Yikes!
"Olivia Nuzzi’s ‘Canto’ Sells Just 1,200 Print Copies In First Week"
Mary Whitfill Roeloffs for @forbes.com— Zach Everson (@zacheverson.com) December 11, 2025 at 10:14 AM
For the record (it’s usually abbreviated), the full quote was an attack on the male proprietor of a media empire: “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” From within my very limited (BlueSky) social media bubble, it’s been interesting to watch the reactions swing between, as Garry Trudea once put it, media people ‘sniffing each others’ lanyards’ and the dismissive ‘two Italians yelling at each other in public’.
Scott Lemiuex, at LGM, on “A major Beltway scandal”:
While I’m very happy to see that Simon and Schuster take a massive bath on Olivia Nuzzi’s hilariously reviewed cross between Shattered Glass and Rite Aid brand Joan Didion, I continue to respectfully disagree with my colleague on the question of whether the scandal Nuzzi apparently barely mentions in her book is worthy of attention going forward. This is almost certainly the biggest scandal in the modern history of American journalism. Judy Miller was bad, but she was merely the most prominent example of reporters uncritically passing along administration propaganda, which was more the rule than the exception in the lead up to the Iraq War. Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair also committed career-ending offenses, but the stories they manufactured were in themselves trivial and had no impact on American politics. What Nuzzi did was much worse, implicates a lot of people and was not in fact even career ending!
Lizza’s latest is free, which is good because it makes the magnitude of the scandal clear…
It’s remarkable that Nuzzi (according to multiple reviewers) seems to think even now that her having an affair with a subject she was covering and whose political goals she was working to advance without disclosure in subsequent profiles and who she was running ratfucking operations on behalf of represents merely “private” misconduct, like she had an affair with some random person she met on a dating app. It’s even more remarkable that she thought it was plausible that it would remain private. And her belief that Kennedy would just fade away would be the most remarkable and damning thing if she probably wasn’t lying about that…
It’s true as far as it goes that it’s unfair that Nuzzi has (belatedly and after a fawning NYT profile literally written by Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron’s son and a windfall profit for a book with no audience she literally dictated into an iPhone) suffered consequences and Kennedy has not, but this makes the behavior of Nuzzi and her enablers even more damning! There is not in fact any viable way of getting rid of a cabinet secretary who has the support of the president once they’ve been confirmed, which makes doing anything possible to stop it from happening ex ante all the more important…
There needs to be much more intense and clear-eyed scrutiny of RFK Jr’s HHS tenure, but how he got into that position in the first place is also an important story, and it was one the Beltway media just wanted to go away for obvious reasons. Nuzzi wasn’t some random person with a substack — she was a huge star in that world, not least because while the reasons for her nihilist embrace of Trumpism were unusual the embrace itself was not.
Dave Carp has a lengthy fisking on BlueSky, which is probably more fun than reading the book. Extracts:
Okay first of all.
You have to pull off a *very particular* kind of style to write a 303-page book with zero chapters.
And the unintentional subtext of this book is quite clearly, “Olivia, you are not pulling that off.”— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 9:04 AM
There’s a sentence on page 2 that is longer than Bluesky’s character limit.
And the sole knowledge that sentence conveys is “Olivia was born on January 6th.”— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 9:15 AM
…
“I do not wish to be understood, which no one seems to understand.”
This is what’s missing from the book. It is a 300-page meandering navel-gaze. A Joan Didion impression from someone with nothing to say, vaguely offended that readers would *expect* her to have something to say.— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 10:08 AM
The one bit of sympathy I feel so far is that it seems like she surrounded herself with (shallow, empty) people who told her “you are the Joan Didion of your generation” and she believed them.
— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 10:10 AM
…
Nuzzi is the type of journalist who treats politics as offering entertaining characters, and zero stakes or substance.
She has had a remarkably successful career within that particular genre.
Her self-immolation, along with this vacuous memoir, illustrates the genre’s limits.— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 10:56 AM
Like, really, read this passage.
This is so many words, all gesturing toward Donald Trump, saying nothing at all.
