Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara. From time to time, we re-air a conversation that stuck with us at Stay Tuned. This week we’re revisiting a conversation I had with Frank Bruni in January of this year. Bruni has worn many different distinguished hats at The New York Times over the last 25 years, from Metro Reporter to White House correspondent, to chief restaurant critic, and now to opinion writer. He writes a weekly newsletter reflecting on politics, culture, food, the use of language, and many other topics of interest.

He’s also a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University and the author of many books, including his most recent memoir, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found. We spoke about polarizing political rhetoric heading into 2024, how AI is changing the fabric of writing, and how an unusual medical ailment he experienced in 2017 changed his outlook on life. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

THE INTERVIEW

Preet Bharara:

Frank Bruni, welcome to the show.

Frank Bruni:

Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a great honor to have you. Way overdue. I’ve been a fan for a very long time, and I like everything that you put out. My first question to you is, given what’s going on in our politics and that you write about politics and public policy, you teach public policy at Duke, do you long for the simpler days of being a restaurant critic? I didn’t mean to presume that those were simpler days.

Frank Bruni:

No, no.

Preet Bharara:

But it just strikes me that if you could luxuriate in a bisque, maybe that’s just nicer and more pleasant than what you have to figure out now.

Frank Bruni:

The thoughts are certainly prettier, if prettier is a word we can use as it relates to food. Yeah, I guess I long for them in that sense, but I tell you, what people I don’t think appreciate unless they’ve been in the hot seat of restaurant critic for an influential newspaper is as angry as politicians get at you, Preet, or as angry as politicians get at me, nothing compared to restaurateurs who have just received a bad review. Nothing.

Preet Bharara:

Did you wear disguises? How did that work?

Frank Bruni:

I reserved in fake names. I had credit cards in fake names. The Times actually had to have a personal conversation with an agreement with American Express because I changed my fake credit cards about every six months, but I didn’t wear disguises because, A, it’s really hard to pull off a good disguise, and so they’re not always successful. But on top of that, it takes an enormous amount of work.

The one time I did disguise myself a restaurateur had made a public proclamation that he so hated my reviews of his restaurants that he was not going to let me review the next one, and he had offered a reward to any staff member who saw me come through the door and correctly spotted me and threw me out. For that restaurant, for the three visits I made there, I wore elaborate disguises.

I had wigs that were styled for my head. It convinced me of something I knew already, which is you cannot disguise yourself night after night and get the job done and not be distracted by it and not spend your entire life in hair and makeup essentially.

Preet Bharara:

What percentage of the time when you were not disguised did the folks at the restaurant know who you were?

Frank Bruni:

I would say in the first year of the job, maybe 40% of the time. By the fifth year, probably 85% of the time. It’s just unavoidable.

Preet Bharara:

What distortions does that introduce into the review process? In other words, are they lavishing more love and flavor on your food? Are they serving you better? Do they seem nervous? How do you account for whatever distortion your presence creates?

Frank Bruni:

Well, I mean, you notice certain things and you temper the amount of weight you give them in a review. The good news is there are things that can’t change. They can’t go out and find a new supplier. They can’t go out and find a new line cook. They can’t remake the recipes. What they can do and what they do do, and I learned all about this later, is really, really nervous self-regarding restaurants would… To use kitchen lingo, they would fire two versions of your entire table’s order, and then they would look and see which duck came out better, which steak looks better, and they would bring you that.

You know that that’s happening and you have to account for that. It would be hilarious. I mean, I would walk in and they often didn’t spot you until minute 10 or minute 25. One of the ways I could always tell is if I had a female server and they figured out 25 minutes in that it was me because they also knew I was gay, all of a sudden, the best looking male server in the place had taken over the table.

Preet Bharara:

What you’re talking about reminds me of a podcast I did a few years ago with my friend David Chang, and he talked about something that I thought was fascinating and I wonder if you experienced this.

Obviously he’s an owner of restaurants and a chef of great repute and he said people that he knows and restaurants that he’s run, sometimes when a reviewer or a VIP person was coming in, the inclination, sometimes, of the chef or the head chef would be, “I need to personally prepare the meal and chop the vegetables and do all the preparatory work because I’m the chef,” when, as Dave points out, it’s been a while since the chef has done that.

The line cooks are actually very, very good at that and they shouldn’t be replaced just because you have a reviewer or a VIP. Does that scenario make any sense to you?

Frank Bruni:

Oh, it makes total sense. A restaurant is really about systems. What someone like David Chang, who is a great chef, a great restaurateur, what someone like him does is they put systems in place. They put people in place. It’s a managerial role as much as it is the role of an artist. I agree with him. I think a chef can actually make the mistake of showing up and getting involved and disrupting what has become a sort of spontaneous effortless system after exacting setup.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, another way I could often tell I’d been made was if a restaurant had an open kitchen. Often halfway through the meal, but not before I would notice, oh, there’s Jean-Georges Vongerichten. He wasn’t here at the beginning of the meal, but he has taxied over from whichever other restaurant he was at to make sure that the restaurant sees him standing in the kitchen and gets the sense that he’s never neglecting this particular restaurant in his empire.

