Twitter vs. Substack, Stormy Daniels, and Jennifer Senior On Grief

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Kara Swisher: Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. Scott Galloway is vacationing with the Supreme Court. So today I'm joined by Olivia Nuzzi, New York Magazine's Washington correspondent. Good to have you here, Olivia.

Olivia Nuzzi: Thanks for having me, Kara.

Kara Swisher: So there's so much to talk about, but let's first get to your cover story about Stormy Daniels. She does a tarot card reading for you, and it's not very happy.

Olivia Nuzzi: I was very disturbed by it. She mentioned when I got there to see her that she does readings, and I knew that she has a kind of ghost hunting show called Spooky Babes, and she's very into all that stuff now. I was worried I'd be pushing my luck by asking her to do an oracle deck reading, but she was game to do it. And it was shockingly emotional. I did not — I really was not a believer going in and I still don't know that I am — but it was surprising.

Kara Swisher: Have you ever done one?

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, it doesn't affect me that way it affected you. So it was all about sort of storm clouds.

Kara Swisher: Speaking of Stormy, you had a great reveal in the article also. She's in close touch with Mary Trump, Kathy Griffin and E. Jean Carroll, which is like some kind of weird Avengers kind of thing. What was your takeaway from your story?

Olivia Nuzzi: I had spent some time with her in 2018 when she first became famous in this way about this story. And I was so struck by how sharp she is and how funny she is and how remarkably well she was handling this extraordinarily bizarre set of circumstances. She was adamant at that time: "I am not a victim. I am not a victim. I am not a pawn. I am not a victim." And I was surprised, but certainly could not blame her this time around. She's having a much more difficult time dealing with all of this. It's much more taxing emotionally. Post-insurrection, there really are no boundaries for a lot of these people anymore. She's under constant threat and concerned and worried for her child, worried for her husband, worried for her own life. And she's also just been flattened by all of this. She was talking about how it never ends. It never, ever ends. And this is something that Kathy was saying during our interview. People think, "Oh, that thing a couple of years ago, that was so crazy." And she's like, "Oh, no, no, no. It's ongoing." And it doesn't seem like it will ever, ever, ever end. This is something that they have to deal with forever.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Being affiliated with Trump.

Olivia Nuzzi: Being affiliated. Yeah.

Kara Swisher: So one of the things is she sort of painted a very dire picture of this guy's not going away. And at the same time, you went to the Trump arraignment that day. New York's hottest club. New York arraignment. What? Talk to me about how you feel. Because you've been covering. You must be exhausted, too, because this never ends. You've been covering him for years and years.

Olivia Nuzzi: I would say, yeah, I've been covering him for a third of my life almost. Which I did not realize when I signed up for that. I thought it would be a couple of months, perhaps a couple of weeks. I was talking to Catherine Miller from The New York Times earlier today, and she made a joke that she calls this the "there are only 40 people alive" theory of the world. That it's just the same cast of people. This is something that I find extremely disorienting. Nobody goes away. They all know each other.

Kara Swisher: And you link them all together.

Olivia Nuzzi: They all know each other. They're all from reality television or they end up on reality television.

Kara Swisher: Or dancing.

Olivia Nuzzi: Or dancing. Dancing competition. A lot of surprisingly good dancers in this cast of people, I have to say.

Kara Swisher: Would you ever do that?

Olivia Nuzzi: No.

Kara Swisher: Are you sure?

Olivia Nuzzi: No, I'm sure.

Kara Swisher: I think you would win. I went to dancing school. I can dance, but I wouldn't.

Olivia Nuzzi: But it's as though time has collapsed into itself. And there are these kind of multiple timelines occurring at once. And it is very hard to keep track of everything and to keep track of everyone and to know where one storyline begins and the other ends. And I think Stormy Daniels is this uniquely American character who's in the middle of it and having a similar difficulty. And with Trump, I mean, I felt like — you know how eels go back to the place of their birth to die?

Kara Swisher: No, no, but go ahead.

Olivia Nuzzi: That's sort of how I felt watching him land in Queens that day. I sort of just thought there's something so beautifully complete about this. And I felt like I just had to be there.

Kara Swisher: Right, right. But it's not over. It's not over. According to Stormy Daniels and her tarot card readings. She seems quite perturbed that it's not over, that he's not down.

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, I mean, I think if you just heard, "Oh, Stormy Daniels read her Oracle deck and predicted that things are not going to go well in the future and will probably be worse," maybe you'd think that she was snickering a bit or having an "I told you so" moment about it. And she was really heartbroken by it. She's saddened by it. And she did not seem happy at all, because if it's not ending for him, then it's not ending for her or for any of us.

Kara Swisher: Right. That's exactly right. Well, it's an amazing story. Thank you. It was fantastic. And you're continuing to cover Trump?

Olivia Nuzzi: Of course. I have to see this thing through. I'm not happy about it, but I have to see this thing through. I would love to cover literally anything else. But unfortunately, I will be seeing this thing through however long that takes.

Kara Swisher: And any predictions right now at the beginning of the cycle? Is there anyone else you're following that you're really interested in?

Olivia Nuzzi: I mean, I'm keeping tabs. I'm keeping tabs on everyone. I'm going to go write a DeSantis piece after this.

Kara Swisher: Good luck with that. Good luck with that.

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, the response from his office was basically, "Go fuck yourself."

Kara Swisher: Yeah, exactly. He's unlikable. That's my take. And short.

Olivia Nuzzi: Well, not with those little block heels that he wears. He wears taller heels than I do.

Kara Swisher: Yes, I know. But short and unlikable. I'm short. I am short and unlikable.

Olivia Nuzzi: No, you're very tall. Just a very tall woman. You project very tall.

Kara Swisher: Okay, well, I'm not. Anyway, go read Olivia's cover piece in New York Magazine this week. Really wonderful, as usual, fantastic writing and reporting.

Olivia Nuzzi: Thank you.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, we have a lot to talk about. Today, we'll talk about dueling court decisions around abortion pills, also Twitter's latest attempt to lock out competitors, and we'll speak with Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Senior about loss, grief, and memory. And I'd love you two to talk about writing long-form articles because you're both sort of experts in that area and fantastic at it.