If you enjoy substance-free politics, then it’s probably quite evocative. (So. Much. Imagery!)
But it’s 2025. We don’t get the luxury of pretending politics is substance-free.— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 11:03 AM
…
And (2) this is precisely Chris Cillizza’s genre of political writing. (“Oh, the performance!”)
Cillizza somehow has a mass audience, even though I have never once encountered a person who reads him.
Think of Nuzzi as a younger, self-consciously blonder Cillizza.— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 11:57 AM
…
Look, let's be blunt about it: what literally every reader of this book wants to know is "hey, so… you blew up your entire life for THIS GUY. What, uhm, what's the deal with that? HIM???"
We're 100 pages in and Nuzzi is extremely not talking about it at all.
bsky.app/profile/razz…— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 7:19 PM
…
The whole “aw shucks we’re so polarized and post-truth, who can tell what to believe now” schtick also hits different when the guy you torched your career for is the antivaxxer who burned down the NIH.
“There exists no agreed-upon neutral arbiter of facts.” …Gee, Olivia, who might we blame?— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 9:01 PM
…
Also, just in general, OLIVIA YOU ARE A POLITICAL GOSSIP COLUMNIST WHO IS FRIENDS WITH ALL THE OTHER POLITICAL GOSIP COLUMNISTS.
Why would you ever think that RFK Jr’s affair with you wouldn’t be treated as news?
Sorry, no, don’t tell me. Tell a therapist instead.— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) December 9, 2025 at 5:26 PM
…
My personal suspicion (for what it’s worth) is that Nuzzi probably didn’t sleep with Anthony Weiner, Dr. Oz, Rudy Giuliani, or Donald Trump. (Especially not Trump, because I’m pretty sure Melania gave the Secret Service some very specific instructions about that.) But they all clearly wanted her to sleep with them, and she used their impulses to get the stories she became famous for writing. (Don’t know how much her much-circulated ‘Biden senile’ story was based on being irked that Biden didn’t respond to her usual performance, but all the reporting around this book certainly make the rumor more plausible.) It would be nice for all of us, not least Olivia Nuzzi, if she took her massive book advance and disappeared for a few years… but that’s not gonna happen, is it?
War for Ukraine Day 1,387: Putin Does Not Recognize Anyone Else’s Sphere of Influence and Near Abroad
Aziz, light!
NuZZi + liZZa + cilliZZa = ZZZZZZZZZZZ……
Citizen Alan
I first became aware of Olivia Nuzzi about eight years ago, when she gave a stirring twitter defense of maggie haberman against claims that she was just a stenographer for trump and the other fascists. That told me everything I needed to know about her. ( The fact that she was as sexually amoral as she was professionally amoral was not something I particularly needed to know about her.)
Gretchen
Your Biden theory makes sense. “ How could he not be flattered by my sexy attention when all the other old guys are? He must be senile and unaware of his surroundings. It’s the only explanation!”
Ishiyama
If I want to read smut about gross and vulgar sexual practices, I will unpack my old S.Clay Wilson underground comix.
Geminid
Cillizza’s account has a lot of tedious inside jounalist-baseball material, but one observation stood out to me: Cillizza said Nuzzi was abusing Adderall. I don’t think ethics was ever Nuzzi’s strong suit, but there’s a lack of rationality here on top of the lack of scruples, and the drugs might account for some of it.
Tony Jay
I like this story because it casts a light on the rulebook for the artificial reality political reporting has been warped to fit into.
If you’re of use to the Right, as Walnut Kennedy was seen to be, there are no hard and fast lines the media won’t let you cross. Consequences for actions taken are made fudged and misty and mysterious. The very idea that Elbow Skinsack should have been subjected to actual journalism during the period Nuzzi was fan-fucking him is dismissed as irrelevant and a bit gauche, and even lingering over the possibility that anyone outside of the Bubble could or should have an opinion on wether he did anything wrong is considered unprofessional.