Preet Bharara:

A couple more questions about restaurants and food and then we’ll come back to it after we do some politics, some language, and there are a few things I want to ask you about yourself. Have restaurants in America gotten appreciably better over the last 20 years overall?

Frank Bruni:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

Why is that?

Frank Bruni:

Well, because more and more Americans have become, I hate the word but it’s a convenient one, foodies, right? I mean, this tracks exactly with the expansion of food coverage in our magazines and in our newspapers. It tracks exactly with the explosion of The Food Network and all the food television. In the last 20, 30 years, Americans became much more interested in food. Many Americans became much more sophisticated about food, and that created a market for restaurants and a set of standards for restaurants that was different from 25, 40 years ago.

Preet Bharara:

Last question about restaurants at this moment, do you agree with me that restaurants should go back, all of them should go back to the actual paper menu?

Frank Bruni:

I do. I agree with you. First of all, every time, I don’t know about you, Preet, but every time they have one of those damn camera codes and you hold your phone over it, I would say-

Preet Bharara:

I can’t get it open

Frank Bruni:

…40% of the time it doesn’t work. And then your meal, the spell of the meal has been broken because your first 10 minutes are one of the servers trying to see if it works on their phone, trying to handle your phone. I mean, it’s like a ballet that begins with a bunch of crap falls.

Preet Bharara:

You try not to pull your phone out for a nice meal with your family or with colleagues or friends. Then you get a Twitter notification and you’re down a bad path right from the onset.

Frank Bruni:

I also enjoy the aesthetics of looking at a menu. I mean, before menus started to go away, you could kind of get some of your first accurate impressions of a restaurant and what it was trying to do and what its style and sensibility were from looking at the way they put together the menu, everything about it.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, some menus are… Well, actually scratch that. I want to move on to something else. Frank, let’s talk about politics, which I know you’re a keen observer of.

Frank Bruni:

Is this the part of the podcast that’s uplifting?

Preet Bharara:

Well, no.

Frank Bruni:

I’m joking.

Preet Bharara:

That’s why I thought we begin with food. We might come back to food. Maybe we’ll periodically come back.

Frank Bruni:

We might need to come back to food.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll just thrown in random foods, because I have a lot of questions about that. We could do a whole episode just on that experience, but there’s a person I want to ask you about that some people might say, “Preet, you talk about him too much,” but 2024 is not far away, and that’s Ron DeSantis. I asked various guests about Ron DeSantis because I don’t really know what to make of the guy.

I don’t know if he has a glass jaw or not. I’ve mentioned that before. But you’ve written colorfully, as you write about a lot of things, about Ron DeSantis and you describe him as… What’s the phrase you used? You say he’s the seething protagonist of a revenge thriller. What does that mean?

Frank Bruni:

What I find fascinating about Ron DeSantis, and I do not mean fascinating in the positive sense, is we live in this era where so much of politics is negative, so much of the appeal that politicians make to the partisans whom they want to have voting for them, so much of the appeal is negative. These are our enemies. This is how I will torture our enemies. Ron DeSantis is the poster boy for that. Everything that he does that makes news, if you think about it. It’s not about constructive stuff.

It’s not about a positive policy vision. It’s all about defining and naming enemies and torturing them. Walt Disney, I’m going to remove your special status. Gay teachers, I’m going to shut you up. Vaccine makers, I’m going to take you to court. He kind of has tried to figure out whom his base is most hateful towards, whom they hate the most, and he goes after them. His pitch is essentially, no one tortures our enemies like I torture our enemies.

It’s a very scary spectacle, because if that’s what politics becomes about, I don’t know how we ever find any common ground again. I don’t know how we ever reclaim any civility.

Preet Bharara:

Well, isn’t a lot of politics about defining yourself in terms of who your enemies are? I mean, I do it sort of good naturedly and in good humor, even in my Twitter bio. In my Twitter bio, I have fired by Trump, banned by Putin, and I have said on occasion, I’m not running for office and it’s not a platform of mine, but I’m a little bit proud of who my enemies are, including some crazy people on Twitter and on social media.

People on the left do it. Maybe it’s deserved, maybe it’s not, but they identify their enemies as Wall Street and sometimes the rich, sometimes the powerful. Is there something inherently wrong with the idea of delineating yourself in terms of who your enemies are?

Frank Bruni:

I think there’s something inherently dangerous about it, and I think it’s a matter of proportion. Yes, we all do it. It’s part of human nature, and it is one way to define yourself. But I think you have to define yourself in numerous ways. Joe Biden’s a good example of that. There was a kind of freak out when he started giving speeches and started denouncing MAGA Republicans.

