Sophie Gilbert | The Atlantic

What Does Lena Dunham Want to Tell Us?

2026-04-14T11:51:00-04:00

Recently, idly researching, I happened upon a Vanity Fair video from about a decade ago in which a 29-year-old Lena Dunham, wearing a shiny olive blazer with her cropped hair swept into a quiff, speculates what the future will bring. “In 2025, I think that feminism is no longer a dirty word,” she says confidently. “I think that we’re probably on our second female president? If our president’s not female, they’re definitely down with calling themselves a feminist because they recognize it’s the sexy thing to do and it’s gonna get them laid. Our first female president’s gonna be Hillary Clinton, unless there’s a real last-minute dash by Viola Davis.”

It might be enough to make you weep: the blithe optimism, the cutesy cheek, the BuzzFeed-esque title (“Lena Dunham: 8 Thoughts on Feminism”), the corporate–meets–Hot Topic styling, the ease with which Dunham proclaims that things will only get better. Were we ever so young?

When the video was published, Dunham’s precocious HBO show, Girls, was heading into its penultimate season, its creator having long since become an avatar for bratty, clumsy Millennial feminism in a way that obscured her talent. Her second memoir, Famesick, which is out this week, is a fascinating shift from her first, Not That Kind of Girl, which was published in 2014 and drew scorn from every imaginable direction: critics, who argued that the book failed to live up to its reported $3.5 million advance; Dunham’s feminist peers (“this vein of narcissism—every bit of the world existing only to make you feel some kind of way—would be unpleasant at any age and any gender,” a mixed Jezebel review argued); and, most cruelly, right-wing writers, who seized on confessions Dunham had made about her curiosity regarding her baby sibling to argue in the worst possible faith that she was a child molester. The internet of the 2010s was a shooting range for prominent and imperfect women, and Dunham was an impossibly popular target.

Why? Because she simply cannot contain herself. She’s unbridled id, pouring herself all over the page, the screen, the extended Instagram caption. “I want to tell my stories, and more than that, I have to in order to stay sane,” she wrote in the introduction to Not That Kind of Girl. I know more about her uterus, at this point in time, than I do my own. She’s unabashed about her appetites, her desires, her cravings. (Food is an underexplored feature in the first few episodes of Girls; never forget that Hannah Horvath’s erstwhile memoir in Season 1 is titled Midnight Snack.) Feminists have always abraded and enraged people, other feminists chief among them, and Dunham was an obvious stand-in during the 2010s for a confrontational frankness and joyful arrested development that many people found infuriating. Her public profile superseded her art, which is a shame, because her art can be sublime.

Rewatching Girls, as many people have been doing, is clarifying: Dunham’s show, which debuted when she was 25 years old, is sharp, profound, and acutely funny, confessionally tender about the state of 21st-century young adulthood. She has an extraordinary gift for observation, noting the specificity of her surroundings and drawing out the absurdity. She’s the native child of a scene that often comes close to parodying itself, and yet Dunham does it better than anyone else. (See Hannah in Girls, observing the shaggy, guitar-toting Desi: “He looks like someone in, like, the Pacific Northwest knit a man.”) Her goal as a writer, she noted in 2014, was to obliterate “the expectation that my femininity, my body, or my work should conform to any set of rules, any aesthetic other than my own.” More than a decade later, having endured a kind of mass apoplexy and even outright hate as a result, Dunham is now trying to share with us what that endurance cost.

“I’ve spent much of the last ten years sick,” she writes in the introduction to Famesick, which is not, she now knows, “a truth that anyone wants to hear.” (She’s referring to her diagnoses of endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and fibromyalgia, and her experiences with chronic pain.) She’s also “spent the last ten years famous,” which even fewer people have been able to sympathize with. The rough thesis of Famesick, as the title implies, is that these two dominant conditions of her life have come hand in hand, equally toxic and equally debilitating. Once again, she seems entirely propelled by an impulse she can’t quite control; she describes it herself as “an unrelenting drive toward self-expression.” I would argue, though, that Dunham has actually learned from her garrulous and unfiltered excesses—she’s got stories to tell in Famesick that blow the roof off, but she’s wielding them with precision this time around.

God bless a memoir that drops names—the more bold-faced and braggadocious the better. (Cher by Cher is beneficent on this front, with its nods to David Geffen and his self-actualization workshops and Salvador Dalí’s pet ocelot, Babou.) Famesick begins with Dunham on summer break from Oberlin College in the latter half of the 2000s, casting her family in a short film that she debuts at the Slamdance Film Festival to a room of about 10 people. (The screening that follows is a much more impressive title featuring puppets that just happens to have been directed by Josh and Benny Safdie.) Dunham graduates, and noodles around with a web series while sharing office space with Greta Gerwig.

She eventually writes a feature—2010’s Tiny Furniture—that’s bullied into existence by Dunham’s mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, who rolls up her sleeves and calls friends for investment. (“It was this dogged belief, this clearing of the path, that has made every aspect of my life possible,” Dunham writes, and while she’s long been skewered for her “privilege”—the term nepo baby did not exist prior to the 2020s—you get the sense that she’s benefited even more from her mother’s sheer force of character than from inherited connections.)

Tiny Furniture, much like the HBO show that succeeded it, was a loosely autobiographical account of a liberal-arts graduate floundering in sexual abjection and undefined creative ambition. It starred Dunham, her mother, and her sibling, and was filmed in her parents’ Tribeca apartment. Entire scenes, Dunham notes, were taken directly from a sadistic relationship she’d been having with a man whom she says gagged her with her own pantyhose, verbally abused her, and then watched cheerfully while verbatim chunks of his own obscene dialogue were brought to the big screen. (“People just like to feel seen,” Dunham shrugs.) Tiny Furniture won the Grand Jury Award at South by Southwest, and Dunham—thanks in part to a prescient early profile by the New York Times’ David Carr, became a hot commodity at 23. In a meeting with HBO, she pitched a series that would be a deglamorized version of Sex and the City, set in the interim phase where, as she told executives, “we’re having sex fueled by the availability of porn, and we’re feminists who don’t know how to live our politics. I want to see my friends on TV.” HBO offered her a blind pilot deal, and the rest is history.

[Read: Romance on-screen has never been colder. Maybe that’s just truthful.]

For everything that was written about Girls across its six seasons—and there was a lot—nothing has offered the access and insight that Dunham provides in Famesick. For example: She cast the show in six weeks, and auditioned actors including Elisabeth Olsen, Cristin Milioti, Dakota Johnson, and Amy Schumer. The suggestion to employ the straight-edged Allison Williams as Marnie came from the show’s godfather/producer Judd Apatow, who thought her normalness would gel well with Dunham and Jemima Kirke’s bohemian quirk. As for Apatow, he struck Dunham less as the Hollywood fixture he was than as “Howie, the Long Island exterminator my mother’s cousin Eileen was briefly married to, and to whom my father referred as ‘the insect assassin.’”

Knowing that Dunham would need a supervisor to help school her in the structure of television writing, HBO set up a meeting with Jenni Konner, who would become Dunham’s best friend and longtime collaborator. Famesick also ultimately paints her as its biggest villain, suggesting that she milked Dunham’s talent for profit and tossed her aside once her illnesses rendered her unserviceable. (In 2018, Dunham and Konner announced that they were pursuing individual projects, saying in a joint statement, “We have had one of the most significant relationships together in our adult lives and we respect each other’s choices.”)

There’s also Adam. Introduced as Hannah’s boundary-less hookup, inspired by Dunham’s unpleasant ex, but defined by the actor who eventually played him, Adam is one of the true gifts of Girls, extravagantly strange and inexplicably charismatic. Dunham’s revelations about Adam Driver, “all ears and nose, gangly and pigeon-toed,” whom she cast after an audition in which he bit her shoulder and then left without farewell or explanation, will likely dominate much of the discussion of Famesick. As brilliant an actor as Driver was (and is, and a ferociously private person to boot, in a way that charges these reminiscences with something like betrayal), Dunham writes that he ploughed through boundaries in search of his character, turning his and Dunham’s first choreographed sex scene into “something intimate, confusing, and primal.” He had a tendency, she writes, to spit and throw chairs when he was angry. The pair’s closeness almost crossed lines one night, as he arrived at her apartment after calling her to say, by her recollection, “I’m warning you, if I come up, I’m not leaving this time.” (Showing uncharacteristic instincts for self-preservation, Dunham refused to let him in, knowing that “however it went, my heart—bruised but improbably not yet broken—would crack.”)

What Dunham shares during Parts 1 and 2 of the book is the best possible combination of weighty and esoteric. Williams bought Dunham a tank top that said ALWAYS AND FOREVS, DOWN FOR WHATEVS. Zosia Mamet, who played Shoshanna, and Kirke, who played Jessa, moved in together, but their relationship fell apart when “Zosia began to casually date someone Jemima had claimed dibs on, despite the fact that she was married with a child.” Dunham started dating the musician and producer Jack Antonoff, who was as weird and “cozy” and neurotic as she was. The show became a very palpable hit, and almost immediately drew accusations that it was too white, too privileged, too popular.

As Dunham’s career took off, her health started declining: She suffered a bout of acute colitis a few weeks before Girls started filming, then excruciating pain she eventually realized was from endometriosis; her body gave her other “noisy signals” that the stress she was internalizing might not be sustainable. (Years later, after getting an email from a stranger who’d read about her issues, Dunham would be diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder that can cause joint issues and chronic pain.) Antonoff began working with someone Dunham identifies only as a teenage pop star, who refers to Dunham as “Aunt Lena” (she’s using a walker, following a surgery for her endometriosis), and whose closeness with Antonoff becomes fodder for a very viral PowerPoin t analyzing signs of their supposed affair. (Yes, Dunham writes, she has seen it.)

It’s interesting to think about who Dunham names in this book and who she doesn’t; who is mentioned lovingly in the acknowledgments (“TayTay,” for “the music that makes the whole world feel seen”) but kept otherwise private; who’s quite ruthlessly excavated for copy and who’s only lightly alluded to. In her first book, Dunham’s intimate, highly confessional style spoke directly to the reader—she was sharing all of this with us, she explained, because “if I could take what I learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine was worthwhile.” For all the book’s erratic and random inclusions—Dunham’s diet journals and fantasy revenge emails among them—that sense of connection justified the oversharing.

The revelations in Famesick feel much more loaded, as though Dunham is settling scores, but also justifying herself. She seems to really want to communicate that she has suffered, both from extreme chronic pain and at the hands of people she trusted. She is a confessedly calculated narrator. A version of the book shared with me by the publisher a couple of weeks ago features, perhaps by accident, the same scene twice—Dunham posing for the photographer Annie Leibovitz on the Brooklyn Bridge while a man jumps to his death behind her—but offers two different versions of how the crew reacted, that they “stopped in their tracks and gasped” and that they “just carried on, moving lights, holding umbrellas over Annie,” as though she’s experimenting with which version will land better for the reader. (In the published version, the bridge scene appears only once.) She cites something she says Bruce Springsteen once told her: “You don’t owe it to people to be honest about every little thing. That doesn’t mean you lie—it just means you can have secrets. You only owe it to them to show ’em how your mind works.”

This is, I’d argue—with apologies to the Boss—bad advice for a memoirist. We know how Dunham’s mind works. We know her sharp eye, her self-deprecation, her skill with bathos. We know that the line between her life and her art, insomuch as a line exists, is porous to the point of chicken wire. What I longed for more of, in Famesick, was what the writer Leslie Jamison has called “the infinitude of any given life as a site of reckoning and truth.” The paradox of Famesick seems to be that the more famous you become, the less you have to defend turning yourself into a subject. And so largely missing from the book is a quality I’ve always loved about Dunham’s work, across Tiny Furniture and Girls and the books and the essays: her impulse to make broader meaning out of her experiences. “I am already in mourning, but I am not in doubt,” she wrote in an essay for Vogue, about the pain so life-altering that it led her to have an elective hysterectomy in her early 30s, evoking an ocean of nuance about choice and dreams and physical limits.

[Read: The wistful, sharp return of ]Girls

I’m not quite sure what the meaning of Famesick is, beyond getting certain things on the historical record. It is, in parts, riveting. Dunham is still among our funniest living writers. (Her mother’s diminutive psychic, Dunham notes in Famesick, once wrote a book called Small Mediums at Large; Dunham’s uterus, after its removal, is characterized as “the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws.”) She is generous to many of her collaborators, and to her father, who emerges in the book as a beautiful soul and a wag for all time. (“Since you were five,” he tells Dunham, “you’ve been walking around like you killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.”)

Yet as the second half of the book spins out stories of very dubious new boyfriends and Dunham’s growing reliance on painkillers, something crucial seems to be absent. It feels unfair to call a memoir self-indulgent, but this one can be, at least for an artist with such talent—Famesick has a tendency in later chapters to read more like glib stenography than rigorous self-interrogation. And for someone who was once considered an era-defining feminist voice, Dunham writes nothing substantive about Donald Trump’s election and nothing at all about the overturning of Roe or the significance of #MeToo. She spends several pages explaining the context behind one of her most widely criticized acts, a statement she and Konner issued in 2017 defending the Girls writer Murray Miller from an allegation that he had sexually assaulted the actor Aurora Perrineau. (Miller denied the accusation.) Dunham had only just been released from the hospital at the time, she writes, was heavily medicated, and has no memory of drafting anything, let alone “a careless, blithe, and damaging” note that remains the one thing about which she still feels “genuine shame.”

All of which perhaps explains why she chooses her targets and her subjects so carefully in Famesick. When you’ve been a lightning rod for almost all of your public life, maybe you learn that having strong opinions about subjects outside of oneself offers minimal gain, that very little you could say might make a difference, anyway. And that the best you can do is just keep trying, as Dunham has, to find ways “to do this job I love.” Her persistence, in that sense, is the best possible rejoinder to her haters—regardless of circumstance and to her credit, Dunham will always have her word.

An Astonishing Concept Album Made Even Better

2026-04-03T07:00:00-04:00

If betrayal is a sin, the devil—Lily Allen knows—is in the details. Her fifth record, West End Girl, an excoriating concept album about the failure of her second marriage, was released with only four days’ notice last October, and in a flash seemed to imprint its specifics everywhere: the Duane Reade bag overflowing with sexual detritus, the discarded receipt detailing a ruinous gift for another woman, the suspicious conversation about vasectomies. Since Allen emerged onto the musical scene in 2006, a sleepy-eyed, chubby-cheeked 21-year-old with oversize gold hoops and Day-Glo attitude, she has married joyful melodies with jarring imagery, a modern-day Kurt Weill with a Myspace page. Her early song “LDN” blends the giddy vibe of a city on a sunny day with unsettling glimpses of urban blight. “When you look with your eyes, everything seems nice,” Allen sings, over a soaring Caribbean brass hook. “But if you look twice, you can see it’s all lies.”

Before West End Girl, which she is set to perform live in its entirety at venues across the United States, Allen hadn’t released an album since 2018. When her name came up, it was often for something she’d said that the tabloids had pounced on, such as the fact that she’d taken to OnlyFans to sell pictures of her feet because doing so made her more money in a month than 8 million streams of her music on Spotify did. (“Don’t hate the player,” she told someone chiding her on X, “hate the game.”) This is the entrepreneurial state of modern celebrity in the 2020s: You might have a podcast, a book, a relationship with a fashion house, various stage and TV roles, your own line of high-end sex toys.

[Read: The art of airing your dirty laundry]

But when West End Girl arrived, as dazzling and destructive as a tactical missile, it affirmed that Allen’s most substantial gifts are as an artist. In the title track, she describes moving to New York after getting married (to the actor David Harbour), scoring the lead role in a play back in London, then finding herself floored by a phone call in which her spouse unexpectedly tells her he wants an open marriage. (Notably, regarding that phone call, we hear only her side—Harbour has commented only broadly on Allen’s account of their relationship, saying “pain, slip-ups, and mistakes” have been part of his life’s journey.)

The rest of the album plays out in spasms of controlled devastation. Allen sings about obsessively picturing her husband kissing someone else over a pounding EDM beat (“Ruminating”); she confronts another woman by text to the score of a Sergio Leone–style standoff (“Madeline”); she tries desperately to maintain her sobriety, her vocals numb and auto-tuned over a dreamy soundscape (“Relapse”). On “Pussy Palace,” Allen’s vocals topple down over a major chord as she portrays herself realizing exactly what her husband has really been using his empty apartment for. (“I always thought it was a dojo,” she sings, tragicomically.)

The first time I heard West End Girl, I felt knocked out. Not by a sense of exact personal recognition—“Woman Who Has Never Been Married or Cheated On Feeling Seen by New Lily Allen Album,” as the comedy site Reductress put it—but by gratitude for the record’s depth of feeling, its ruthless honesty, its narrative ambition. Allen tells a fully conceived and haunting story that begins with upheaval and ends with acceptance, dropping little bombs all the way through. On “Let You W/In,” the album’s penultimate track, she wrestles with why it matters to her to reveal so much about her life, and to potentially torch other people’s reputations along the way. “I’m expected to be nice / Picking up the pieces,” she sings. “What is it you sacrifice? I’m protecting you from your secrets.” She’ll be able to recover from the pain of her marriage, she senses, only if she’s able to transform it into something new. Her goal isn’t revenge so much as recovery. (“If I tell the story,” Nora Ephron wrote in Heartburn, “it doesn’t hurt as much.”)

[Read: Nora Ephron’s revenge]

The tour for West End Girl continues that project of metamorphosis. I saw the show at the London Palladium ahead of its journey across the U.S.; crowds of exhilarated and wined-up fans exploded when Allen emerged onstage in a pink tweed Valentino suit. The show is presented in two acts. In the first half, three cellists—named the Dallas Minor Trio, a play on the alias Allen apparently used on the celebrity dating app Raya—play her greatest hits. The second half is something between a live concert and a theatrical production. During Act I, the lyrics of songs including “Smile” and “The Fear” are projected onto a screen so that people can sing along in raucous interactive tribute. But Act II is all Allen. She doesn’t speak or address the crowd. She’s here to perform the new album straight through, and you get the sense that to break character would simply make it too hard to endure.

When Allen first steps onstage, her hair in a tight beehive, she’s alone on a shag carpet in front of velvet curtains, the stage empty apart from a rotary telephone. The aesthetic suggests 1970s social satire—part kitchen-sink realism, part Abigail’s Party. During “Ruminating,” Allen looks weary; she sings in front of projections of her own face, seemingly trapped in cycles of intrusive thought. Watching her perform her breakdown while thousands of people dance (the song is a bop) feels unnerving, but also intentional: The crowd’s discomfort as they sense the cognitive dissonance plays into the spectacle. (The production design is by Anna Fleischle, who also designed 2:22 A Ghost Story, the play Allen was cast in at the beginning of West End Girl—an eerie kind of circularity.)

After the first song, Allen removes her jacket; after the second, she steps out of her skirt. The undressing goes on until she’s wearing spectacles and a sheer negligee over underwear: think intellectual fembot. The stage behind her is slowly exposed, too, layer by layer, as the velvet curtains part to reveal a bedroom, which turns into a West Village apartment, and then a moodily lit kitchen. Before “Pussy Palace,” Allen disappears to change into burgundy hot pants and a blue lace body stocking, as if trying to recover some bravado, while projections of the New York City subway shimmer onstage. During “4chan Stan,” she wraps herself in a giant unfurling replica of receipts from her husband’s alleged purchases of gifts for other women, then winds an enormous piece of fabric covered in handwriting, presumably from those women, around her head and neck, seemingly suffocating herself with their words.

Early reviews of the show have ranged from rapturous to perplexed. The Guardian gave West End Girl live two stars out of five, assessing Allen’s performance as detached and listless; The Observer argued that Allen’s magnetism and fragility onstage revealed new dimensions to the songs. I found the production enthralling and audacious in how it turns her marriage into epic theater, fragmented and highly stylized. The cellists in Act I prime the audience for a boozy good time, a rip-roaring nostalgic sing-along, only to then become mired in a work of heartbreaking claustrophobia.

Allen’s decision, in the second half, to trap herself in different domestic settings onstage like a disconsolate Ibsen heroine, is haunting. If you’ve seen the viral Architectural Digest tour of her gorgeous Brooklyn dreamhouse, the brownstone “with four or five floors,” you know how wan and nervous she appears throughout, playing second fiddle to Harbour’s flirtations with the camera. Not any more. Recreating that home onstage every night only to dismantle it seems like an act of reclamation. Allen is center stage now, right where she belongs.

What We Lost When We Lost Rom-Coms

2026-03-20T10:20:00-04:00

Those of us who worship at the altar of Rachel Weisz had high hopes for Vladimir, Netflix’s new miniseries starring the British actor as a frustrated English professor who becomes giddily unmoored by a sexual fixation on her new colleague Vladimir (played by Leo Woodall). On-screen, Weisz is our preeminent interpreter of erudite but animalistic desire; Woodall is the most reliably lunkish and sleepy-eyed rogue currently acting. Put them together, and it’s fair to expect—at a bare minimum—fireworks.

So why does Vladimir feel so leaden, so performative? Watching it, I felt detached anthropological curiosity at best, and more often was irritated by how insistently the series proffered close-ups (Vladimir’s calves, the folds of his neck, his tacky silver chain) as motifs of desire instead of actual chemistry. Weisz’s unnamed professor is a fiendishly unreliable narrator; she breaks the fourth wall constantly to tell viewers things that are obviously untrue, while hammering us with repetitive glimpses of her fantasies—Vladimir pressing her up against a bookshelf; Vladimir pushing a ripe plum into her mouth—to the point where they feel less erotic than intrusive. Her attraction to Vladimir doesn’t seem based on a real craving for connection. Rather, she’s projecting her anxieties about aging and diminishing status onto a hunk-shaped void.

Vladimir left me cold; so did Wuthering Heights, whose stars rubbed up against each other with all the frisson of smooth-bodied Barbie dolls. (If the most erotic thing in your supposedly scorching-hot movie is the latex wallpaper, something’s off.) Love Story, the FX miniseries about the doomed relationship between Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr., seemed to promise elemental romance (the clue’s right there in the name) between two mythic-grade smoke shows. But apart from an early scene in which Carolyn measures John for a suit, the show seems more compelled by the aesthetics of mid-’90s Manhattan than by the central entanglement. Movies over the past year have been much more interested in cars, grief, societal breakdown, and midlife malaise than in people falling in love—the best will-they-won’t-they storyline of 2025, unfortunately, was not an on-screen romance but the high-stakes flirting between Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson during the Naked Gun promotional run.