A dangerous lunatic was moving ever closer to being appointed to a position of real power where he would kill a lot of people, and the reporter assigned to his beat was breaking all of the rules of her trade to help him get there, but that’s not The Story. That’s not even A Story. That’s just Livvi being Livvi. The Real Story is how soon the movie rights to all this are going to be snapped up and if Sidney Sweeney is really going to take the role. Dead children? Wrecked institutions? That’s page 17 stuff.
When they show you who they are… etc.
Also, long sentences can be beautiful things. I object to Nuzzi degrading them in service to her crush on her own fantasy of herself.
Spc
@Geminid: you mean Lizza? Yeah, way too many Zs in this post.
Spc
@Tony Jay: Nothing but an attention-seeking narcissist who learned the wrong lessons early in her career. A scandal it is but I have doubts as to how much her interference actually mattered in the end – so many insane things about Bobby Jr. were already public knowledge and it didn’t really matter in the end. Claiming her behavior had great impact just feeds the same narcissistic impulses.
Baud
@Aziz, light!:
Ruzzia?
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I wish for all of them a year like I have had, with no more pain and suffering than I have endured.
Some may consider that cruel and unusual punishment.
Baud
Elitist that I am, I want to live in a society in which the culture does not treat the worst people as the most interesting.
Tony Jay
@Spc:
It doesn’t matter if it did or didn’t have an impact. The scandal is that it wasn’t allowed to have an impact. It was normalised, accepted, and eventually commoditised and packaged up as a product just in time for a Christmas a lot of people Walnut Kennedy has been given power over aren’t going to see, because the political media world doesn’t hold itself or many of its (pro-Right) subjects to any kind of behavioural standard.
The only consequence any of the people involved in this complete failure are going to suffer stems from lacklustre book sales? Now that’s a scandal.
Central Planning
I think the reason the book isn’t selling is because normies don’t know who Nuzzi is and they also don’t know what canto means.
John Revolta
I would haul out the old “She needs to get in touch with her Inner Editor” line, but in this case nothing less than an entire FLOCK of real live editors would have any chance of pulling anything worthwhile out of this crap. Sheesh.
John Revolta
@Central Planning: To give you some idea, Mrs Revolta, who is possibly even more obsessed with politics than I am, never heard of her until I brought all this up.
Anyway
@Spc: she wrote a hit piece on Biden for New York magazine — one of the articles that set the stage for last July’s fiasco. Funny how all these eleet journalists have memory-holed it.
DivF
A minor thing about this episode that infuriates me is the favorable comparison of Nuzzi to Joan Didion. I discovered Didion in the early 1970s, and have been a fan of her work ever since. Didion worked hard at her writing, both in the sense of her writerly craft, and in the sense of making a sustained and honest intellectual effort over decades to use the act of understanding herself as a means to understand her time and place, especially as a Californian. To put Nuzzi’s self-referential gossip in the same category is ludicrous.
Anyway
@Anyway: the hit- piece:
m.j.
@Tony Jay:
Don’t forget the genesis of this whole mess was Trump politicizing a virus because his ineptitude in handling it embarrassed him.
RFK Jr. saw a wave of stupid he could surf on and, boy howdy, that guy can hang ten.
Baud
@Anyway:
Oh, so it wasn’t just a hit piece on Biden’s “senility.” That’s underselling it. It was a hit piece that evoked the long-standing racist trope that Democrats are shifty people who shouldn’t be believed.
After all, if we’d lie to protect Biden, how can you trust what we say about Trump or RFK Jr.?
Central Planning
@John Revolta: My wife would have no idea who she is, but if she did, she would be disgusted by the whole thing and wouldn’t buy the book anyway.
Birdie
This person is also famously friends with (the fashionable) white supremacists. She has always been a dangerous clown and the only reason she gets airtime in the public discourse is because she is white and blonde.
Anyway
@Central Planning: Her book sales are besides the point — she got her fat book advance and is waiting for a call from Bari Weiss. She played a role in kneecapping Dems in 2024 and got away with it. No consequences for her.
p.a.
@John Revolta: No red pencil, no 1000 red pencils, could salvage anything in that book (I assume. Not getting within a chain bookstore area of it.) Can of red spraypaint would do it.
p.a.
