#396: Process Junkie, A Vanity Fair Upset in Central Park, Subway Gun Scanners, The FOUR, Quokkas & More!

+ Elephant bugs, The Cool Monk, & Morris begins a new summer diet

This week’s edition comes to you over a sweaty bread basket at Sarabeths on the Upper West Side. I hope you’re having a great week because I have some big news…

I’m very excited to finally share that this week will be the official launch of my new Substack about the process of making art with my very human hands.

“Process Junkie” will invite you into my studio to explore all of the joys of the process of making art of all kinds— from cartoons and illustrations to comedy and books. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, you can sign up here to make sure you get the first post in your inbox Thursday.

Here’s a sneak peek…

Thailand was just the break I needed…

…and by that, I mean I needed to get an elephant-borne virus that had Sophie and me bedridden for three days. Our intrepid tour driver/random guy with a van thought we might like to see the decaying corpse of a monk on our way to lunch. He was wearing sunglasses. I know they’re there to cover his hollow eye sockets, but part of me thinks it’s because he was the ‘cool’ monk.

“Make me one with everything… hold the pickles!”

Lunch didn’t go down the same after witnessing that, but at least we got to feed the ethical elephants with the family. And you know what they say— a family that feeds sugar cane to enormous mammals together, stays together. The place went to a lot of trouble to tell us they were the most ethical elephant sanctuary in the world. I did believe them, but it started making me suspicious when they reassured us for the twelfth time.

Seeing exotic animals is nothing new for me— after all, I’m from Australia. Pretty much everything from the platypus to the kangaroo looks like it was concocted in a lab by a drunken bond villain. Every single one of them can kill you, of course. There is, however, one creature from my hometown that I get asked about the most by my American friends, and that is the humble Quokka.

If you haven’t heard of these things, you’ve almost certainly seen them on your social media feed. A quokka is a small marsupial that is only found on Rottnest Island (and a few other smaller islands) off the coast of Western Australia. They technically belong to the macropod family (which includes kangaroos and wallabies) but they happen to be the cutest, most photogenic creatures alive. They can’t quite kill you, but you may just ‘literally die’ when you see one.

My friend Rebecca shared these photos from her time in Rottnest (Wadjemup) recently, which I’m sharing here with her permission. Take one look at these things and tell me you don’t make an involuntary high-pitched noise.

Rollout begins for gun-scanning metal detectors in NYC subway stations

New York Mayor Eric Adams said that new metal detectors would be rolled out at select turnstiles around NYC as part of a pilot program with the company Evolv Technology, but they wouldn’t tell anyone which stations they’d be at. One of the stations happened to be my local stop. I’d just returned from a 3-leg, 28-hour journey from Samui via Hong Kong, so I was just thrilled to be going through another TSA scanner to get on the subway. I counted 9 officers milling around. Something tells me Hudson Yards isn’t exactly the place you’re going to have the most gun crime, fellas. You just picked the area with the most Instagram influencers so your scanners got more coverage. (Oh, crap… I see what I’ve done.)

Because that’s what the MTA needs — a TSA.

What was I reading on the beach?

I had a few readers asking what I was poring through while I was on the beach. I took my Kindle instead of a hard copy of some kind of Sedaris offering this time. I wouldn’t recommend it. It meant I was bouncing around from fiction to non-fiction, from science to fantasy, to self-help. I think it’s better to just make a commitment to one author and bring a physical book. If it gets soggy and dog-eared, so be it— at least you made a decision.

Sophie read possibly the most ‘airport novel’ airport novel ever written— a post-mortem collab between the late Michael Chrichton and James Patterson, called ‘Eruption’.

Apparently, Crichton’s widow found the beginnings of the book in his stuff* and sold it to be finished up by one of Patterson’s ghostwriters (ooer) and despite the great blurb, it was a huge dud. Don’t waste your time; Unwieldy plot devices, unnecessary character deaths, and sparkling dialogue like “Jenny died.” — I can’t wait for Gerard Butler to play the lead in the movie. The whole thing is written like the outline of a summer blockbuster screenplay. Each chapter is three words long, and the language is at a third-grade reading level.