TV, of course, offered a few notable exceptions, including a sleeper hit you may have heard of called Heated Rivalry, about two closeted hockey players who hook up, flirt, retreat, pine, stare at their phones in a painfully accurate portrayal of deep limerence, hook up again, and then finally admit that they’re in love. Confronted with the spectacle of two human beings of equal status—no power differentials or wealth/age/swag gaps here—navigating their ungovernable mutual attraction, the viewing public lost its mind. Because, I’d argue, we are absolutely starved for this kind of affirming love story, at least on-screen. In publishing, romance is by far the biggest-selling category of fiction, with some 51 million romance titles sold across 12 months from 2024 to 2025—a year-on-year increase of 24 percent. But in film and television? Love makes barely a ripple. In music, too, the number of hit love songs released each year has dropped sharply since the 1990s; these days, artists seem more compelled to write about sex, money, mental-health struggles, and self-actualization. Curiously, though, four of the five best-performing songs of 2025 were ballads or at least ballad-adjacent: Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’s “Die With a Smile,” Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control,” and Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather.”

[Read: When did literature become less dirty?]

We, the people, still love love. More crucially, though, we crave stories in which people connect intimately and are changed in the process—the kind of works that normalize and defend caring about others as much as or even more than we care about ourselves. Times are hard out in the real world. The AI chatbots are circling. The manosphere is cartoonishly—and lucratively—hate-maxxing. (“This is my dishwasher over there,” the influencer known as HSTikkyTokky says, pointing at his female companion, in the documentarian Louis Theroux’s new Netflix film about the manosphere. “Women are made to be fucked,” the far-right streamer Nick Fuentes said on his internet show last month.) What if the reason so many women are currently crazy about romance as a genre is that they can sense that it’s the one thing humanity can’t thrive without?

Two years ago, the social scientist Alice Evans published a Substack post titled, succinctly, “Romantic Love Is an Under-Rated Driver of Gender Equality.” Her thesis was straightforward: Cultures throughout history that have valued love tend to also care about women, for the fairly simple reason that loving people is usually associated with an investment in their happiness. In patriarchal settings where marriages strengthen familial ties and male power networks, love is discouraged, and many women are oppressed. But when cultures uphold love and intimacy, the status of women rises in tandem. Romantic ideals, Evans noted, are “a latent asset for gender equality” simply because they bolster the number of “loving men who want women to thrive and be happy.”

The state of romantic ideals across contemporary culture, though, is … not great. This year has been billed as the year of the “crush recession,” a heteropessimistic wasteland in which men and women are struggling to find compatible partnerships—and are becoming uninterested in even trying. This is not, by my read, women’s fault: A recent study conducted by Kings College London and Ipsos found that almost a third of Gen Z men believe that women should always obey their husband, an opinion that only 13 percent of male Baby Boomers agree with. “We are witnessing perhaps a great re-negotiation of how both men and women inhabit gender roles in today’s society,” Kelly Beaver of Ipsos said in a statement. Raised on Andrew Tate sound bites and hard-core porn, a substantial proportion of young men are less progressive than their grandparents with regard to gender equality. And their beliefs aren’t serving them or their future prospects: 44 percent of Gen Z men report having had no romantic relationships as teenagers, and the same proportion are unlikely to ever marry. (Tech bosses—who seem to value romantic partnerships for themselves—are trying hard to sell us on AI companions, but the data remain clear: Men who are married are healthier, happier, and longer-lived than their single counterparts.)

Evans isn’t the only person theorizing that romance matters. In an episode of the podcast Armchair Expert last year, the actor and producer Reese Witherspoon offered up her belief that the dwindling number of romantic comedies has deprived two generations of examples of “relationships and romantic dynamics,” the kinds of scripts and cues that show us how to relate to one another. Yes, rom-coms can rely on tropes and formulas and set unrealistic expectations regarding love. But their absence has left a void that’s been filled by much more extreme imagery. In the process, we’ve lost “the possibility of erotic material that celebrates pleasure without harm,” as the law professor Clare McGlynn writes in her upcoming book, Exposed. In 2000, about a third of movies were romantic in nature; by 2024, fewer than 10 percent were. (Sexual content in popular movies also fell by almost 40 percent during roughly the same period, possibly because it was so widely available on the internet in much more explicit forms.)

[Read: The death of the sex scene]

With all this in mind, the popularity of Heated Rivalry among women seems much less surprising. Yes, the series is about two athletic men hooking up over the course of a decade, with joyfully abundant sex scenes and minimal plot. But the show is also romantic to its core, emphasizing how Shane and Ilya meet as equals, like and respect each other, have electric chemistry, and eventually discover that loving each other enhances their happiness. The show’s carnal gaze is mirrored, as the critic Wesley Morris wrote, by its “heroic belief in emotional nudity”—the “sex isn’t simply positive. It’s love’s gateway.”

I can count on one hand the number of on-screen couples—from this century so far—that have, at least for me, embodied a similar kind of intensity, the type of mutual fixation you can’t tear your eyes from: Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones on Normal People, Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen in Pride and Prejudice, André Holland and Trevante Rhodes in Moonlight. Materialists wore a rom-com mantle but was too convincing in its analysis of modern cynicism, too sharp in its skewering of what men and women really want from each other. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy valiantly asserted its belief that women over 50 can find happiness and that kindness is an essential quality in a prospective partner; for both ideals, it was banished from movie theaters in the United States and released exclusively on Peacock.

It’s beyond obvious that we need more romance in popular culture—more portrayals of sexual intimacy, love, relationships grounded in mutual care and affection. We won’t find those things on social-media platforms, whose algorithms are programmed to reward extremity: body counts and bank balances, “sprinkle sprinkle” anti-feminist ideology and “cheat codes” for men to dominate life. Older forms of culture will have to pick up the slack. But the rewards—for their creators and industries, and for us—could be substantial. To draw on Evans’s arguments, women need romantic ideals to affirm what’s possible; men need the reminder that women are fully human, worthy of love and respect. This isn’t just a conservative belief; it’s also a progressive one. Romantic love at its best can “serve as a site of resistance,” Maria Wemrell and Evelina Johansson Wilén argued recently in the socialist magazine Jacobin. The stakes for love, in other words, have never been higher.

What America’s Next Top Model Was Really Selling

2026-03-06T10:45:00-05:00

Models are born, not made, to tweak Simone de Beauvoir’s famous saying. Every once in a blue moon, a human being arrives on Earth as a freak accident of genetic alchemy, gifted with bone structure, height, and the uncanny positioning of features that registers to other humans as beauty. When they grow up (some barely), models have to be distinctive enough to be recognizable but bland enough to be chameleonic, a canvas for constant reinvention. They should look assertive in images but be compliant in the studio. They cannot overshadow the clothes, or the designers, or the photographers.

The idea that a normal person could work to transform themselves into a model is preposterous, like spinning straw into gold. But, for much of the 2000s, reality television insisted that this was possible, never with more fervor, ruthlessness, and capitalist commitment than on America’s Next Top Model.

Because why not? Reality television was still in its infancy in 2003, when the show first started airing, but the genre had already spawned pop stars, celebrity comebacks, even marriages (short-lived but legal ones). To Tyra Banks—a bona fide supermodel with a career spanning runway shows, Vogue, and guest stints on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—the formula seemed obvious. “I wanna marry American Idol and The Real World and set it in the modeling industry” is how she recalls things now, on the new Netflix series Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. Idol was devoted to discovering hidden talent and steering it all the way to the bank; The Real World made an art of watching ordinary people crack in manufactured high-stress environments. Add in fashion, an industry practically built on demoralizing vulnerable girls, and what could go wrong?

[Read: Reclaim imperfect faces]

The first season of America’s Next Top Model tried to pull off a strange trick: Banks insisted that she wanted to change the conditions of modeling while replicating them beat by beat for 10 eager contestants. “I wanted to show that beauty is not one thing. And I wanted to fight against the fashion industry,” she explains. She cast young women with different body types, but then weighed and measured them in the first episode, and introduced a personal trainer who’d be tasked with getting them into shape. She fought to be able to cast contestants of different ethnicities, but often reduced them on camera to stereotypes. (Cycle 1’s Ebony, who is Black, was labeled “angry” and “aggressive”; Cycle 8’s Jaslene, who is from Puerto Rico, was described as “spicy” by the judges.) Toward the end of Cycle 1, Banks flew the remaining contestants to Paris, where they were forced to share a cramped, dorm-style apartment and tasked with charming four strange men at lunch—a kind of hazing that, far from reforming the system, seemed to be preparing them for the degradations of the industry.

“I’m gonna say the exact opposite than what these people in fashion have been telling women for years,” Banks recalls herself thinking regarding the pressure on models to be skinny, and the prevalence of eating disorders in fashion. But she also critiqued contestants for gaining weight, for not being disciplined enough, for not ordering the burger and discarding the bun.

The very first episode of ANTM subjected the contestants to on-camera Brazilian bikini waxes and then sent them up to a Manhattan roof terrace to pose in swimwear in frigid weather. Right away, the show made clear that it wanted them to suffer: to squabble over who was the smallest—“She has a little more insulation than me,” one contestant, Elyse (114 pounds), griped of one of her peers after shivering up on the roof—and to wail while their pubic hair was ripped out. It wanted viewers to see beauty as something that could be earned. It was a product not of luck, but of labor.

“Il faut souffrir pour être belle,” my mother told me as a child, a phrase you would have to torture me to make me repeat to my own daughter. “Sometimes you have to go through pain, you know, to be beautiful,” Joanie, a former Top Model contestant, explains in Reality Check. The point Banks makes, over and over, is that the 2000s were a different time—the implication is that no one then knew that criticizing people’s weight on national television might be bad, or that subjecting young women to sadistic photo shoots and arbitrary commands might damage them psychologically.

Which is bunk: Plenty of people were criticizing Top Model while it was on the air. But this things were different then line of defense does ward off a more crucial critique of the show—one that Reality Check doesn’t identify. Top Model and shows like it were intoxicating because they compelled each woman who watched to imagine herself as a virtual contestant, and to internalize the idea that beauty wasn’t a pleasurable pursuit but a necessary grind for self-optimization and profit. The world we live in now, with its casual parlance of Botox and blephs, glass skin and looks-maxxing, was built on the foundation that Top Model helped set—the idea that if you simply work hard enough on your physical form, blessings will surely follow. That if you do enough to yourself, whether with procedures or products, you can become a product yourself, no matter what you were born with.

Reality Check has been a sensation, which is surprising only because it offers little in the way of insight: It splices together contemporaneous interviews with Top Model’s biggest stars (Banks, as well as coaches such as Jay Manuel and J. Alexander), archival clips from the show, and TikTok commentary that dissects its excesses, all accompanied by a pounding EDM score. But it doesn’t analyze the genre Top Model was helping to pioneer (we’d soon get extreme-makeover shows and contests such as The Swan and I Want a Famous Face). Nor does it examine the era of naked American consumerism the show emerged into—a post-9/11 period that espoused a go shopping philosophy of patriotism perfect for wanton product placement. (In Cycle 2 of Top Model, the contestants were charged with styling themselves in shoes by Steve Madden, a company that had previously stiffed New York City firefighters on the profits of a bedazzled flag-themed shoe line titled “Bravest.”)

Much of the water-cooler talk regarding Reality Check has focused on Banks herself, an imperious, enigmatic figure wrapped in a laser-cut trench coat. (Inspector Clouseau, but make it fashion!) The question of whether she knew what she was putting her models through, and whether she was sincerely interested in reforming the industry or more invested in building a business empire, hovers over the documentary series. (“You just have a magazine?” Banks tells the camera, imagining herself talking to a rival, explaining her motivations for wanting to be a producer. “I have a TV show.”)

Reality Check picks out a handful of moments that seem to indict Top Model and its motives: When Banks encouraged two contestants to get painful dental work, then filmed it; when Jay Manuel told Cycle 4’s Keenyah, who’d complained about being harassed by a male model during a shoot, to stop holding things up; when, most appalling, producers seem to have done nothing while a Cycle 2 contestant, Shandi, got blackout drunk before having sex with one of the Italian men serving as the models’ chauffeurs—an incident that Shandi describes on Reality Check as obviously nonconsensual—and then recorded her calling her boyfriend, sobbing, to confess what she’d done. The point of ANTM was not to create models, Reality Check suggests. It was to make TV entertainment, no matter what happened to the contestants in the process.

This conclusion seems fairly obvious, and it skirts the more interesting purpose of revisiting ANTM, which is to consider its legacy. The media-literacy scholar Jennifer Pozner has argued that reality TV during the 2000s was about entertainment, yes, but also “ideological persuasion”; it informed how viewers saw the world, and themselves. And the overarching gospel of ANTM was transformation. In scouring America for unrefined material, girls who could supposedly be sculpted into supermodels like raw clay, the show was telling viewers, You yourself are not beautiful.

[Read: Can television destroy diet culture?]

If Banks had an ethos on the show, it was one of rational egoism—the elevation of the self by any means necessary. (In 2007, the critic Ann Powers compared Banks to Ayn Rand, writing, “When she’s about to send a girl home, she always has that face, that Tyra stare, that says, this is no laughing matter, ladies. This is capitalism; this is democracy; this is the heroine’s quest.”) There was no “we” on ANTM. Nobody was there to make friends. The models who went all the way were the ones who ceded to Banks’s worldview, who agreed to have their hair dyed and their teeth messed with and their bodies altered.

And when models protested, when they asserted themselves, they invariably triggered fury. The first episode of Reality Check opens with Banks’s infamous “rooting for you” meltdown of Cycle 4, in which she berates a woman named Tiffany for not being committed enough to the self-abnegation and relentless effort that Banks has deemed necessary. “I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this,” Banks says feverishly. “I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you! How dare you?” Tiffany, rationally, points out afterward that Banks, who is positioning herself as a mentor, hasn’t done anything for her except “bring me here and put me through hell these weeks.”

But the point isn’t what Tiffany has or hasn’t been given. It’s that she has insufficiently submitted to Banks’s will. Docility is the secret sauce on ANTM, the quality that, more than any other, will get a girl to the top. (When Cycle 1’s winner, Adrianne, left the hospital bed where she was being treated for food poisoning to return to the competition, she was praised by judges; when she missed a go-see in Paris after being sexually assaulted on the street, she said she was criticized for not meeting her commitments.)

As the series progressed, the challenges got more extreme, the conditions of photo shoots more precarious. Models were tasked with changing their ethnicities with makeup and hairstyling for more than one challenge, as though even the reality of their biology could be altered with the right level of commitment. To refuse to change yourself, to embrace your imperfect smile or your natural hair texture, was sedition, and it would not be tolerated. (A guest judge once sneeringly asked Cycle 3’s Yaya DaCosta, who refused to straighten her hair, “If you walk into a toothpaste ad, are you gonna go in a dashiki or T-shirt and jeans?”)

Models were also asked to pose as corpses in crime scenes, to personify eating disorders and addictions that models might have. The Cycle 8 contestant Dionne, whose mother had been shot when she was a child, was told to embody a shooting victim herself. “I think they wanted to see some type of mental breakdown or, you know, to see me crumble,” she says in Reality Check. During a shoot that took place in an unheated swimming pool in Cycle 7, one contestant was rebuked for coming down with hypothermia. “As a model, you have to know your limits,” Banks reprimanded her, as though we hadn’t all witnessed contestants being told to suppress their instincts, never talk back, push through pain, for the entirety of the show.

All the while, the rewards remained intangible. No contestant on ANTM ever became a top model; the stigma of reality television was too strong. Before Instagram, people who appeared on the show had no way to parlay their brief notoriety into actual followings, or to portray themselves as they wanted to be perceived. The show itself was a juggernaut, doing what was essentially sponsored content for Sephora, CoverGirl, Revlon, Wonderbra, Baby Phat, and Guess. But most contestants received next to nothing for their labor. Banks, by contrast, became arguably America’s first true girlboss: a magnate in the making with a beauty line sold via multilevel marketing, a talk show, an ice-cream brand, and a truly incomprehensible young-adult novel called Modelland in which supernatural talismans called smizes (a Banksian term for “smiling with your eyes”) are sent out into the world to transform seven humdrum commoners into extraordinary beauties.

This was always Banks’s philosophy. Beauty isn’t something that anyone innately possesses; it’s something you fight and suffer for. In the real world, it’s subjective, but on ANTM, as the critic E. Alex Jung wrote in 2015, “it’s a skill that can be honed.” Watching the show, we were encouraged to project ourselves right into the contestants’ places—to change our hair and our clothes, to transform our bodies and alter our aesthetic and buy buy buy, always, what the show was selling. You wanna be on top? Then put in the work. It will never be enough, and nor will you, but the market is waiting.

Why the Wuthering Heights Movie Is Infantilizing

2026-02-21T07:00:00-05:00

A few months ago, the musician Patrick Cosmos shared a “new unified theory of American reality” that he called “everyone is twelve now”—an attempt to explain an executive branch that endorses AI-generated videos of the president dropping poop on protesters from a shiny jet, and that replies to official press queries with the words your mom. Everyone is 12 is a strikingly effective summary of contemporary politics, but it also helps us understand why a good amount of popular culture feels as brain-numbingly dense as it currently does. Why is Nicki Minaj throwing insults at one of Cardi B’s children and generating images of her as the purple dinosaur Barney? Everyone is 12. Why is Kim Kardashian the star of a fur-swaddled drama about Bentley-driving divorce lawyers with seven-figure clothing budgets? Everyone is 12. Why has Emerald Fennell adapted one of the more chasmic and ambitious tragedies in English literature into a poppy, gooey, thuddingly literal work of sexy fan fiction? Everyone is … you get it.

In some ways, that Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is this vacuous and one-dimensional feels like progress. Male directors get to make big, unserious epics all the time. (“How many times have you watched Top Gun: Maverick?” I asked my husband last night. “This month?” he replied.) Fennell, whose film made $83 million at the global box office during opening weekend, is at least proving, with sticky aplomb, how starved we as a culture are for romance. Margot Robbie, the movie’s co-star and one of its producers, has shrugged off mixed reviews; she told Vogue Australia, “I believe you should make movies for the people who are going to buy tickets to see the movies. It’s as simple as that. I love working with Emerald because she always prioritizes an emotional experience over a heady idea.” In other words, Wuthering Heights is simply giving the people what they want. And the people are 12.

[Read: An erotically untamed take on Wuthering Heights]

Truly, though, at times the movie gave off an even more immature vibe—a lot of it felt like watching a toddler smear lunch on the wall and grin at how naughty they’re being. Emily Brontë’s Gothic tale about the mutual obsession between Cathy, a self-centered and irascible teenager, and Heathcliff, the foundling her father has brought into the family, is a notoriously ambiguous study of how noxious social systems ruin people. None of that subtlety or analysis is present in Fennell’s version, which begins with an opening scene of grotesque commoners cheering the public spectacle of a hanging and the deceased man’s postmortem erection, then copulating grubbily in the town square. Immediately, this Wuthering Heights makes clear that what it’s shooting for is one-ply provocation.

Cathy and Heathcliff grow up surprisingly naive for two teenagers surrounded by farm animals. Cathy seemingly learns about sex while witnessing Joseph—a sinister religious fanatic in the book, now reimagined as a friendly dom—and Zillah, a servant, get into some light BDSM horseplay. The teens (both played by actors well past that decade) have a bond, the movie emphasizes via multiple scenes of them running on soggy moors—not since “November Rain” has pathetic fallacy been so abused—and staring at each other. (At one point, Cathy leaves raw eggs in Heathcliff’s bed, which he sits on, then runs his fingers through with pensive emphasis.)

But Cathy, dismayed by her family’s poverty, becomes fixated on the wealthy new neighbor, Edgar Linton, whose money allows him to inhabit a totally different aesthetic universe. (If Cathy and Heathcliff live in coal-blackened serf grime, the home that Edgar shares with his ward, Isabella, is Homes and Gardens meets Madonna video, all sunshine and flowers and maximalist patisserie.) Cathy loves Heathcliff but despises his poverty; she marries Edgar, then punishes herself by making her corsets too tight and wafting gloomily around her new acid-trip mansion.

Much of the drama is undermined by the odd choice to have the characters explain exactly what is happening (presumably for the slowpokes in the back). “Here, look, the freckle from your cheek,” Edgar says to Cathy, pointing at the silk-and-latex wallpaper in her new bedroom, neutralizing any of the tension that might have ratcheted up from his offering of a room modeled after human skin. All the subtext is made too explicit, the text too flatly literal. “My, you are handsome, you brute,” Cathy tells Heathcliff when he returns, with a gentlemanly makeover, from the vaguest of travels. “And rich.” (This, in case the audience has missed Fennell’s insistent association of poverty with monstrous ugliness, and wealth with fetishized beauty.)

Did we notice that Cathy’s father is drinking himself to death? Behold his corpse presented in front of two enormous piles of bottles, as green and resplendent as Christmas trees. Did we forget that Cathy is now extravagantly humping Heathcliff while pregnant with another man’s child? Allow Cathy’s companion, Nelly, to spell it out for anyone who might later stream the movie with one eye on their phone. Speaking of which, by the time the two protagonists do finally consummate their relationship after apparent years of unbridled yearning, the montage of sexy, sexy sex—in a rose garden, in a carriage, in a gazebo next to a grave—should feel like ecstatic release. But the film’s inability to really communicate why Cathy and Heathcliff are drawn to each other, beyond both being played by smoking-hot Australians, leaves us nothing to connect with but visuals.

[Read: The director tackling the dark side of Millennial desire]

Fennell is an extraordinary stylist, and combining beauty with darkness—what could be called her “poisoned candy” aesthetic—seems to be in her blood. Her father, a jeweler, is known for his irreverent and often macabre designs. An exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy in 2007 included the faces of Lenin, Mao, and Mussolini carved into gold rings, and displayed a pair of ruby-and-diamond earrings on a model of the guillotined head of Marie Antoinette. Some of the shots in Wuthering Heights are breathtakingly audacious: Cathy’s pearlescent plastic nightgown on her wedding night, the crimson sky behind Heathcliff as though he’s on the cover of a Harlequin-romance paperback, or backlit in a Kate Bush video. But without a coherent narrative to hold them together, they don’t have anything to do—beyond being screenshotted and reposted on TikTok.

It’s audacious, too (as many others have written), to take a book so deliberately and boldly written about the toxic dynamics of class and racism—a book that exposed the brutality of domestic violence—and remove all of those elements to focus on mucilaginous erotica. Fennell has presented her movie as “Wuthering Heights”—quotes included—as though it’s really just a riff on the characters with some viscous, eggy imagery to get extra attention. She casts a white actor as Heathcliff, a character who, in the novel, is ambiguously described as “dark,” whose brutality seems to stem from being cruelly treated as an outsider and from his subsequent desire for revenge.