Olivia Nuzzi: She certainly is.

Kara Swisher: Well, you are too. But first, a gaffe has one of the Bidens in hot water, but it's not the one you think. First Lady Dr. Jill Biden stirred up controversy after she suggested the winners and losers of the women's NCAA basketball champions come to the White House. The final game, Louisiana State University defeated the team from the University of Iowa by quite a lot. Most of the players on LSU's team are black, though Iowa's team is mostly white. Critics say the First Lady's comments disrespect a historic win for the largely black team. On The Daily Show, Desi Lydic said the move would "honor white losers the same as black winners." Is this a big issue? Are you surprised? She never sort of makes a mistake. It's sort of a role reversal for her and her husband, right?

Olivia Nuzzi: There is something deeply comic about it. But I am surprised. She's extraordinarily careful and seems to put a tremendous amount of energy into avoiding something just like this. But I think if it's a very grandmotherly English teacher, "everyone gets a trophy" sort of comment, I can't imagine that she even realized that she was stepping in it. I would have loved to be in the room when someone told her.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, yeah. Any effect?

Olivia Nuzzi: I don't know. I mean, I think it's hard to predict how these things will reverberate and whether or not Joe Biden calling the coach and calling the players will smooth things over in the end. But I thought it was very interesting that there was no hesitation in really going after them for it. It was sort of this pure expression of anger.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, even I know this. You don't invite the second place team. I know this. I was like, "What? Hey, no." And there's a lot of — everyone was all up in arms about the dunking in the face thing and the hand thing. That's what they do in sports. I was like, you only invite the winners, it seems like. Also, it's very American to do that, although it's very nice to invite everybody. That's why you win, so you get to go by yourself. Yeah, of course. So, I don't know. How is she doing? Is she feeling good about it? He's obviously running for reelection, I think, or maybe not. But that's what most people think at this point.

Olivia Nuzzi: This White House, if you can believe it, is very different from the last one. And one of the fundamental ways that they are different is that it is pretty shut down. There are not a lot of — the way that you would sort of just stick your head out your window and 11 people would emerge to tell you how Donald Trump was feeling. That does not really happen here. And even the people who would know about that sort of thing, I think, are extraordinarily protective. Which is another way of saying, I have no idea, Kara. No one is telling me how she's feeling.

Kara Swisher: All right. But you assume he's going to run, correct?

Olivia Nuzzi: I do. Yeah. I mean, I would be surprised.

Kara Swisher: Oh, well, I certainly don't think that this would be the thing to determine that he would not run. But who knows? I mean, smaller events have had monumental consequences in our politics.

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, they're pretty functional, probably. I mean, all White Houses are dysfunctional, but presumably this one's more functional.

Kara Swisher: But it's a low bar. It's a very low bar. Speaking of low bars, Clarence Thomas says he did nothing wrong, which is not accurate, after a report revealed that the Supreme Court justice traveled on private jets and super yachts paid for by a wealthy Republican donor. One trip being over $500,000. Thomas never disclosed the gifts, which he received over a period of decades. Now Democrats are calling for action with different degrees. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wants Chief Justice Roberts to investigate, which will not be happening, while AOC says that Thomas should be impeached, which will probably not be happening. And the Wall Street Journal's opinion page came to Thomas's defense. There's also attention on the man who paid for those trips, Texas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow, who does sound like a villainous billionaire by name. The name itself, Crow collects Nazi memorabilia, including a signed copy of Mein Kampf and a painting by Hitler. He reportedly keeps one — that one besides another by George Bush. Not a lot of context from what I understand. What a guy, I mean. What a guy. Like nobody's focused on the — everyone's focused on the Nazi memorabilia now and not on the fact that he's getting a lot of stuff from a rich guy. So what do we think of this? This seems not a surprise and yet pretty awful on some level.

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, before this, I had heard at a dinner party about how he loves traveling in his RV and they go on vacations in this RV. And I thought that was so fascinating. And a dream of a story for me would be to embed on this RV with them. And little did I know that in fact, that is only his Man of the People vacation. And he was having way more luxurious vacations. Yeah. But it is — I mean, I think it's remarkable to watch everyone learn in real time that there is really no system of accountability for the court. For the court whatsoever. They can do whatever they want. For whatsoever. I mean, I don't know what it would take for there to be some sort of penalty or some effort to impeach, but it certainly does not inspire faith in the system.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it absolutely doesn't. I mean, I think it's not a surprise. He also has funded all kinds of things, including publications, this guy Harlan, and a bunch of things. And so a lot of people came to his defense. "He's a nice guy." And I was like, I don't think it's about that. I think it's about him taking him on vacations, even if they're friends. It's a whole lot of gimmies that this guy is getting.

Olivia Nuzzi: I think the promise of the court or anyone in a position like that is that you will hold yourself to a higher standard and that the system does not need to have in place guardrails for you to act ethically.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. That's a very good point.

Olivia Nuzzi: But we did not factor in when making the system that all manner of personalities would be finding themselves there.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. It's such a Washington story. I literally felt like I was in an episode of Scandal. I'm like, okay, here we are. Again, and not a surprise, but sort of, ugh, yuck, really.

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, very icky. And then I want to know who everybody else is hanging out with.

Kara Swisher: They're not hanging out with you?

Olivia Nuzzi: No. No, I'm not. They're not. I've never been on a super yacht. But now I kind of want to see this guy's house. A lot of people have been to this guy. He didn't hide away all his collectibles.

Kara Swisher: I want to go to the Garden of Dictators. That's where I would like to go.

Olivia Nuzzi: Is it like a statue garden?

Kara Swisher: Yes. Of — you know, he collects heads from across the world. When fascism and communism fall, he goes and gets one of the heads. They're all over the place in Eastern Europe if you go there. And Russia. And so he collects them and puts them in a garden near his house.

Olivia Nuzzi: What do you think the shipping cost is like?

Kara Swisher: I don't think he cares. I think he's a billionaire. So it does. "I shall have the head of Stalin in my garden." The broken-sided head. You do see them all over the place there many years ago, but they're probably gone now in rubble. But he's got them. That's not something I would decorate my garden with. I'd put gnomes in perhaps, but I don't think I'd put Ceausescu. I don't think I'd want any disembodied head lying around.