The reason people freaked out and were so struck by it is because Joe Biden had actually taken a much different tack to get to the presidency. His whole pitch to Americans was, “I’m not going to speak in that way. I’m going to turn down the temperature on everything.” And that was his pitch because he understood how important it is and was. I mean, how important it was and is.

If we only define ourselves in terms of our enemies, if we only rally and rouse support by talking about how we’re going to make sure our enemies can’t enter the public square or don’t have votes or et cetera, et cetera, there’s no way we’re ever going to be able to forge the sorts of compromises that legislation requires, and there’s no way we’re ever going to find common ground again, and this country is a perilous place in all of those regards.

Preet Bharara:

It seems to be, not to be cynical, none of that is going to matter so long as defining yourself by virtue of your enemies is effective political strategy. Is there anything to suggest that will in the near future cease to be an effective political strategy?

Frank Bruni:

Biden’s election. If you look at spread of Democrats who ran, I would say he spoke of all of them and perhaps the softest and not conciliatory, but he spoke in perhaps the softest voice as pertains to naming enemies and venting any disapproval or discuss toward them. Americans at that moment in time decided they wanted that. Yeah, I think there’s some hope.

Preet Bharara:

Stay tuned. There’s more coming up after this.

There’s this other phenomenon that you also talk about, and it’s not just the juxtaposition of a particular figure as against his or her enemies, it’s also the comparison of someone in the spectrum of other political figures. There is this phenomenon, this dynamic in which DeSantis, people have said this, may appear sensible and centrist.

I think that’s Musk’s phrase. You write, “In what universe? He’s sensible and centrist only by the warped yardsticks of Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, and the like, but those yardsticks will be used frequently as various Republicans join the 2024 fray.” The introduction of people like MTG and others, describe how warped that causes the political competition to become.

Frank Bruni:

Well, I mean, in stretching the measuring stick of possibility, you see this happening already and it’s an enormous danger for the media for journalism as the 2024 race takes shape. You’re not moderate just because you’re not Marjorie Taylor Greene. I saw this in the coverage of Kevin McCarthy’s constipated ascent to House Speaker.

Preet Bharara:

I’m sorry, his what?

Frank Bruni:

His constipated ascent.

Preet Bharara:

His constipated ascent. I’m going to ponder that for a minute.

Frank Bruni:

Well, I mean, it’s a fair description, right? It was constipated. I would read stories about it. After a story had talked about Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, in that case, Marjorie Taylor Greene was not blocking Kevin McCarthy’s way, but they would talk about those, in my view, wackadoodle Republicans who were staging a tantrum or a snit and trying to block him. And then they would interview another Republican and say a moderate Republican, but it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, there aren’t really many moderate Republicans in the Republican Party of this particular moment.

That party has moved so far to the right that there are very few genuine moderates there anymore, certainly very few genuine moderates who have any say in sway. But we sometimes put that label on people who are not Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are not talking about space rays and QAnon and microchips and vaccines, and that’s a real danger. We have to be careful of that.

Preet Bharara:

Now, is Joe Biden a moderate or does he too appear to be a moderate because there are people like Bernie Sanders and AOC and others in the Democratic Party?

Frank Bruni:

Joe Biden is a mix. I think it’s a great question, and I think you could get smart people to argue the answer to that either way. If we look at some of the economic solutions coming out of the pandemic, and that’s an important distinction coming out of the pandemic, if we look at some of his economic prescriptions, they certainly are far more liberal than Joe Biden had previously seemed, and they’re pretty far to the left.

If you look at the totality of Joe Biden, which includes a whole lot more in terms of the way he speaks about cultural issues, et cetera, I think it’s hard to paint him as being anywhere near the extreme left, but it’s a mixed bag and it’s a mixed bag that’s harder to analyze and pinpoint because circumstances are so different than they were five years ago. I mean, everybody governs in response to the circumstances of his or her time, and that’s part of what you’re seeing with him.

Preet Bharara:

I find it interesting that there are people on the right, and whatever you think of Joe Biden, like him, not like him, want to vote for him, don’t want to vote for him, think he’s told, think he’s just fine, that there are people who seem to say with sincerity that Joe Biden is a crazy extremist. Now, I’m biased in favor of his policies, but how does that resonate with people who live in the real universe?

Frank Bruni:

I don’t think it resonates at all. I don’t think they experience him that way. I think that that’s a lot of rhetoric that is aimed at getting far right and close to far right Republicans to turn out for primary elections and to flood the Twitter sphere or whatever will come after the Twitter sphere, et cetera. But I also think we’re falling into a little bit of a trap here, Preet, and I do it all the time in my writing, and then I kind of look back and I catch myself. I think we are too frequently talking in a left-right binary.