Fennell also trollishly reimagines Isabella—a character who, in the book, impulsively marries Heathcliff, then is tortured by him to the point that she flees without any concern for the consequences—as an adult baby who consents and even delights in her own abuse. It’s easy, really—excising all the multivalent complexity of the book so as not to confuse us. As the film critic Richard Brody wrote this week, “Rushing to defend a literary source against a supposed cinematic mauling is often little more than an attempt to signal culturedness and education.” Why would we expect a movie to cater to either? We’re 12!

The thing is, I’m not so sure making a big, silly epic is quite what Fennell was trying to do. You don’t name-check auteur filmmakers such as Catherine Breillat and David Cronenberg as inspiration if all you’re hoping to create is, as one critic described it, a “smooth-brained” Wuthering Heights. The insistent sliminess of her imagery—a snail trailing wetly down glass, hands sinking into sticky dough, pigs’ blood on petticoats—suggests a desire to provoke more than please, to needle into the space between sex and romantic iconography. But Fennell has also expounded on her obsession, as a tween, with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and James Cameron’s Titanic—both movies that also drew mixed reviews but made astonishing amounts of money. In attempting to bridge the gap between art-house extremity and mass-marketed blockbuster, Fennell has made something that just ends up feeling juvenile.

Still, the Warner Bros. marketing machine rolls on: Wuthering Heights has branded partnerships with lingerie companies and body-oil brands; you can purchase a “Haunt Me” Heathcliff-themed acai bowl, a “Be With Me Always” leather bag charm, a “Crème Undone” tin of tea, and a “Burning Desire” chocolate-lava cookie, many of which are emblazoned with the movie’s logo. Because this is what stoking 12-year-old desire is actually about—the real yearning is for what’s contained in our wallets.

An Extraordinary Account of a Dangerous Marriage

2026-02-20T07:30:00-05:00

One afternoon in 2024, when her session in court had ended unusually early, Gisèle Pelicot went to the Leclerc supermarket in Carpentras, a picturesque town in Provence. She asked to meet the security guard who, four years earlier, had confronted her husband, Dominique, after observing Dominique trying to use his phone to film up the skirts of unsuspecting female shoppers.

The guard had been irate at the time. He had been thinking, he later told the Daily Mail, about his mother and sister, who shopped at that supermarket and might have been vulnerable to this creep with a cameraphone. Police officers who arrested Dominique Pelicot went to his home, seized his personal devices, and found more than 20,000 images and videos of Dominique—and of other men he had invited into his home—raping his drugged wife.

Gisèle Pelicot wanted to thank the guard, who she believes saved her life. Prior to her husband’s arrest, her physical health had been deteriorating due to almost a decade of being drugged and violently assaulted. Had no one intervened, she thinks, he eventually would have killed her.

Pelicot recounts this story in her new book, A Hymn to Life. It’s an extraordinary account of her marriage to Dominique, their life together, the revelation of his crimes, and the public trial of him and 50 other defendants, men from a wide range of ages and backgrounds whom Dominique had met online in a chat room called À Son Insu (“Without Her Knowledge”) and invited to his home to assault Gisèle. (All 51 defendants were found guilty of varying charges, many for aggravated rape; Dominique, who is 73 years old, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.)

In her account, Pelicot also mentions other security guards who, around 2010, had also caught Dominique taking upskirting photos. Back then, she writes, “the police clearly didn’t think filming under women’s skirts was terribly serious, because he got away with a fine of 100 euros, and I never heard a thing about it.” At the time, upskirting was still something paparazzi photographers did to female stars—many of them teenagers—with apparent impunity; the words nonconsensual pornography weren’t applied to this kind of behavior until much later, and the act itself wasn’t officially criminalized in France until 2018. But if the police had taken Dominique’s earlier offenses seriously, would they have been able to prevent what he became?

I’ve been stuck on this question because the central mystery of the Pelicot case seems to have been what kind of man could do such a monstrous thing to his wife. What kind of man reverberates as a bass line through the news coverage of the trial, the interviews with Dominique’s family members, the books, even my own writing. It’s a strange inquiry, because we know very well what men can do to women when they feel untouchable. In 2024, some 83,000 women and girls were killed intentionally, 60 percent of them by their intimate partner or a family member—137 a day. (That’s compared with just 11 percent of male homicides in which the victim was killed by an intimate partner or family member.)

Since Dominique Pelicot was arrested, news stories have emerged of an Italian Facebook group where users posted intimate photos of women to its tens of thousands of mostly male members; a Telegram channel reportedly devoted to swapping tips on how to sedate women before assaulting them had more than 70,000 members. The latest tranche of the Epstein files has revealed messages between world leaders or billionaires and a convicted child sex offender in which the dehumanizing catchall word pussy abounds in subject lines and sentence fragments, as a party password and a buddy-buddy bonding prompt.

[Read: Not all men, but any man]

We know that there are also many good men, honorable men. The outraged security guard, for one. The lawyers who flanked Gisèle Pelicot in court, protected her from cameras, took her to lunch every day so that she wouldn’t be intimidated by seeing some of the men who were on trial for assaulting her drinking beer and laughing together in a nearby café. But for half a century, Pelicot thought she was married to one of these good men. Her husband claimed during his trial that he himself was one for four decades, until his urges became too strong to resist.

People who commit appalling sexual crimes are generally “more like us than not like us,” the clinical psychologist Veronique Valliere argues in her 2022 book, Unmasking the Sexual Offender. Down in the undercurrents of the internet, Dominique Pelicot found not just fantasy but community. And it’s been hard lately not to notice the trend toward more flagrant male transgression out in the open—more performative vice signaling among some of the most powerful people in the world. So the question after reading A Hymn to Life becomes slightly different from What kind of man would do such a thing to his wife? Gisèle Pelicot famously said that she wanted a public trial because “shame has to change sides.” But what do we do when many men can’t—won’t—feel it? What if there are simply more rewards these days for monsters?

A Hymn to Life is an astonishing book—unflinchingly honest, open to self-interrogation, evocative, determined. Co-written with the journalist Judith Perrignon, it begins on November 2, 2020, when Gisèle Pelicot accompanies her husband to the police station for an interview over “something foolish” he’d been caught doing at the supermarket, only for her to be confronted with the truly unimaginable. The deputy sergeant asks her about her husband’s character. “He’s kind, attentive. He’s a lovely guy,” she replies. “That’s why we’re still together.”

The deputy sergeant asks if she and her husband are swingers. Pelicot is disgusted by the question. He tells her that her husband has been arrested for aggravated rape and administering toxic substances. He shows her photographs of a woman wearing a suspender belt being penetrated by an unfamiliar man. “That’s you in the photograph.” “No,” she counters. “That’s not me.” There are more photographs, more men, dozens of them, he says (the police eventually determined 72 in total). Pelicot asks for water. “My mouth is paralysed,” she recalls. “A psychologist comes into the office. A young woman. I don’t need her. I am far away, even though we are in the same room. I am secure in my happiness, our happiness.”

She’s submerged instantly in deep, deep shock. She automatically goes home to wash and dry clothes for her husband, now in police custody, as though she’s “a dog waiting by the garden gate for its master.” Pelicot writes that she had met Dominique when they were teenagers; they were both from very unhappy backgrounds. Gisèle had lost her mother to a brain tumor when she was 9 (the symptoms of which would haunt Gisèle later in life when she started having unexplained blackouts), and her stepmother was unloving and cold. Dominique’s father, Denis, tormented his wife and was suspected of abusing their daughter—a girl with learning disabilities whom they’d adopted when she was 5. (Denis moved her into his bedroom, according to Gisèle’s memoir, as soon as he was widowed.) During his trial, Dominique testified that on a family camping trip, he once discovered his mother in her tent, her hands bound, “being forced to fellate her husband.” Gisèle writes that the bond she had with her husband was based on mutual suffering and mutual rescue: “We were lovers and we were twins. We would always be together; our suffering behind us, we would escape from our damaged families. I would be his cure and he would be mine.”

One of the cruelest ironies of love is how vulnerable it makes you to danger. In her book, Valliere—who as a therapist has frequently worked with sexual abusers—states plainly that “a relationship is the best avenue to sexual offending. It is the path to love, trust, hope, and denial.” Confronted with the images shown to her by the police, Gisèle Pelicot simply cannot process the gap between her idea of her husband and the reality of what he has done to her: the deceit, the manipulation, the degradation; intentionally exposing her to sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV; letting her agonize over inexplicable gynecological symptoms and the terrifying idea that she might be losing her mind.

The reaction of her three children, especially her daughter, Caroline, is totally different. Hearing the news of her father’s arrest, Caroline screams out loud—“a shriek of anguish. The howl of a wounded animal.” The next day, she begins destroying her father’s possessions, smashing plates and tearing up a nude painting hanging in the hallway that turns out to have the word coercion written in pencil on the back. Pelicot is troubled by her children’s immediate disavowal of their father, of their entire childhood. “All their memories had certainly turned out to be unbearable lies,” she writes. “But mine hadn’t.”

Pelicot’s honesty is breathtaking, and it helps make A Hymn to Life all the more revelatory as a sociological document. Despite her confident assertion early on that her husband was a terrific guy, un super mec, her narrative reveals more complexity than her own interpretation of Dominique seemed to allow. From the beginning, by her account, the couple’s sex life bears the dynamic of Dominique pushing Gisèle further than she wants to go. He demands fellatio, then anal sex, which she refuses. In her book, she casually reveals that she didn’t have her first orgasm until she had an affair in her mid-30s, because sex had always been about gratifying her husband. Dominique begins consuming pornography, asking her to replicate certain things he enjoys and taunting her as a prude when she declines. He calls her a “bitch” during sex. He has a tendency to become “aggressive” when contradicted. He’s constantly on his computer. One day, his son’s partner walks in on Dominique masturbating behind his desk, which Dominique seems unembarrassed about, so much so that you can’t help but wonder whether he’d planned it. (In fact, at some point, he set up secret cameras to film each of his two daughters-in-law in the shower; he then posted the images online.) His email handle is “Fétiche45.”

He repeatedly loses his job and runs up huge debts that Gisèle, the main breadwinner, has to pay down. Once, in 2013, she finds bleach on her clothes but has no memory of how it might have gotten there; she jokingly asks Dominique if he has been drugging her, to which he responds with incredulous outrage. The portrait that emerges is that of a domineering liar and narcissist who seems to get off on punishing his wife and making her uncomfortable. That none of this has ever been clear to Gisèle is perplexing even to her. “Beyond the pain of the revelations and the shame of my body being turned into a sack,” she writes, “there was also the shame of having understood nothing—of feeling like an idiot in the eyes of others, and in my own.”

Since the trial, multiple people involved have published books elucidating their own sides of the events. (Dominique Pelicot is apparently writing one from prison.) Caroline, whom Dominique took sexualized photos of while she was sleeping but has always denied abusing, has written I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, in which she recounts her family’s history as a “chronicle of horror and survival.” Tormented by her instinct that she was also drugged and assaulted by her father, Caroline can only lash out: at Dominique, who has “soiled” their family; at the “gutter press” that plagues them; and at her mother, whose calm resilience she’s baffled by, and who refuses to concede that Caroline might also be a victim. “Maybe her doubt is an unconscious attempt to shield herself, but it hurts me all the same,” Caroline writes. Her raw anger feels totally alien from her mother’s remarkable strength, and yet both are understandable. “If I allow the full extent of my pain to be seen, all my pain, I will drown in it,” Gisèle writes. “I have no choice but to be invincible.”

In another book about the Pelicot trial, Living With Men, the philosopher Manon Garcia notes that both Gisèle and Caroline were reproached during the trial for not responding correctly to what had happened to them: Caroline was gently asked to behave “more properly” by the judge, who seemed “taken aback by the fury of her pain,” while Gisèle was apparently criticized by one of the defendants’ lawyers for being so calm. “One thing is clear,” Garcia writes. “Whatever you do, you will always be someone’s bad victim.”

But she, too, is torn between expressing a kind of primal rage of her own and deploying a more detached analysis of the “cultural scaffolding of rape,” the social systems that enabled Dominique to easily find scores of men within a 40-mile radius who would rape his wife. The defendants have nothing in common except a culture where, as Garcia puts it, “the only relationship that might count is with other men.”

That many of the defendants came to court expressing not shame but intense anger at Gisèle Pelicot—they were “simmering with rage,” Gisèle writes—suggests that they simply did not think they had done anything wrong. And the reality we are left to confront, Garcia argues, is that they’re not aberrations for feeling this way. They really might be just your average guys next door.

Not all is quite so dismaying. Garcia believes that Gisèle Pelicot would not have been confident enough to ask for a public trial if #MeToo had never happened. Dominique Pelicot was exposed as a direct result of changes to French law that activists had been campaigning for. And in some ways, the generational divide between Gisèle’s long-standing marital devotion (“The principal axis of our lives was the man we had married or were hoping to meet,” she writes in A Hymn to Life) and Manon Garcia’s skepticism (“Can we live with men? And if so, at what cost?”) reveals a growing unwillingness among women to accept an inferior or unsafe status as the price of being loved.

But many are also noticing who’s devastated by the news these days and who isn’t. “I just think it’s funny how men don’t seem to be adequately upset or outraged by the Epstein files,” the artist Chloe Wise posted recently, noting that all the women she knows “can’t sleep” or are “spiraling,” “disturbed,” and “forever scarred,” while “every man is like: ‘Oh yeah, it seems bad, I haven’t really looked into it.’”

[Read: The unspeakable, enabled]

And you’d be forgiven, observing recent news cycles, for coming to the conclusion that, for too many people, a culture that tacitly condones and even enables exploitation is not that big a deal. Consider Meta’s new smart glasses, which make filming someone without their consent far too easy, or the flood of sexualized images of women and children that Grok has generated. Or the ways in which both adult-content sites such as OnlyFans and chatbot platforms habituate users (primarily men) to intimate relationships that are entirely sycophantic and affirming. One of the defining characteristics of generative AI, Paul Ford emphasized in Wired last year, is that it is “totally shameless.” In that sense, he wrote, it’s an apt reflection of the minds that created it, who are themselves just as shameless: “They insist we remake civilization around them and promise it will work out. But how are they going to teach a computer to behave if they can’t?”

The shame must change sides, Gisèle Pelicot still insists. Her story, she argues, “stirs up our violence, our barely concealed sordidness, our dormant traumas, our silences, our equivocations. It is the grubby reflection of the domination and predatory activity that still structure our world.” Her takeaway is that love can be an antidote to such misery, and her faith in it is extraordinary. Possibly even superhuman.

The Melania Trump Documentary Is a Disgrace

2026-01-30T13:30:00-05:00

Recently, I watched a new documentary about an enigmatic woman of notable charm and courage preparing for one of the most momentous events in her life. That woman is E. Jean Carroll, and the movie is Ask E. Jean, a feature about Carroll’s life and her decision to sue President Trump in civil court for defamation and sexual battery.

In 2019, Carroll alleged that Trump had sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s; Trump promptly denied the allegation while deriding Carroll at rallies and in TV interviews as “totally lying” and “not my type.” Ask E. Jean follows Carroll as she prepares for the trial, revealing why she buried what had happened for so long; it captures, too, her profound discomfort while she’s badgered during depositions by Trump’s legal team, and her eventual victory. (The jury found Trump liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll and ordered him to pay $5 million in compensation; Trump’s appeal is currently awaiting review by the Supreme Court.)

But very few people have seen Ask E. Jean or even heard of it. Streaming platforms and distributors have steered absolutely clear of a movie that so plainly impugns the president, regardless of its obvious relevance and engaging portrait of Carroll, whose decision to come forward was resolutely in spite of everything she knew she’d face as a result. “We all have a lot at stake here. This lawsuit is not just for me; it almost has nothing to do with me,” she explains in one scene to the director, Ivy Meeropol. “It’s for, really, women across the country.” In court, Carroll faced lawyers for a former (now reelected) president, making the case, as she puts it, that Trump was protected by “his scope of employment as president when he called me too hideous to rape.”

The president’s lack of impulse control and trigger-happy litigiousness have often collapsed in court, but they’ve had a profound impact on the entertainment industry. Both ABC and CBS have settled lawsuits served by Trump rather than fight, seemingly deducing that the cost and capitulation are worth it if they smooth the way for mergers and keep the mercurial and media-fixated president off their backs. (“A big fat bribe” is how the late-night host Stephen Colbert characterized CBS’s $16 million settlement to Trump, shortly before his own CBS show was canceled; CBS called the cancellation “purely a financial decision.”) And so you can’t see Ask E. Jean, but you have no end of options this weekend when it comes to watching a documentary about the current first lady, Melania: Twenty Days to History, whose unusual genesis (a $40 million bid from Amazon, which was reported to include a roughly $28 million personal fee for Melania Trump, and a further $35 million marketing budget) and aggressive rollout across more than 3,300 theaters reveal an awful lot about our entertainment infrastructure, none of it good.

[Read: Melania really doesn’t care]

To be fair, most people involved with Melania do seem to feel shame, if not the ones who matter. The publicity emails sent from Amazon regarding the movie have no individual names or email addresses attached, as though no one wanted their career or personal brand sullied by association. A report in Rolling Stone this week alleged that two-thirds of the production crew based in New York who worked on the film similarly asked to be uncredited. (“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one reportedly said.) Melania is directed by Brett Ratner, best known for the Rush Hour franchise and for the multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment leveled at him by half a dozen people in 2017. (Ratner has denied or disputed the allegations; Melania marks his return to public life after a nine-year absence, although a photo of Ratner with the accused sex trafficker Jean-Luc Brunel—now deceased—did pop up in the last month.)

At the Melania screening I attended today, what was most surprising about the movie was how little is actually in it, despite a running time just shy of two hours. Mostly, Ratner captures his subject walking from liminal place to liminal place in five-inch heels, the camera trailing her like a lap dog. She looks immediately uncomfortable being filmed, an effect that never quite goes away. In voiceover, she opines vaguely about wanting the film to capture her motivations as first lady. “Every day I live with purpose and devotion,” she explains, while we see her being fitted for her inauguration outfit, working with designers to manage the aesthetic of the presidential balls, and interviewing various white women with barrel curls to join her staff. She talks proudly about having, during Trump’s first term, restored the White House Rose Garden (unfortunately since converted by her husband into a paved patio area).

Ratner seems desperate to find action, but there is none. The pace is stultifying. The camera lingers on a designer’s aide who trembles at the task of trimming Melania’s inaugural blouse with scissors. We see the first lady videoconference with Brigitte Macron, her French counterpart, about her Be Best initiative. Halfway through, Ratner picks up what seems to be Melania’s father’s Super 8 camera and never puts it down, so the latter part of the film is studded with grainy handheld scenes of helicopters and Arlington National Cemetery. Trump is inaugurated—Ratner uncharitably includes scenes of a backstage Kamala Harris looking pissed off—and we follow the president and his wife to three balls. Melania shows off her custom-made inauguration gown, stark white with black ribbons overlaying it, a dress that now looks unavoidably like the redacted Epstein files.

What’s in the film—lots of shots of tech bosses paying homage to Trump, Ratner trying to get Melania to sing along to “Billie Jean,” Melania’s insistence on the sacred values of the Constitution and its protection of individual rights—is almost less compelling than what’s not. (Any glimpse of Stephen Miller.) But Melania’s heavy focus on its subject, despite her husband being one of the most attention-sucking people on the planet, does raise one interesting question: Is his wife the only person Trump can stand being upstaged by? Throughout, the president seems truly proud and enamored of Melania. “You look beautiful, beautiful,” he tells her in one scene. “Like a movie star.” (I laughed out loud at one phone call, during which Melania, in New York, seems exasperated when her husband won’t shut up about how big his election victory was.)

What might make people curious to see Melania, despite the movie’s questionable origins and terrible timing—the merch-heavy White House premiere for the movie on Saturday night coincided with mass grief and outrage in America over the killing of the ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents—is the fact that Melania Trump is our least accessible first lady in recent memory. Like all true divas, she mostly declines to reveal herself in public these days unless there’s a formal event or something to sell. Almost all of her Instagram posts over the past year have promoted her movie, her branded ornament collection, her memecoin, or her “AI audiobook.” At her husband’s second inauguration, she wore a black-and-white broad-brimmed hat that covered half of her face and kept everyone near her at arm’s length. (On a state visit to the United Kingdom, she opted for a dark-purple version so forbidding that you couldn’t see her at all, an aesthetic the website Defector labeled “Babadook mode.”) The first lady is both “fiercely private,” according to one of her former confidantes, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, and largely unbothered by scandal. “For her,” Wolkoff wrote in her 2020 book, Melania and Me, “public disgrace was nothing more than brushing sand off her feet after a quick stroll on the beach.”

Others might not be as adept at doing so. It bears underlining here that first ladies prior to Melania have typically declined—out of a sense of propriety rather than specific ethical constraints—to profit directly from their role while in office. Trump world has been notably different in this regard. The idea for a documentary was supposedly sparked by the success of Melania’s 2024 memoir of the same title, in which she ignored the dozens of women who’d accused her husband of sexual assault, Carroll among them, but spent four full pages analyzing a failed caviar-based skin-care line she’d hoped to launch. (Donald Trump has always denied any allegations of assault and harassment.) “It is my sincere wish that you will find inspiration in my journey,” the first lady wrote in the introduction, before gliding over highly selective accounts of her early days dating “Donald,” her jewelry line for QVC, her “proactive adoption of blockchain technologies” (Melania-branded non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrencies), and her relationships with her stepchildren, which apparently benefit from “boundaries.”

Melania the book wasn’t an autobiography so much as a highly priced brochure. Melania the movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket. It’s a reminder that the richest people in the world are investing in entertainment brands not because they care about art but because the public does, and because all of these vanity projects and capitulations are a way to consolidate their own power and fortune. It is galling to think about Jeff Bezos (whose wife is a former TV news anchor) deciding to invest so much money apparently to buy the president’s good graces while reportedly preparing to cut hundreds of jobs at The Washington Post. (Amazon reps have insisted that the company invested so heavily in the movie purely “because we think customers are going to love it.”) It is also galling—to me at least—that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended the premiere of Melania this week while the Trump administration’s militarized forces are killing Americans and detaining preschoolers. Melania Trump really doesn’t seem to care about the optics of launching her $75 million show reel while the country is in such profound crisis—that much she has always made clear. But most Americans do. And the particular details of the past week—the demonstrations and the tear gas in Minneapolis, the Melania ads covering the Sphere, the themed macarons at the White House, the scurrying-away of many who were professionally involved with this documentary—should be remembered long after the film itself is forgotten.

Half His Age Isn’t At All What It Seems

2026-01-27T12:22:00-05:00

Whatever you might think you’re going to get from the familiar setup of Jennette McCurdy’s Half His Age (a lonely high-school girl in Anchorage begins an extremely questionable sexual relationship with her teacher), any presumptions are dispelled from the very first page. When Waldo, the teenage narrator of the novel, observes her boyfriend’s “slimy tongue that loop-de-loops over and over like a carnival ride, mechanical and passionless,” she’s setting a tone: irreverent, graphic, bilious.

