New York Magazine - USA (2019-09-16)

(Antfer) #1

18 new york | september 16–29, 2019


ing among the guests in a highly excited
state, is exhibit A of Weiss’s social eclecti-
cism. Last year, Bowles wrote a harsh profile
of the right-wing pull-your-pants-up guru
Jordan Peterson just days after Weiss’s sym-
pathetic piece on the dark web (including
Peterson). Weiss was once married to a man,
but before that, at Columbia—where she
was known for leading a student campaign
against anti-Zionist professors—she dated
SNL comedian Kate McKinnon. McKinnon
was also at the party; Weiss greeted her with
a long hug.
Another strange (figurative) bedfellow,
journalist Eve Peyser, presented Weiss with
homemade bialys. Peyser, once a vocal Twit-
ter leftist, famously co-wrote a column with
Weiss last year, headlined “Can You Like the
Person You Love to Hate?,” about becoming
friends. She’d hoped to moderate Twitter’s
position on Weiss (and on people in general)
but only brought grief on herself.
The depredations of the online left came
up often at the party. MSNBC anchor
Stephanie Ruhle, who has frequently host-
ed Weiss on her morning show, deplored
“cancel culture.” To Ruhle, Weiss is “the
perfect example of someone who gets un-
warranted flak for her thoughtfulness.”
There were plenty of flak catchers in the
room. The neoconservative New York Post
columnist John Podhoretz said he finally
quit Twitter in March, following a joke
about bombing NYU. “Twitter is only good
for people until they get around 75,
followers,” he explained. “And then the
only thing you can do is fuck yourself ...
With the exception of people like Ta-Nehi-
si Coates that people are afraid to criticize,
everybody looks like shit.” The fact that
Coates did, in fact, quit Twitter, having
amassed more than a million followers,
after Cornel West called him “the neolib-
eral face of the black freedom struggle,”
both undermines and reinforces Podho-
retz’s point.

Closer to the heat of battle were Katie
Roiphe, scourge of the “Shitty Media Men”
list, who told me she and Weiss had com-
miserated over their ostracism, and Meghan
Daum, author of the forthcoming book The
Problem With Everything: My Journey
Through the New Culture Wars. “There’s a
sort of ambient dislike” online, Daum said.
“It’s a way of maintaining your status in the
group for another afternoon.”
The status here at the Lambs Club was of
a more traditional variety. Frank Bruni, the
liberal Times columnist, defended the need
for intellectual diversity at the “paper of
record.” “This party isn’t Twitter,” he said,
“and I think it’s easier for diverse people to
find points of connection. [Even] if this
were a Bret Stephens party, you would see a
far greater diversity than you’d expect.” Ste-
phens, the Times’ most conservative colum-
nist, was having a bad summer online. After
someone called him a bedbug, he wrote to
the offender’s boss, and followed up with a
column equating such insults with Nazi
rhetoric. Bruni was quick to say Stephens
had told him “many weeks ago” that he
would be out of town the week of the party.
In her book’s acknowledgments, Weiss
writes that “no one taught me more than
Bret Stephens.” But it’s hard to imagine him
bridging political divides over brunch or a
cocktail party. “I come from a Hasidic family,
and I hang out with a lot of very left-wing
media people,” said Taffy Brodesser-Akner,
the novelist and Times profile writer. “If you
look at that as the spectrum, Bari is one of
the only moderates I know.” Fishman, the
writer, put it a little more fatalistically: “I’m
ex-Soviet, so I’m very receptive to a lot of
what Bari has to say. Of course, it’s not
enough for my parents and it’s too much for
my friends, so reading Bari’s writing makes
me feel really close to her and really lonely in
the world.”
Fishman believes his lefty friends “don’t
want to find out she’s a lovely human being.”
The distance between Weiss the public fig-
ure and the woman described by these, her
cultivated colleagues, was a popular party
topic. Out in the world, Weiss the persona
was enduring plenty of publication-day
scrutiny. Slate had run a review claiming
she’d exploited the Pittsburgh attack “as a
launchpad for a bizarre and undercooked
exercise in rhetorical bothsidesism.” And the
Times Book Review had accused her of
going soft on the left. But here in the glow,
as Weiss hugged and kissed guests good-
bye, she told me she was “having the time of
my life.” When I said she seemed unusually
extroverted for a writer, she agreed: “My
alternative career path is rabbi or agent.
Those are the things I love, making matches
with people.” ■

patronofthearts—and his wife, Lisa. The
Pleplers met Weiss, who is 35, via Times
reporter Nellie Bowles, Weiss’s girlfriend.
Plepler had been mulling an HBO doc-
umentary about anti-Semitism, and
Weiss—galvanized by the mass shooting
at Tree of Life, her hometown Pittsburgh
congregation—had rushed headlong into
writing a book dissecting anti-Semitism
everywhere she found it (left, right, Is-
lamic). So the Pleplers wound up spon-
soring Weiss’s first book party. “Judaism,
journalists, and—what’s the third J?”
asked the writer Boris Fishman, whose
stories Weiss has edited at the Times and
on Tablet, in an effort to describe the
scene. “Oh, the third J is for ‘philanthro-
py.’ ” So far, so very Establishment. And
yet, like Weiss, it was an Establishment
that felt, at least to itself, like a class in
internal exile, surrounded on all sides by
Trump, Twitter, and timidity.
As the canapés came out (pastrami on
rye!), the temperature rose, and the head
count approached 140, guests grumbled
about Twitter mobs and cheered Weiss’s
outspokenness—though not all were so
outspoken themselves. Mad Men creator
Matt Weiner wouldn’t be quoted. Times
publisher A. G. Sulzberger said, “I think
she brings a terrific and really brave voice
to the Times. I’ll leave it at that.” Asked
what Weiss had contributed to the opin-
ion pages, section editor James Bennet
parried, “Is that a party question?” before
offering that “she’s got a lot of guts and
ambition, and it’s been a privilege to
watch her become the writer she’s meant
to be.” Asked a party question—what he
thought of the party—he said, “I’m not an
expert,” and wished me luck.
Plepler told me Weiss’s book is “smart,
timely, necessary.” But when I asked Plep ler,
a Democratic donor, about Weiss’s tendency
to anger some members of the left—she has
equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism,
written sympathetically about the “Intellec-
tual Dark Web,” and critiqued #MeToo—he
went off the record.
Weiss herself was not shy about the barbs.
Her teary thank-you speech focused on the
book’s subject, using a column by her col-
league David Brooks to explain the Jews’
“survival and success.” But she credited her
own social-media survival to her inner cir-
cle: “A lot of people, the first thing they say
when they meet me is ‘You seem like a nice
person; how do you withstand the things
people say about you on Twitter?’ And the
answers are standing here by my side. Chief
among them is Nellie Bowles, who is by far
the most unexpected thing to happen from
working at the Times.”
Bowles, 31, who spent the evening bounc-


“This party isn’t


Twitter,” said


Frank Bruni.


intelligencer

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