It was funny listening to Sophie balk and grouse on the pool chair next to me as another horrendous plot hole burst through the page like a convenient new volcano. The only eruption was the incredulous laughter from her upon reading the last page.

*Chrichton’s waste paper bin

I won’t list the crap I was reading, but I will share my list of Book Recommendations from 2021:

I’ve never really done any book recommendations before, but that’s likely because in the past 7 years, I barely had time to finish a book. However, since nixing all my social media for a year, I ended up finishing over two dozen books. My nightstand has never been cleaner. Funny that.

Click here to read them.

Each week the New Yorker softball team meets at the softball diamond in Central Park and plays people who work at other magazines based in New York. I am probably the least valuable member of the team, with the pitching arm of an old chair and the knees of a septuagenarian. That said, I do bring the beer…

07/30: The New Yorker VS. Vanity Fair:
A Condé Clash of the Titans!

Last night The New Yorker softball team was pitted against our longtime rivals Vanity Fair. This publication, of course, operates under the same banner of the New Yorker’s parent publishing company Condé Nast, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a no-holds-barred, no ‘beg your pardons’ Condé Clash* of the Titans.

We lumbered up to the Softball field we’d booked out in Central Park only to find another game running over. We moved to another diamond to begin play late, meaning we were almost certainly going to be barked off the field by our least favourite creature in the park: Golf Cart Guy.

Our turnout for the historic bout was our biggest in history. We looked more like a Taylor Swift audience than a softball team. The batting order was so long we ran out of paper.

After getting three home in the first inning we were off to a flying start. I was playing catcher most of the game, meaning my gluggy-headed jetlag was being counteracted with pure adrenaline. It wasn’t until the 5th inning when one of the Vanity Fair players slid into third and was definitely tagged out, but called safe by the third base coach —a man with the vision of a duck with glaucoma— that we started to have some problems.

We were down by two, but everyone on our team had clearly seen her get tagged out, so we obviously cheered and moved off the field to begin the next inning. They, however, insisted we stay in the field for another pitch…

Confusion spread across the thousands of players on our team, as cries of “That’s Vanity Un-Fair!” rang out from the dugout. It was on. We reluctantly returned to the field, resulting in two more home, placing us squarely behind. The team was incensed.

By the seventh inning, we were down by 1, and the sun was well and truly disappearing behind the great lawn. But there was no sign of golf-cart-guy, so our stoic captain and Talk Of The Town editor, Zach Helfland, asked if we could play one more inning to see if we could square the score.

With bases loaded and Jenny Kroik at the plate, we were split seconds from getting all three players home when we heard the familiar bark ring out from behind the fence…

“PARK’S CLOSED! GET OUT!”

That’s right. It was Golf Cart Guy, right on cue: Once again, making us call the game before we had the chance to finish up. we slunk off to Tap a Keg for pizza and beer with our heads hung low. The enormous procession from the park to the pub looked more like some kind of parade than a softball team. This round goes to you, Vanity Fair. But next year, we’re gonna be ready.

(*Dan Greene gets full credit for this sparkling pun)

Amid the slew of new Substacks popping up over the summer, one I’ve been excited to see is from the mind of my dear friend, Lauren Layne — mostly due to her new writing course, The 5P Method.

Lauren is the best-selling romantic fiction author of over 42 books. (She has re-written, or abandoned twice as many, as I learned in her course.) At one point she was turning around 4-5 books per year, which was nothing short of Herculean. (and they’re excellent reads!)

If you’re an author, want to be an author, or are simply interested in the craft of storytelling, I highly recommend taking her masterclass— and while you’re at it, subscribing to her Weekly Newsletter, TheFOUR.