McCurdy is much more interested in late capitalism than in Lolita. Waldo’s world has long been poisoned by the microwavable meals her disinterested mother leaves out, the fast-fashion crop tops she orders that come with a cancer warning, the laptop she falls asleep clutching at 2 a.m., its unnatural heat “searing my ovaries.” By the time she meets Mr. Korgy, her frowsy middle-aged creative-writing instructor, on page 11, she is already imprinted on the reader as a caustic force of anti-nature.

And so she seduces Korgy—of course she does. Their relationship ensues through the slow erosion of boundaries, mostly instigated by her but sometimes by him. She masturbates using a bottle of tropical-fruit-flavored Tums while stalking his Instagram. He praises her writing and asks her to stay after class; he later invites her to dinner at his home with his wife. She sends him a thank-you email with her phone number. He calls her. And so on, until they’re frantically humping in a janitorial closet, in her childhood bedroom, at hotels (after fancy dinners where people assume he’s her father). Mr. Korgy—his first name is Theodore, but Waldo never uses it—is no scheming predator. His wife calls him “Teddy” and tells emasculating anecdotes about him. He’s soft and pitiable where Waldo is ferocious in her loneliness and adept at transforming herself into various alluring guises.

Literature is rife with memoirs and works of autofiction about ravening English teachers, accounts of mentors who allegedly groomed vulnerable girls with writing and manipulated their own words. Half His Age is resolutely not one of these books. But McCurdy, who, as a child, starred in Nickelodeon shows alongside Ariana Grande and Miranda Cosgrove, knows well all the ways underage girls can be flattened and plasticized by adults—turned into objects. Her previous book, I’m Glad My Mom Died, recounted McCurdy’s childhood being coerced into performing by her narcissistic and mentally unstable mother, who introduced her daughter to ritualized anorexia at the age of 11 and was such a hoarder, storing objects in every bedroom in the house, that her children had to sleep on Costco mats on the living-room floor. (McCurdy also wrote about a man she called The Creator, widely speculated to be the Nickelodeon executive Dan Schneider, who has faced multiple accusations of inappropriate conduct and abuse; Schneider has denied many of the allegations, but apologized for making people uncomfortable on set.)

[Read: Don’t judge I’m Glad My Mom Died by its title]

Half His Age, though, isn’t about abuse, or exploitation, or even the power dynamics of what we now call “age-gap relationships,” though Waldo is bracingly aware of the occasions when Mr. Korgy manipulates her emotionally, and far too astute to fall for his “I want to expose you to art and films and music and books” schtick. The book reads much more like a postmodern novel for the fast-fashion generation, a portrait of civilizational decline told through declining mall chains, ultra-processed foods, and relentless consumption. Online shopping isn’t just a compulsion for Waldo—it’s an assertion of her existence.

Temporally, Half His Age is hard to place. Waldo refers to Instagram and TikTok but doesn’t scroll; she obsesses over her appearance, grooming herself with rigor and self-loathing, but doesn’t post pictures of herself or seem to have an online footprint beyond her shopping orders. She lives in Alaska, but all we hear about it is that her summer days are “bloated” and her winters bleak. Her local hangouts are wholly generic: Waldo works at Victoria’s Secret to fund her shopping habit, eats breakfast with her mom at Denny’s, and survives on Auntie Anne’s pretzels, Marie Callender’s entrees, and Sour Patch Kids. She rattles off cosmetic brand names the same way Mr. Korgy lists his favorite directors (“Bergman and Kubrick and Kurosawa, Lonergan and Linklater and Solondz”)—as a way of underscoring her identity, even if it’s homogenous. Brands are omnipresent in her life, as extant as air. (When the two have sex in Korgy’s car, the feeling of Cheerio crumbs being ground into Waldo’s knees becomes a staple part of the experience.)

McCurdy’s brittle commentary made me think of Don DeLillo’s description of the supermarket in White Noise, with all the hyperreal produce “sprayed, burnished, bright” and inserted into “filmy bags.” At some point in the 20th century, the critic Cynthia Deitering has written of that novel, humanity oversaw one of its most profound transformations: “a shift from a culture defined by its production to a culture defined by its waste.” In DeLillo’s imagination, the specter hovering over all of this unnatural abundance is death; in McCurdy’s, it’s desire. How is Waldo supposed to know what she really wants when her synapses are distorted by the dopamine thrill of acquisition, the heart-stopping kick of something new? She’s not exactly surrounded by appealing prospects. “You think some beefy senior’s gonna be emotionally available between his rounds of Grand Theft Auto and his daily hour of Pornhub?” she tells Mr. Korgy. What she’s most drawn to in her teacher is the way he seems to live outside her dull, trashy monoculture. But his Crate & Barrel throw pillows are no more authentic than her mom’s HOME SWEET HOME Target doormat, or the Le Labo candles and coffee-table books at Waldo’s rich friend Frannie’s house. When Korgy Amazon-ships Waldo a grocery order of some of his favorite nourishing foods, she can manage only three bites of the “chocolate paleo crunch granola with almond milk” before throwing it away.

In structural terms, Half His Age is much more thrilling in the first half than in the second, when Waldo’s frenzied fixation on Mr. Korgy curdles into a more predictable entanglement. But McCurdy’s furious writing—her dystopian rendering of a culture squandering its dreams and desires on the crack high of cheap stuff—is hard to tear yourself away from. “Few adult persons can see nature,” another Waldo once wrote. Is that kind of transcendent communion with the real world even possible anymore? Half His Age might make you wonder.

The Unspeakable, Enabled

2026-01-16T12:21:00-05:00

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Every time I’ve found myself lost for words over something in the news this past year—which has happened disconcertingly often—I’ve returned to the same book for guidance, the philosopher Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, published in 2017, largely in response to the election of Donald Trump. Misogyny, Manne argues, is often less about hating women outright than about policing and punishing their behavior.

It can—of course—be an expression of both. “Fucking bitch,” a male voice, believed by many to be that of the ICE agent Jonathan Ross, was captured on video saying last week—after Ross had crossed in front of Renee Nicole Good’s car; after she’d calmly told him, “I’m not mad at you”; and after he’d then shot her at least three times. Good didn’t seem afraid of Ross—even though, apparently, she should have been. She wasn’t sufficiently reverent and deferential to the uniform he wore, to the gun in his hand, to the terror the Trump administration is using ICE to elicit in so many American communities. And because of that, she’s dead.

[Sophie Gilbert: No, women aren’t the problem]

Not just dead but grotesquely maligned in her death, in ways that try to enforce and underscore the patriarchal order that women such as Good threaten. “There’s a weird kind of smugness,” the conservative analyst Will Cain said on Fox News, “in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority.” Good was, President Trump himself said, “very, very disrespectful” in her interactions with the officer who shot her. Other people compelled to weigh in on the mother of three’s manifestly avoidable violent death seemed to take umbrage at the fact that she had previously specified her pronouns, that she was visibly queer, and simply that she was, in the right-wing pundit Erick Erickson’s words, an AWFUL: an Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.

If sexism is based on the belief that men are inherently superior to women, misogyny, Manne writes, especially targets “unbecoming women—traitors to the cause of gender—bad women, and ‘wayward’ ones.” Good has apparently been deemed by some to be all three. “You guys gotta stop obstructing us,” the Minnesota Reformer quoted one ICE agent as telling another activist this week. “That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” Women are by no means ICE’s primary target or victims—officers have been empowered to act as aggressively as they please toward anyone they encounter. (Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year according to The Guardian, the highest number in more than two decades.) On Wednesday night, an agent reportedly threw flash-bang grenades and tear gas near a car filled with children, causing airbags to deploy, three minors to be hospitalized, and an infant who was in the car to momentarily stop breathing, the child’s mother said. Over the past year, videos have documented agents throwing people to the ground, shooting them with “nonlethal” rounds at close range, raiding day-care centers, leaving children alone and unattended after detaining their parents.

Good’s wife, Becca, stated after Good’s death that she was “a Christian who knew that all religions teach each other the same essential truth: We are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.” For her insurgent empathy, the U.S. government has labeled her a domestic terrorist, and has instructed Minneapolis prosecutors to investigate her wife. (Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota subsequently quit in protest.)

Hating and wanting to punish women is an ancient pastime—“fucking bitch” made me catch my breath, as honest as it was in its loathing—but one that is being ever more gamified, turned into recreation. On January 2, The Guardian reported that Grok, xAI’s chatbot, had been generating images of women and children “in minimal clothing,” responding to prompts that could turn virtually any picture of any person into nonconsensual pornography. In many countries, including the U.S., publishing imagery like this of minors is illegal, and yet X’s owner, Elon Musk, responded to Grok’s generation of sexually humiliating imagery and child-sexual-abuse material (CSAM) with crying-laughing emojis. (xAI posted, “We’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them—CSAM is illegal and prohibited.”) Later, Musk asserted that any country seeking to prevent this kind of ritualized harassment by taking X offline would be suppressing free speech, even though sexual imagery of minors has historically been the one kind of speech that virtually everyone can agree should be suppressed.

[Read: Elon Musk cannot get away with this]

It’s beyond clear that the technologies being imposed upon us exaggerate and enable tendencies that used to be unspeakable. They normalize abuse, and they have already normalized gendered hatred. These compulsions come from the same place as the impulse to punish Renee Nicole Good for protesting, for not bending to patriarchal authority. Grok, in fact, generated images of Good wearing a bikini and pictures of her defaced with bullet holes in the days after her death. Objectification, Manne writes, “can seemingly serve not only as punishment but also as a way of defusing the psychic threat that certain women pose.” What do you do with a disrespectful woman, a wayward one? Punish her, dehumanize her as an example everyone can learn from. What do you do with a woman who seeks authority for herself? Remind her of her place. It’s not surprising that many of the first people targeted by AI deepfake “undressing” technology were women in positions of power. In her 2025 book, The New Age of Sexism, the writer and activist Laura Bates describes learning that her image had been modified into deepfake pornography, seemingly in response to her work addressing sexism. “Even now, it feels like a violation,” she writes. “There’s a little shock, disgust, fear, and, yes, shame every time I see it.”

We have a choice to make about whether we simply accept Musk’s right to turn his social-media site into the world’s biggest pixelated abuse generator—whether we yield to the idea that any woman who appears online or annoys a man runs the risk of being turned into grotesque sexual caricature. As my colleagues Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong have written, if we refuse to put a “red line around AI-generated sex abuse, then no red line exists.” (Musk has since responded to pushback in certain countries by supposedly geoblocking Grok from fulfilling explicit requests on X in some places, although reporters in Britain have noted that its “undressing” mode continues to function.)

In some ways, what Grok is doing is what new technological platforms have always done. “Sex,” a Wired essay stated in 1993, “is a virus that almost always infects new technology first.” The first mass-consumed video of the online age was a private tape of one of the most famous women in the world that a disgruntled contractor stole and turned into nonconsensual pornography. One of Mark Zuckerberg’s early websites was Facemash, a site that encouraged Harvard students to rate the hotness of female students, and the “Metaverse,” the virtual-reality landscape he spent almost $100 billion building, suffered from widespread reported incidents of sexual harassment and assault from the very beginning.

So many of the platforms that have come to dominate our daily lives were born out of the simple desire to see women exposed. Objectification isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. But Grok’s transformation into a nonconsensual-porn factory is unprecedented in its shamelessness, its seeming impunity, its scale. (One report in 2023 identified 95,820 deepfake videos circulating online; Grok has been generating thousands of “nudified” images per hour.) And it speaks to all the ways in which contemporary reality is currently chipping away at women’s rights and status, with predictable consequences. “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human,” Aldous Huxley wrote in The Olive Tree in 1936. We are now facing an urgent choice as to whether we submit to the entrenched hatred and abuse of women as a technological and cultural norm, or whether we fight for an alternative way forward.

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The Pitt Is a Brilliant Portrait of American Failure

2026-01-10T07:30:00-05:00

The Pitt, HBO Max’s hospital-set drama, back for a second season, is a throwback in every sense of the word: formulaic, propulsive, topical. Each episode represents a single hour of one shift in a Pittsburgh emergency department presided over by Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (played by Noah Wyle) and the charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), immersing viewers in the relentless stress of crisis medicine. Season 1 detailed how Robby—a crinkle-eyed stalwart whose stethoscope seems made of thorns—was still suffering from PTSD from his experiences working during the coronavirus pandemic, while a violent attack from a patient made the otherwise flinty Dana reconsider whether her job was still bearable.

None of this was unfamiliar to viewers of ER, the groundbreaking NBC hospital drama that ran for 15 seasons, introducing Wyle as the haplessly green medical student John Carter, and that tackled an array of social issues including HIV, sexual violence, and drug addiction. “The popularity of the show ensured we could do stories we were proud of,” John Wells, one of the show’s executive producers, told Today as the series was ending. TV was still in its virtuous Very Special Episode era when ER debuted in 1994, but 30 years later, when Wells, Wyle, and the writer R. Scott Gemmill reunited for The Pitt, antihero narratives and dissociative sadcoms had inured TV viewers to anything earnest or didactic. (A lawsuit is still pending from the estate of Michael Crichton, the creator of ER, over whether The Pitt is an unauthorized reboot of the earlier show or simply a medical drama in the same mold.)

Even so, The Pitt was a smash. Plotlines tackled the fentanyl crisis, vaccine hesitancy, and a mass shooting at a music festival, unloading catastrophe after disaster on Dr. Robby until he physically broke down, having a panic attack alone in a pediatric treatment room. The series later won five Emmys, upending presumptions about the kinds of shows people still really want to watch.

[Read: The Pitt has revolutionized the medical drama]

Some might call The Pitt preachy. (A recent Vulture review argued that the show’s righteousness has become “distractingly pedantic, even patronizing,” as though considering real-world flash points through a humanizing lens was wholly new for television rather than embedded in its history: Remember Maude’s abortion? Rose’s Golden Girls HIV test?) I’d argue, rather, that The Pitt has an emphatic moral clarity that feels awkward only because we haven’t seen it for so long. It refuses to both-sides issues that it considers straightforward. Should you vaccinate your children against measles? Yes, The Pitt says, offering up a child with not just spots all over his body but also acute inflammation in his brain and spinal cord. The show is set in the emergency room, where society’s problems become inescapable, where people who have fallen through the cracks land. In an era of relentlessly absurd and wealth-washed TV, The Pitt’s realism, its defiant lack of glamour, is bracing.

The second season is even more insistent than the first that we wake up. Set on the Fourth of July, a day devoted to blowing things up and gauzy narratives of American exceptionalism, it opens with Dr. Robby riding to work triumphantly on a motorcycle, wearing no helmet, impossibly contented as he heads to his last shift before a three-month sabbatical. I mention the helmet because it feels relevant, just as important as the fact that Dana smokes—being confronted daily with the consequences of risky behaviors doesn’t make The Pitt’s staffers any less human. Case in point: Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball) is back from rehab, after being caught last season stealing prescription drugs from patients, and his return seems personally offensive to Robby, who can’t quite bear to look at him. The resident coming to take Robby’s place, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), similarly needles him, with her cautious approach and bureaucratic lean (she’s a big fan of generative AI).

Over the course of the first nine episodes made available for review, the doctors do their best to patch up the gaps in people’s lives where a social safety net should be. They tend to surly patients who accuse them of profiteering, an unhoused man with a festering wound on his arm, a new baby abandoned in a bathroom. A patient of Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) absconds because he’s so terrified of the medical bills he’ll amass if the hospital treats him. We see the direct impact of ICE deportations on families. The show is even more graphic this time around, given its emphasis on the bodily indignities both doctors and patients can be subjected to (I do not recommend watching while eating). Blithe stupidity is a constant: Multiple patients try to film their doctors to post on TikTok. And risk is everywhere. Dana tells a new nurse that the ER has a safe word, Hula-Hoop, should health providers feel threatened, and one of the floor’s residents, Mel King (Taylor Dearden), is preoccupied by a deposition she has to give for a malpractice lawsuit.

All of this makes for very good television. The show’s ability to flip back and forth between patients is both narratively forceful—we don’t have time to get bored—and realistic. Wyle and LaNasa, both of whom won Emmys last year for their roles on The Pitt, manage to show us exactly how much their character’s job costs them without leaning all the way into martyrdom. Wyle especially underscores Robby’s innate humanity while also letting us see his god complex, his unwillingness to be challenged. Over the course of the shift, his body seems to calcify with tension, as though every successive hour in the hospital adds weight. And a scene in which Dana treats a rape victim—documenting the care she takes, the processes she meticulously goes through, and the rage she experiences when she discovers a rape kit from two weeks ago ignored by local police—is indelible.

There’s simply no way to watch The Pitt and feel good about the way society is currently functioning. Which is the point. The show can be funny, the camaraderie among the characters is gratifying, and the doctors are extraordinarily good-looking in the way only TV doctors can be. But in a moment when most series seem intent on keeping us mindlessly half-engaged and monetizing the minutes we watch, there’s something inherently satisfying about a series that actually wants us to think. And, even more crucially, to care.

Why Did We Ever Watch To Catch a Predator?

2025-12-24T09:00:00-05:00

The year 2004, situated after 9/11 and before the election of Barack Obama, might have been the one that best summed up the excesses and cruelties of the George W. Bush era, particularly on television: The Apprentice, Nipplegate, 60 Minutes’ report on atrocities at Abu Ghraib, The Swan. The overarching theme was exposure, followed by ensuing cycles of shame, recrimination, and (often) profit. Reality TV, having cycled through its anthropological social-experiment phase, was now balls-to-the-wall invested in spectacle—the more lurid and indefensible, the better. In March 2004, MTV debuted I Want a Famous Face, a reality show that featured people having extreme plastic surgery to look more like their favorite celebrities. Late in the year, on Dateline NBC, the debonair investigative journalist Chris Hansen premiered a new series of special reports targeting adult men who were trying to have sex with underage teenagers they’d met on the internet.

To Catch a Predator ran for three years, and its unique selling point seemed to be that it was, as Jimmy Kimmel once jokingly referred to it, “Punk’d for pedophiles.” The series touted its noble intentions—identifying and exposing people who might prey on children—but the format of the show clarified that its main focus was entertainment. Unwitting men who’d chatted online with adults pretending to be children would be invited to a house rigged with cameras, where actors (“decoys,” in the show’s parlance) who were over 18 but looked younger would welcome them in, chat chirpily in Mickey Mouse helium voices, and then disappear so that Hansen could take over. “How are you?” he’d ask in a faux-friendly tone, before revealing the cameras, the chat logs, the scale of their reprobation. To Catch a Predator was, essentially, a prank show with a monstrous twist, Candid Camera with the prospect of prison time and a spot on the sex-offender registry. “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child rapists, you know it’s doing something wrong,” Charlie Brooker argued in The Guardian in 2008. (A few years later, possibly in response to the NBC show, he wrote one of the darkest episodes of Black Mirror, in which a cheery host tortures and humiliates a woman accused of child predation while audiences cheer.)

Predators, a documentary by David Osit recently released on Paramount+, homes in on that feeling of reluctant empathy, where we’re forced to confront multiple truths at once: Yes, To Catch a Predator was targeting men who were trying to doing something monstrous; yes, the show was raising awareness about the grooming of children online; yes, it was also doing so in a way that turned personal transgression into public drama, appealing to our basest desires to see people disgraced, from the comfort of our couch. By 2004, this kind of “humilitainment”—a term that the law professor Amy Adler devised to describe the fetishization of punishment on camera exemplified by Abu Ghraib—wasn’t just “the master narrative of reality TV,” as Adler put it, but “a template for contemporary culture.”

[Read: The cruel social experiment of reality TV]

Watching Predators, I thought of Janet Malcolm’s observation that “every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” Osit is interested not only in the moral complicity of exposing someone on camera but also in the technical aspects of how that exposure is carried out, from the camera angles and lighting setups right down to the interviews and signed release forms. The documentary begins with a segment from the Dateline show: We hear a phone call, as an unnamed man charms a girl, calling her “so sweet” and telling her that he has to stop at Walmart to pick up some things “so I don’t get you pregnant.” As the conversation plays out, we see the house being staged as a set, lenses being adjusted, the zipper on a girl’s hoodie being pulled up. We’re led to wonder what it means to capture the worst day of someone’s life on camera, how banal the preparation is, and how guilty Osit is himself in re-airing the show’s footage.

To make a documentary is to have a kind of godlike power over someone else’s narrative, Predators suggests, and yet it’s an authority that To Catch a Predator wore extremely lightly. The series followed a tight formula: introduction, preamble, revelation, and then the absurd coda, during which Hansen would tell the ensnared man, “You’re free to go,” only for police officers to ambush him outside as he tried to leave. The moment that the subjects realized they’d been caught was the instant around which the show was constructed, as we watched them register their new reality with horror, denial, and—often—desperate pleas for clemency. “What you’re seeing is effectively someone else’s life end,” Mark de Rond, an ethnographer interviewed for Predators, tells Osit. “And they realize it.” Early in Predators, we see a man in a Red Sox hat weep and clutch his face while Hansen remains wholly unruffled, almost unresponsive, the consummate TV professional whose mien does not falter. He’s calm to the point of serenity; in some episodes, he undeniably seems to be enjoying his part in the proceedings.

The question throughout is how anyone could ever have been entertained by such a grim presentation, as Osit splices in footage of the show being lauded by Oprah Winfrey (“I don’t understand why the guys sit down and talk to you!” she jokes to Hansen, while her audience laughs), Kimmel, and Jon Stewart. Predators also gestures at the pop-cultural fixation on girls that underpinned this particular era: Britney Spears, the Olsen twins, Vanity Fair’s “It’s Raining Teens” cover from 2003. One particularly caustic moment in the documentary shows the TV host Joe Scarborough interviewing Hansen about an episode of To Catch a Predator that led to one man’s death by suicide—the man shot himself after local police and a Dateline crew surrounded his house as part of a pedophilia sting; NBC eventually resolved a subsequent lawsuit claiming wrongful death—right before Scarborough mockingly teases an upcoming clip about Spears’s second trip to rehab. Awkward? Yes. Self-aware? Not in the slightest. The media ecosystem of the 2000s thrived on exactly this kind of cognitive dissonance, as talking heads scolded the very women they relied on for clicks and ratings.

