Financial Times writer Emily Stokes recently had lunch with Jonathan Safran Foer at Gobo, a vegan restaurant on Sixth Ave. She seemed to find his personality as distasteful as their meal. His "Rejuvenate" juice, she writes, was "the color of manure." [FT] @2:30 PM 14
How Much Does the Modern Father Suck? @10:00 AM
Lizzie Skurnick reads the Foer and the Chabon alike in search of understanding what's gotten so hideously annoying about modern dads. "Foer's unhinged screed against the dangers of the modern meat-industrial complex takes 'me too' fathering to a new level…. There is nothing wrong with falling into wonderment at one's own child. (It is contraindicated over the long term.) There's also nothing wrong with being against the wholesale ripping of beaks off innocent chickens to keep Tyson Foods in business, an image Foer returns to frequently. Who, after all, is for a food system that, among other things, routinely releases a geyser of fecal matter into the air to spray neighboring crops? The problem is that Foer suddenly cares-and, by extension, so must we-because some day one micrometer of that shit might fall on the head of Jonathan Safran Foer's son." 9
Have Some Bacon! You and I, We Are Going to Die @2:15 PM
The New Yorker gets mail about its review of Jonathan Safran Foer's vegetarian book. Including someone who said he was writing from the parking lot of a slaughterhouse: "I wonder if Foer has ever visited, or considered the impact of, a thousand-acre soybean monoculture. We have demanded cheap food, and so we have received cheap, destructive food production. Second, vegetarian moralism denies an essential fact of living: death. Everything dies, and not always in its due time." The great beyond eagerly waits for all forms of meat, including the writing kind of meat! 52
Mark your calendars for Monday, December 7th, when novelist/polemicist Jonathan Safran Foer and former New York Times restaurant critic/recovering bulimic Frank Bruni will have a conversation at the JCC in Manhattan on whether or not it is moral to throw up animals. @9:40 AM 1
The Shadow Editors: Meat and Real Estate are both Murder @3:07 PM
Tom Scocca: Did they time this whole rollout around Jonathan Safran Foer's vegetarianism book so as to get the maximum number of semi-precocious 15-year-olds to ruin their family Thanksgiving dinners?
Choire Sicha: Well it may just be the need for a Hot New Nonfiction Airport Book for fall, as Malcolm Gladwell only had a "best of" book. And I think David Sedaris is off this year.
Tom Scocca: Nice of J.S. Foer to swing over from the fiction team to fill the gap.
Choire Sicha: He took one for the team.
Tom Scocca: My advice to young would-be reporters is to write a novel, because once you've written a book-length made-up story, you're qualified to write about any sort of factual business you please. READ MORE 48
