MEDIA: Whacked Non-Fiction –
Feb. 11, 2020 – It remains a bit of a mystery how the 28-year-old Peres, who was working as a correspondent in Paris, got the head job at a major Condé Nast title, and an even bigger mystery how he kept that job for 15 years. By his own admission, he was largely uninterested in fashion, fitness, night life, music, sex or celebrities other than David Copperfield — the magazine’s staple topics. And soon after he got the job, in 2000, he was zonked on a dose of 60 Vicodins a day. (“Man, that would explain a lot,” a current Condé Nast editor said when I told him the subject of Peres’s memoir.) Peres would seem to be a poster boy for high-functioning addicts, although he describes himself as barely functioning — missing meetings, nodding out at work, spending hours in the offices of five different pain-management doctors to feed his habit. You can’t fault his honesty, although you’ve got to wonder about the judgment of his bosses, including Si Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast at the time, and Patrick McCarthy, who occupied the same position at Fairchild Publications, the owner of W.
