Frank Bruni On The Silver Linings Of Suffering

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2022

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Frank is a longtime writer at the NYT — ranging from White House correspondent to chief restaurant critic to op-ed columnist, and now also a journalism professor at Duke. In his early days at the Detroit Free Press, he was a war correspondent, chief movie critic, and religion writer. We’ve known each other for many years, gay writers of the same generation. His latest book is the bestselling memoir The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found, about aging and optimism after Frank began to go blind.

For two clips of our convo — on the opportunities that can be found in suffering, and on the wisdom found in cringey cliches — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics we touch on include: the AIDS crisis, losing my best friend to the disease, the marriage movement, the alphabet people, psychedelics, Frank's dog, and the marvelous adaptations of blind people.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Hi there, and welcome to another teachcast.
0:31.3	I'm back in DC now.
0:32.6	I'm in the studio.
0:33.6	I was last week, I guess, as well, but life goes by fast.
0:44.4	But this week I have Frank Bruni, who is a legendary, long-time writer at the New York Times,
0:47.5	ranging from White House correspondent to the Hill.
0:51.7	I remember him most vividly as the chief restaurant critic,
0:55.2	because even though I am utterly uninterested in food, I always found his reviews really fun and actually could have made me interested in food if I could get
1:00.9	past probably my English-trained palate at some point. And he went on to be an op-ed columnist
1:06.2	at New York Times as well, of course, and he's now a journalism professor at Duke. And his early days of the Detroit Free Press, he was a war correspondent, chief movie critic, and religion writer.
1:17.6	He's written many books, but the one we're going to talk about today is his recent best-selling memoir,
1:24.6	The Beauty of Dusk on Vision, Lost and Found, which is a story that began really just waking
1:34.2	up one morning and finding himself utterly changed.
1:37.8	But before we get there, Frank, welcome.
1:40.9	Nice to see you.
1:42.1	It's great to see you.
1:42.8	And I always ask this question because I think it's a helpful one.
1:46.0	And because we're talking about your life, it's completely actually integral to the episode.
1:53.0	Tell me where you were born and grew up, what your atmosphere was in your home, what it was like to be you as a kid.
2:01.8	I was born and grew up for the first 12 years of my life in White Plains, New York, which is
2:07.1	an interesting place and that it is at once a suburb of New York City and its own sort
	...

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