Olivia Nuzzi: Well, there's full statues too. There's full statues too.

Kara Swisher: That changes everything. That changes everything. Anyway, strange man.

Olivia Nuzzi: Deeply.

Kara Swisher: Nothing's going to happen. Nothing's going to happen here. It's just — it really does feel like an episode of Scandal or Succession. Did you watch the ending?

Olivia Nuzzi: Of course. I thought it was brilliant.

Kara Swisher: Plot spoiler. I'm going to warn people. Plot spoiler. It was brilliant. It was really — I had a good interview with Brian Cox last week. I thought that the way that they handled just the awkwardness of death was — I've never seen anything like that portrayed. And I thought that was really, really brilliant. Just the —

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, it was sort of in real time. You were experiencing it while they were.

Kara Swisher: I think that's really what was in the way was explained to me is that was the whole goal of it. Right. And it was beautiful. I think the acting was like, acting!

Olivia Nuzzi: I also love the subtleties of no one in this family knowing how to hug each other properly.

Kara Swisher: Yes. Yeah, like pat, pat, pat, pat. Just grabbing Connor's arm or just attempting to do this three-child hug. I thought it was handled so beautifully.

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, the only one that worked was the last shot of them getting married.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. That was actually very natural.

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, well, he's the only one that doesn't need love.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, and so he has it in a weird way. In a weird way. That was just a really beautiful shot, I thought. I thought the whole thing was great. And although Brian Cox really wanted to have a death scene, he really did. He was kind of pissed. He was like, "What the fuck? What the fuck? Back of my head on the toilet. Oh, my God. What the fuck? What the fuck, Gary?" He kept saying it was very funny. But I loved how they did that. They were scared to tell him.

Olivia Nuzzi: Oh, God.

Kara Swisher: I loved how they handled it without — you never saw his full body.

Olivia Nuzzi: No. Right?

Kara Swisher: No. And out of the picture literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was great. Are we on the Succession podcast now? I feel like we're on the Succession podcast.

Olivia Nuzzi: No, we're not. No, I'm just saying. I'm just curious.

Kara Swisher: So everyone's talking about it today, so we have to talk about it. Okay, it's actually getting huge. People got real bothered by it in a good way. Like, it really impacted them.

Olivia Nuzzi: I had to leave the room. I found it emotional.

Kara Swisher: Oh, wow. Huh. That's interesting. Okay. You cried with Stormy Daniels, and now you're crying at Succession. Interesting.

Olivia Nuzzi: I'm crying a lot these days.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Oh, my goodness, Olivia. Get it together. When was the last time you cried?

Olivia Nuzzi: Oh, 1969? 1969 or so?

Kara Swisher: Nice. 70? That's long before you existed, Olivia. Okay, let's get to our first big story. Access to abortion pills could be in jeopardy after a pair of dueling court rulings came down last week. First, a Texas judge ruled that the FDA should never have approved mifepristone, a drug used to terminate pregnancies, among other uses. That ruling is on pause pending appeal, but if it's upheld, that could take an essential abortion drug off the legal market in the U.S. Meanwhile, a second court ruled that the same drug must be kept on the market in 17 states plus D.C. that sued to expand access. So many Republicans were very quiet after the ruling. They've been getting hit hard, including in Wisconsin, where they lost that judgeship that was critically important to them. Have they realized limiting abortion access is a losing issue? Talk about it from a political point of view. In a poll of last-term, midterm voters, about 60 percent were angry over the Supreme Court ruling. Can you talk about it from a political perspective?

Olivia Nuzzi: It's this tricky predicament where it is an animating force for both sides. And it is what they have been campaigning on for so long. It has been animating the right and especially the evangelical right for 30, more than 30 years. And it is likewise — people have a long memory about this. Women have a long memory about this. I think remember in the last midterms, everyone was saying, "Oh, well, will people still care? Will people still care about this by the time voting happens?" And the answer, I think, was a resounding certainly. And I do think that it seems like they have been sort of not chastened into changing their views, but not wanting to be beating their chests about this because it had such negative repercussions in these last elections. So will it continue to do that? It seems to be continuing to fuel quite a lot of voting by people. And now this — it just keeps going. It keeps going with this struggle. They seem to be pushing it far too far. Florida, six weeks, and you're writing about DeSantis. That's something else. You don't even — as someone who's been pregnant, I didn't know for eight weeks, I think, something a long time. A lot of people don't know for a very long time. I think that the more that there are stories about women who, regardless of their politics, are having their health negatively affected, are their lives in danger, their children's lives in danger — those stories are not just going to go away. And the more that time goes on, and there are real people in danger because of this, who are not political activists, who are not acting to try to help Joe Biden or any Democrat — this is about health care. And I think that it becomes clearer and clearer how radical this position is, the more that those stories are reported on.

Kara Swisher: Do you talk to Republicans? I mean, I know Trump was one that said, "This is too far." Like, that was — it's not a good thing. Many people had said that. But he's not a Republican. Do they get it? It's hard to talk about Trump.

Olivia Nuzzi: No, right. He was pro-choice very recently.

Kara Swisher: Right. But he was with the evangelicals. Yeah. But he was.

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, but he then became the opposite just for political expediency.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, of course. But he had warned about this ruling in the correct way. Do Republicans get that? And do you think it's going to continue to be a big issue? Everyone says it's not. And I keep saying, "Oh, yeah." Who's saying it's not? It doesn't change. During the midterms, they thought there was going to be a red wave. And I was like, "No," and the abortion thing was over and this and that. And I was like, "No, it's not. It's not over by a long stretch."

Olivia Nuzzi: I just think there's this disconnect where on the right and among certain segments of the kind of pundit class in the kind of centrist left, people are talking about this as if it is only a political issue, as if it is only about religious fervor and people who believe in protecting life. And it's just not about that. It is about health care. And I think that that is where the disconnect is, where people are making political predictions, talking about this as if it is just a religious right-wing evangelical issue and not realizing that, no, actually, everyone is affected by this. If you know a woman, you will probably be affected by this at some point. So I think that's where that disconnect is from. It's the way that we talk about this in this sort of reductive way in our pundit class.

