You're not wrong, but these people are not going away. This is New York magazine, Vulture section, they just talk about what people eat at the interview, that's what the same people like to read.

Ben Lerner is from that world. Very New York, very arty, very socialite. If I remember correctly one of his books sets place in Marfa, the Art center.

Ben Lerner is not what "normal people" read, nor is New York magazine.

I find the books pretty good, but I think I qualify as one of "them".

This is part of a certain type of journalism. You're free to dislike it but it's doing something very specific that most readers of this type of journalism and literature in general do enjoy. You may be coming to this with the (not unusual for the HN crowd) overly stemmy attitude that scans for nuggets of relevant data (and only relevant data!) that can be processed in the most efficient way possible. This is not it, and if it was forced to be we would lose something precious.