Journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s new book, American Canto, was released Tuesday and has been widely panned, even by Nuzzi’s fans in the mainstream press. But if you’re tempted to buy the book just to search for the juiciest gossip about national figures, we’ve got some bad news. That’s going to be tough to accomplish in an efficient manner.

Nuzzi doesn’t use the actual names of the most controversial figures in the book, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A search for “Kennedy” will get you just one hit: A reference to President John F. Kennedy. But Nuzzi’s choice does create some hilarious moments of attempted obfuscation.

For example, Nuzzi repeatedly refers to a “South African tech billionaire.” There is indeed more than one of those in the proximity of American politics (Peter Thiel was born in Germany but raised in South Africa and Namibia before moving to the U.S., David Sacks was born in Cape Town), but it quickly becomes clear who Nuzzi is referring to.

See if you can guess which South African tech billionaire Nuzzi is talking about when she uses the phrase South African tech billionaire three times in a single paragraph:

The South African tech billionaire spent hundreds of millions of dollars to support the president, and on the day he was sworn back into office, the South African tech billionaire appeared at a rally in Washington to celebrate. He thanked the crowd for having made the same choice he had made, to stand behind the president at what he called “a fork in the road of human civilization.” He was all head, the South African tech billionaire, a roaming consciousness. The autonomous vehicle of his body looked soft and rubbery under his dark clothes. His physicality was rubbery, too. He moved with certain imprecision and on what appeared a delay. But now his motion seemed synced to the beat of his intentions: his fist pressed first to his chest, then his arm shot upward at a rigid angle. A salute, unmistakable, in the manner of the Third Reich. He had not meant it as such a salute, he said later. His assertion was echoed by many actors in our age of insincerity.

Gosh golly, who could this be about? It couldn’t be Elon Musk, could it? If Nuzzi’s description wasn’t specific enough for you, maybe the next few lines will help:

His mother posted on the digital town square that he owns to praise the prototype of a fully self-driving electric vehicle called the Cybercab, her son’s innovation. “The most insane thing is, you sit in a seat and there is no steering wheel nor foot pedals. It takes a while to enjoy just sitting as if you’re in your lounge, while driving to your destination,” she said.

Cybercab? The name rings a bell. Not as something that anyone can actually buy, but still, it’s a word we’ve heard before.

There are a few people who are named explicitly in the book. Donald J. Trump appears dozens of times, even if “South African tech billionaire” is put in brackets right beside Trump’s name in a quote for some reason. It’s unclear why Nuzzi bothers. If it’s a stylistic choice, it feels like an obnoxious one to use with such repetition. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t make the book any more enjoyable.

Even companies get weird nicknames, like when Nuzzi calls Amazon the “digital everything company.” Other characters get names like the MAGA General and The Politician. That last one is the one we all know about, of course. It’s the reason you may have heard Nuzzi’s name in the first place, since she became a big part of this country’s political narrative after the 2024 presidential election.

The Politician is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man Nuzzi reportedly had an emotional affair with, though she has denied that the relationship was ever physically consummated. After the existence of that relationship was made public, she was let go from New York magazine and spent the next year writing American Canto. She was also recently hired to be the West Coast editor of Vanity Fair.

Another reference to the South African tech billionaire was arguably more scandalous than the others, but it’s still easy to figure out who she’s talking about. Nuzzi writes that Kennedy (sorry, The Politician) had a vice presidential nominee who had “gone rogue.”

From the book:

He said he had been warned about her by the South African tech billionaire with whom she had reportedly had a drug-fueled sexual encounter while she was married to a different tech billionaire, but by the time he received the call that informed him she was “crazy,” it was too late.

That vice presidential candidate was Nicole Shanahan, the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Elon Musk denied having an affair with Shanahan while she was still married to Brin in tweets from 2022, though the part about it being a “drug-fueled” encounter wasn’t mentioned in the press at the time.

The biggest problem with American Canto is that Nuzzi seems to be an unreliable narrator. At one point, she claims that she doesn’t care about breaking news and considers it a burden. If that’s the case, she chose not only an odd profession but a peculiar way of pursuing that profession. Nuzzi’s skill has always been gaining proximity to people who are making news. People aren’t reading her work to hear her describe Trump’s hair in myriad ways, as she does in the book. They’re reading because she has a knack for getting close to people who have real power. And it turns out that this proximity comes with a pretty heavy price tag.

If Nuzzi’s former fiancé Ryan Lizza is to be believed, Kennedy wasn’t the only politician she had an inappropriately personal relationship with. Lizza has been delivering a drip-drip of stories on his personal blog over recent weeks and alleges Nuzzi also became close with former congressman Mark Sanford, a Republican who briefly ran for president in 2020.

But Lizza is just as unreliable as Nuzzi. He was fired from the New Yorker in 2017 over sexual misconduct allegations, according to the New York Times. And Lizza is clearly trying to milk his association with Nuzzi for all it’s worth. He ended “Part 3” of his serialized narrative by teasing the idea that he had special knowledge of something that had happened during the assassination attempt on President Trump in the summer of 2024. It was a cliffhanger that made sure folks would tune in for his paywalled article in Part 4. Readers would learn in Part 4 that whatever scandalous thing had been said about the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, was lost to history because some audio tape had been destroyed. That cheap stunt alone should make anyone skeptical of the claims Lizza is now pumping out.

So go ahead and grab a copy of American Canto if you’re really that interested. But if you’re only looking for quickly searchable gossip, just know it’s going to be virtually impossible. You’re going to have to read the whole thing.