Kara Swisher: And yes, is it still an effective issue for Democrats? Should they keep drilling down? I mean, the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court looks a lot like a political campaign. Big spending, endorsements from Planned Parenthood. Candidates talked about their political beliefs. The judge in the Texas case, Matthew Kacsmaryk, is a Trump appointee with a long history of anti-abortion advocacy. According to The Washington Post, his ruling used the term "abortionists" and referred to fetuses as "unborn children." Is it a good political thing to press in? I mean, Biden definitely weighed in on this against Kacsmaryk.

Olivia Nuzzi: I think that it's certainly a winning issue for Democrats besides being in line with what they actually believe. It's sort of conveniently — unlike with Republicans who are sort of at turns being quiet about this now — it is both a winning issue and something that is very much part of the platform and has been for a long time. So I think that they will continue to campaign on this.

Kara Swisher: Do you see any Republican using it in a way that's positive to them and trying to appeal? Or is it impossible in the modern Republican Party to be anything but for the overturn of the right?

Olivia Nuzzi: I have not seen a ton of nuance on this on the right. Have you?

Kara Swisher: No, not at all. I'm sort of thinking it's an opportunity. Yeah. I kept thinking it was an opportunity. I'm trying to think of one. Well, there's a few Republicans, but they're not being loud about it in any way whatsoever.

Olivia Nuzzi: Right. Well, it's not really popular to be like a civil libertarian anymore among on the right.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Yeah, we'll see where it goes. I think it's going to be a potent political issue for a long time to come.

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah, I agree.

Kara Swisher: Olivia, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, Twitter once again locks the doors to keep people from leaving. We'll speak with a friend of Pivot, Jennifer Senior, about her Pulitzer Prize winning story that inspired her new book.

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Kara Swisher: Okay, Olivia, we're back. Twitter users can once again post about their favorite newsletters. That wasn't the case last week when Twitter took escalating steps to block access to Substack, the newsletter service. Here's what happened. First, Substack announced a new Twitter-like feature called Notes. Then Twitter made it harder for users to engage with tweets that mentioned Substack. Eventually, Twitter blocked searches for the word Substack, which I noticed. Twitter's CEO Elon Musk claims the actions were necessary because Substack tried to download a massive portion of the Twitter database. Substack's CEO denies the claim. I'm with Substack's CEO on that. So are you on Twitter a lot? Should writers stay on?

Olivia Nuzzi: I mean, I view it as a necessary evil to continue to have an account there. I'm not really — I mean, I'm active on it depending on how much I am procrastinating. I might be active on it. I don't really look at it anymore. I mean, there was a time when I think like a lot of people, especially in our industry, I was compulsively online and was constantly chatting with people on Twitter. Now I mostly use it just to share my work because I have an audience there that I've — I've been on Twitter since I was 16, Kara.

Kara Swisher: I know, but that was like last week.

Olivia Nuzzi: I mean, I have really complicated feelings about it because I think that it taught me how to write in some ways.

Kara Swisher: How so?

Olivia Nuzzi: I mean, it taught me about brevity. When it was 140 characters, it was like a writing boot camp in some ways. And it's where I found an audience. Friend of Pivot, Casey Newton, wrote last week — who you know — also "Twitter is extremely hard to kill." And for journalists who have come to align it, there's almost no indignity they won't suffer to get there fixed. But Matt Taibbi quit last week after he makes his living off of Substack. But he was also one of the handpicked journalists covering the shitty Twitter files.

Kara Swisher: Covering.

Olivia Nuzzi: Covering.

Kara Swisher: That he defended most recently. Covering. Yeah, covering is a broad term. And journalist is a broad term in that case.

Olivia Nuzzi: Well, he is a journalist. Come on.

Kara Swisher: Yes, he is a journalist. No, I'm talking about the Twitter files. I'm sorry. They didn't do a very good job. They did a bad job of reporting. That's all I'll say. It was weird. It was weird. It was cherry-picked in a lot of ways. What about the use for politicians and the media that covers them? Because that's where it really comes alive in a lot of ways. Hollywood doesn't use it that much except for marketing. And fewer and fewer people are using it. The numbers are going down. But the political media nexus is quite strong, no matter what people dunking on each other or putting things out or having a reaction to a reaction, et cetera. Right. How important is it still?

Olivia Nuzzi: I mean, I think it is important. And I think it's important for that class of people the way that Instagram is important for Hollywood. It's this direct line where you don't have to filter through any media intermediaries. So it's very attractive for politicians or for any type of activist trying to speak directly to people. I don't think it's going to go away.

Kara Swisher: But what do you think? I mean, why is he handling this so poorly? I don't know. Everyone thinks there's always a plan with him. I don't think there is.

Olivia Nuzzi: Really?

Kara Swisher: I think he operates completely as an id.

Olivia Nuzzi: No, it's all id.

Kara Swisher: What he feels that day, whether he decides to cover up the W on the Twitter sign, make "titter," ha ha ha ha ha.

Olivia Nuzzi: Did he do that?

Kara Swisher: Yeah, he did that. Yeah. All it says to me is, "Hug me. My parents didn't."

Olivia Nuzzi: Would you hug him?

Kara Swisher: No.

Olivia Nuzzi: You wouldn't?

Kara Swisher: No.

Olivia Nuzzi: If he was crying and he asked you for a hug, you would not hug Elon Musk?

Kara Swisher: I would not. I would not hug him.

Olivia Nuzzi: What would you do? Would you walk away?

Kara Swisher: Say, "You should get some help." That's what I would say. "You need some help." If asking you for a hug would be asking for help. Go hug your children.

Olivia Nuzzi: Do you think — I'm imagining a Succession-style hug, frankly, like an awkward —

Kara Swisher: No, yes, that's what it would be. I would do that. I would hug Stormy Daniels, though. I certainly would.

Olivia Nuzzi: Well, of course. Who wouldn't hug Stormy Daniels?

Kara Swisher: Exactly, exactly. I don't know, but let's move off the hugs for a second. I'm just curious, when you think about it being used by Trump, he still gets on it by using Truth Social. How do you follow him there? Do you just look at Truth Social?