@Anyway: Yes but. I’m disgusted there will be no financial consequences (can advances be clawed back?) BUT these p’tok’s self images are so grandiose, her book tanking, and the cutting reviews, from day 1 have to leave a big freaking mark. Take the win whenever it comes.
Geminid
I was just checking out Oil Price Magazine (yes, I have boring life). Some headlines caught my attention, including;
Analysts expect Russia’s oil revenues for December to hit $5.1 billion, which would be 50 percent of revenues for December, 2024. That is the lowest since August 2020, “when oil prices were plunging as the pandemic crushed demand.”
Revenues might not be so hot either in the Permian Basin, which covers much of west Texas and southeast New Mexico. Another headline:
The Permian Basin produced at a rate of 6.71 million bpd [barrels per day] in November. That is a record for the Basin, which accounts for roughly half of total US production.
But now the WTI price is $57.44 a barrel, with 2026 prices predicted to stay in the $50-55/bbl range. So will Permian producfion fall substantially? Not according to Oil Price reporter Julianne Geiger in her article titled:
Geiger argues that the Permian Basin’s record production is more of a floor than a ceiling, and that growing efficiencies can make $50 dollar oil sustainable for producers.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@p.a.: I’d settle for a red pencil utilized with John Wick’s skill set.
(YouTube reference)
Geminid
@Spc: Thank you for the correction. I got Ryan Lizza mixed up with Axios reporter Chris Cillizza
Baud
@Geminid:
I buy it for the articles.
m.j.
@Geminid:
The new one burns costs.
Labor?
NotMax
@Baud
Rigged news.
//
MagdaInBlack
Chicago-land weather report: a balmy 10 degrees, down to -3 tonight.
I see our Betty Cracker is also getting to enjoy this cold. I’m sorry, Betty.
Layer8Problem
@Baud: ”Ruzzia?”
Gotta capitalize those ‘ZZ’s. It’s in the BJ Style Guide, man.
Geminid
@m.j.: Producers have definitely cut their work force. There are also technological improvements: new “propants” which I gather are fracking fluids; longer horizontal drilling; using pressurized carbon dioxide to make oil flow more freely; and others.
Other Oil Price articles describe how standard drilling technologies leave 80-90% of the Permian Basin’s “tight oil” in the ground. So now the major oil companies are putting their formidible engineering resources into developing techniques to recover this stranded oil.
Which reminds me of a December 9 New York Times article titled:
The geothermal energy industry has plenty of potential, and Texas companies intend to put their drilling knowledge to work exploiting the renewable energy found deep down in the Earth.
But Texas industrialists and politicians are very wary of the term, “renewable.” So instead they call geothermal energy “inexhaustible,” which seems like a very Texas thing to do.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Central Planning: “normies don’t know who Nuzzi is”
This is so true. I barely know who Nuzzi.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I wouldn’t know who she was if it weren’t for AL.
But that’s true for a lot of things.
Princess
Didn’t Nuzzi get her start with a fawning hip profile of Milo Yiannopoulos? Whom, I now realize, she also tried to sleep with.
West of the Rockies
Even the title (Canto) seems pretentious. There’s nothing poetic about her dreary carryings-on with those creepster men. Ugh.
geg6
@DivF:
None of the reviews I’ve read have compared her at all favorably with Didion. They’ve all pretty much said that it seems that is what she was going for, but failed miserably.
For fun, I watched Tim Miller interview her at Bulwark. It did not go well.
m.j.
“inexhaustible,”
Data Centers.
mappy!
With Public Works, roads & bridges & sidewalks & stuff, a rule of thumb was that organized crime provides the work force, Republicans provide the materials… Nothing like 9″ of chip seal over 30 years to pad the profits. And then there’s bid rigging…
Ramalama
She refers to Leather Kennedy as The Politician. Which she can do since it’s a memoir and not journalism? He has not won any elections, right? So … politician adjacent.
But she got the contract to write the memoir due to her journalistic journeys down the pie holes of American bad boys. Journalist adjacent.
She’s more like Didi-NO.