We’re too often looking at the spectrum of possibility solely in terms of left and right. I think there’s a kind of different thing that comes into play, and I’m not sure most Americans, outside of the people who are allowed on social media, outside of the people who are enormous rabble-rousers and primaries, I’m not sure most Americans look at Joe Biden in particular, but other politicians and ask exactly where they are on the left-right spectrum. I think they ask, is this person solution-oriented or destruction-oriented?

Is this person someone who seems like they’re trying to promote a rational discussion or someone who seems to be throwing a tantrum? I think those are binaries, for lack of a better word, that are every bit as important and relevant to many voters as the right-left thing.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about writing and language for a little bit. That relates to politics some, but I don’t want to talk about it in that vein. My intro to talking about writing is the thing that now we have to talk about on every episode apparently, and that’s ChatGPT.

Frank Bruni:

Duh!

Preet Bharara:

What was that sound? Let the record reflect that Frank Bruni made a weird sound when I mentioned ChatGPT.

Frank Bruni:

That was the sound of someone who is a professor and teaches students, and now on top of plagiarism, which here at Duke I’ve never encountered in one of my students, but now on top of worrying about plagiarism and worrying about other sorts of stuff, I have to worry, as anybody teaching at I was going to say at the college level, but it’s true at the high school or middle school level too, is I have to worry about what ChatGPT means in terms of the authorship of a piece of work that is submitted to you for grading.

Preet Bharara:

Just for people who have not been following, ChatGPT is a particular chatbot by OpenAI. It’s artificial intelligence. You can query it and it will do things for you, including writing papers or doing other kinds of writing assignments in the style that you want. There are limitations, but the results of something that’s still pretty nascent are impressive. You have written that ChatGPT is “a surprisingly competent writer and sometimes even a clever one to the point where early users regard regard it as some mix of software and sorcery.” Have you seen these stories about how ChatGPT lies?

Frank Bruni:

Yes. Yes.

Preet Bharara:

And makes up studies? It’s quite human after all.

Frank Bruni:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Totally wholesale makes up studies. And even when instructed not to lie, it will still lie.

Frank Bruni:

Yeah. Well, I’ve seen those stories. I mean, I think all of us are a little bit too focused right now because this is the way things work in media and public discussion on ChatGPT as a fake author, as an author of things that human beings should be authoring themselves. But I think it’s the kind of tip of the iceberg. This is when we talk about what sorts of jobs automation will come for and what sorts of things machines and computers can do that once required human beings.

This is an example and a metaphor and the kind of front edge of all of that, and that’s what really freaks me out beyond just what sorts of tools my students are using, which is a minor question in the scheme of things. How many jobs that exist today, how many of us who have what we feel and experience is meaningful labor, that gives us a sense of pride and purpose, what happens to the sense of human purpose as machines do more and more of the things that we used to do? I think that’s a huge spiritual crisis.

Preet Bharara:

Right, but some people would say, and it depends on the exact function that’s being taken over by the machine, it frees you up to engage in higher pursuits. I mean, some people might say, depending on what kind of writing you do in your profession, that ChatGPT is not going to replace you, but ChatGPT can do the first draft and then you layer in human personality and cleverness and style and additional substance. Maybe you have more time to do the research, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know. I mean, do you have some optimism that it can give us greater liberty or not?

Frank Bruni:

Well, it certainly could give us greater free time and greater liberty, but I have questions. Where’s your salary coming from if the machine’s doing that? Now you have more free time and greater liberty. Do you have the economic agency to do something with that free time and that liberty?

Also, we’re living in an era where people’s attachment to religion has waned. Many people have lost any sense of connection to their communities as they’ve moved online, as life has become fractured in various ways. Freed up from work, which is often a source of connection, identity, pride, productivity, purpose for people, freed up, and then what takes its place? So many of the things that might take its place are on the decline in modern life.

Preet Bharara:

What makes a good sentence?

Frank Bruni:

Oh, I mean, I don’t know. I’m no expert on that, but I think a good sentence is lucid. It accomplishes whatever task it attends to. It accomplishes whatever task it intends to accomplish with vigor, with vividness directly, and it stands out from the sentences around it. I mean, a good sentence is a long sentence if it’s coming after a bunch of staccato sentences, and a good sentence is a short sentence if it is coming on the heels of a lot of Rococo syntax.

I’m snob about the written word because I grew up in a family that revered the written word and because I’ve made a life in words and I hope that I sometimes write in a competent and even compelling way. But there are many, many, many other ways to express yourself. Today’s young people may not be as fluent or as fluid with the written word as their analogs 20 or 30 years were, but they’re much, much better with other media and there are many different ways to communicate.