Kara Swisher: Well, they actually banned me. They removed my account from Truth Social after my last—

Olivia Nuzzi: Why? Did the Chinese government have a problem with you? Sorry. I'm sorry.

Kara Swisher: I wrote a story about Donald Trump around Christmastime where he was on the cover. Yes, it was good. And he did not like the story. I cheekily used my Truth Social account that I had just to monitor him. I also followed an account called Hot Girls Who Golf. Those are the only accounts I followed on there. But I tweeted, or I truthed, whatever they call it, at him with the article. I said, "Thank you for your time" or something like that. They immediately removed my account.

Olivia Nuzzi: Wow.

Kara Swisher: So I haven't looked at it since then.

Olivia Nuzzi: I thought they were for free speech. I'm shocked and appalled.

Kara Swisher: It turns out they are not for free speech, Olivia.

Olivia Nuzzi: Jason Miller is getting a text from me in a second.

Kara Swisher: Oh, God. Well, that's better you than me.

Olivia Nuzzi: That's true. Although I don't even think he's running it. So do you think it's important for Trump to have these platforms?

Kara Swisher: Not at all. I don't know. Twitter was so essential to his political rise. It really was. It was like his art form. This man is a frustrated, failed artist. We know that never ends well in history. He was perfect for that platform, with fatal consequences. It's weird that he is not on it. I assumed they would find a way to navigate whatever the complicated factors are with Truth Social.

Olivia Nuzzi: But he hasn't gone back to Twitter.

Kara Swisher: He seems to like where he is. He likes his new little home.

Olivia Nuzzi: Or is he there because he has to be, because of whatever the intricacies of his deal are?

Kara Swisher: I think he likes it. I think he likes the big all-caps screaming, vomiting kind of thing. From him, it's not really a difference. He says to his assistant or whatever underling is meandering about his haunted mansion, "Post this, post this, all caps on this word, exclamation. 'Stormy Daniels is a horse face,' exclamation point. Send it now." That process is not him sitting there on his phone typing these things out and reading the replies. Although they will print out replies and bring them to him so he can see. That process has existed since he was in Trump Tower. So he's not sitting there with his little fingers in his haunted mansion, little fingers typing out.

Olivia Nuzzi: So do you think in the election this is going to matter? The nexus between Musk and him is important because there is a nexus now. Elon has moved towards Trump, I think.

Kara Swisher: In a way.

Olivia Nuzzi: When I was working on that story, a current campaign official told me he would be back on Twitter, that they did have plans for him to come back. I'm sure they are waiting until they want to level a particularly devastating insult at Ron DeSantis or whoever else emerges. He will arrive on that platform and have some classically Trumpian missive to welcome himself back. It's good that Elon is running it for them now. They're pretty thrilled. Do you think they are similar personality-wise?

Kara Swisher: Elon is obviously a lot smarter, by a factor of a lot. But Trump has more sense. I think they both have a very good need for attention almost 24/7, and it's sad and pathetic and also dangerous.

Olivia Nuzzi: Do you worry about your data on there following you?

Kara Swisher: I don't put anything on there now. I wouldn't put my credit card to pay for Twitter Blue.

Olivia Nuzzi: You wouldn't pay for Twitter Blue?

Kara Swisher: I have been on there since I was literally a child. I assume my privacy has been violated on there for a very long time and will continue to be violated. I don't think anything is private. I'm not paying for Twitter Blue.

Olivia Nuzzi: Well, of course not. I think being verified is mortifying, and I've always thought it was mortifying. This has aged very well in the last few weeks, my refusal to get verified.

Kara Swisher: Yes, yes, yeah. Well, here we are. All right. Let's bring in our friend of Pivot. Jennifer Senior is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2021 story, "What Bobby McIlvain Left Behind." That story is now available as a book titled *On Grief*. Welcome, Jennifer Senior.

Jennifer Senior: Hey, Kara. How are you?

Kara Swisher: Good. I'm glad to have you here. Your book is wonderful, as I suspected. The story was amazing. I'm going to have you start. Walk us through your story. Broadly, it's about a family mourning the loss of their son who died on 9/11. It's also about memory and the act of journaling. It's also about misinformation, which I found really jarring. Tell us about it and what prompted you to do this.

Jennifer Senior: The crudest answer is Bobby McIlvain, who died on September 11th, was my brother's roommate. They were roommates for eight straight years, almost to the day. They threw their duffel bags on the same bunk bed in early September, and then he died on September 11th, eight years later. I knew him. I adored him. It was devastating when he died. What led me to the story were a couple of things. It was the 20th anniversary, but those are kind of fake pegs. *The Atlantic* was doing something and Jeff called me—Jeff Goldberg, the editor—and said, "Do you happen to know any families to whom this might have happened? We have people thinking about policy and foreign policy." I said, "I do." At first I thought I was pitching a marriage story. Bobby's father became a huge truther. He embraced all the 9/11 conspiracy theories. He started tailoring his own, made them really bespoke, really arcane, got deep in the weeds about some really weird stuff. His wife is totally indifferent to this stuff. She would walk across the street and around the corner and go halfway across the country to never have to think about 9/11. I thought, screw all the stories about how do you get along with your Trump-loving uncle at Thanksgiving. How do you stay married after 20 years after you've lost your son and negotiate that unbelievable gulf? That seemed so much bigger and more challenging. So I thought I was going to be writing a story about a marriage. But then I realized there was a story to be written that was maybe even more beguiling because I'm a writer. Bobby was this diarist. He wanted to be a novelist. He kept all these diaries since he was a teenager. His last diary was sitting on his desk when he died. His father, in this total fugue state, gave that diary away to the woman that Bobby was about to propose to, because she saw that her name was all over it and she wanted it. He was trying to be kind. But after he did it, his wife was like, "How could you have done that? How could you have given away the last thing our kid ever wrote when this was a chance to hear his voice one last time?" It was fresh conversation.

Kara Swisher: Oh my God, are you kidding?

Jennifer Senior: She was so broken by this. She was desperate to get this diary back. She asked this woman, her name was also Jen, "Would you give me this diary back?" And she wouldn't give it back. I wanted that diary back. That's the story.

Kara Swisher: Olivia, you also write long form and very pungently, same way. What would you have done with this story? Have you written a story like this?

