Episode 87: Mortadella and Mortality

“It’s the best thing I’ve seen on television in a really long time,” Jessica says of Succession, the HBO series about an aged media mogul and the future of his empire.

“It seems like a crazy, almost to a surreal degree, fantasy. But it’s a little bit more real than I’m comfortable with,” says Michael, who speaks from his professional experience:

Before I moved to New York, I never really met anyone who I thought was fabulously rich. And it’s so happened that we were designing the invitation, say, for some kind of fancy gala dinner. And you’d meet with a big donor to the dinner, who would have to sign off on the invitations. And you think, Well, this person is really wealthy. They must be incredibly smart and poised and everything else.

And I swear to God in my career I probably met versions of the patriarch, Logan Roy, and all of the Roy children in various configurations. Like, it’s dead accurate. They’re exactly like that.

Also mentioned this week:

• Alexander Hawkins
• Jessica on Eataly World: What’s it like? Who is there in August? How crowded is it? What did you eat? How does it feel?
• Eater, Tasting Table, New York Times on Eataly World
• Guardian, Eataly World opens but leaves a bad taste in Bologna
• The Cape May Bread Lady on Facebook
• Troy Patterson, The New Yorker, “Succession”: An Irresistible Family Power Struggle
• Jen Chaney, Vulture, Succession Is a Compelling Portrait of Untrustworthy Power Players
• Matt Brennan, Paste, The Exquisite Sliminess of Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen
• Kate Wagner, Vox, Betsy DeVos’s summer home deserves a special place in McMansion Hell
• Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
• Jessica Helfand, Reinventing the Wheel
• Open Culture on the Coltrane circle
• That Charles Eames drawing

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