Kosh III
@Central Planning: “I think the reason the book isn’t selling is because normies don’t know who Nuzzi”
Me. I had never heard of her until y’all jackals started talking about her here.
A favorite quote, which applies a LOT, from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes to mind “first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.”
Just look at that parking lot
@Baud: Heard Oil Price Magazine was the late T Boone Pickens favorite porn site. Coming in 2nd was the weekly Baker Hughes Oil Rig Count summary.
@Baud:
schrodingers_cat
@Princess: Yep hence I call her Olivia Nazi.
different-church-lady
So… tired… of… crazy… people….
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: I don’t know which one should be more insulted by that.
Ramalama
@Ramalama:
Make that Joan Didi-NO.
gratuitous
Eugh. I need a hot shower after reading those excerpts from Nuzzi’s book.
Did anyone else start to hear Nuzzi’s prose in the voice of the detached, doomed narrator of so many French existentialist new wave movies?
youtube.com/user/HenriLeChatNoir
zhena gogolia
@Aziz, light!: Hahahaha!!!!
I’m so sorry I missed this thread. I made a good-faith effort to read the excerpt in Vanity Fair, but it is UNREADABLE.
zhena gogolia
@Gretchen: Absolutely.
no body no name
As someone who’s slept with both sexes… yet finalized on a woman, is that Nuzzi and RFK are barely what I’d call a 6/10. This is on a purely physical level. I wouldn’t fuck either and if I some how got so drunk I didn’t I wouldn’t admit I did it, because it’s a 6.
They both look like pity fucks or “maybe than can give me something” neither qualifies as hot.
Nuzzi is at best a 6, maybe naked she’s a 7. She’s so far from cute or hot I don’t know how she catches a dick other than most straight men will fuck anything. RFK JR is a dried prune and old I can’t see how fixes this. I wouldn’t tap that. RFK, god I’d rather die.
I don’t get what it is about DC with at best mediocre looking people or at works fuglys getting into sex scandals but it’s very funny. Nobody under a 9 should be having sex for men. Nobody under an 8 for women. The great thing about online dating is it’s made that the law and the unspoken norm.
zhena gogolia
@Central Planning: 😂😂😂
schrodingers_cat
@Central Planning: Unfortunately I know who ON is but I have no idea what or who Canto is? Some character from some opera?
Paul in KY
I think for elite press ‘courtiers’, her’s is a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ situation and thus they want to just sweep it and her under the rug.
rikyrah
The Biden theory does make sense
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: It’s a name for a certain kind of poetic form. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the sections are called cantos.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
She may also be emulating fascist poet Ezra Pound. Wikipedia ETA: “fascist” is probably more accurate than “racist”:
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: Reading that shit made me pine a bit for the artistry in ‘Atlas Shrugged’…
Paul in KY
@MagdaInBlack: Gonna be up there in a couple of weeks. Hoping it gets a bit warmer. Will have a great time no matter what!
chemiclord
I mean, 1200 copies would be my 2nd highest selling title, and that’s lifetime.
I’ve… not been a particularly successful author.
Paul in KY
@no body no name: Politics is sports for ugly people. For what she works in, she’s definitely an 8. RFK Jr…yeesh….
If he was RFG ‘Robert Francis Goodnorb’ or something like that, he’d be running a soon-to-be-out-of-business gym.
Miss Bianca
God, I can’t even *read* this dreck. Literally. My brain shuts off, my eyes wander, and I find myself entertaining fantasies of this blonde boil on the ass of the body politic ending up as a bag lady on the streets of DC, shaking a paper coffee cup full of coins at the right-wing dudes who may have wanted to bang her at some point, but who end up with their eyes averted as they scoot down the street while she mumbles some strung-together sentences from her “work”.
Fuck this bitch. Or rather, *un*fuck her, as George Carlin used to say.
Also, too, was her writing always this bad? I know AL used to think there was something entertaining about it once upon a time.
glc
Thanks. That’s enough about Nuzzi for the remainder of my life but it’s fine.
Here’s a long sentence.
There are more amusing things by Barthelme, but it’s not bad.