Olivia Nuzzi: I don't think I've ever written anything this tricky. It sounds like an impossibly difficult thing to navigate. Was it?

Jennifer Senior: That's incredibly nice of you to say. Yeah and no. On one hand, I'd been obsessed with that diary for 20 years. In some ways, I'd been writing this story in my head for 20 years. You'd be amazed at how fast something comes out when you've been unconsciously, subconsciously writing something. Olivia, I bet you know what that sense is like. I'm sure there are things that have been pent up.

Olivia Nuzzi: Of course. The greatest impediment for me with writing is when I don't have the time to sit and just think it through idly, not even in my conscious mind. If I haven't been able to take that time, that's when I'm bumping up against not knowing how to phrase something. But if I've spent any time at all mulling something over, usually it just comes right out.

Jennifer Senior: That's so interesting. Some of it's not even conscious.

Olivia Nuzzi: Exactly. You don't even know what work your unconscious mind is doing.

Jennifer Senior: So imagine having a 20-year gestation period. There's no mammal I can think of that is pregnant for 20 years. This was the world's longest pregnancy. I had this thing going for 20 years.

Olivia Nuzzi: Did you know you were ready?

Jennifer Senior: I was so ready to do it. The tricky parts were that the McIlvains have become these dear family friends. My brother has remained very close to Bobby's younger brother. I didn't want to ruin these precious friendships over a piece of journalism. I had to have my priorities straight.

Olivia Nuzzi: What happened there? How do you deal with that?

Jennifer Senior: I sort of violated a lot of the traditional rules. I made sure the McIlvains knew what was going to be in it. I read to them.

Kara Swisher: I do that too. If you're dealing with civilians, even with politicians—well, I don't do that with politicians. I make sure the quotes are right.

Jennifer Senior: Of course. I'm from the Gay Talese school of there should not be any surprises. If people are surprised, you're probably being an asshole.

Kara Swisher: Then you're being a dick. Exactly. Why be a dick? You don't have to be a dick. Good journalism. You're marvelous proof. You've got all of these corkers, all of these blockbusters. Clearly everyone keeps coming back to you. You're doing something right.

Olivia Nuzzi: They can't quit her.

Kara Swisher: They can't quit her. One day I would love to sit down with you and find out how you manage everyone.

Jennifer Senior: Can we have coffee or something?

Kara Swisher: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, ladies, let's talk about this book. I want to know what happened with the McIlvains once they read it.

Jennifer Senior: The best thing about their reaction was this. They loved the piece because it got everybody saying Bobby's name. They also loved it because they're not fancy people. A lot of people who lost people on September 11th have annual golf tournaments and walk-a-thons and hit up their friends every year for money. The McIlvains are not the kind of people who do that. That's not what they do.

Kara Swisher: You made it that way.

Jennifer Senior: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: Can you talk about memory and the fallibility of memory? I remember where I was on 9/11. Strangely, many people in the story have forgotten a lot about it. Obviously they have to in some ways because it's so devastating. Memory and grief get mixed up together in weird ways, especially when someone dies young. People have different memories. Can you talk about when you're writing about it? You yourself have memories that may not be the right memories.

Jennifer Senior: Oh my God. Can I tell you the craziest thing about this? First, I'll tell you about all the flawed memories I found in this story that totally transfixed me. A really good example is Jen, the almost fiancée. Bobby had bought a ring for her, just hadn't proposed. She lived with the McIlvains after September 11th because she couldn't tolerate the echoing emptiness of her apartment. If you ask Bobby's younger brother, she stayed there with them for six months. If you ask Bobby's mom, she stayed there for a week. Jen remembers having stayed there for two months. The gulf between six months and a week? Here's another one I couldn't get over. Both Jeff, Bobby's brother, and Jen could not decide who slept in Bobby's bed during that time. Someone slept in Bobby's bed. It was either his brother sleeping in his dead brother's bed or it was his fiancée sleeping in this man's bed that she was not going to marry. How can it be that they couldn't remember waking up to all of Bobby's things? It is amazing what we choose.

Kara Swisher: It's part of grief. It's how you deal with grief.

Jennifer Senior: There's some argument that while we're grieving, things are more vivid, but I don't think that's true. This gets a little treacherous because of course you want to believe the memories of people who have been raped, who have gone through traumas. But it was unnerving to hear the different testimony. We know from eyewitness testimony at crimes that you can get radically different reports of what happened. Here's an example of how fallible my own memory was. I was interviewed for a storytelling podcast maybe four months ago. They said, "What was it like asking the McIlvains to do this story? How delicate was it?" I was very cheerful. I said, "They were super open-hearted. I wrote them a long, heartfelt, careful note. They said, 'Of course, yes, absolutely. We'll do anything we can to help you.'" I went back and looked at that note recently. It was not long and careful and heartfelt. It was way too short and telegraphic. Maybe wince when I reread it, like it was too careful. Helen McIlvain was so cautious with me. She was not in any way like, "Oh, absolutely anything you need." She said she wanted to only answer my questions in writing. I think I couldn't tolerate the idea of pressuring them.

Olivia Nuzzi: But isn't it sort of like when something works out and the reaction to the story is positive from your subjects, doesn't—I find this happens to me too—I forget all of the negotiating that went into getting the access, or I forget how difficult it was or what the fact-checking process was like. All of that just fades or gets distorted. I remember it as an easy process. This is the second time I'm going to use this metaphor, which is so bananas. It's like childbirth. You forget the pain. It's just like, "Oh, yay, a baby. A totally awesome baby."

Jennifer Senior: Yes, right. I was like, "Oh, yay, a totally awesome baby." And I forgot what I did. I think it was too disruptive of my own self-concept to think that I, an empathetic journalist, would have leaned on the McIlvains in this way.

Olivia Nuzzi: Your mind protects you. Your mind is protecting your self-image when that happens.

Jennifer Senior: Totally. That's just what happens. Our minds are protecting us in all kinds of ways. That's what happens with memory.

Kara Swisher: I'm going to ask you a couple more questions. You interviewed Steve Bannon. It was not a kind piece, but you were right in there with him. He answered—I know he's very available. You interviewed him too, Olivia. When they know—sometimes Olivia did that famous Trump thing when you were in his office. I kept thinking, why are they letting her in there? You wouldn't have invited me?