But worse was still yet to come. Osit follows up his examination of To Catch a Predator by considering the internet copycats who came after it, embedding with a particularly puffed-up and dystopian YouTube personality who calls himself Skeet Hansen, in tribute to his predecessor. At first, Skeet Hansen’s efforts seem ludicrous. His “decoy,” “T Coy,” is transparently not a teenager (even the men she invites into a motel room seem unconvinced on that front), and his operation is so ham-fisted that he occasionally dresses his friend up as a police officer, with a makeshift badge and a walkie-talkie. But Osit’s interview with T Coy is revelatory. She was abused as a child, she tells him, and that’s why she’s so committed now to helping punish people who might hurt children. It’s the first time anything in Predators has felt clear-cut, and when Osit, later in the movie, shares a revelation of his own that sheds light on his interest in the show, it’s all the more destabilizing.

The fact that the first six minutes of Predators are essentially taken wholesale from To Catch a Predator, with the presumption that the footage will land very differently than it did in 2004, seems to suggest progress. Osit is relying on contemporary viewers—who have lived through the public demonization of so many fragile women and the bad-faith deployment of “save the children”–style campaigns—to have a quite distinct reaction to the show two decades later. (The woman subjected to dozens of death threats after being caught on Coldplay’s kiss cam might have a very different read on how far we’ve actually come.) To really want to protect children, Osit insinuates, would mean having to try harder to understand the perpetrators of abuse, not just vilifying them for cheap gratification. The final scene of the documentary, open-ended and unsettling, implies that Predators hasn’t achieved the kind of enlightenment its director hoped it would. But for how it illuminates a truly strange and callous moment in culture, it’s one of the best documentaries of the year.

Everything We Know About Rape Is Wrong

2025-12-22T10:04:00-05:00

“There is no single anecdote,” Jen Percy writes in the opening sentence of Girls Play Dead, her riveting, heartrending analysis of what sexual assault does to women. “What I’m talking about is an accumulation.” She lists a few of her own encounters with harassment and rape culture: the man who rubbed his crotch while staring at Percy and her friend; the man working a cash register who asked to touch her breasts; the man who asked to photograph her when she was 16, showing her an album of naked women. The point isn’t to interrogate the men who supposedly did these things, or whether they happened. (With regard to veracity, I have my own accumulation of similar anecdotes; I’m guessing most women do.) More useful is to consider what Percy did in response, what so many do when faced with sexually threatening behavior: nothing.

Girls are socialized to be pleasant. To be passive. To neutralize conflict rather than spark it. They learn to prioritize others’ feelings over their own. In 1988, the feminist legal scholar Robin West argued that these habits and behaviors help foster intimacy and community, but that they also diminish women’s protection under the law. If someone’s instinct is to preserve relationships and stability as a matter of survival, what do they do when they’re violently or sexually threatened? Not always something that might be construed as logical, or that might convince a jury that they have been gravely violated. The majority of women who are sexually assaulted don’t fight back, Percy notes. (In addition to “fight or flight” responses to danger, advocacy groups indicate that other common responses to rape include “freeze,” “flop,” and “friend,” or trying to placate one’s attacker.) She compiles a list of accounts from her reporting of things women have done after they were raped. “I made him chicken soup,” one woman tells her. “I comforted him because he was crying,” another says. Still another: “I told him I couldn’t wait to do it again.”

Girls Play Dead began as a feature Percy wrote in The New York Times Magazine about the phenomenon of “tonic immobility,” a self-preservation mechanism that leads people to freeze or become paralyzed when under attack. In the animal kingdom, mammals play dead so that a predator will lose interest in them; some female dragonflies do it to avoid mating. Percy encounters so many women who describe freezing as their response to sexual assault that she pronounces it a kind of “lingua franca.” (Men freeze too, she notes; her focus is largely but not exclusively on women.) “I just froze,” Lady Gaga said in an episode of the series The Me You Can’t See, while recalling the time she was raped at 19. “I just absolutely froze,” Brooke Shields said of her own rape in the documentary Pretty Baby. While I was reading Girls Play Dead, I watched a BBC documentary in which a woman, recounting being raped by her own boyfriend, said, “The fact that I froze—it’s a feeling that absolutely takes over your body. You can’t move.” Tonic immobility, Percy writes, is an “extreme response to a threat” that “renders victims unable to scream or move their limbs.” Its evolutionary benefit, she notes, is that by simultaneously numbing the body, it might—in the animal world at least—“alleviate the agony and horror of being eaten alive.”

Percy’s subject is brutal, but her writing allays some of the impact by being almost impossibly beautiful: crisp, vulnerable, lyrical. Her mother, a naturalist, raised her partly in the wilderness, where hills “were painted with belts of ochre, orange, brick-red sand.” Sometimes the pair slept in a trailer, “with its stale formaldehyde smell, lacquer table, and tiny fridge that gasped as if afraid.” She has a miniaturist’s eye for detail and a raw compassion in her analysis. Girls Play Dead isn’t a manifesto, or a call to action. It’s more like a scientist’s collection of samples from a field trip, arranged by genus. Percy observes and bears witness. She interviews women in prison for murdering their abusers, after describing their biographies at harrowing, hard-to-read length. She interviews self-professed sex and love addicts who experienced childhood abuse and whose understanding of emotional connection got distorted. (“Abuse, neglect, or drama—it was all mistaken for intimacy,” Percy writes.)

On first reading, some of Percy’s stories seemed strange or incongruous, like the man she profiles who’s utterly obsessed with a woman he broke up with a decade ago. But I came to understand that woven into her line of inquiry are the nature and significance of storytelling itself. Police investigations and criminal trials demand clear narratives: They tend to expect evidence to be neat, behavior to be logical, and stories to be linear. The questions that rape victims tend to face don’t allow for the kind of messiness that accompanies violation. Often survivors themselves try to make sense of what has happened by reinterpreting it. “Self-preservation doesn’t always look like what we imagine it does,” Percy notes. She describes once going home with a man while studying abroad in Spain, and all of the times she said no, until she finally stopped, because “I was tired and I didn’t want to be rude.” Later, she went to Paris with him. Illogical, maybe, but commonplace all the same, because occasionally our coping mechanisms require transforming an abuse into something wanted, or at least something not so bad.

[Read: Unbelievable is TV’s most humane show]

In a court of law, though, irrational reactions—such as a sustained relationship with an abuser—can fatally undermine a victim’s credibility. Defense lawyers, Percy writes, have a pronounced tendency “to portray the normal behavior of women, both during and after their experiences, as ‘unusual’ or ‘inconsistent.’” During the trial of Harvey Weinstein, his defense lawyers put significant emphasis on the fact that two of his accusers had continued friendly communication with him after their alleged attacks, and had even gone on to have consensual sex with him. “Many individuals may not understand why I had hoped that attempting human connection with the man who was sexually abusing me, humiliating me, using me, and pumping me into his world where he always controlled the script—was a long exhausting form of survival,” one accuser, Jessica Mann, read in a statement to the court during Weinstein’s sentencing hearing, by way of response. We are, as a culture, deeply uncomfortable with the idea of victimhood. (Consider the idiom “playing the victim.”) “Claiming victimhood,” Kate Manne writes in her book Down Girl, “effectively involves placing oneself at the center of the story.” And women who foreground themselves in any capacity are often perceived to be self-important drama queens, or narcissists.

Perhaps sensing this, Percy turns victims into a collective instead. Her stories, woven together, become something like a fabric, a totality. Messiness is the defining feature, in a way that becomes clarifying. Chronic stress damages the prefrontal cortex, she writes in one chapter, explaining how trauma can impair the brain so that her later accounts of women found guilty for acts of self-defense seem even more profoundly unjust. Girls Play Dead illuminates how stories can trap people, how the impulse to rewrite a violation or rescue an abuser leads us away from the truth. But Percy also seems to feel that showing us the texture and shared features of human experience might be the crucial thing that can make a difference. The law often renders women unprotected, maligned, and misunderstood. The only countermechanism, as Robin West wrote in 1988, “is to tell true stories of women’s lives,” in such breadth and definition that the justice system finally has to acknowledge what it’s been obscuring. Girls Play Dead is a vital continuation of this effort.

The 14 Best TV Shows of 2025

2025-12-17T09:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2025” coverage here.

On the small screen, 2025 was all about money—the ostentatious peacocking of wealth on shows such as Sirens, And Just Like That, Selling Sunset, and With Love, Meghan; the spiraling production costs of episodes themselves; the politicized wrestling over which megacorporation will take over Warner Bros. Discovery and its TV arms, including HBO. CBS canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in what seemed to many critics like an obvious sop to the Trump administration, ahead of Paramount’s $8 billion merger with the production company Skydance. ABC briefly pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live off the air, until public outrage mounted to such an extent that the market value of Disney, its parent company, fell by $4 billion. It’s hard to remember another time when the line between profiteering and entertainment has felt quite so porous.

With all of this in mind, the television series we loved most this year exemplified and defended the medium’s artistry, demonstrating what can be done with serialized storytelling, ingenuity, and ambition. They leaned into topical flash points and dispensed with bland distraction. During a stretch when so much felt resolutely mid, these shows were anything but.

Netflix

Adolescence (Netflix)

Adolescence opens with a photo of a chubby-cheeked boy posing for a first-day-of-school photo, his hair cowlicked, his face proud. From that image onward, the show insists on the point that this boy—named Jamie (played by Owen Cooper), now 13 and accused of murdering a classmate—could be anyone’s child, even yours. The immersive miniseries, created by the playwright Jack Thorne with the actor Stephen Graham (who stars as Jamie’s father, Eddie), is filmed in a series of continuous shots: We follow the police into Jamie’s bedroom; we watch Eddie recoil from his son after realizing what Jamie has done; we learn more, as children are interviewed and footage is revealed, about what’s happened, but only fragments of why. The third episode, in which Jamie is gently interrogated by a psychologist (Erin Doherty), is excruciatingly tense; it’s also revelatory, in the bleakest way possible. If Jamie is a monster, Adolescence posits, he’s the kind that implicates everyone. — Sophie Gilbert

FX / Everett Collection

The Lowdown (FX)

With apologies to Ethan Hawke, part of the pleasure of watching The Lowdown comes from seeing how his character takes a beating. Lee Raybon, a used-book-store owner and self-proclaimed “truthstorian,” tends to chase risky scenarios without fully thinking things through, but getting hurt only assures him he’s on the right track. Created by the Reservation Dogs showrunner Sterlin Harjo and set in present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma, The Lowdown is a shaggy neo-noir that understands the appeal of a scrappy troublemaker. During his investigation into what he believes is a murder plot involving a powerful family, Lee pinballs around his surroundings and runs into all kinds of eccentric locals, played by an ensemble of excellent character actors. The result is a kinetic watch, anchored by a top-notch Hawke, bruises and all. — Shirley Li

HBO

Task (HBO)

What does it mean to be a man? The Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby’s newest show—also set in Delaware County, and also fascinated with the flaws and vulnerabilities of tight-knit communities—contrasts the lives of two very different male figures set on a collision course. Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) is a former priest turned grieving FBI agent; Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey), a single father who robs drug houses, is his latest target. Over seven episodes, Task considers the two antagonists’ oppositional responses to tragedy while also sketching out the world around them: a fentanyl-trafficking biker gang, local and federal law enforcement, a 21-year-old trying to raise her younger cousins as best she can. Beautifully shot, and more propulsive the longer it goes on, Task interrogates masculinity without losing sympathy for any of its adherents. — S.G.

Adults (FX)

The ensemble at the center of Adults could easily be called the Gen Z Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe. But what differentiates the series from that other New York–set comedy about 20-somethings is the fact that, to borrow a little more from Friends, these characters knew life was gonna be this way. They feel pressured to get serious but struggle to navigate the ever-changing expectations of growing up. Is it more important to stand out or be liked at the office? Which is harder: paying off deep medical debt or getting on the phone to dispute the costs? The season’s highlight involves a character totally unprepared to throw the dinner party she’s hosting, only for a much older guest to be the one who embarrasses himself the most. That’s the fun of Adults: The titular group may be striving for maturity, but the show understands that adulthood can be a moving target. — S.L.

Netflix

The Diplomat (Netflix)

I have a soft spot for any show willing to consider women in positions of power, and Season 3 of The Diplomat offers up two of them: In addition to Keri Russell’s brilliant, unkempt, impossibly charming Kate Wyler, the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, there’s Allison Janney’s icy Grace Penn, now—thanks to her predecessor’s heart attack—promoted to president of the United States. Can the two find common ground? The Diplomat reliably examines all of our most special relationships, understanding that marriage can sometimes feel no less complicated, ambitious, and humbling than statecraft. There are twists galore, but I liked the smaller moments—such as Bradley Whitford’s wacky contentment as first gentleman, and Kate’s MacGyvered costume change for Grace’s first presidential appearance. — S.G.

HBO

The Pitt (HBO Max)

At their best, hospital procedurals maintain a curious balance: They combine the stress of seeing patients suffer with the pleasure of watching competent doctors. In its first, Emmy-sweeping season, The Pitt perfected that formula. Starring the ER alum Noah Wyle as Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch, a physician still reeling from the trauma of the coronavirus pandemic, the drama follows a sprawling ensemble of emergency-room workers over the course of a single shift. The real-time framework gives viewers an intimate look at the people who trickle in and out of the facility with various maladies—some comical, others terrifying. Through it all, Wyle’s lived-in performance grounds the stakes in the doctors’ emotional reality, keeping The Pitt focused on what it takes to be in the business of saving lives. — S.L.

Apple TV / Everett Collection

Severance (Apple TV)

Goats. Ether. Doppelgängers. Animatronic deities ushered in to music by the Alan Parsons Project. Severance is a weird trip; Season 2, which came three years after the show’s premiere and took us on frozen waterfall hikes and into secret pastoral laboratories, was no exception. Unlike most puzzle-box shows, though, the series sometimes offers answers as to WTF is actually going on at Lumon Industries. Season 2 develops the relationship between Innie Mark S. (Adam Scott) and Helly R. (Britt Lower) while continuing the investigation into what happened to Mark’s not-actually-dead wife, now imprisoned on a secret floor at Lumon and undergoing a series of agonizing emotional trials. Stylized to a modernist extreme, Severance looks cold to the touch—which is why it’s always surprising when the show reveals a little of its heart. — S.G.

[Read: Severance can’t save you]

Peacock

The Traitors (Peacock)

Most reality shows rely on a simple conceit: Dozens of men vie for the affections of one woman; strangers become roommates; a famous-enough family gives audiences a glimpse into their life. The Traitors seems just as uncomplicated at first, thrusting its contestants—many of them veterans of other unscripted series such as Big Brother and the Real Housewives franchise—into a game of Mafia for a cash prize. But the competition toys with reality-TV tropes, borrowing from and satirizing the genre itself. The result, much like the host Alan Cumming’s eye-popping wardrobe, is delightfully over-the-top. This year, many of the designated “traitors” and “faithfuls” entered the castle with established rivalries and reputations—think Tom Sandoval of “Scandoval” fame, or “Boston Rob,” a notoriously crafty Survivor winner—boosting the mischief and melodrama. As my colleague Megan Garber put it, this is “hyperreality TV.” — S.L.

FX / Everett Collection

Dying for Sex (FX)

“Are you on some kind of sex quest?” Gail (Sissy Spacek) asks her daughter, Molly (Michelle Williams), midway through Dying for Sex, as the pair sit in a hospital waiting room. And the answer is: yes. Molly, given a terminal-cancer diagnosis, is enraged by how little she’s actually lived—and thus decides to venture out on a boundless journey of sexual exploration, aided by her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate). What makes the show work is Williams’s wide-eyed guilelessness as Molly; she is in some ways liberated by the finality of her illness, approaching dating apps and novel kinks with the positivity of a Disney princess and the enthusiasm of a sailor on shore leave. After a lifetime of quieting her desires, she’s finally able to look inward. Molly’s closeness with Nikki also upends ideas about which relationships can mean the most to us in the end. — S.G.

HBO

The Rehearsal (HBO)

As a comedian, Nathan Fielder tends to push every gag to its furthest extreme—which is why, in some ways, the fact that he turned the second season of The Rehearsal into an extended attempt to prevent all future airline disasters isn’t that surprising. But the show, in which Fielder stages elaborate practice sessions for ordinary people facing uncomfortable scenarios, offers an array of unexpected twists. In one episode, Fielder has pilots judge a singing competition; in another, he tries to embody Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, who famously landed a passenger jet on the Hudson River. The Rehearsal’s sophomore outing became unforgettable television because it was often hard to tell what kind of television it was: comedy? Drama? Reality TV turned performance art? No one really knows except Fielder himself. Perhaps that’s what made the show irresistible. — S.L.

Netflix

Dept. Q (Netflix)

It feels like not much can surprise me anymore, at the end of this exhausting shocker of a year. But Dept. Q, Scott Frank and Chandni Lakhani’s Scotland-set procedural thriller, delivered a truly jaw-dropping narrative turn at the end of the first episode and then never let up on the suspense. Matthew Goode is in fine misanthropic form as Detective Carl Morck, a police investigator left traumatized and surly after being shot during a case. His boss tasks him with reinvestigating lost-cause cold cases, a thankless job that leads him to a compelling mystery; meanwhile, his therapist (Kelly MacDonald) struggles to get him to open up about his PTSD. Dept. Q’s tone is mordant and its imagination can be monstrous, but like any good crime show, it knows who its heroes are and the reassurance we get from them. — S.G.

Amazon Studios

The Summer I Turned Pretty (Prime Video)

The 21-year-old college student Belly (Lola Tung) is just so torn: between marrying the hot but immature Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) and reigniting her relationship with his hot but moody brother, Conrad (Christopher Briney); between staying in a picturesque vacation town and studying abroad in the equally picturesque Paris. Her turmoil may seem inconsequential, but in its final season, The Summer I Turned Pretty turned into appointment viewing, even for many older viewers. This adaptation of Jenny Han’s best-selling young-adult novels scratched an itch for the teen melodramas of yesteryear—The O.C., Dawson’s Creek. The series takes its heroine’s emotional crossroads seriously while offering the fantasy of life lived in a perpetual glow, as sweet as a peach bought off a stand on the side of the road. — S.L.

Netflix

North of North (Netflix)

Siaja (Anna Lambe)—plucky, loving, and prone to pratfalls—is a classic sitcom heroine in an underutilized setting: Canada’s Arctic territories, where she lives in a tiny Inuit community with her vain, selfish husband (Kelly William) and her young daughter. By the end of the series premiere, after realizing how small her life has become, Siaja leaves her husband (in painfully public fashion) and sets out on a mission to make something of herself. “You’re acting like a white girl with options,” her mother, Neevee (Maika Harper), tells her. Nevertheless, Siaja is convinced that she can forge her own path. North of North pays painstaking attention to the details of life in Nunavut, and the icy landscapes are gorgeous on-screen. But Siaja’s relatability, and her unflagging optimism, is what really sells the series. — S.G.

Disney / Everett Collection

Andor (Disney+)

The second and final season of the most mature Star Wars show moves at light speed compared with the first, the plot leaping forward a year in time every three episodes: Newly introduced characters disappear; planets that seem pivotal to Cassian (Diego Luna) and his mission to help the Rebellion aren’t visited again. Yet Andor never feels unsteady. The Rogue One co-writer Tony Gilroy’s extended foray into a galaxy far, far away offers a stronger thesis than the average Star Wars spin-off: that the line between the dark side and the light can be terribly blurry. Perhaps the series, with its spy-thriller stylings, bold speeches, and lack of anything Jedi-related, isn’t really a conventional Star Wars story. It thoughtfully contemplates the painful reality of a conflict’s anonymous foot soldiers, who believe in, fight for, and sacrifice themselves for an ideology. In that sense, Andor conveys a force—lowercase f—all its own. — S.L.

The Slow Death of the Prestige Thriller

2025-12-04T12:59:00-05:00

All Her Fault contains two dramas. One—melodramatic, Hitchcockian at its best, Lifetime-hacky at its worst—follows all the most generic beats of the airport thriller, starting when Marissa (played by Succession’s Sarah Snook) arrives to pick up her son, Milo, from a playdate at a house where, somehow, no children live and no one has ever heard of him. The other—sensitive, almost documentary-realist about the dynamics of modern parenting—deals with the fallout, as a community struggles to confront how such a nightmarish failure of safeguarding could have happened. The two modes of the show intersect only briefly, in the show’s terrific opening scene, as Snook’s eyes begin to dart with mounting panic that she’s trying frantically to rationalize in the presence of a stranger. But for the rest of the series they diverge, leaving us stuck inside a mostly hokey story that has flashes of brilliance, or at least of sharp insight into the tensions and fault lines of working motherhood.

I’ve rarely felt more frustrated with television than I have this year, watching hour after hour of humdrum wealth porn, self-indulgent maximalism, and turgid aimlessness. All Her Fault, initially, seemed to fall into the first category—it’s based on a crime novel by the Irish writer Andrea Mara, it’s set in an affluent suburb of Chicago (the series was filmed in Australia), and its trailer teases lies, dead bodies, and a minefield of familial conflict. So the first few episodes were a pleasant surprise: Without preamble, Milo is suddenly missing, which throws us headfirst into a charged environment of suspicion and terror. But, around the edges of the story, Megan Gallagher (who created the show and wrote five of its eight episodes) fleshes out other nuances. Marissa’s husband, Peter (Jake Lacy), relies on his wife to answer basic questions about their son during a police interview; Jenny (Dakota Fanning), the mother of a boy in Milo’s class, has to leave an important work meeting when her husband can’t manage bedtime on his own. The second episode flashes back to the weeks after Marissa and Peter bring a newborn Milo home; Marissa frantically Googles sleep routines and swaddling techniques while Peter serenely assures her that he’ll do anything she asks him to do to help. (The look she gives him in return is so murderous, it almost burned a hole in my screen.)

[Read: Money is ruining television]

Pausing the episode to fill in a Google doc with an assigned code word for someone to use if they have to pick up my kids from school without prior authorization, I felt uncannily immersed in the plot—the WhatsApp groups, the ever tenser requests from PTA reps for volunteers (somehow delivered in a sonic register only women can hear), the guilt, the extreme frustration. One of the suspects in Milo’s disappearance is, immediately, a nanny, leading the stay-at-home moms to judge the working moms for leaving their kids with strangers; meanwhile, to be a working father in the world’s imagination, the show slyly points out, is to glide like a swan away from blame and self-reproach. Still, All Her Fault goes beyond the novel in thoughtful ways by considering the lead investigator on Milo’s case, Jim Alcaras (Michael Peña), who does struggle to balance his work with the needs of his nonverbal 13-year-old son, and whose insight into what people would do out of profound love for their children enhances his understanding of the case. Without Alcaras, All her Fault would be yet another televisual excavation of wealthy white pain, but the shared resonances between his character and Marissa help broaden the show’s vision.