Preet Bharara:

That’s pretty good. That’s a good silver lining. I take it also a good sentence doesn’t have what you call words that are worth sidelining. You have this feature and you talk about words that you think kind of suck or phrases that kind of suck. I want to point to one in particular because I use it a lot. I will often say the phrase, it is what it is. We use it all the time, which language observers and experts and practitioners of writing decry. I just think it’s a pretty good tautology. Why do you dislike it?

Frank Bruni:

Well, partly because of its ubiquity. When something becomes as overused as it is what it is or any number of other phrases, it just sounds like white noise. It sounds like meaningless chant.

Preet Bharara:

But Frank, it is what it is.

Frank Bruni:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

I could say that about the phrase.

Frank Bruni:

I’ve heard too many people say it is what it is as if they have just scaled the summit of philosophy, and that drives me crazy. But yeah, no, I do. In my weekly New York Times newsletter, which I’d love people to read, I have occasional feature called Words Worth Sidelining, and it is what it is was one of the most nominated phrases or words.

I say to readers, please write in with words and phrases that should be retired forever. Sometimes what I choose is a reflection of what people write in, because I’m blessed enough to have readers who are very, very engaged and do write in by the scores and hundreds, and along with the phrase at the end of the day.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, at the end of the day, that’s a little crazy.

Frank Bruni:

Right. Along with that phrase, which I wrote about, the most nominated phrase by readers who are like, will you please sound the death knell for fill in the blank, it is what it is was a very popular choice. The one thing that I also railed against in that feature, I mean railed in a good-natured sense, I hope, I try to write that feature in a humorous way, I begged for the retirement of no worries as an answer, like “Thank you, no worries,” or, “It was nice of you to do that. No worries.”

Those damn syllables still come out of my mouth. Although now it’s like a comedy routine because I start to say, “No wor,” and then I kind of catch myself and I lash myself on the back.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s say in an email correspondence… Here’s a context in which it’s used. You’re going to meet someone for lunch or a drink or dinner, and they’re running five minutes late. “Hey, running five minutes late.” What is the appropriate response and why isn’t it no worries?

Frank Bruni:

I mean, no worries is a perfectly fine response. It’s just, again, so thread bare and nauseating with overuse. I mean, you could say, “Don’t worry about it.”

Preet Bharara:

Thank you is overused too, but we don’t say, don’t use thank you because it’s overused.

Frank Bruni:

That’s fair. That’s fair.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a way of letting people off the hook. No worries.

Frank Bruni:

But no worries, we’re not in Australia. No worries comes from Crocodile Dundee in Australia, right?

Preet Bharara:

What if you’re meeting someone for a vegetarian sandwich?

Frank Bruni:

I mean, Preet, you’re here in the United States, not in England. How often do you say cheerio mate? Probably never, right? So why no worries?

Preet Bharara:

But it’s become Americanized. I don’t know.

Frank Bruni:

I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

Do you find yourself using exclamation marks in email and text correspondence more than you did before?

Frank Bruni:

I did for a while, and then I realized how mannered and just faddish that had become. I’ve actually been on an exclamation point diet for about five years now.

Preet Bharara:

Is that being perceived poorly by your colleagues who think you’re being more blunt and not as effusive as they want you to be?

Frank Bruni:

I don’t know. It’s a good question. They may feel I lack passion.

Preet Bharara:

You should ask people about it.

Frank Bruni:

They may feel like I’m a milk toast person with no affect and no gusto for anything because I’ve exiled exclamation points from my life.

Preet Bharara:

I feel like when we were talking about thank you a minute ago that at the end of a text or an email to colleagues, if you end with a mere thank you with either no punctuation or a period, maybe that’s dismissive and not thankful enough. Do you think that’s the evolution that we’ve had?

Frank Bruni:

It might be. Because in a weird way, we’re back to the distorting aspects of having Marjorie Taylor Greene’s and Matt Gaetz’s is in the world. When the standard gets changed, how does everything seem in relation to it? I don’t know. I mean, I have reached a point where it’s clear to me everybody communicates in a different way when it comes to courtesies and how to end an email. I much prefer a seemingly flacid thank you without an exclamation pointer, without all sorts of modifiers.

I prefer that to an XO, XO, XO from someone who I’m not really in a position to want or get kisses and hugs from, but XO, XO, XO has become some sort of code that no longer means what it used to mean, which is kisses and hugs, which I would argue are not appropriate in the professional context.

Preet Bharara:

Hear more of our conversation in just a moment.

This is an awkward segue into something much more serious. I said I wanted to talk about you a little bit. I’d like to spend the last few minutes we have together having you talk about something that you’ve shared with the world about a medical problem you had about five years ago. Can you tell us what happened, and then I’m going to ask you how that affected you and how it’s changed your life?

Frank Bruni:

Sure, yeah. About five years ago, I woke up one morning in October on a Saturday and my vision was different, compromised, blurry. To make a very long story short, I found out in the coming days that I’d had a very rare stroke of my right optic nerve, that the vision from my right eye was ruined forevermore, and that the science of this, the literature of this, suggested that there was a 20% chance in the coming years or at some point in the future that the same exact thing would happen with my left eye.