Olivia Nuzzi: I would not have. Are you kidding?

Kara Swisher: No, absolutely not. Not unless every drawer was locked. How do you both interview someone like Steve Bannon, where it's probably not in their best interest to talk to you? In this case, it wasn't in their not-best interest because it did preserve his memory in a lovely way. But how do you think about that when you're doing these long-form things and you have to spend significant amounts of time with people? You first, Olivia.

Olivia Nuzzi: I'm very curious to hear your opinion on Bannon and his calculation. For a lot of people like that, they know what they're getting into. Steve Bannon is certainly savvy about the media. He's been manipulating the media for years, spinning himself as being central to history. For someone like that, he just wants attention. He wants to be—we're talking about last night's episode of *Succession*. Jennifer, I don't know if you watched it. When Tom is like, "It's important that I was on the plane with him." That's what all of these guys are doing. They just want everyone to know that they were on the plane. So they take the hit. They know they're probably going to get a negative interpretation of at least some of their story. But that's not what it's about. To cooperate with mainstream or liberal media, it's about attention and writing themselves into history. That is what Steve Bannon is doing, in my view.

Kara Swisher: I think megalomania plays no small part. He is a part of the establishment. He was a Goldman guy. He was a Hollywood guy. He's going to hate this so much, Jennifer. But the point is, he craves the establishment's approval. *The Atlantic*, *New York Magazine*—they're all places to get your passport stamped that matter to you. A lot like Trump. For Trump, he hates the media, hates the media. All he wants is the acceptance of the New York media. That is what animates him. He came of age in New York. I think this all matters to these guys. I can't believe they talked to you. I still can't believe it.

Let me ask you two more questions. We've got to go soon. What should people know about grief? What did you learn about grief from this book?

Jennifer Senior: Two things. First, telling anyone how to grieve, to move past it, or "you should be"—there's a tyranny associated with grieving in a way that you've got to do it sequentially, in steps. There's a certain point where you should be done. No one grieves sequentially or logically. Everybody grieves really idiosyncratically. The second thing is that some people never get over their grief. I didn't realize that some people don't want to get over their grief. They want to live in it and inhabit it. It's a way to keep—people live in terror of forgetting someone. I wrote at some point that it's the craziest thing that the dead abandon you, but then you abandon the dead. People don't want to abandon the dead. That's sometimes why they perpetually grieve or stay in their grief. You've got to respect that. You can't view it as odd or pathological. It's just another response.

Kara Swisher: I was so floored. I think it came out a few months ago. Some medical group said they had determined something called "long grief" or "extended grief." I thought that was so strange and silly. The idea that after a year or six months or whatever the time period was, they determined it was unusual. How could that be?

Jennifer Senior: Pathologizing it or making it its own DSM category is completely wackadoodle to me.

Kara Swisher: There have been arguments about that. The more rational heads not prevailing, saying, "This is a normal response to the human condition. Are you kidding me? This is just what love looks like inside out. It's grief. What are we talking about here?"

Jennifer Senior: That's absolutely true.

Olivia Nuzzi: I think you can use it positively too, in a way to keep you going.

Jennifer Senior: That's right.

Olivia Nuzzi: I think that's so interesting, Jennifer. The idea that people are terrified of exiting that period of trauma. I always think the hardest part of losing someone is not the immediate aftermath and the shock. It's that period of time, maybe a week later, maybe a month later, when people stop calling and people stop dropping by and you stop having cause to mention the name. The idea that your story was saving them somehow, saving this family because it puts their son's name in people's mouths again, is so powerful.

Jennifer Senior: That's so lovely for you to say. And yes.

Kara Swisher: You wrote another piece about COVID. I want to end up on this. You have long COVID. You wrote very beautifully about it in *The Atlantic*. There's been so much trauma for this country and individually for everybody between 9/11, the wars, COVID, everything else. Talk a little bit about what prompted you to write about this. Many people don't want to write about their long COVID. I know a lot of reporters who have it who don't write about it.

Jennifer Senior: Some of it was self-serving. I knew my byline was not appearing, and I wanted people to know why. Partly inspired by a jackass from the *New York Times* who one day—when you and I are face-to-face and deep in our cups, I will tell you who—said to me, "Is this your excuse for being underproductive?" It's like, wow.

Kara Swisher: Oh, wow.

Jennifer Senior: Yeah. They live in fear of that at the *New York Times*, but go ahead.

Kara Swisher: I know.

Jennifer Senior: No, what it really was, I was struck by how many people kept saying, "Are you better now? Are you better?" Not understanding that it was chronic and that there is no such thing as better. For a lot of us, we don't know if we're ever going to be better. I actually have something with a big, long, ugly name called hyperadrenergic POTS that most people don't recover from. I was in the asterisked percentile of unlucky where it looks like I'll have something permanent out of this. Although there is a chance my body will stop attacking itself and I won't have this autoimmune condition forever. People with long COVID are looking at possibly never knowing when they will recover. I wanted to make clear, please stop asking if I'm better. There's also a certain amount of prurience once people find out. They will buttonhole you. It's a lot of the things Helen McIlvain had to deal with when people don't know the right thing to say.

Kara Swisher: Between grief and mourning in this.

Jennifer Senior: Oh yeah. I'm mourning the fact that I used to be able to walk without pain. I can't even imagine what it'll be like. Will I ever be able to hike? I would like just to be able to take a very long stroll without it hurting. I have been able to do that lately, which is good. Knock on wood. Maybe I'll be able to hike one day. I don't know. I think I was grieving hard.

Kara Swisher: That's right.

Jennifer Senior: I work a lot of things out on paper. That's how a lot of writers roll. I'm interested in the writers who don't want to do it.

Kara Swisher: It was beautifully done. I thought it was a real slap in the face to people in a good way. In terms of telling them about that when they want to—as you know, I had a stroke and then I just had heart surgery. The way people behaved. Mine is much more temporary than yours. I was very irritated by it on lots of levels. I never wrote about it. When I read it, I was like, "Uh-huh."

