Graydon Carter

Monday

Cosmo Landesman

Toby Young: love him or loathe him?

London Everyone has at least one friend that none of their other friends can stand, someone you love but everyone else loathes. Mine is called Toby Young. For around thirty years people have asked me: are you still friends with that awful Toby Young? And with a bit of hesitation I say, well... yes. And they shake their heads or roll their eyes in disbelief and disapproval. They don’t like his politics — he’s a right-wing conservative and founder of the Free Speech Union, which defends victims of woke ideology. And they don’t like Toby the person because of a series of sophomoric and “sexist” tweets that came to public light in 2018. It was national news and it cost Toby his career in public life.

Toby

Tuesday

Keith McNally

Instagram is appallingly mundane

New York Four years ago, I had a stroke that left the right side of my body paralyzed and my speech so impaired that I sound like I'm talking under water. But the stroke also left me not giving a fuck what anyone thinks of me. I didn't know a thing about Instagram until 18 months ago when a friend explained how it worked. Looking at some typical posts for the first time, I was appalled how mundane the majority were. At least half were of dogs, kids or spouses, falsely attesting to the happiness of their lives. There were some brilliantly ironic posts, but not many. The political posts were the worst. I found the iron-like conviction of their opinions so frightening that I decided to half throw my fool's cap into the ring and oppose them. I loathe cancel culture.

keith mcnally

Tuesday

Cockburn

Hell hath no fury like a restaurateur scorned

How does the saying go? Is it ‘fool me once, shame on me. Fool me four times, I’ll shame you on social media’? It’s a lesson someone like Graydon Carter, the legendary former Vanity Fair editor who now runs an ambiguously successful digital magazine called Air Mail, should know by now. Yet Carter has managed to infuriate his fellow bon-viveur, Keith McNally, the restauranteur and Instagram enthusiast. Carter has, McNally claims, booked and not shown-up at one of his New York restaurants not once, not twice, but four times. To rub salt into an empty place setting, Carter didn’t call ahead in his latest no-show, at Morandi in the West Village, for a reservation for 12 people.

graydon carter

Wednesday

Cockburn

When Ann Coulter met Jeffrey Epstein…

In an interview last week with Breitbart News Tonight, Ann Coulter revealed a curious episode from her past in which she met Jeffrey Epstein. Coulter recalled Epstein picking her up in a limousine and taking her to his Manhattan townhome. She was so creeped out by the encounter that she later asked to be dropped off two blocks from her own home. Cockburn has acquired the transcript of Coulter's story. ANN COULTER: I had my own encounter with Jeffrey Epstein, and before I give you this little vignette: very important that I tell you something. All of my friends know I have absolutely no radar on freaks, on weird people. I'm a terrible judge of character.

Ann Coulter