “lunatic” and a twinkle in her eye. “At one point they call Natalie quote unquote, good enough. And honestly, that is so brutal in its own fucking way,” she told me. The Post was right.

caroline calloway

Friday

Ben Domenech

Biden’s decline deepens in MSNBC interview

MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace conducted an interview with Joe Biden (if you can call it that) that came across more like twenty minutes of a middle-aged daughter trying to help dad remember where he is. It was a rarity for Joe — nearly all of his conversations with the media of any length these days are pre-taped, not live — and it did not end well. In fact, it was so awkward that the video posted by the network cuts off abruptly so as not to show Biden wandering off the set as if seeking a bowl of porridge and a nightcap.  https://twitter.

msnbc

Sunday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Pet portraitist Mimi Vang Olsen marches to the beat of her own drum

Mimi Vang Olsen operates in the West Village equivalent of a goldfish bowl. Every day, the eighty-five-year-old pet portraitist settles in a chair in her studio-cum-storefront on Hudson Street and gets to work, painting dogs, cats and the occasional guinea pig. Tourists stop to peer inside, cooing over a haphazard display of postcards and paintings. Locals tap on the glass to wave hello. During the pandemic, curiosity intensified: Vang Olsen’s shop became an Instagram sensation after she attached a blue mask onto a pug portrait hanging in the window for some much-needed levity. Vang Olsen, however, is nonchalant about the attention. She doesn’t have a cell phone or social media.

vang olsen

Wednesday

Cockburn

Fauci retcons the pandemic in laughable NYT interview

The New York Times published an extensive interview with Anthony Fauci on Tuesday, and the doc still shows little remorse. To his credit, Times reporter David Wallace-Wells did not let Fauci off easily — there was no Joe Biden treatment in this one.  Fauci, as usual, showed himself a master of illusion. Take his assertion that “only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly.” Really? Well that depends on what you mean by “vaccinated”. If that means you got the first shot — the only one that actually provided transmission protection — then the US actually did quite well, with 80 percent receiving at least one dose.

fauci

Monday

William Newton

Greg Lansky: the artist with a scandalous past

St. Paul points out that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Despite that inclusive “all,” human nature inclines toward exclusion of the “other,” which is a very difficult thing for many of us to overcome — me included. Enter Greg Lansky, pornographic-film producer. Perhaps no one in recent memory has made a greater profit from the highly lucrative commerce paradoxically known as “adult entertainment” than Parisian-born entrepreneur Lansky. Within the span of about fifteen years, he went from dropping out of school and having few realistic prospects to making fortunes from adult media, partying with celebrities and receiving glowing profiles in magazines such as Forbes, GQ and Rolling Stone.

greg lansky

Monday

Zoe Strimpel

Joyce Carol Oates, a woman for all seasons

Midway through my conversation with the eighty-four-year-old Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most prolific writers America has ever seen (fifty-eight novels, plus plays and children’s books), and now one of its more unpredictable tweeters, with over 226,000 followers, I ask what it’s like being having been one of the country’s “major” literary figures for so long. Oates’s classic 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” about the kidnap and possible murder of a sixteen-year-old girl, and her 1992 Pulitzer-nominated novella Black Water demonstrate her grasp on the dark side of the twentieth-century American psyche.

Oates