Jennifer Senior: I can understand. You're a lot better known than I am. You would have had to deal with your inbox teeming for too many weeks. People still wouldn't have necessarily—I still got a lot of weird emails and responses. Even after I wrote about all my bêtes noires and the weird things people would say to me, they would still—and they were so well-meaning.

Kara Swisher: Explain what one of them was.

Jennifer Senior: A lot of them had weird advice. "You should take orange peel."

Kara Swisher: Right, exactly.

Jennifer Senior: I had more than one of those. I had more than five of those. It's like, anyway.

Kara Swisher: I had a lot of "You should slow down because of stress." I'm like, "It's a genetic condition, you fucking idiot." I got that from people. "You should take time out to be sick. You should slow down." It's like, I did do that. And have you met me? Do you know anything about how work-identified I am? There's nothing—I can't walk. There are so many things I can't do. This is one thing I can do. I can lie in bed and type. Please let me lie in bed and type.

Olivia Nuzzi: Has your relationship to the idea of loss changed through the course of working on this project?

Jennifer Senior: I don't know. In some of the ways I said, I didn't realize that people could live in a glass house of sorrow forever and that was where they needed to be. That was certainly something. In terms of—I think it's made me very acutely—I also lost my health in a way that I don't know if it's permanent or not. Nine and a half months already feels like forever. I guess I am starting to develop a more philosophical attitude toward what I have. Trying to do that slightly more Buddhist thing of—I am the opposite of Buddhist. I am neurotic to my core. But I am trying to notice things and appreciate things and breathe. Breathe in and breathe out. Send out. Breathe in the bad and live with it and then breathe it out. Take on my suffering and other people's suffering and then breathe it out. All the things—I'm reading Buddhist books. Was I doing that before? No.

Kara Swisher: Wow. Don't do that.

Jennifer Senior: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: People gave them to me after I had a stroke and I was like, "No." I would be afraid to give you something like that.

Jennifer Senior: You should be. People should be afraid to recommend that to me too. People I really—you really do want to slap people who recommend that stuff, especially people like us. But you know what? I've kind of secretly loved it. I'm doing oxygen therapy for an hour and a half every day where I can't bring a screen inside my little hyperbaric oxygen tank. So what do you do? You read a Buddhist book. It's not the worst thing.

Kara Swisher: It's not the worst thing. Okay. On that note, and orange peel. Orange peel. Jennifer, how are you doing? How are you doing? Anyway, I love those lines. They made me laugh. "How are you doing?" And then "How are you doing?" That's serious.

Jennifer Senior: That's right.

Kara Swisher: No, really. How are you?

Kara Swisher: I'm terrible. Thank you. I'm so awful. Wait, I'm going to enumerate now all the ways I'm terrible because that's what you want to hear. That's what they want to hear.

Anyway, Jennifer Senior, you should read her really wonderful book on grief based on an article she did for The Atlantic and won the Pulitzer Prize. It's available now. I really appreciate it. Both of you are two of my favorite writers. And everybody should read this and get a hard copy so that they can keep it and pass it around.

Thank you so much. And you two are two of my favorite journalism gals or dames or broads. I think we just said you on broads. Dames. Jennifer, thank you so much. Thank you so much.

All right, Olivia, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails.

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Kara Swisher: Okay, Olivia, let's do wins and fails. I'll go first.

Obviously, the fail is the Tennessee state legislature full of sexual harassers and strange people, peers on people's seats. They voted to remove two members last week after they joined an anti-gun protest. At the time of this taping, local national officials are expected to vote on whether to reinstate them. That's probably going to happen.

Justin Pearson and Justin Jones were expelled by Republican colleagues. A third member who participated in the protest, Gloria Johnson, was not expelled. She is white. Two are black men. It's a very bad look. But as I've come to learn, the Tennessee state legislature is a mosh pit of weird.

Win, obviously *Succession*, and Jesse Armstrong and Mark Milod, who's the director of that episode. Jesse Armstrong wrote it and is the creator of *Succession*. Just a beautiful hour of television, I have to say. It was really moving. So those are my wins and fails. Olivia?

Olivia Nuzzi: I guess my win has to be Sting, who it turns out is receiving $5,000 a day because Diddy sampled "Every Breath You Take" without his permission.

Kara Swisher: Wow.

Olivia Nuzzi: So he pays him $5,000 a day for those rights.

Kara Swisher: Wow. And he deserves it. That was a great song. Right? Great song. A great song. Yeah, all that sampling is going to be a big deal. Yeah. Especially with AI.

I'm not pandering, but I guess it's Elon Musk. It's not going well.

Olivia Nuzzi: No. No. He needs some help. He needs a hug.

Kara Swisher: He does need some help. But you're not going to give it to him. You should hug him.

Olivia Nuzzi: I mean, look, if he asked, if he was like crying and he said, "Could I have a hug?" I don't know. I wouldn't like walk away. That's sociopathic.

Kara Swisher: Hello. Nice to meet you. I'm sorry. All right, Olivia, you can hug him. I will just—let's take that the headline. I'm not offering it. I'm just saying if he asked, I wouldn't walk away because I'm not a sociopath.

Kara Swisher: All right. I'm going to give him your cell just in case.

All right. We want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business, tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT.

All right, Olivia, that's the show. Thank you for joining me. You're wonderful. It was really good. It was a really good discussion. And you can find Olivia's cover story on Stormy Daniels in the latest issue of *New York Magazine*. It's on the cover. Did I say that again? It's a wonderful piece. And it's very thought-provoking in a lot of ways. We're excited.

What are you working on next?

Olivia Nuzzi: Ron DeSantis. Call me, Ron DeSantis, if you're listening.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, he's not going to listen to this.

Olivia Nuzzi: Yeah. I think his PR person called me a groomer.

Kara Swisher: So, oh, don't assume that'll help you. Why haven't you tried to groom me? What the hell?

Olivia Nuzzi: No. Oh, my God. Stop. This is going to become an internet thing. Anyway, I don't think I'm going to go there. I'm not saying a word.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, we'll be back on Friday for more. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Androdot engineered this episode. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to *Pivot* from *New York Magazine* and Vox Media. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Thanks again to Olivia Nuzzi and Jennifer Senior.

[Laughter]

Kara Swisher: Oh God.