EDITOR’S LETTER | Consider the lobster thermidor

I spent this past summer with Anthony Bourdain. He was with me as I drove 140 miles roundtrip twice a week to Syracuse to teach a news reporting class. As I flew to Palm Springs and New Orleans for work trips. He was with me as I unpacked boxes from a move, built patio furniture and replaced the floor in my kitchen. As I walked the four blocks to meet my sister, brother-in-law and tiny niece for sunset ice cream jaunts on Park Avenue. Hear me out. There may be no better person to have in your ear during an unusually chaotic summer than an irreverent, reticently famous chef-turned-author-turned-TV star who died by suicide in the prime of his life. Bourdain’s voice, reading his audiobooks in my car and in my airpods, was the companion (or perhaps, distraction) I could not otherwise find. The ghost in the machine. And before the release of the Bourdain quasi-biopic “Tony” last August, I wanted to revisit his work.

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