The Dude-itors
By 
You may have seen that the deposed editor of Bon Appetit presided over a massively racist workplace with a stark two-tiered payroll. This caused Maura Johnston to dig up this old article, which is truly amazing stuff:
imagine working with a bunch of people who wanted to be these guys but couldn’t because they were even bigger fucking dorks and you’ll sum up my experience with voice media group management https://t.co/2eIJhlOSHd— maura 💥 johnston (@maura) June 9, 2020
We need a word or snappy phrase to describe an article that is all the more damning because it thinks it’s being laudatory:
A few weeks ago, Bon Appétit editor in chief Adam Rapoport and New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren went out to dinner at Veritas with Times food critic Sam Sifton and Random House editor Andy Ward. It was, in Rapoport’s words, a “very dude dinner.”
Once the waitress came around to take drink orders, Lindgren made the great faux pas of ordering a sparkling wine.
“I was like ‘Dude! What? You want a sparkler?’” said Rapoport.
Sh-t talk began. The other dudes had ordered vodka and bourbons.
“We were giving Hugo a hard time because he wanted a, quote-unquote, ‘sparkler’ to start off the meal,” Rapoport said. “He got a lot of grief from all three of us.”
I would love to think that that isn’t just bad writing and the people at this “very dude dinner” were actually ordering a “vodka and bourbon” cocktail. Anyway, I don’t know if it was Rapoport himself who made fun of another’s insufficiently butch choice of beverage from behind a $25 vodka martini but it will be in the pitch for my satirical series about mediocre white dudes failing upwards at prestige media outlets. (An additional detail worth knowing is that Veritas had such a famous wine list Anthony Bourdain spent a considerable amount of time discussing it in Kitchen Confidential.)
Just a night of dudes being dudes, bros being bros, but there’s a lot of this going around Manhattan media these days. In fact, you don’t have to look farther than the youngish, vaguely athletic, literate and street-jargoned top editors at The New York Times Magazine, Bon Appétit and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. They’re dudes; they’re editors. Ladies and dudes, meet the Dude-itors. These are not the editors who call you “Mr.” and “Miss,” as famed New Yorker editor William Shawn once did — although he did drive an M.G. convertible on the weekend. These guys say “Hey, man” as a salutation. Dude-itors don’t practice lines for lunch at the Century Association — they practice their golf swing in the office, toss around Nerf footballs when an issue is closing, and occasionally play pickup basketball together.
Who said this of his game, Maxwell Perkins or Adam Rapoport? “I don’t want to say I schooled Hugo, but if he tried to claim that he took me to school, then I’d have a problem with that.” It was Rapoport, dude!
[…]
“He’s both a bro and dude,” Tyrangiel said, describing Lindgren, who worked for him at BusinessWeek before setting off for the Times. “I don’t think there’s any doubt there. He’s got that sort of relaxed, ‘I’ve been doing this a while and I know how to navigate this’ demeanor. There are people who get very, very tense around deadlines, which are endless. And then there are people who are like, ‘Hey, let’s sort this out so I can get to the gym and get back.’ He’s much more in that realm of I’m going to get a little coffee, I’m going to go to the gym, and then I’ll come back and it’ll all be fine. Then you put in the late hours and it will all be fun. There’s something to be said of people who crank their stereos up with terrible Swedish indie music and make everyone else pretend it’s really good.”
A bro and a dude! I observe here Lindrgen’s main “contribution” to the Times magazine was the “one page magazine” — a combination of some of the most excruciatingly unfunny attempted comedy writing in known human history (what if you did a point-by-point comparison between JONATHAN Swift and TAYLOR Swift yuk yuk yuk trust me after 12 vodka and bourbons it seems funnier) with Mario Batali drink recipes. Indeed, I’m now curious how many of these Very Dude Dinners ended up with Mario in the “rape room.” Anyway, it’s amazing how many of these bad media guys existed in plain sight for so long.
Also, one needn’t be a literal dude to embrace the ethos:
(I was senior to but not the boss of the editor who had assigned the story. Did she email the writer or editor? Nope. Big Karen energy.)— Helen Rosner (@hels) June 10, 2020
Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.
Wifey, Simone Shubuck and Janine Foeller’s beloved bakery-meets-gallery pop-up is back and this time will hold court at Café Altro Paradiso. The restaurant, a part of Ignacio Mattos’ Matter House group, will collaborate with Wifey for a one-day-only “morning market” held at Altro on Sunday, October 27th. From 9-11:30am, guests can check out Shubuck’s custom ceramics, while noshing on deli-themed dishes and pastries such as grab & go egg and cheese sandwiches, buttered kaiser rolls and coffee—all executed by the restaurant’s celebrated pastry chef, Natasha Pickowicz, who has collaborated with Wifey in the past. Oh, and hot chocolate with mezcal….
Every detail is perfect I tells ya.