you can never be too thin or too violent

The author of the notorious 'Rose in the Desert' tongue bath on Asma al_Assad has been explaining herself. What gets you a profile in Vogue, anyway?

I think that Vogue is always on the lookout for good-looking first ladies because they're a combination of power and beauty and elegance. That's what Vogue is about. And here was this woman who had never given an interview, who was extremely thin and very well-dressed and therefore, qualified to be in Vogue. And they had - Vogue had been trying to get her for quite a long time.

Ms Buck, the profile author, confirms that mrs Assad 'never ate' all the time she was with her. Yet she does seem to have been imbibing the Friedman:

Asma Assad called the ancient culture of the country its hardware. She speaks like a banker with a degree in computer science. She said what interested her were the people. They were the software. The software has been getting killed every day for 13 months by her husband's forces, and they're pretending nothing is happening.

So the whole Syrian thing is a software malfunction.

Comments

[Chris E]

The npr comments are almost as amusing, apparently Ms Buck's biggest offense was equating being thin with being fashionable.

[Charlie W]

The Vogue piece can still be found here only without the original formatting, by the look of it.

She runs her office like a business, chairs meeting after meeting, starts work many days at six, never breaks for lunch, and runs home to her children at four. "It’s my time with them, and I get them fresh, unedited—I love that. I really do."

I bet she demands that everything brought to her is fresh and unedited. If she were a character in a Banks novel, she'd be doling out truth drugs left and right. The detail I liked best from the Buck interview was that the children in the photos are not the Assad children.

[Cian]

She speaks like a banker with a degree in computer science.

Um the word for that is Venture Capitalist.