I was in a position where I was suddenly having to learn to operate with compromised vision, learn how to see with one eye and edit my right eye out of the equation, and everything that entailed, which was slower reading, more error-prone writing. I also had to come to terms with the fact that there was a 20% chance, and there remains as I talk with you right now a 20% chance I’ll go blind. And that’s a lot to deal with in one fell swoop.

Preet Bharara:

You wrote a book recently, I think the paperback is coming out soon, called The Beauty of Dusk. Explain the title.

Frank Bruni:

After this happened to me, Preet, I had the work ahead of me. I mean, emotional work, that sort of thing that anybody who has this… There are all sorts of medical traumas, mishaps that happened to us, especially as we age and part of the book is about aging. I mean, I had to figure out how to deal with limitations and how to look at the changes in my life in a positive way as opposed to from the framework of loss.

The Beauty of Dusk, which is the name of my book, that is a reference to both lifespan, kind of being closer to the end of the day than the beginning of the day, but it’s also a reference to how you can take a different kind of inventory and survey of your life and focus on what blessings you still have, focus on the beauty in it as opposed to the hardships and the challenges. I found that in confronting these new challenges, in meeting them head on, in not falling prey to self-pity and not being undone by them, I found sorts of joys and satisfactions and senses of pride that I hadn’t before.

I know that can sound a little Pollyanna-ish, but I think it’s true for a lot of people who’ve been through the kind of thing I’ve been through. The book is basically about meeting a life challenge in that fashion and trying to come out the other side of it as whole, as positive, and as grateful as possible.

Preet Bharara:

I will point out for the record that in your answer you correctly and in a non-trite way used the phrase at the end of the day.

Frank Bruni:

I noticed that myself. You know what, Preet?

Preet Bharara:

But no worries.

Frank Bruni:

No worries.

Preet Bharara:

Thank you! The exclamation mark is hard to convey. I just want to ask you a little more about that because not everybody in the face of distress or a physical change like that or risk of what many would consider quite a debilitating physical limitation would look to the positive. You have said that you were terrified of the idea that you would lose all of your eyesight and you’re not anymore. You hope you never do, but you’re just not…

How do you get over being terrified about that and how can you explain it in a way that people who are listening to this, who themselves are experiencing hardship or at risk of greater hardship, lose the fear of it?

Frank Bruni:

For starters, I don’t think everybody can get over the terror of it or the anxiety or the self-pity. I think we’re all wired in different ways. One of my great blessings, it turned out one of my great bits of good fortune is that I was able to. And that’s not a triumph of character. That’s probably the grace of biochemistry or whatever endowment I’ve been given. But I was someone who was often a pessimist.

I was someone who if you told me this was going to happen to me, I would’ve said, “Well, I’m just going to be undone by that. I’m just going to live the rest of my life curled into a fearful ball in the fetal position in bed.” But if you have this ability, and you should certainly test yourself and see if you have this ability, you have to think and realize there is no point to the terror. What does that get you? There’s no point to self-pity. What does that get you? None of that changes your tomorrows.

If you plan on having and spending those tomorrows, you’re going to be in a much better position and you’re going to be much happier within the realm of possible bits of happiness you can have if you move past feeling sorry for yourself to the best extent you can. If you move past the terror, we’re talking about the fact that I still live with this 20% chance that I’ll go blind. I can sit here and focus on that and say, “Holy crap, that’s going to be so hard,” but it’s going to be hard whether I worry about it now or not.

The other thing is, it’s not going to take everything away from me. I have lost things already, and there is so much left. There’s so much that remains. When I choose to focus on that… Preet, to give you an example, we’re talking here because I’m a journalist and you’re interested in current affairs and journalism and all of that, it takes me longer to write than it used to because I have to circle back and find and fix all these typos that were never there before because of my compromised vision.

It takes me longer to read the material that I’m consuming in order to write. I can rage about that. I can feel really sorry for myself about that, or I can say, “Holy shit. The New York Times still runs my stuff. It still wants my work.” Given the fact that I still have this microphone and given the fact that I still have this invitation to share my thinking and work with the world, I would be some kind of ingrate moron to focus on the fact that it takes me longer than it used to. And that’s the kind of thinking that I think it’s important to try to get to if you’re able to when you’re in a situation like this.

Preet Bharara:

Does this mean that the risk of raising your ire, that you sometimes think about your situation, you accept it and you say to yourself, not out loud, but you say to yourself, “It is what it is?”

Frank Bruni:

I will never say it in those syllables, Preet, but I suppose I say the philosophical equivalent to that in less overused and I hope more poetic language.

Preet Bharara:

You can say it to yourself. Do you see differently now?

