Day 1379
The Children's Crusade
“So it goes” appears throughout Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s Vonnegut’s deadpan shrug at death—a fatalistic hiccup that pops up whenever someone dies. The phrase captures the worldview that fighting fate is pointless, the perfect philosophy for checking out of responsibility entirely, depending on how charitable you’re feeling.
Yesterday, Z awarded “Golden Hearts” to Irish medics training Ukrainian doctors to stop frontline bleeding1. Noble stuff.
Meanwhile, 3,392 miles west, Trump, fighting sleep, called Ukraine “chaos” at a cabinet meeting, claiming he’s “settled eight wars” and his people are “over in Russia right now” working on number nine. “Not easy. What a mess.”
So it goes.
Moscow talks between Witkoff, Kushner and Putin yielded exactly nothing.
Silver lining: judges in Kyiv eased pre-trial restrictions for the father of Ruslan Magamedrasulov and Roman Chervinsky. Related cases. Foreign press stays quiet, though. Acknowledging them means admitting an inconvenient truth about their previous reporting and, er, Z.
So it goes.
Speaking of inconvenient truths and the instinct to write one’s way out of them: Olivia Nuzzi thought she could pull it off. The political reporter’s new book, American Canto, was supposed to reframe her scandal—the revelation that she’d been in a months-long relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she’d profiled, leading to her departure from New York magazine after violating conflict-of-interest standards. An unnamed editor had told her, “You could write your way out of it.”
Instead, the book’s debut became its own fresh disaster. Days before publication, her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza alleged on Substack that she’d also slept with another politician she profiled—former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford—and that her Kennedy liaison went beyond sexts to include acting as an unpaid political operative, feeding him confidential source material. Vanity Fair, which had just hired her as West Coast editor, launched a review. A spokesperson told the Times they were “taken by surprise” and “looking at all the facts.”
The Colombia Journalism Review notes the bitter irony: Nuzzi once shared a piece criticizing the Hollywood stereotype of female reporters sleeping with sources, asking on X, “Why does Hollywood think female reporters sleep with their sources?” Turns out, sometimes stereotypes write themselves. And sometimes, writing one’s way out proves trickier than it seems.
So it goes.