> , and Lerner ordered, for the both of us, a glass of “something dry and cold.” For lunch, he requested the chicken: a roasted baby chicken from a farm upstate, to be exact, an order that, in its comically artisanal specificity,

Stuff like this is so upper-middle class (or aspirational upper-middle class, which is the same thing) coded that it hurts, somehow I thought we left all that behind in the pre-Covid era, looks like I was wrong. Imo it all started with the Lunch with the FT (again, see the upper-middle class larp-ing) gonzos, and it went downhill from there.