Frank Bruni:

Oh, yeah. Well, I see differently in every which way, and it’s why the subtitle of the book, which is a little bit gimmicky, is On Vision Lost and Found. I see differently in the sense that there are blurry patches of my vision and I don’t have the depth of field. I can’t parallel park anymore, which among the losses in a life is not a terrible one.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I have eyesight in both my eyes and I can’t parallel park either.

Frank Bruni:

See, there you go. No, but that’s an important perspective. But I also see differently. When I go through the day, my favorite thing every day is when I go into the woods near my house and explore the trails with my dog, Regan, who’s the love of my life, I see differently. I see the creek that we cross over differently. I see the trees ahead of us differently.

I am able in a way I wasn’t before, and it’s a shame that this had to happen to me for me to get to this place. I see everything with a sort of emotional precision and a gratitude that was absent from my life before. Because in a very cliched way, I realized by dint of what happened to me how quickly things can change and how fast things can be taken away from you.

Preet Bharara:

Do you worry that that will fade and that you will just become accustomed to the new normal and not feel the same zest for looking at things that you do?

Frank Bruni:

I don’t because I feel that happening to a certain point all the time and I catch myself. I was always a champion stewer, Preet. I was someone who could…

Preet Bharara:

Not steward.

Frank Bruni:

Not steward, but stew. I could stew and marinate in my disappointments and resentments like nobody else. I was my own kind of emotional piece of beef bourguignon or something, just to bring us back to restaurants and food. Now, when that old tropism comes back, when I feel it happening, time and again, I am able this many years into this experience to say, “Frank, you’re doing that ridiculous thing and you know better now.” I correct myself over and over again, and I have no reason to believe I’ll stop correcting myself.

Preet Bharara:

You said something that I’ve been thinking about since I saw it. As commencement speaker at your alma mater, at UNC last year about the choice that people make that will have as much bearing on your decency as a human being and on your happiness as any choice that you will make, and the choices you describe it as “whether you’re going to be somebody who counts her blessings or somebody who tallies her slights.”

Frank Bruni:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Can you amplify that?

Frank Bruni:

Well, it’s what I meant when I talked about my blessings are, my slights are. It’s harder for me to do the work that I’ve chosen to do in my life and that has been my purpose in my life, but it’s harder for me to do that than ever before. That’s a slight. I can focus on that, or I can focus on the blessing of the fact that I still have an invitation to do that work. By focusing on that blessing, I’m a much more contented person, but I’m also a more decent person because that’s the truth of the situation.

The other thing I realized, Preet, and I wish we would all do this in our lives, and I write a whole chapter of the book about this, which I call the sandwich board theory of life, if we all would pause and do a truly honest and open-eyed inventory of all the people in our immediate circle, of all the people in the circle beyond that, everyone has dealt with or is dealing with some very profound disappointments and challenges in their lives. Most of them are not visible to the naked eye.

Most of them are emotional things they’ve been through, even diseases they’ve battled that we can’t see on the surface. Struggle is a part of life. Setbacks are a part of life. Illness, infirmity is a part of life. Once you realize that and stop judging where you are by the lacquered images you get over people’s Instagram and Facebook feeds, you are able, I think, to adjust toward the blessings and to see yourself in a more truthful fashion and to find the gratitude you should have for those aspects of your life that have gone well.

Preet Bharara:

Going back to restaurants and eating, you’ve been very forthright and candid about your struggles with weight at various times of your life. One would think that during the years that you were eating professionally, that would’ve been difficult in terms of your relationship with your weight. In fact, you have written the opposite is true. How can that be?

Frank Bruni:

Yeah, no, the opposite was totally true. I’ve never been fitter and thinner in my life than the years I was a restaurant critic. I wish I could get back to that fitness and thinness now.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, when you were going to restaurants, I meant to ask you this earlier, one reason why you might be given away is that, I’m guessing, as a critic and you want to sample a lot of food, you’re ordering more than the average person might order, correct?

Frank Bruni:

Yeah. I mean, you’re going with three other people usually. Four is the perfect table size. You’re telling everybody to order different dishes, and then you’re treating the table as almost kind of like a lazy Susan. You’re rotating things around because your job as a critic is you’re trying to sample as much of the menu as possible.

Preet Bharara:

How did you not gain weight? And by the way, it’s free, right? The Times was paying for your meal.

Frank Bruni:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Free food.

Frank Bruni:

It’s a big budget item at The Times.

Preet Bharara:

It’s basically you had an all-you-can-eat job, and yet you maintained trimness in an all-you-can-eat job. I’m confused.

Frank Bruni:

Well, I mean, part of the answer is I used the verb sample before. You’re not pigging out on this stuff. You’re sampling it. When you approach food as something that you’re appraising, when it is a job, you’re not eating as heedlessly as you do in other situations. There’s an almost automatic portion control that happens, because you’re not approaching food as, let me stuff myself. You’re approaching it with much more discernment, and that kind of is a hedge against overindulgence.