Snook is fantastic as Marissa, delivering complicated anguish in a series of chunky knits. Fanning’s Jenny, trying to secure a new whale of a client for her publishing company while her feckless husband perpetually clocks out of activities with their son, is also compelling to watch, particularly when Jenny and Marissa find ways to bolster each other. Nevertheless, All Her Fault starts floundering midway through and never quite finds its footing again. The problem, it seems clear, is the source material, and the mandates it sets out. The show can color outside the lines of the thriller format, but it can’t transcend them altogether—the red herrings have to be carelessly dropped, the mind-boggling twists revealed. Nor does it really lean away from stylistic convention: Whether by directorial choice or by imposition, the most pivotal scenes in the series are accompanied by a score so sonorous and heavy-handed that it evokes a Murder She Wrote rerun, not a glossy mystery for one of the most ambitious actors currently working. None of these choices is outright awful, but they are jarring when juxtaposed with the verisimilitude and emotional realism of the early episodes.

Maybe All Her Fault is a sign of an industry in retrenchment, relying on formulaic adaptations rather than original concepts because they’re demonstrably easy and popular. Maybe this is the best we can hope for at the moment—an expanse of blah, studded with a few exceptions. Top-tier television used to entice movie stars with the promise of meaty roles and superlative writing; 2025 television enlists battalions of Oscar winners by waving around a script based on a mid-tier best seller and the prospect of a couple of months on location in Nantucket. I’m grateful for the producers—Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman among them—who’ve seen untapped potential in books that would allow them to tell textured stories about women’s lives. But TV has become overly reliant on adapting lurid, pulpy paperbacks, the resulting shows associated with prestige only because their stories were once printed out. (Netflix is particularly implicated here—consider, if you can bear it, the body-switching infidelity thriller Behind Her Eyes, or anything in its Harlan Coben collection.) Viewers, meanwhile, get artless plots with familiar faces in glamorous locations that offered decent tax incentives. It could be better; it could be worse—but it’ll keep you watching, which is apparently all that really counts.

Stranger Things Comes to an Exhausting End

2025-11-26T20:01:00-05:00

In a recent article for The Atlantic, W. David Marx argued that culture as we know it today is a hoarder’s paradise, a hopelessly cluttered landscape of rubbish. “Everyday life has never contained more stuff—an endless reel of words, ideas, games, songs, videos, memes, outrageous statements, celebrity meltdowns, life hacks, extremely talented animals,” he writes. My 5-year-old’s favorite song is a version of “Golden,” the standout hit from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, meowed by fake cats. Her favorite TV show is Is It Cake?, a Netflix baking competition seemingly inspired by a viral TikTok trend that involved making trompe l’oeil cakes disguised as random objects. Everything in popular culture feels recycled or reanimated or patched together out of preexisting elements. The dominant art form of the 21st century is the remix.

Stranger Things got there first. When the show debuted nine years ago, at the tail end of Barack Obama’s presidency, what was most astonishing about it was how unabashedly it pillaged the Blockbuster Video archives, borrowing from Spielberg and Hughes and Cameron to produce a pop-cultural behemoth that managed to both gratify audience nostalgia and create fresh intellectual property. Matt and Ross Duffer, its genial creators, were able to sell Stranger Things as a sincere homage, a love letter to 1980s media born out of admiration, not a cynical cash grab in an era of supercuts and sequels. Thanks to them, even in its fifth and final season, the series still has a pure heart. In the background, though, are product-placement deals featuring more than 100 carefully selected brands, a curated Spotify “experience”, influencer tie-ins, and prime Demogorgon placement inside the new Netflix House at the King of Prussia mall, in Pennsylvania—the latter truly a potent postmodern symbol of art becoming consumption. “Who wouldn’t want an $80 cookie house modeled after Vecna’s death mansion?” Fast Company’s Jeff Beer wondered recently about the show’s branded partnership with Williams Sonoma.

[Read: Stranger Things isn’t TV. It’s something else.]

It would be hard for any show to carry the weight of all this late-capitalist ambition, and the series’s last season embodies all the best and worst aspects of the Stranger Things decade. (The first four episodes were made available for review, and are streaming today.) It’s been almost three and a half years since Season 4, during which time the once-tweenage actors have hit drinking age (or, in Millie Bobby Brown’s case, become a parent); the teenagers have entered their 30s; and David Harbour’s beard has reached Rip Van Winkle proportions. I struggled to remember the specific plot nuances from a time before Sabrina Carpenter’s adult-pop era, but the story doesn’t really require thoughtful comprehension. At the end of Season 4, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower)—the antagonist who possessed and murdered victims after manipulating their minds—was revealed to be the ruler of the Upside Down, the parallel dimension Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) was transported to after being kidnapped in the first season. Once a sadistic child with telekinetic abilities named Henry Creel, Vecna was experimented on in the same government lab as the show’s heroine, Eleven (Brown); this allowed him to control the gruesome creatures of the Upside Down in service of a larger plan, and to create a rupture between the two dimensions.

Season 5 jumps forward in time 18 months to November 1987. Hawkins, Indiana, is under military quarantine, surrounded by metal fencing. Robin (Maya Hawke) and Steve (Joe Keery) are broadcasting a radio show that periodically roasts the occupying forces and delivers coded messages to the core characters—Chief Hopper, Joyce, Eleven, Nancy, Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas—who occasionally try to infiltrate the Upside Down to conduct sweeps in search of Vecna. Winona Ryder’s Joyce and David Harbour’s Hopper are still technically together, albeit with apparently minimal interest on the part of the writers. Eleven is wanted by the military and so mostly spends her time doing drills with Hopper, whose overprotectiveness as a parent is matched only by Joyce’s constant fretting over Will.

[Read: Stranger Things won’t save Netflix]

When everyone is a fan favorite, no one is expendable, which is why the cast has sprawled out to such an unmanageable extent. There’s no time for characterization—not when Mike has to purchase a Coke from an ostentatiously branded vending machine, or a group breakfast has to be written in to showcase Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake syrup and Sunny Delight. The first episode is largely devoted to catching viewers up; everything that comes after follows the formulaic grooves of previous seasons—propulsive set pieces, meme-able moments, heavy allusions to a pop-cultural touchstone that will likely be important (in previous seasons, the show has nodded directly to Wes Craven and Stephen King; this time, the crucial text is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time). The violence seems brutal for a series so heavily invested in childhood; the characters barely get to relate to one another; the capers are slapdash and illogical; and for some reason Murray, the grating conspiracy theorist, seems to get more screen time than Eleven, the ostensible star of the show.

All of this might change in the episodes still to come. (Not the violence—the Duffers have acknowledged that the final season features one of the most gruesome deaths yet.) I found the first four episodes largely joyless and grim, right up until a moment that seemed to reset the show, or at least to capture some of the connection and spirit that used to make it so compelling. At its best, Stranger Things has been a show about the triumph of underdogs, outcasts, and aliens—not an original concept, sure, but a winning one even now, as the government posts propagandistic imagery celebrating white heritage and children are snatched not by fictional monsters but by masked officers. If Stranger Things can locate more of that humanity in its last few episodes, it’ll be much easier to swallow everything else it’s trying to sell us.

The Culture War Comes to the Kitchen

2025-11-25T08:00:00-05:00

Illustrations by Lucas Burtin

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Sometimes I think I became a mother not in a hospital room but in a Trader Joe’s in New York City. It was May 2020. A masked but smizing employee took one look at my stomach and handed me a packet of dark-chocolate peanut-butter cups. “Happy Mother’s Day!” she said. I was pregnant, with twins, during the early months of the pandemic, and all I could think about was food—what to eat and how to acquire it. Once a week I dashed clumsily through the store’s aisles, grabbing cans of beans and bags of apples while trying not to breathe, like a contestant on a postapocalyptic episode of Supermarket Sweep.

Food then was interlaced with a sense of danger, the coronavirus potentially spreading (we worried, absurdly it turned out) even by way of reusable totes. Meanwhile, I knew from my relentless pregnancy apps that what I ate could have monumental implications for my future children’s eating habits. I was scared, and I felt powerless, and food seemed like one of the few things I could control, or at least try to.

[Read: Becoming a parent during the pandemic was the hardest thing I’ve ever done]

What I didn’t yet know was that I was tapping into a deep-rooted tradition—or that, even as I panic-shopped, it was evolving. Mothers are our first food influencers, and for most of history, they have been our primary ones. The process starts even before we’re born, we now know: The tastes we’re exposed to in utero inform the preferences we’ll have much later in life. Culture, “at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother,” Michael Pollan wrote in his best-selling 2008 book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Up until the mid-20th century or so, we humans ate much as our parents did, and their parents before them, and so on: food cooked at home, from fresh ingredients, made predominantly by women.

But a flurry of destabilizing changes followed the Second World War, which had accustomed Americans to mass-produced boxed meals via rations issued to the military. Technological developments on multiple fronts brought prepackaged meals, frozen food, industrialized agriculture, the microwave oven. Marketers were learning how to subliminally manipulate shoppers. Perhaps most significant of all was a shift taking place at home: Women were joining the workforce, happily ceding the task of dinner to Big Food.

[Read: Avoiding ultra-processed foods is completely unrealistic]

By the 2000s, the consequences of all these changes were becoming calamitous. In the 1960s, 13 percent of American adults and about 5 percent of children were obese; by 2005, the number had risen to 35 percent of adults and more than 15 percent of children. Food companies had long since mastered the art of engineering products to encourage mindless overconsumption with every lab-perfected crunch, crisp, and snap. They’d also figured out how to maximize their sway over U.S. food policy, donating to politicians and directly funding scientists. And they did so while decrying as intrusive any efforts to rein in the ruthless lobbying tactics laid bare by the nutritionist and advocate Marion Nestle in her 2002 book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.

Nestle, whom The New York Times has called “one of the most influential framers of the modern food movement,” has spent the two decades since then trying to help Americans understand the extent to which the systems that feed them are implicated in sickening them for profit. Big Food, she was among the first to highlight, often bypasses parents to target kids directly using cartoon mascots and promotional collaborations with toy companies. (One of the prized possessions in her archive is an Oreo-themed Barbie doll.) Until recently, Nestle’s war against the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger looked unwinnable, as she observes in her new book, What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters. An update of her 2006 field guide for supermarket shoppers, it demonstrates how lamentably little progress has been made since then.

Supermarkets and supply chains are even more consolidated than they were 20 years ago, and corporations are more empowered, as Nestle writes, “to sell food products no matter what they do to or for your health.” Nearly three-quarters of American adults are now overweight or obese. An array of new products since 2006—oat milk and gluten-free pasta, more global ingredients (gochujang, sumac), plant-based “meats,” CBD-infused everything—has added variety, but also confusion. What counts as healthy? The influx certainly hasn’t halted a rise in consumption of ultra-processed foods (those heavily reliant on industrial ingredients and methods far removed from anything you’d cook at home). They now make up more than half of the average American adult’s diet and two-thirds of what children eat. The food system in America, Nestle explains, produces twice the amount of calories we actually need, while ravaging the environment we can’t survive without. (Industrialized farming results in water and air pollution, soil degradation, deforestation, and a loss of biodiversity.)

But something perplexing has also been happening for half a decade or so now: Once again, patterns of influence over what we eat are being upended. Enabled by social media, certain mothers have been mobilizing, intent on reasserting their authority over mealtime. I wasn’t the only one obsessed with food during the pandemic; something about the confluence of fear, frustration, and way too much time online ignited an impassioned, women-led, influencer-stoked, food-centered movement. A lot of the focus on fresh, homemade meals that this missionary crew has been advocating for has felt familiar—and sensible—to parents like me, dealing with uneaten strips of bell pepper and endless requests for snacks heavy in high-fructose corn syrup. Much has also felt wholly reactionary, rooted not just in the dietary and agricultural traditions of bygone days, but also in old-style gender politics.

The past few years have seen a glut of wellness content about the dangers of seed oils and chemicals, as well as nostalgic imagery disseminated over social media by women labeled “tradwives”: freshly baked bread emerging from a weathered Dutch oven in a lovely country kitchen, cows being milked in bucolic bliss, chubby-cheeked toddlers waddling through vegetable patches. And then “Make America Healthy Again,” a slogan that began life as a winking provocation in a 2016 Sweetgreen ad, morphed into a more politicized mantra among an improbable coalition of personalities who also want milk unpasteurized, food dyes banned, vaccines eliminated—and who also seem to want women re-enshrined in their rightful place in the kitchen.

“Who isn’t a food person these days?” the chef Ruby Tandoh asks in her new essay collection, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, surveying a culture in which everybody seems to be “talking about almost nothing else.” What’s striking is that these days, most of us recognize that America’s diet needs an intervention that goes beyond talk—and medication: GLP-1 drugs, however remarkable their effects may be, can’t feed kids. Yet the dramatic showdown between profit-greedy Big Food and proselytizing Big Family is eclipsing a middle ground of parenting pragmatists. Contradictory nutrition advice online drowns out a basic consensus: Experts overwhelmingly agree that a healthy diet still aligns with the same boring guidelines we grew up hearing—eat your fruits and vegetables, avoid ultra-processed (formerly “junk”) foods, limit sugar. How has the discussion become so polarized? And what might it take to actually fix dinner?

We’ve seen politicized food fights before. In the mid-2000s, a harried mother in Chicago, navigating a fast-track, dual-career schedule with her partner, began to rely on quick fixes when feeding her kids: takeout, ready meals, prepackaged snacks. One day, at a routine doctor appointment, she learned that both of her daughters were on the path to becoming overweight, a warning that spurred her to overhaul the way her family was eating. “I was grateful for the time and the effort that I saved with these kinds of products,” Michelle Obama told a gathering of food-business executives in 2010, after she became first lady of the United States. “But I was also completely unaware that all that extra convenience sometimes made it just a little too easy for me to eat too much, for my kids to eat too much, and to eat too often.” She was unprepared, too, for the partisan ruckus that was about to begin.

The chef, advocate, and policy adviser Sam Kass recounts this story in his wide-ranging and pragmatic new book about America’s food failings, The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis. Kass was just a few years out of college when he was hired by Obama in 2007 to help improve what and how her family ate at home. He then moved to Washington to work with the first lady on expanding her healthy-eating revolution from a personal goal into a political project. At the time, Kass notes, he’d been radicalized by Pollan and Nestle, who were giving shape to an intellectual, leftish, Berkeley-centric movement advocating for sustainable food production and more health-oriented food policies: “I shopped at farmers markets. I ate organic. My beef was grass fed. I thought that everyone should eat that way.” He arrived in the capital, he writes, “ready to decisively take on Big Ag—until reality reared its ugly head.”

In February 2010, Obama announced her first major initiative as first lady: Let’s Move, a public-health campaign aimed at lowering childhood-obesity rates in the U.S. Improving the nutritional quality of school meals nationwide was a centerpiece; for children living in poverty, those breakfasts and lunches could be their main source of sustenance. Conservatives instantly caught the scent of a culture war. Figures such as Sarah Palin and Fox News’s Glenn Beck regularly fulminated against nanny statism and accused the Obamas of trying to overrule the sacred rights of American parents.

Some of the backlash was bipartisan. When Kass tried to eliminate a policy that offered White House employees free Coke—after all, the administration was trying to get the nation to drink less of it—Michelle Obama’s deputy chief of staff responded, “Over my dead body.” And when Kass and the first lady spearheaded a national campaign to get people to drink more water, they were criticized by some of their public-health allies—Nestle among them—for not considering the environmental impact of plastic bottles.

The uproar, in retrospect, is illuminating. Food is deeply personal. Our natural response to being told what to eat is defensive: We tend to be attached to the foods we associate with family, comfort, and care. Obama had presumed that the straightforward changes that had worked for her family might benefit the wider public—and to her credit, she aimed to provide healthier meals for all American children, through broad institutional reform. Kass cites a study showing that the odds of poor children developing obesity would have been about 50 percent higher without the school-meal interventions. Crucially, though, childhood obesity was soon rising again. And Let’s Move, rather than surging in popularity, was cast as elitist coercion, and Obama as the mean mommy forcing America to finish its vegetables.

[Read: RFK Jr. is repeating Michelle Obama’s mistakes]

In hindsight, Kass concludes, almost nothing Let’s Move could have suggested would have pleased conservatives at the time. But he also infers that the biggest failure of Let’s Move was one of communication. If you come across as instructing people on what to eat or, especially, what not to eat, you’re more likely to prompt a raised middle finger than compliance. Slide gracefully into people’s subconscious by enlisting the power of suggestion—visually presenting healthier products in a way that elicits an emotional response, say, or evokes a sense of home or prosperity—and you can help an idea take hold. There’s a reason the MAHA movement caught fire as social-media use escalated. “Marketers will tell you this,” Kass writes: “When you are trying to shift culture, seek out the influencers.”

Illustration by Lucas Burtin

One thing that Big Food, and now MAHA moms, understands is that what we see fundamentally affects our attitudes about what we eat. In 2010, the same year that the Obamas were hustling to pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, two software engineers debuted a photo-sharing app that they named Instagram, unwittingly ushering in a new hyper-visual food era of “serial virality,” as Tandoh puts it. Three years later, when the French pastry chef Dominique Ansel debuted the cronut (a hybrid of French patisserie and American deep fat frying), Instagram had 100 million users, many of whom responded to photos of his concoction with ravenous abandon. “People just shared the cronut, a platonic torus of golden dough with a sugar-salt-fat ratio to please the gods,” Tandoh writes. “Instead of spreading person to person through word of mouth, it spread exponentially, like a contagion.”

The cronut wasn’t remotely healthy, but it was totemic of food trends in the 2010s, as community bonding through photo sharing took off. While the Affordable Care Act fueled attacks on Democrats as the party of Big Health Care, an alternative subculture was gaining momentum. In September 2008, the Oscar-winning actor Gwyneth Paltrow launched Goop, a newsletter of recipes and recommendations intended to foster—and eventually monetize—a more intimate relationship with her fans.

Paltrow, who had lost her father to cancer, was now the mother of two young children, and believed passionately in the connection between food and health. “I am convinced that by eating biological foods it is possible to avoid the growth of tumors,” she told an Italian newspaper, drawing fierce pushback from doctors and dieticians—but not from her audience. Paltrow seemed to intuit the mood of many women in the aftermath of the Great Recession: their concerns, their exhaustion, their eagerness for an escape from their own cramped kitchens offered by images of delightfully wholesome domesticity. Goop gave an air of both glamour and accessibility to the kind of alternative lifestyle that had previously existed only on the crunchy fringes.

[Read: The baffling rise of Goop]

Since Goop’s debut, the wellness market has ballooned and is now worth more than $6 trillion, with the U.S. making up about a third of that figure. Paltrow’s association of food with health helped instill in people’s minds a connection between what they ate and how they felt. “I would rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can,” she told an interviewer in 2011. And mothers were especially vulnerable to this messaging. We worry endlessly; we (traditionally) manage doctor appointments and household budgets, to the tune of an estimated $2 trillion a year in America.

Over the course of the 2010s, even as the Alice Waters–inspired farm-to-table cause of the 1980s was enjoying a boost from Pollan and company, a different cottage industry of food and wellness advocates gained influence online. It tapped into valid concerns about health in America, while also hyping fearful ideas about a contaminated state of modernity (ridden with parasites, carcinogens, and GMOs, as well as vaccines and prescription drugs). Zen Honeycutt, a pro-organic-farming and anti-vaccine activist—now one of many mom acolytes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—founded the pressure group Moms Across America in 2012. “We, the mothers who buy 85% of the food and we women who make 90% of household purchasing decisions, have the power to shift the marketplace and protect our people and the planet,” the group’s website proclaims.

In 2020, amid the anxiety and embattled politics of the pandemic, the 21st century’s wellness fads, paranoid tendencies, and regressive gender dynamics consolidated. The horseshoe gap between leftist naturopaths and libertarian farmsteaders began to close, enabled by health influencers, podcasters, and the cheap thrill of algorithmic engagement. Today, the people most likely to be advocating online for slow food are homesteaders and tradwives, canny content creators who post reels of themselves churning butter and pulling dirt-dusted produce out of the soil.

Yet you don’t have to be a homesteader to be anxious about the food systems and environments that your children grow up in. Many of us parents have been buying organic and baking from scratch and trying to get creamed spinach off upholstery since our kids were born. We give them whisks and make cooking time part of family time, and do our best to serve them fresh, colorful meals. Though we may rarely live up to Waters’s edict about lovely food preparation and presentation—“Beauty is a language of care,” as she writes in her new book, A School Lunch Revolution—there’s always the joy of messy participation.

What few of us have is the tradwife’s luxury of retreating to the Instagrammed home, of opting out of an external reality where food conglomerates go unchecked and food deserts unchanged. “Don’t overcomplicate it,” the homesteader known online as Greenview Farms posted this summer, in text overlaying a video of a sunset. “Just marry your best friend, have his babies, spend your days on the land, plant a garden, get a few chickens and a cow, and live a simple life.” (This surfaced in my feed, shared approvingly by a distant relative, a woman who—for the record—works in finance.)

[Read: The wellness women are on the march]

If you overlook the very real public-health ramifications of vaccine hesitancy and raw milk, the rise of the MAHA movement might offer some promise. Trump “sounds just like me when he talks!” Marion Nestle exclaimed back in February, laughing at the absurdity of a hard-core McDonald’s eater railing against “the industrial food complex.” RFK Jr. and his merry band of mothers have, if nothing else, made the importance of good food in encouraging good health more prominent in our culture, and more bipartisan.

But unlike, say, Michelle Obama, MAHA proselytizers simply want moms to take on more responsibility, turning what should be a multifaceted effort into an atomized, individualistic one. The onus isn’t on the administration to regulate food companies or restrict marketing to children. It is on mothers to obsess over what their families are eating.

[Olga Khazan: Doomed to be a tradwife]

The irony is that plenty of parents who don’t dream of returning to the land are already on board for back-to-basics meals, made as manageable as possible. The Instagram account for Feeding Littles, which gives guidance on how to raise “adventurous, intuitive eaters,” has 1.9 million followers. The most popular Substack newsletter under the category of food and drink is titled “What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking”; it dishes out quick, practical recipes oriented toward exhausted parents and has more than half a million subscribers. We care not just because we’re fixated on health, or on our own homes. We’re also reminding ourselves, and showing our kids, that eating is more than a solo need; it’s a communal enterprise, one that thrives on dealing as carefully and fairly with food resources as we can. “You eat. Willingly or not you participate in the environment of food choice,” Nestle writes toward the end of her new book. “The choices you make about food are as much about the kind of world you want to live in as they are about what to have for lunch.”

This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline “What’s for Dinner, Mom?”

President Piggy

2025-11-20T10:17:00-05:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

The roughly six months that have made up November this year have—it’s fair to say—not been a high point for women, journalism, women in journalism, women with jobs, or anyone following the news.

