Cult classic / Mad scientists
Today: Laurie Woolever, author of Appetites, World Travel, Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography, and Care and Feeding; and Misha Angrist, a senior fellow at the Initiative for Science & Society and associate professor of the practice at the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University (the views he expresses here are his alone).
Issue No. 519
Free Love, Yeah Right
Laurie Woolever
Scholars Return Fire
Misha Angrist
Free Love, Yeah Right
by Laurie Woolever
I visited my 79-year-old father last week; our days together were structured around planning, cooking, and eating meals, and watching TV. The evening of my arrival, we had smash burgers made with ground moose meat (he’s a big game hunter with a capacious freezer) and watched The Apprentice (the Trump villain origin story film, not the Trump villain origin story reality series).
As horrific as the subject matter is, there’s a lot to like about the film, which I first saw in the theater during its brief run before the 2024 election. The script is fast-paced and punchy. Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn is funny, repugnant, and ultimately pathetic, and in an era where very little about politics seems to make sense, I find some cold comfort in knowing the original recipe for the shit sausage on the current menu in this country.
I asked my father what he remembered about Roy Cohn. He’d been too young to know or care about the Rosenbergs or McCarthy, he told me, and he hadn’t cared about who helped get Reagan elected.
“To be honest, I didn’t pay attention to national politics till 2016,” he said. “Work, family, hunting, taking care of the garden, saving money for retirement: that was what I knew.”
Keep us breathing fire!
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