But the other thing is, most of us, when we fail to control our weights, as I’m failing some right now, it’s because we can say, “Tomorrow I’ll be good. Next week I’ll go on a diet.” When you’re a restaurant critic, you can’t diet and you can’t tell yourself the lie that you’re going to make up with an asceticism tomorrow for the indulgence of today. Once you remove that, once you realize, “No, today and tomorrow I cannot give up food. My only choice here is to eat in a measured fashion,” you end up doing that because of the lies you can’t tell yourself.

And then the other thing is when you know that every day needs as a matter of your profession to be full of a certain amount of food, I never kept to exercise regimens the way I did then. I ran probably six miles most days. Along with paying for my restaurant bills, The Times paid my gym membership because they saw that as a legitimate part of the restaurant critic job.

I probably spend two and a half hours a day working out because I viewed that as part of my job. For me to have the appetite that I needed to have to go into those restaurants and enjoy food in the vicarious way that my readers wanted me to, for me to be able to keep doing it in a healthy fashion day after day, those hours of exercise I viewed as part of my job. That’s how it all worked out in a fit fashion.

Preet Bharara:

Is there stand out in your mind a singular worst meal that you ate at a restaurant that you had to review?

Frank Bruni:

I remember, yes. It wasn’t that the meal was so singularly bad, it was that the whole experience seemed to me so grading and nonsensical. But there was a restaurant that I wrote, what many people told me years later, they thought was my most amusing, negative review, and it’s a restaurant in New York called Ninja. I think it still exists.

Preet Bharara:

Already that’s a problem.

Frank Bruni:

I think it’s still exists. It’s funny because after that review came out, many of my friends said, “Well, that restaurant has a couple weeks left,” and I think Ninja’s still going strong, but it’s going strong because parents with a lot of money take their children there because it is a bastardized version of sushi and Japanese cuisine served in this labyrinth that’s like a Walt Disney ride. The servers wear what I guess are supposed to be ninja costumes. I’m no authority on authentic ninja wear.

They scream at you and jump out of corners and deliver your food in clouds of smoke. I mean, I wanted to end my life right there in that restaurant rather than endure the next several hours, but there’s a market for that. You know what I mean? Great. Great. Different things turn us all on. Follow your bliss. Embrace what makes you happy. If yelping and gyrating servers dressed supposedly as ninjas and carrying mediocre sushi, if that’s your bliss, great.

Preet Bharara:

I want to end with the question about how you felt about and the appreciation you had for the power you had potentially over the success or failure of a restaurant. Obviously, Ninja thrived, as you said. The reason I asked the question is not many people know this, I’ve mentioned it before on the podcast I think, my dad and my uncle and a friend of my dad’s opened up the second Indian restaurant in the State of New Jersey I think back in 1977, something like that, before Indian food was what it is today and widely popular, not just in urban areas, but in suburban areas too.

They put a lot of money into it to recreate what they experienced as great Indian meals from the country of our birth. One day announced with a great fanfare in our house was the fact that there was going to be a restaurant reviewer, and there was a guy named Bob Lape, L-A-P-E, still remember his name, who was the restaurant critic for WABC local television. The amount of fretting that my dad and my uncle did in worrying about how that review would come out was something that I had never seen before. How did you think about that?

Frank Bruni:

I thought very seriously about it because it is a job much more than many other critics’ jobs because there are so many film critics, there are so many people who review a television show or a book, whereas the area as restaurant critic is often the only person who reviews a restaurant. Most of the bad meals I had, Preet, I never wrote about. Because if it was a terrible meal at the kind of establishment that was going to be killed off by a review that nobody was curious about, that wasn’t well-capitalized, I just moved on.

When I wrote a negative review, it was written after at least three visits to the restaurant. It was written after giving restaurants every benefit of the doubt. It was most often written about a kind of restaurant that had a degree of capitalization or a degree of public curiosity about it that really meant it was fair game morally. The other thing I thought is, well, I wanted to always be entirely respectful and cognizant of the economic consequences of writing a negative review.

I also wanted to be respectful and cognizant of people’s hard-earned money. There are many people who swan into a restaurant with a corporate expense account, and it doesn’t really hurt much if they feel they’ve wasted their money. There are also a great many people who are making a budgetary decision to spend money that they don’t have in hyper abundance on this meal in the hope that they will have a wonderful evening. If you can save those people from wasting their hard-earned money, well, I mean, that’s a moral good that’s part of the picture as well.

Preet Bharara:

Frank Bruni, a real delight and treat to have you. Thanks so much.

Frank Bruni:

Totally my pleasure. Thank you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Frank Bruni. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338, that’s 669-24PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy, and the Cafe team is Noa Azulai, David Kurlander, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay Tuned.