A quick recap: On Friday, Donald Trump said to a reporter on Air Force One, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy,” when she tried to complete the most basic requirement of her job by asking a question. Earlier this week, when a reporter at the White House asked Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, about the determination by U.S. intelligence that he was complicit in the killing of a Washington Post journalist—a finding that bin Salman has denied—Trump viciously scolded her for her “horrible, insubordinate” question. On the flip side, a reporter, doing herself zero favors in the take-me-seriously department, published an excerpt from her memoir—in which she describes her love for a man she calls the “Politician” (clearly the much older Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), whom she’d ostensibly been profiling—after which one of the reporter’s (also much older) exes piled on with claims of his own.

Somehow, it all feels connected: the denigration of professionals doing their job, the fetishization of young women, the older men’s blindness to their own abuse of power. I’ve felt, consuming the news with no little amount of nausea these past few weeks, like we’re revisiting the same characters over and over, with no consequences and no forward momentum. A month or so ago—you may remember—the political commentator Helen Andrews published an essay for Compact magazine titled “The Great Feminization,” arguing at length that the defenestration of Larry Summers as president of Harvard in 2006, after he suggested that women had less natural aptitude for math and science than men, was the catastrophic and unjust work of a feminized woke mob, proof of how unreasonable and vindictive women can be when you give us any power. But then, here came Summers again, in the Epstein email cache released last week by the House Oversight Committee, quizzing one of the 21st century’s most notorious sex criminals for advice on how to get “horizontal” with an economist who was looking for a mentor, and joking about how women are so dumb that we didn’t even understand his brilliant joke about how dumb we are.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]

And still, it wasn’t over. Because here comes a New York Times podcast briefly titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” (Not yet, but we do have several full ruination weeks left before the holidays.) And here comes Jeffrey Epstein again, sending apparently infinite ungrammatical, innuendo-filled emails to members of the Davos elite, and composing bizarre notes to himself about whether skin conveys thought. Here’s the manosphere hate preacher Andrew Tate, a man who has been charged with sex crimes (Tate has denied wrongdoing), and who is my personal least favorite of all the misogynist bobbleheads, having his confiscated personal devices returned to him by U.S. Customs and Border Protection after the intervention of Paul Ingrassia, who—it’s hard to keep track!—was previously accused of canceling a colleague’s hotel reservation so that she’d be forced to share a room with him. (Ingrassia’s attorney disputed the allegations.)

And here’s Olivia Nuzzi, being portrayed in The New York Times as a tragic Malibu Ophelia, in a profile in thrall to her excuses for having engaged in a romantic relationship with a married, elderly conspiracy theorist who may finally soon realize his apparent dream of making measles in the U.S. endemic again, and whose legacy will be measured in child death. Here’s Cheryl Hines, the conspiracy theorist’s wife, sharing a stage at an anti-vaxxer conference with Russell Brand, an alleged rapist. (Brand has denied being a rapist.) Here’s Keith Olbermann—it’s been a while, in fairness—popping up to claim that, yes, he did pay for Nuzzi’s jewelry and “writing studio” while she was barely an adult and Olbermann was a middle-aged TV host, but that he was justified in doing so because, according to him, they were in a four-year relationship and he was making a lot of money at the time.

A common thread weaves through all of these stories, these outbursts, these leaked emails and petulant tantrums and collusions and cursed blogs. Some men, possibly many men, have always believed that women are simply not their equal. Some women have believed or internalized this idea, too: that women can and should be fetishized, sexualized, domesticized, but not respected. In the recent past, as women gained rights and men seemed to gain enlightenment, the public tended to frown on these beliefs, which is why all the jokes about teenagers in Epstein’s birthday book were supposed to be private, and why Summers concluded an observation to Epstein about men who “hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank” with the all-caps qualifier “DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.” The impulse to dehumanize women used to be something that people had to hide. (In her recent memoir, Virginia Roberts Giuffre—who died by suicide earlier this year, and who alleged that Epstein had trafficked her to many rich and powerful men—noted that Epstein also used to say that a woman’s primary value was being “a life-support system for a vagina.”)

[Read: The dumb truth at the heart of the Epstein scandal]

What’s changed is Donald Trump. In the decade since he became the singular influence on American politics, he has completely and thoroughly dispensed with concepts of shame, of decency, of equality. He has proved himself time and again to be entirely self-seeking, totally amoral, cruel by nature, and impossibly fragile. And the rewards he’s gained in the process have emboldened others to be just as unabashedly themselves as he is.

It stands to reason, too, that journalists—the people whose job it is to consistently challenge power—have provoked such great ire from this administration. Highlight reels of the president insulting female reporters have gone viral over the past few days. When the White House press secretary responds to a reporter’s question with “Your mom,” it’s a signal that the decay has spread. When men direct particularly humiliating and degrading treatment at women, it is because of the “psychic threat,” as the philosopher Kate Manne once put it, that these women who question male authority pose.

It’s exhausting. It’s enraging. The past decade has been a gloomy lesson in how limited a proportion of men actually see women as equal human beings. The fact that many men believe they no longer even have to pretend to respect women in order to participate in public life makes it unlikely that anything will change anytime soon. The fish rots from the head. The pig is in the Oval Office.

All’s Fair Is an Atrocity

2025-11-08T08:39:00-05:00

The beauty writer Jessica DeFino refers often to the “mirror world” inside our phone, the uncanny, glistening selfieverse that’s also become more real for many of its devotees than the lumpy, blotchy meatspace where the rest of us live. I thought about the mirror world while watching All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s new creative product—I can’t call it a television show, because it isn’t one. Rather, it’s Instagram Reels at episode length, 45-minute collections of bedazzled moving images, targeted at the idly scrolling second-screen viewer. Scenes pass quickly, as if to emulate the true feed experience: Here’s a private jet, swaddled in ultra-feminine bouclé; here’s a ring, its diamond as big as a grape, slipped gently onto a finger with a two-inch acrylic talon; here’s lunch, three lavishly adorned bites of salad; here’s the face you know better than your own after two decades of overexposure, poreless and glazed and unmistakably Kim Kardashian, with arachnid eyelashes and lips so pillowy that you could fall asleep on them. If you’re not already on your phone, you may as well be.

All’s Fair is technically a drama on Hulu about divorce lawyers, but only in the sense that someone needed something to tie all of these visuals together. Scenes start, jarringly, without introduction or fanfare, as though we’ve been vaulted into the action; the plot resists all attempts by the viewer to impose any kind of order. But: 10 years ago, infuriated by how sexist and stuffy their law firm was (this was, mark you, a good two years into the Lean In girlboss tote-bag-feminism era), and by how the partners at their firm refused to see the potential of divorce law (I laughed into my hand), three trailblazing legal eagles named Allura Grant (played by Kardashian), Emerald Greene (Niecy Nash-Betts), and Liberty Ronson (Naomi Watts, regretfully) left to start their own firm. Flash forward to the present day, and their dream is fully realized: Allura drives a Bentley to her womb-like office (the curved hallways resemble nothing so much as vaginal canals), every partner meeting comes with champagne, and practicing law apparently consists of walking into a room and declaring, “Ladies!!!!,” as though you’re kicking off an inexhaustible bachelorette group chat. (The New York Times felt obliged to ask this week whether women ruined the workplace; All’s Fair says: “You betcha.”)

[Read: No, women aren’t the problem]

This summary is basically it. There are subplots involving Allura’s marriage to an NFL player 10 years her junior, and the firm’s antagonist, a vicious rival lawyer named Carrington Lane (Sarah Paulson, chewing scenery so aggressively that she must still have splinters in her teeth). Each episode has a few cameos from actors who I can only hope were paid unspeakable amounts to play clients: Grace Gummer as an abused wife; Elizabeth Berkley as a gaslighted wife; Jessica Simpson, covered in facial prosthetics, as a trophy wife coerced into getting botched plastic surgery. The writing suggests that ChatGPT was asked to emulate Fifty Shades’ E. L. James, and however cringeworthy and brand-name-peppered that sounds, I can promise you it’s so much worse. “From cocktails to cock rings in one 24-hour period,” Watts’s Liberty says at the end of the first episode. “God, I love my job.” Now that’s acting.

The reviews of All’s Fair have been so uniformly dire that the show has emerged, paradoxically, as a must-watch. I can only assume that this is exactly what Murphy and his co-creators—including the playwright and two-time Pulitzer finalist Jon Robin Baitz—were going for. You simply can’t make something this bad without intention, even if the intention is just to be widely memed each week via Evan Ross Katz’s Instagram account. The performances are wildly disparate: Paulson’s key is psychotic operatic, Glenn Close’s (she plays the mentor figure Dina Standish) is animated to excess, Nash-Betts’s is sitcom charming, and Kardashian’s is Days of Our Lives perfume ad. I don’t mean to malign Kardashian—whose character seems very sweet on the show—but her particular art form works only in the hyper-specific world of heavily edited images. On Instagram, and even on her reality show, Kardashian comes across as thrillingly impervious, wearing impassivity like body armor and putting her body and face through Olympian ordeals to draw our collective gaze. On scripted television, she’s much more vulnerable to someone else’s camera angles, and to a genre that rewards expression, not provocative blankness.

[Read: Reclaim imperfect faces]

Watching the show, you may have questions. Such as: Does this portend the end of culture as we know it? and Is the scene where the lawyers all talk about vaginal filler made of salmon sperm critiquing the absurdity of late-capitalist beauty culture or endorsing it? My question was: What does Ryan Murphy really think about women? He’s spent much of his career portraying us as grotesques and static archetypes—divas, witches, den mothers, monsters—in shows The New Yorker has described as “cynical hits.” The first five seasons of American Horror Story featured not a single female director; All’s Fair is a drama co-created by three men about a supposed feminist wonderland. Is this show written for women? Or, as seems more likely to me, are we being pandered to in plain sight—patronized, diminished, and fed designer-label eye candy and weak-sauce revenge plots by someone who recently noticed Selling Sunset at the top of Netflix’s most-watched list? It’s easy to absorb endless amounts of branded pap when you’re on your phone. The experience of being bombarded with shoe-closet-makeover reels and deep-plane-facelift infomercials from Miami plastic surgeons is as normal there as breathing. It’s harder to take on television. It seems much more obvious, somehow—all the ways we’re being pacified and manipulated to consume, to desire, to disassociate.

No, Women Aren’t the Problem

2025-11-05T10:09:00-05:00

Helen Andrews’s essay “The Great F eminization” reached my feed on the same day that photos spread of the East Wing of the White House—the space traditionally reserved for the first lady and her staff—reduced to rubble. The spectacle was almost too on the nose: Here was the nexus of women’s (limited) history within the executive branch, once home to Jacqueline Kennedy’s Rose Garden and Laura Bush’s restored movie theater, now totally demolished. Donald Trump has made clear his wishes to put a new ballroom in the East Wing’s place. But his planned additions to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue also include the installation of an Ultimate Fighting Championship octagon for America’s 250th birthday celebration. (The former UFC star Conor McGregor, an Irishman whose Wikipedia subsection for “Rape and Sexual Assault Cases” is 982 words long, was personally hosted by the president in the Oval Office in March.)

So … about that great feminization. Andrews’s thesis, published by the online magazine Compact, is that everything wrong with institutions in America comes down to the growing influence of women. Women, she argues, have implemented “wokeness” across the land, and her evidence for this is the outrage over Larry Summers’s comments about whether women might have less natural aptitude for math and science, which led to his resignation as president of Harvard University in 2006. Her 3,400-word essay seems to assert that wokeness is inherently feminine, prizing “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” and that women—with all our feelings and conflict avoidance—are ruining the nation’s most fundamental institutions. If women continue to make inroads, she argues, adding to the ranks of doctors and lawyers and judges and businesspeople, then the “eruption of insanity in 2020”—by which she means the mass protests and efforts to address racial inequality following the death of George Floyd—“was just a small taste of what the future holds.”

“The Great Feminization” catastrophizes wildly about the future, presumably because what’s happening in the present utterly undermines its central thesis. Eighty-five percent of Republicans in Congress are men. From January to August, an estimated 212,000 women left the American workforce while 44,000 men gained jobs; Black women are being disproportionately—perhaps even intentionally—excised from the federal workforce. According to a new assessment from The Ankler, only four of the top 100 American films in 2025 so far have been directed or co-directed by women. Democrats are currently so desperate for strong male role models to promote as candidates that they’re all tangled up over whether a burly Maine oysterman’s Nazi-symbol tattoo is defensible. As for emotions run wild, Cabinet members brawl in public like rhesus monkeys on HGH: In September, the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, reportedly told the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, Bill Pulte, “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face,” because Bessent heard Pulte had been talking to Trump about him behind his back. (The anecdote slightly refutes Andrews’s argument that men “wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.”) Also in September, the “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth, summoned all of the nation’s generals to Washington and gave an erratic lecture about facial hair and implementing a “male standard” for combat roles. In April, a Fox News chyron calle d Trump’s tariffs “manly” as a roundtable discussed whether they might even be able to reverse the crisis of masculinity, presumably by making soybean farmers so poor that they have to join ICE for the signing bonus.

[Sophie Gilbert: Misogyny comes roaring back]

With respect to Andrews, in the midst of all this—the testosterone-addled executive branch, but also the supplicant legislative and compromised judiciary that are bending to its will—her essay comes across as someone watching a tsunami roll over a coastal city and complaining about trash collection. Maybe this particular era, with masked officers (overwhelmingly male, at least as far as anyone can tell from bystander footage) deploying tear gas as families were assembling for a Halloween parade, isn’t the optimal moment to do a head count of the number of women at The New York Times and extrapolate end times for the Age of Reason.

To me, it’s much easier to see that what’s really wrong with American culture right now is the slow-drip infusion of toxic masculinity it’s been receiving since 2016, the year of the “Grab ’em by the pussy” leak, and “Trump that bitch,” and “Such a nasty woman.” It certainly requires less cherry-picking, less abstract philosophical hand-wringing. The political reality in 2025 is that our government is as stereotypically masculine as a dick-measuring contest in a weight room, as in thrall to performative aggression as an illegal cage fight. Outside of politics, in what stands for culture, America’s favorite national pastimes seem to be gambling, weed, gaming, and Joe Rogan. Women still read more than men do, but inevitably get scolded when they do—by Compact magazine!—for not giving enough attention to the “vanishing white male writer.”

The fact that Andrews’s arguments are selective and not backed up by evidence hasn’t bothered her primary audience, whom she must have known would jump on any opportunity to blame American decline on women. More than 200,000 people have watched the original speech that inspired the essay, “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture,” which Andrews delivered at the National Conservatism Conference on September 2. (For what it’s worth, 89 percent of its speakers were men.) On X, people who’d only recently been calling for the Cracker Barrel CEO to be fired after the chain’s attempt at a modernized logo rebrand celebrated Andrews’s piece, with its bold acknowledgment that men are predisposed to “reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace.” (Cancellation is apparently feminine—just don’t tell that to J. D. Vance, who urged citizens to try to get people fired for criticizing Charlie Kirk after his assassination.) There was particular approval for Andrews’s zingy observation that “women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten.” Which, to me at least, actually makes sense! Because one has historically incubated rape culture and hierarchical violence while the other tries to foster independent thinking and self-expression via finger paints.

Much of “The Great Feminization” is drawn from an anonymous 2019 blog post theorizing that the increased participation of women in public life had led to an insufferable “shift away from reason and logic in American public discourse.” Andrews is particularly worried about the law: “All of us depend on a functioning legal system,” she writes, “and to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” I’d counter that it might, but we likely won’t find out, given that it seems fated not to s urvive past next month what with the pardoning of people financially involved with the Trump family, the targeting of political enemies with amateurish lawsuits, and the extrajudicial killings of dozens of people off the coast of Venezuela. Maybe a “feminized legal system,” as Andrews writes, would end up prioritizing squishy empathy over starchy precedent, but it’s hard to make that argument when precedent itself has already been so thoroughly steamrolled.

Andrews wants us to know that she’s not opposed to women, per se. “The problem,” she writes, “is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.”

This is an assertion so bold and so unproven that it made me gasp. For thousands of years, men in power have been responsible for catastrophe after genocide after unnatural disaster. If you wanted, you could blame masculinity for these atrocities and deduce in turn that perhaps prizing fundamental rights and the inviolable humanity of other people isn’t such a terrible concept. Andrews doesn’t propose any policy suggestions or alternatives to the Great Feminization, presumably because, as Matthew Yglesias has written, the only viable solution would be “widespread de-feminization, which would require massive cultural change and the rebirth of an incredibly oppressive and constraining set of social norms. And neither she nor her allies are willing to actually make the case for it, because it would be horrifying.” (Nevertheless, Project 2025 is doing its best.)

Better, then, to plant the seed in people’s minds for what would really be necessary rather than say it directly and face the consequences. She might call that kind of aversion stereotypically feminine. I’d call it craven.

The Movies That Capture Women’s Deepest Fears

2025-10-30T12:35:00-04:00

Stephen King has never shied away from talking about how much he dislikes Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, King’s novel about a writer possessed by malevolent forces at an isolated hotel in the Colorado mountains. Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation, King has argued, is “totally empty” and a “great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside,” a film much more interested in the conventional awfulness of a man terrorizing his wife and child than in the uncanny suspense of the book. “Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel,” King explained to Playboy in 1983. “So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones.” The movie, he insisted, “never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.”

With the greatest respect for an author who’s had to see someone else’s vision of his work become culturally indelible, I think King is wrong. But he’s wrong in a fascinating way—one that speaks to how little ownership artists have over their work as it goes out to the broader culture. Kubrick’s The Shining isn’t a domestic tragedy. It’s a domestic horror. The movie’s premise is that a woman and her young child are trapped in a remote setting with a man who, from the outset, seems to resent and even hate them; their forced confinement together over a long winter puts the woman and child in mortal danger. The Overlook Hotel is, yes, sinister and even demonic, taunting Jack Torrance with bizarre visions that Kubrick manipulates to create a mounting sense of dread. But Jack is also a man who, before he ever sets foot inside the property, once dislocated his son’s shoulder in a drunken rage; his wife’s hands visibly shake every time she lights a cigarette. Prolonged isolation simply unleashes Jack from the moral strictures holding him back.

How much The Shining is intended to be an allegory about domestic violence is unclear, but, as Eleanor Johnson points out in her convincing and illuminating new book, Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968–1980), it doesn’t actually matter. In feeling out what really scares us, horror often connects with its cultural moment by accident, she contends; art forms like it help an audience process social anxieties “long before a culture is fully prepared to grapple with those problems and traumas in mainstream public discourse.” And because it triggers an intensely physical response and denies viewers the catharsis of a happy ending, horror imprints its imagery and ideas on us long after the movie ends.

In the 1950s, horror movies about giant sentient blobs and gruesomely distorted creatures channeled anxieties about nuclear radiation; a spate of slasher movies during the ’70s and ’80s reflected fear about rising crime rates and serial killers. And a handful of standout horror films from around the ’70s, Johnson argues, specifically mirrored and even accelerated feminist flash points at a moment when public opinion regarding the roles and rights of women was wildly in flux. Rosemary’s Baby, she writes, made literal the terror of reproductive violence and coercion; The Stepford Wives considered the cost of women being prized only as housekeeping drones and sexual objects; The Shining immersed viewers in an environment of stark marital terror.

The biggest accomplishment of these films and others like them, Johnson contends, is that they made women’s suffering inescapable, particularly for people who were inclined to look away. Intentionally or not—the main works she discusses were all directed by men—these movies tricked viewers into absorbing much more than just schlocky thrills. Scream With Me makes the case that horror has long been aligned with American feminism on some of its most pressing questions, and that it continues even now to refract women’s experiences through a lens that can make them seem wholly monstrous.

The most pivotal scene in Rosemary’s Baby disguises a supernatural atrocity as a much more familiar one: About a third of the way through, Rosemary (played by Mia Farrow) wakes up in her sunny yellow bedroom, groggy and apparently hungover, as her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), unceremoniously shoves her, then suggests she go fix his breakfast. Sitting up, Rosemary realizes her back and sides are covered in bright red scratches. Guy confesses to having had sex with her while she was passed out. Rosemary is stunned. “It was kind of fun in a necrophile sort of way,” Guy says, shrugging. “I dreamed someone was raping me,” Rosemary says, plaintively, rubbing her eyes. “I don’t know, someone inhuman.” “Thanks a lot,” Guy shouts from the bathroom. (Viewers by this point have watched her—drugged, terrified, and surrounded by onlookers—be forcibly held down and assaulted by a sinister figure with glowing red eyes.)

According to the movie, closely adapted by Roman Polanski from a 1967 novel by Ira Levin, Guy has colluded with the neighbors to have Rosemary raped and impregnated by Satan. Rosemary will unwittingly give birth to the Antichrist; as a trade, Guy’s woeful acting career will take off. This is all in the script. The subtext, though, is that Rosemary’s marriage is fundamentally abusive, and her husband is subjecting her to coercive and reproductive control. “Whatever supernatural horrors may arise in this film, there is an acutely interpersonal domestic horror at its heart,” Johnson writes. “Guy is a betrayer, a liar, and the facilitator of acute sexual violence toward his own wife.” In the very first scene of the film, Guy attempts to lie to the couple’s real-estate agent about his career, before Rosemary twice interjects with the truth. Innocent to a fault, Rosemary doesn’t see the resentment clouding her husband’s face. But the moment sets up a particular dynamic: Guy despises his wife for refusing to let him obscure his failures, and he will eventually punish her for it.

[Read: The remarkable rise of the feminist dystopia]

Levin intentionally set Rosemary’s Baby in 1965, the year he began writing it, out of a desire to ground it as much in realism as possible. He was struck, he noted in 2003, by the suspenseful potential of pregnancy as a condition, particularly “if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine!” Polanski—who, a decade later, would plead guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor—makes clear all the ways in which Rosemary has been cornered: Following their casual discussion of marital rape, Guy leaves, and Rosemary is shown sitting at her kitchen table, tiny in a white robe and fluffy slippers, framed between two forbidding doorways as if the apartment is already encroaching on her. As Rosemary’s pregnancy develops, she suffers excruciating pain and becomes pallid and frail. When she breaks down in tears at a party, her friends tell her that this kind of suffering isn’t normal—that she needs to get a second opinion. “I won’t have an abortion,” Rosemary says, a statement that nevertheless raises the prospect for the audience that her survival might require one.

Johnson contrasts her analysis of Rosemary’s Baby with attitudes toward reproductive choice in the late 1960s. In 1968, when the movie was released, abortion was still illegal in New York (where the story is set), but a growing number of activists were campaigning to decriminalize it. According to one estimate, more than 800,000 illegal abortions were performed in the United States in 1967, a statistic that can feel abstract in its extremity. Rosemary’s suffering, though, is as plain as it is terrifying: Because of the movie’s success, Johnson writes, “tens of millions of Americans—male and female alike—watched Rosemary get raped and forced to maintain a pregnancy at extremely high physical and psychological cost.” What could they have taken away from the movie, she asks, other than a visceral awareness of the horror of an unwanted or coerced pregnancy?

