“Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more.” And that’s when Maureen Dowd fell down the rabbit hole, delivering a New York Times opinion pages piece that had half of Twitter cheering on Dowd for getting stoned and writing about it and the other half making jokes about the fact that we have yet another Times writer getting real about the wacky tobacky.
I, for one, thought it was a fine piece, although I do wish Dowd had taken a page out of Kendrick Lamar’s playbook and titled it “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe.” But now that writers at the New York Times are celebrating 420 on a regular basis, I got to thinking about what other dream drug pieces I’d love to see in the back pages of the Grey Lady.
David Brooks pops a molly and goes to a Steve Aoki concert
Here’s where the Times has a chance to get “on it” twice in one piece. Notorious jaded cool guy David Brooks takes a little MDMA to see one of the world’s preeminent button-pushing, killer drop-making EDM DJs, to help subscribers understand what all the fuss is about. Midway through the event, the music takes control, and all Brooks wants to do is dance. However, he promptly gets over it and writes a piece titled, “Molly: Meh.”
Thomas Friedman on the joys of a good burn cruise
Thomas Friedman’s piece about growing up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota starts off innocently enough: Senator Al Franken grew up down the street, the Coen brothers went to his synagogue, Chicago Bears football coach Marc Trestman was on the debate club with him; then the whole thing takes on a weird spin when Friedman starts talking about how the good old fashioned suburban American teenager burn cruise just isn’t as great as it used to be. “Back in the day,” Friedman writes, “I used to drive around in the van we dubbed the ‘Shaggin’ Wagon’ with Al, Marc, and Joel. We never took Ethan, cause the guy was sort of a narc.” The piece gets published, and Friedman announces immediately after that he’s taking a sabbatical from the paper to write a screenplay for a Coens-directed movie tentatively titled Future Famous Jews From Suburban Minnesota Getting Stoned While Driving Aimlessly. The film eventually gets a green light and is renamed The St. Louis Boys.
Gail Collins gets baked and writes a column
Oh wait — that’s every week. Isn’t it?
Nicholas Kristof does peyote in the desert
“The world is a really fucked up and terrible place. It’s sort of my job to report on that,” Kristof writes in his piece. “So sometimes it’s just nice to escape it for a little while.” The piece is billed as a report on the indigenous people of the American Southwest, but it’s really just a ton of babble that would even freak out William S. Burroughs.
Paul Krugman does an eight ball, crunches all the numbers, decides to finally tell us we’re all fucked
Paul Krugman gets ripped and writes that America is done and socialism is really the only place to turn at this point. The piece receives the largest amount of letters to the editor ever. Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, faced with the task of explaining what the hell happened, promptly quits her job, saying, “I’m tired of trying to clean up your fucking messes.”
Michiko Kakutani does ecstasy at the National Book Awards and gives everybody shoulder rubs
This is actually a title of an Observer blog post about the Times book critic giving people shoulder rubs at the National Book Awards.
Mark Bittman accidentally eats the wrong kind of mushrooms
The piece was supposed to be about all the great mushrooms you can put in your summer dishes, but somehow it devolves into Bittman writing about all the beautiful colors at his local farmers market.
Ross Douthat tries Gas-X
Ross Douthat finds out that not even Gas-X can cure him of Insufferable Windbag Syndrome.