About a third of the way into her new memoir, American Canto, Olivia Nuzzi airs her grievances with DC. The things she loathes about the city include the weather (“unbearable”), the vibe (“people in Washington love to identify as productive”), the size (“you cannot look both ways to cross the street without seeing someone you wish to not know”), the sheer volume of other political reporters (“as if what repulses me about them is not what I see of myself in them”), and the need to repeatedly endure the “buzzless start to a dinner party or a book event or a strange gala at the residence of the ambassador to I-never-know-what.”

To Nuzzi, DC is a “place where you cannot live, really,” where stepping outside for some air means encountering John Kerry or Newt Gingrich and realizing that “those

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