Somewhere else he mentions having snacks faxed to his apartment – I believe he was waiting for the papal nuncio at the time. We’re still not quite there but we might as well be.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia:Thanks, that’s what I thought it was related to music or poetry, that’s where I have heard that term before.
schrodingers_cat
ON’s hit job on Biden should be the first sentence when discussing her self serving book.
WTFGhost
@Gretchen: The other possibility is, “he didn’t come at me like a ravening beast! How could he be so insulting?” Yes, it’s a sexist joke, but I think I have permission to use it in this limited circumstance.
goodmatt
@Central Planning: Nuzzi’s inability to write or say anything direct or straightforward might be inhibiting the breadth of her appeal.
Captain C
@WTFGhost: Por que no los dos?
Bupalos
I watched Tim Miller interview with her and I highly recommend it if you’re in the mood for a truly enlightening kind of tense nightmare. You can see Tim internally choking down a rising nausea, related to the fact that he himself is in and of this tribe and has a kind of parallel story of empowering fascists.
He makes her cry. She makes him constantly wince. She’s repeatedly intoning the phrase “rebranding myself” as in “this isn’t an attempt to rebrand myself.” Which comes out whenever Tim gets back to the central issue of why she’s trying to make mysterious literary art out of an incredibly silly and disastrous infatuation and ethical bankruptcy.
We learn that she offered RFK advice in a “Socratic” spirit only. Because she “cared about him.”
We learn she failed to go public at the time of his nomination when she could have possibly taken him down because she feared being killed. Mostly, and most incongruently, by Lizza… who she’ll only call “the man I did not marry.” Or else because she would have compromised the value of the information by being too involved in it. Or because [insert pseudo-artistic babble about emotional truth. Then reiterate that this isn’t a rebranding.]
Aziz, light!
@Kosh III:
That phrase was popular back around 1970 when we suburban teens believed that the establishment was irredeemably corrupt and evil.
Layer8Problem
@Aziz, light!:
More recently very much a line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy talking about a particular corporation’s marketing division.
PJ
It’s impossible to measure the impact of what she did, but it had an impact. In addition to consistently writing favorably about RFK, Jr., and, to aid him, writing a weirdly effusive profile fluffing Trump and a weirdly negative hit piece about Biden (which, among others, led to the pundit/celebrity and elite Dem demand that Biden drop out of the race), she actively worked to suppress damaging information about RFK, Jr. from being reported on. We can’t know if that information would have prevented RFK, Jr. from becoming head of HHS, but it sure helped that it didn’t come out.
glc
@Aziz, light!:
or “noticed that.” As has so amply been demonstrated since – by the kids, though, as often as not.
Nice public service ad by Frank Zappa: Kids, if you take drugs, your brain will turn to mush, and you’ll become just like your parents. Delivered with panache.
Archon
@no body no name: Nuzzi has a look white men swoon over.
something fabulous
seems to me the now-ex is not getting enough scorn for his substack or whatever it is… revelations. I get that he is an injured party and wanted to tell his side, but boy he does not come off well. and not in a self-deprecating, conscious way. so self-satisfied! so completely smug about his part in enabling her throughout. so gross and patronizing– and apparently he’s already with someone new, even younger? Yuck on all parties here.
piratedan
there’s a fast melting ice floe awaiting her residency.
Miss Bianca
@glc: Although the funny thing about Frank Zappa is, that however much he scorned drugs, he was addicted to cigarettes and coffee. I’ve always wondered if anyone ever got away with pointing out to him that nicotine and caffeine are drugs as well.
Paul in KY
@Bupalos: Thank you for the summation. Now I don’t have to!
Paul in KY
@Miss Bianca: Died of lung cancer, I believe.
Miss Bianca
@Paul in KY:
Prostate cancer. Aged 52.
glc
@Miss Bianca: I always drew the line at nicotine, but coffee is my herbal supplement, as it happens.
My grandfather gave me one drag on his cigarette at an impressionable age, and it sufficed.
Paul in KY
@Miss Bianca: Thank you for the correction. RIP, Frank.