Nowadays, acknowledgment of Couric’s influence may prompt bafflement. Along with a handful of other women - Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, Oprah Winfrey - Couric was one of the people who determined how American television audiences understood the world. At the peak of her fame at the turn of the millennium, which coincided with the heyday of the Today show and the primacy of the morning network-news program, she enjoyed near-unrivaled power. That career would wind up being a blockbuster. The carrots were on account of the Scarsdale Diet, the deprivational fad to which the 22-year-old Couric had committed because her plan “was to look as good as possible for my wet hot American summer” before “finding a job - maybe even a career - in TV news.” In the weeks before the publication of her memoir, Going There, Katie Couric and I would play a dark little game called Funny or Fucked Up? Over coffee, lunch, and Zoom calls, I would bring up an anecdote from the book - like, say, the first sentence, which is about the time she ate so many carrots in the summer after college that her skin turned orange - and ask her what, exactly, her reader was supposed to make of it.
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