Big Think Interview With Frank Bruni | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Frank Bruni

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A conversation with the five-year restaurant critic for the New York Times.

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Frank Bruni:

Frank Bruni was named restaurant critic for The New York Times in April 2004. He stepped down in August 2009 to become a writer with the Times' Sunday magazine and to promote his book Born Round: The History of a Full-Time Eater.

Before that, Mr. Bruni had been the Rome bureau chief from July 2002 until March 2004, a post he took after working as a reporter in the Washington D.C. bureau from December 1998 until May 2002. While in Washington, he was among the journalists assigned to Capitol Hill and Congress until August 1999, when he was assigned full-time to cover the presidential campaign of Gov. George W. Bush. He then covered the White House for the first eight months of the Bush administration, and subsequently spent seven months as the Washington-based staff writer for The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Mr. Bruni is the author of The New York Times bestseller about George W. Bush called "Ambling into History" (HarperCollins: hardcover, 2002; paperback, 2003). He is also the co-author of "A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church" (Viking: hardcover, 1993; HarperPerennial: paperback, 2002).

During the summer of 1998, Mr. Bruni spent three months as a national correspondent in the San Francisco bureau.

Frank Bruni joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in August 1995. For three and a half years, he worked on the metropolitan desk and also frequently wrote for the Sunday magazine, profiling a diverse group of individuals that included the actress Vanessa Redgrave, the writer David Foster Wallace and the former Massachusetts Governor William Weld. Mr. Bruni also wrote many articles for the Sunday Arts and Leisure section and other feature sections of The Times.

Prior to joining The Times, Mr. Bruni worked for The Detroit Free Press from 1990 until 1995 and held a variety of positions. During this period, he spent three months covering the Persian Gulf War and was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing for his portrait of a convicted child molester entitled "Twisted Love." He spent his last year in Detroit as the newspaper's movie critic.

Prior to Detroit, Mr. Bruni worked as a reporter and writer for the New York Post for a year and a half.

In 1996, Mr. Bruni and three colleagues won the George Polk Award for metropolitan reporting for their coverage of the child-abuse death of Elisa Izquierdo.

Born in White Plains, N.Y., on Oct. 31, 1964, Mr. Bruni received a B.A. degree (Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1986. He received a M.S. degree in journalism, with highest honors, from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1988, graduating second in his class and winning a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Topic: How did your childhood shape you?

FRANK BRUNI: I was born in White Plains, New York just outside the city and grew up there for the first 12 years of my life. And I’ve never really thought about how that’s shaped me. But I think probably like anyone who is born and who grew up in the New York metropolitan area, we’re exposed to a great range of things that I think expand our horizon in the future.

As a kid, well I grew up in big sports family. And so I remember with my brothers and my father going into the city fairly often to see Rangers games and Knicks games. And then I remember when I was, you know, 11 and 12, and probably too young to be doling it, going to Led Zeppelin, and Queen, and Pink Floyd concerts at Madison Square Garden on the train, and feeling very sophisticated and very grown up.

I was actually an incredibly good swimmer. I used to travel around the country to go to swim meets, because when I was 11 and I was 12, I was one of the best swimmers in the country in certain events for my age. So to find the right level of competition I would travel, you know, to the Midwest. I would travel down to Washington, D.C. frequently to go to meets.

Topic: Journalism

FRANK BRUNI: I got into journalism really through reviewing, but not through reviewing food. When I was in high school, and then when I began college, I was just a big movie buff – and to a lesser extent a music buff –

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