How hackers helped me meet my idol

Spending my evening on the couch scrolling through social media, as one does, I was delighted to spot a post on Mark Bittman’s Twitter/X account.

I’ve been a fan of Bittman’s cooking and recipe-writing style since 2012. Bittman’s willingness to eschew established cooking orthodoxy in popular recipes for easier, faster, better methods drew the respect of this fledgling recipe writer.

The sprawling index of “How to Cook Everything” showed me that the world was my oyster, when it came to drawing on inspirations from around the globe. Bittman’s “there must be an easier way” ethos helped me hone my own recipe-writing style.

We had something else in common. Bittman left newspapers for digital self-publishing, as The Bittman Project. I left The Buffalo News in 2023 to launch my own food site, Four Bites. Finally getting into video, where the right picture is worth a thousand words, I could use the editing chops of an Apple laptop.

As I scrolled, I found a second post.

That seems like something people are going to go for, I thought. What luck I happened to spot this now.

So I gathered my nerve, and dove into my idol’s DMs.

My heart thumped in my chest for a couple minutes.

Well that was brusque, but it’s probably an assistant.

I couldn’t resist checking if I’d actually made contact.

“Thank you for the kind words.” That’s what I tell strangers who compliment my writing. Wow, this Internet is really something: I got to digitally fanboy my idol. Plus get an excellent computer for an absolute steal. How much do those things go for anyway?

Three grand plus? Holy Toledo, I was going to save so much money.

But Apple Pay refused to work. Isn’t it just like your phone to fail you at the worst times?

I reassured Mark’s assistant that we could make this work.

But I couldn’t figure out how to send my $600. I was getting miffed.

As I was trying to decide which payment system to try next, a small bubble of skepticism floated to the surface.

As a regular reader of r/Scams on Reddit, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is,” came to mind.

So I had a look through Bittman’s past posts.

No fund-raising posts at all before the one for St. Jude’s. Hmm. Might be best to sleep on this one.

My phone buzzed again.

Chagrined at my dopeyness, I did not reply.

The next day, my phone buzzed.

Oh, boy, I thought. On r/Scams, “recovery scammers” are another type of scammer that show up after you were scammed, promising to reverse the financial damage. Guess what: It’s a scam.

Play it straight, I figured.

Wait, could this be Bittman himself? If it was, my brush with Internet scammery might be worth writing about. But he’d never go for being quoted embarrassing himself?

Couldn’t hurt to ask. That’s Journalism 101.