Scream With Me expands on this argument with its analysis of The Exorcist, a movie that Johnson interprets as a parable about physical abuse; its male demon torments and beats a single working mother and her child. The movie was released in 1973, as the first shelters for battered women were opening in the U.S.; by 1978, according to Johnson, more than 150 were open nationwide, signaling a sea change regarding what had previously been thought of as a private matter between husband and wife. And 1976’s The Omen, she notes, doubles down on the insight of Rosemary’s Baby by acknowledging that even a loving husband and father could endanger his wife by “denying her reproductive agency,” in this case by allowing doctors to switch out Katherine Thorn’s stillborn baby for the orphaned—and, it turns out, demonic—son of a woman who died in childbirth. The Omen is extremely hammy, with its clunky synthesized score and melodramatic shifts between cameras, but its point is nevertheless clear: None of this should have been allowed to happen.

Scream With Me reads urgently in other ways: Johnson’s chapter on 1975’s The Stepford Wives refers directly to the ongoing fetishization of domestic life on social media 50 years later. Tradwife culture, she writes, celebrates “female sexual pliancy and physical beauty as things that married women owe to their men, as a constitutive part of their contribution to the functioning of the family.” The roboticized wives of Stepford, soft-spoken and be-aproned, devoted to their baking and their homes, would have done numbers on TikTok; the husbands, only too eager to trade their free-thinking partners for obsequious sex dolls, would absolutely be drawn to the one-sided erotic subservience of, say, ChatGPT. The technology imagined in The Stepford Wives—based, again, on a novel by Levin—hasn’t yet come to pass, but the desires it gratifies on-screen are affirmed freely on all of our modern platforms.

[Read: When domestic life is like a horror story]

One of Johnson’s timeliest essays, though, is about Alien, Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror about an extraterrestrial creature that forcibly impregnates a member of a commercial hauling ship, killing him when the alien fetus bursts out of his abdomen. The movie, Johnson writes, forces male viewers into an empathetic thought experiment; within its cinematic boundaries, they, too, can be assaulted, impregnated, and killed during “birth.” It does this while creating a fictional universe that’s suffused with metaphors for fecundity: The ship’s computer is named “Mother,” the crew sleep in stasis pods that look a lot like amniotic sacs. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the warrant officer who eventually battles the alien, also came along at a moment when America was fiercely divided over whether to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, Johnson writes, a debate that hinged in part on whether women should have an expanded role in the military. Ripley—smart, strong, powerful—suggested that women absolutely could be warriors, and her judgment and pragmatism in Alien serve her infinitely better in the movie than any other qualities could.

Spoiler: America did not, in fact, certify the Equal Rights Amendment as part of the Constitution. Roe v. Wade has been overturned. The number of working mothers ages 25 to 44 with young children dropped, in the first half of this year, to the lowest level in more than three years, in part because of the challenges of combining full-time employment with maintaining a family. In one of her final chapters, Johnson observes how recent horror films such as The First Omen and Immaculate have revisited reproductive-coercion stories through a post-Roe lens. But I’ve been thinking, too, about movies like 2024’s The Front Room, in which Brandy Norwood’s Belinda faces the burden of caring for her husband’s horrifying elderly stepmother while pregnant, or 2025’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, starring Rose Byrne as a mother subsumed with the needs of her sick child. Both seem to be responding to a culture in which women’s caregiving is extracted until nothing is left. They’re domestic horrors about burnout. The message of the genre, though, remains consistent, regardless of plot or theme: The home, the place that women are repeatedly told will reward and sustain them, is not the refuge it’s supposed to be. It may, in fact, be deadly.

The Hard-Won Lessons of Lilith Fair

2025-09-30T12:56:00-04:00

One of the cruelest tricks played on the North American women’s movement is the way the caricatures, over time, have edged out reality: the ritualized bra burnings (never happened), the batik hemp dresses (not since the 1970s), the strictly enforced misandry (only on holidays). With regard to Lilith Fair, the late-’90s touring festival of female artists co-founded by Sarah McLachlan, so many jokes were made about “bi-level” haircuts and juice tents and “Lesbopalooza” that the purpose and power of Lilith have largely been relegated to the archives. “I just recently discovered there was an all-female music festival from 1997 to 1999, and I am shook to my core,” a young woman exclaimed on TikTok two years ago, prompting consternation from Millennial and Gen X elders at the loss of some of our crucial cultural herstory.

All of which makes Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a new Hulu documentary from the director and writer Ally Pankiw, particularly relevant—both as a corrective to the mocking mythology of Lilith, and as a distillation of what women have lost in the decades since. As a 14-year-old in 1997 who stayed up late to tape Paula Cole and Shawn Colvin songs off the one British radio show that sometimes played them, I was probably fated to cry all the way through Lilith Fair, and indeed I did. More than the music or the melancholic nostalgia, though, what felt devastating was the realization of how rare the festival’s sense of collective possibility feels today. “Being there was one of the earliest memories I’ve had of safety,” the actor Dan Levy, a producer on the film, tells the camera. Looking around at the crowds and seeing people smiling and celebrating and being fully themselves “felt like this kind of quiet revolution.”

The concept for Lilith, as McLachlan and her co-founders—her agent, manager, and road manager at the time—make clear, was less ideological than pragmatic. By 1996, McLachlan had released several albums, with 1993’s thoughtful, moody Fumbling Towards Ecstasy marking a breakthrough. But she kept encountering obstacles from the industry, which—despite a wave of new performers in rock, hip-hop, and indie—saw female artists as tokens at best. Radio stations, interviewees in the documentary explain, refused to play two songs by women in a row. Promoters wouldn’t put two women back-to-back on the same bill for fear of looking like they were hosting ladies’ night (or the less charmingly titled “pussy package”). The women who did succeed, as Liz Phair notes, were pitted against one another or publicly dragged by TV and radio hosts for not looking sexy enough. At 19, Jewel recalls, she was asked, “How do you give a blow job with those teeth?” Phair was asked to pose for a magazine wearing nothing but men’s pants and suspenders. “Everything that I was good at, that I was skilled at, that I’d worked my entire life for, boiled down to ‘Do her tits look good?’” she says.

[Read: What porn taught a generation of women]

McLachlan, lonely on the road, and disenchanted after her new American record label suggested that she fix her hair and lose five pounds, had the idea to tour with some other women, partly to prove promoters wrong, and partly out of the desire to have more women in her life. (Her co-founders were all men, and all three were instrumental in helping establish Lilith.) Touring festivals at the time were popular, lucrative, and impossibly male—Lollapalooza’s 1996 Los Angeles lineup featured more martial arts–performing monks than it did women. McLachlan suggested a tour in which she shared billing with other female artists, doing a test run of sold-out shows with Paula Cole, Patti Smith, Lisa Loeb, and Aimee Mann in 1996. Selling people on the concept wasn’t easy. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Loeb describes herself thinking when she was invited to join the tour. Having fought for much of their career to be seen as artists, not women artists, many were reluctant to silo themselves intentionally.

But from the outset, Lilith felt different to its performers. The festival was named after a figure from Jewish folklore, Adam’s first wife, who left the Garden of Eden because he refused to treat her as an equal. It was a demonstration not of secondary status, but of strength. The first show, at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington State, drew 15,000 people. The bulk of the next 36 shows sold out. There were female crew members, engineers, sound technicians—an “incubation of female talent,” as Catherine Runnals, the production coordinator, puts it. And the crew had extended health-care plans, which for many was unprecedented. (Dan Fraser, McLachlan’s former road manager and one of Lilith’s co-founders, recounts how “these grown men would be crying because they could send their kids to the dentist.”) The artists, more accustomed to the isolation of touring, quickly formed a community, practicing harmonies backstage for each show’s closing sing-along. “Whoa, is this heaven?” Emmylou Harris remembers thinking. “I think Lilith Fair is a symbol of hope,” Paula Cole says in an archival interview from before her set one day. “Not only is there a tremendous amount of support, but I think this is just a metaphor for what could be in other areas of life.”

Lilith Fair is partly adapted from an excellent 2019 Vanity Fair oral history of the festival by Jessica Hopper, Sasha Geffen, and Jenn Pelly, but the documentary has the benefit of being able to draw on raw footage of Lilith’s prize asset: its audience. “One of the things I was criticized the most for in my music was sincerity, which was kind of funny,” Jewel explains, over footage of her performing the painfully vulnerable “Near You Always” at the Gorge. “But I have to say that when I sang for Lilith, what I noticed in the audience was unabashed sincerity.” Pankiw cuts to scenes of young women watching and smiling with the unselfconscious radiance of oil-painted saints. But there are also plenty of men in the audience, and attendees wear not just tie-dye, but also Adidas and Gold’s Gym T-shirts. The idea propagated by Saturday Night Live skits and sitcom one-liners that Lilith Fair was a misandrist showcase for joyless, hormonal angst was totally alien to accounts of what being there actually felt like.

Lilith’s success spawned a backlash, which was inevitable, and the whiteness of its 1997 lineup led to valid criticism of its lack of inclusivity. In the Vanity Fair oral history, McLachlan argues that this wasn’t due to lack of trying to book a more diverse slate of artists; many people she’d asked to join turned her down. In the festival’s second and third years, it was easier to sell people on what Lilith represented: not just a community and a more nurturing touring environment, but an alliance. The music industry had doubted that women could have meaningful commercial clout, and Lilith Fair proved them wrong. (Erykah Badu notes that Lilith inspired her to establish the touring Sugar Water Festival in 2005.) It demonstrated the collective potency of women as artists, and as leaders. “We are businesswomen,” Sheryl Crow remembers realizing during the tour. “We are women who run our tours. We are women that make the creative decisions. We are women that set the tone for how everyone gets treated on the road.”

Watching from the perspective of 2025 is a discombobulating experience. Women have come to dominate popular music in the years since—the Eras and Cowboy Carter tours are maybe the only recent cultural phenomena to have conjured a similar camaraderie and delight as Lilith Fair—but they don’t tend to project as much of a shared sense of community or political intention. A 2010 attempt to revive the festival failed because, as the music critic Ann Powers theorized, “on the one hand, there are many, many more visible women at the top of the mainstream pop scene. On the other hand, I think it’s arguable that there’s less consciousness.” The earnestness and sincerity that characterized so much music from the late ’90s were overtaken by the sneering rage of nu metal. (“Take your Birkenstocks and stick them up your fuckin’ ass,” Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst screams in footage from Woodstock ’99, where women reported being harassed, groped, and sexually assaulted.) Today, the prevailing modes of popular culture are detached self-awareness and winking irony, defensive attitudes that hint at a feeling of helplessness—that nothing one does will really make a difference.

[Read: HBO’s Woodstock ’99 documentary is a dark warning]

McLachlan says she has no interest in bringing back Lilith Fair, possibly because the 2010 failure was so bruising, but also because she clearly sees it as a group effort that someone else would need to steward to make it both relevant and significant in the 2020s. But it’s hard, watching Lilith Fair, not to yearn for some of what the festival conjured at the end of the 20th century: a sense of shared strength and communal agency. “These women can sell fucking tickets, and we proved that,” Marty Diamond, McLachlan’s former agent and Lilith co-founder, says at the end of the documentary. But what the festival was really about, he argues, was “the power of music. The power of women. And the power of purpose. But nothing lasts forever.”

Illustration sources: Tim Mosenfelder / Getty; Steve Granitz / WireImage / Getty; David Bergman / Getty; Bill Tompkins / Getty; Joe Fudge / AP.

A Bleak World Without Women

2025-09-17T10:17:00-04:00

In Mare of Easttown, the previous Delaware County–set series that Brad Ingelsby made for HBO, solving crimes was women’s work: Kate Winslet’s blowsy, grimacing turn as a detective in a Philly exurb was thrilling to watch not just for her flattened vowels and bone-deep sighs but for her character’s authority. Looking more exhausted than any TV character in recent memory, Mare investigated murders, raised her grandson, and presided over her community with questionable ethics but unfailing care. The show’s local specificity—Mare scarfed down hoagies and found a crucial clue next to a treasured piece of Eagles memorabilia—earned its own Saturday Night Live parody (“Your pop was a cop, and your pop-pop was a cop, and your pop-pop’s pop-pop was the original Phillie Phanatic”). But the show’s matriarchal power structures, which involved women like Mare forever cleaning up the messes their male relatives made, were carefully shaded.

Task, Ingelsby’s new HBO miniseries, has a dynamic that’s almost exactly inverted. The show is a crime thriller but not a mystery; the question is less about who did what than about who we should really be rooting for. The first episode immediately introduces Tom (played by Mark Ruffalo), a grizzled former Catholic priest turned FBI agent, and Robbie (Tom Pelphrey), a trash collector with a side hustle robbing drug houses by way of documenting their daily routines. Tom wakes alone, prays, struggles through a tedious day, and drinks too much vodka out of a Phillies plastic cup. Robbie cradles his sleeping child; bonds with his best friend, Cliff (Raúl Castillo), during a discussion about dating and intimacy; and then carefully removes his gun from a lockbox in preparation for a violent raid. Task’s juxtaposition of the two men, the cop and the robber, is unsubtle: Tom is withdrawn, and Robbie is affectionate. (Ruffalo is dour and uncharacteristically muted; Pelphrey is hypnotic.) Tom passes out nightly, waking in the morning to see his daughter fleeing on her bike to school so she doesn’t have to interact with him; Robbie tells his kids bedtime stories about dragons and has no qualms expressing love.

[Read: What HBO’s new crime show gets exactly right]

Inevitably, one of Robbie’s invasions goes very wrong, and Tom is assigned to form a task force to investigate. The show’s pace at first is a test of patience—Task parcels out its details, lingering on shots of the birds Tom watches through binoculars, and the endless green of the Pennsylvania woods. Only over the course of several episodes do we quite figure out, say, what happened to Tom’s wife, or why his family has a sentencing hearing coming up, or why Robbie has such a fraught relationship with his niece, the 21-year-old Maeve (Emilia Jones). The show’s world slowly expands; we’re introduced to a biker gang that traffics fentanyl up and down the East Coast, a handful of inexperienced agents and state police officers who get absorbed into Tom’s task force, stray villains with face tattoos, cheerful water-ice vendors. At first, I wondered why Ingelsby, who wrote such compelling women for Mare, was casting them here as ancillary characters at best. But as the show goes on, this absence starts to feel more and more intentional. The world it depicts is one that women simply can’t seem to endure—they get hurt or killed, or they vanish altogether. The bonds in Task are between men and other men, whether the backdrop is a barroom or a church; the loyalties, power structures, rivalries, and affections are all patriarchal. And the consequences, as we get to watch, are monstrous.

Unlike Mare, whose community was cloistered and intimate, Task builds a wider world of dealers, gangsters, and thieves, not always to its benefit. A scene in which a Dominican drug lord opines about racism feels pat, and the bikers never get enough detail of their own to move beyond stereotype, although a moment in which one crime boss gazes mournfully at a commemorative photo album made me wonder which hardened biker took the time to print out all the pictures. Mare had a distinctive sense of humor, with Jean Smart’s Fruit Ninja–obsessed great-grandma and Mare’s deadpan one-liners; the only time I laughed during Task was when one character mulls whether he’s accidentally kidnapped the most depressing man alive. (He has.)

[Read: The real twist of Mare of Easttown]

Still, the show’s insight into institutions—how they function, what they require, what they enforce—is acute, and its action is riveting. Within the FBI, Tom’s boss, Kathleen (Martha Plimpton), is a firebrand with language so coarse that it stops Tom in his tracks, as though she’s absorbed the necessary chauvinistic qualities in order to ascend the career ladder. Tom’s appointees on the task force include Lizzie (Alison Oliver), a state police officer who’s regularly tormented by her fellow cops, and Aleah (Thuso Mbedu), who wins over a suspect in interrogation by sharing awful details of her past. The Dark Hearts biker gang being targeted by Robbie has its own internal code, rigorously enforcing obedience but also offering members kinship, even a warped kind of mentorship. Both organizations, it turns out, contain members who can’t be trusted, although the twists and turns of who’s betraying whom feel less consequential than inexorable.

The choice Task makes to soften Ruffalo’s natural affability and presence in favor of Pelphrey’s Robbie—who transmits anger and despair with palpable, desperate energy—is a fascinating one, requiring humility from one actor and intense commitment from the other. In its final episodes, the show builds to a climax that’s protracted over several episodes, drawing out the series’ ideas about masculinity, rage, and forgiveness. When Tom and Robbie finally meet, in a scene where the dynamics are constantly shifting, their connection feels charged, which it should—Tom, who abandoned the Catholic Church to marry his wife, rejected one fraternal order for the FBI; Robbie is waging a hopeless war against another. Both men seem to feel cursed. But there’s something grimly revelatory about watching all of these different hierarchies collide—so many clenched fists heading toward impact.

Lights Out, With a Whimper

2025-08-15T08:17:51-04:00

Carrie Bradshaw’s last episode of television ended not with a bang but with a flush, which feels appropriate somehow. “Party of One,” the series finale of HBO Max’s And Just Like That, rehashes old patterns for the show’s last hurrah, but no one’s heart seems to really be in it: Miranda tries to adjust to an unexpected pregnancy; Seema wonders if she could be happily partnered without marriage; Charlotte tells Carrie, “I’m so excited to show you my new hallway,” to which Carrie replies, pro forma, “I may be alone for the rest of my life.” The image left in my head, though, is of the toilet bowl being frantically flushed by Charlotte’s art-dealer boss, a man whose private jet can’t spare him from the gastrointestinal Thanksgiving issues of a lactose-intolerant Gen Zer. Humiliation, more than anything else, has been the theme of all three seasons of And Just Like That, a cringe comedy without comedy. (Who among us will ever forget Carrie peeing into a plastic bottle while Miranda got to third base with Che in her kitchen, or Charlotte taking a pratfall onto a Tracey Emin–esque art installation and emerging with a used condom stuck to her face?)

To be fair to the series, which is more than it deserves, Sex and the City was also often about mortification—the indignity of putting yourself out there as a single woman time and time again, only to be rewarded with funky spunk, porn-addicted dates, pregnancy scares, STDs, men who can’t ejaculate without shouting misogynist slurs, envelopes full of cash on the nightstand. When it debuted on HBO in 1998, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King’s show seemed determined to puncture the fantasy of single life in post-feminist Manhattan. “Welcome to the age of un-innocence,” Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie narrated in the pilot. “No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember. Instead we have breakfast at 7 a.m. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible.”

[Read: And Just Like That is a far cry from Sex and the City]

Over the course of six seasons and two movies, the show’s thrillingly cynical core got smothered by cloying commercialism—a fixation on both wide-eyed romance and flamboyant luxury. What stayed consistent, though, was the disgust the show seemed to manifest anytime it was forced to think about the corporeal bodies beneath the characters’ clothes: Carrie’s horror at Miranda’s postpartum nipples and Samantha’s disgust at her unwaxed bikini line, Charlotte’s refusal to look at her own vagina, Anthony’s appalled proclamation—when Samantha returned from Los Angeles approximately three pounds heavier—of “Mother of God, what’s with the gut!”

And Just Like That has been a lot of things since its debut late in 2021: an apologia for the sins of the past, a lookbook, a backdrop for cameos from the two most Machiavellian men on reality television. But it’s consistently been oddly squeamish about both sex and human physicality—almost pathologically so. During the first season, critics winced at the heavy-handed flagellation of the characters for their unconscious bias and uptight middle age; during the second, the show’s lack of purpose and stakes crystallized into excruciating storylines about strap-on sex toys and, in one case, an unsolicited octogenarian dick pic that rudely interrupted a fundraiser with Gloria Steinem. The third season, set in the more genteel location of Carrie’s new Gramercy Park townhouse, seemed nevertheless stuck on the idea that anyone still tuning in must be watching with the sound off, cackling at the visuals of their favorite characters being ritualistically shamed for the crime of aging.

And so: We had not one but two stories about Harry’s penis—first a brief examination of something called “ghost sperm” that troubled Charlotte during sex, followed by a multi-episode storyline about prostate cancer that left Harry impotent and peeing all over his raw-denim jeans. Seema’s armpits occupied a variety of scenes, culminating in the gardener she began dating recommending a crystal deodorant that failed her during a crucial business meeting. Charlotte’s sudden struggle with vertigo left her staggering all over Manhattan like a toddler on a boat. Miranda, cursed on this show like no one else, had sex with someone who turned out to be a virgin nun, accidentally flashed Carrie, became a meme after a disastrous appearance on live television, and eventually found love with a woman who’s strikingly weird about her dogs, even for a Brit.

[Read: We need to talk about Miranda]

And Just Like That, as Jake Nevins wrote in July, “feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves.” The pie shoved in Anthony’s face by his lover, Giuseppe, felt like a neat distillation of how crudely the series seemed to clown its characters, week after week after week. Earlier this year, I wrote about television’s current obsession with extreme wealth, and how shows such as And Just Like That suffer from the diminished stakes that come with easy abundance. When you’re insulated from calamity, maybe, the worst thing that can happen is physical degradation—a reminder that no matter how big your closet, how exclusive your couture, we all share the same basic bodily functions, which can fail and shame us in all the same discomfiting ways. Still, the casual cruelty with which And Just Like That treated its cast’s bodies as punch lines and visual gags seemed to suggest a deeper unease with what it means to age—to be undeniably, messily human.

The show occasionally expressed the same kind of disgust toward poverty, or toward any evidence of how rising inequality in New York has left many people to live. In the finale, Carrie visits her old apartment, now occupied by a jewelry designer named Lisette, and is horrified to see that Lisette has divided the studio into two claustrophobic spaces with a temporary wall, presumably because she can’t afford roughly 600 square feet on the Upper East Side all by herself. The moment reminded me of a plotline in Season 2, in which Miranda went home with a voice actor who was her dream date, only to be repelled by the woman’s cramped space: the cat-litter tray, the unmade bed.

No one wants their fantasies to be punctured so abruptly, and yet both scenes demonstrate how out of touch these characters have become, and how hard it is for us to empathize with them in turn. Anthropological curiosity used to define Carrie’s work as a columnist; now, in her 50s, she’s happier behind the walls of an inward-facing fantasy land, posing for no one in her pre–Gilded Age living room, and turning her romantic misadventures into a god-awfully mawkish historical novel. It’s not the ending I would have chosen, but it sure does make it easier to say goodbye.

Romance On-Screen Has Never Been Colder. Maybe That’s Just Truthful.

2025-07-17T11:54:00-04:00

The first time I watched Too Much, Lena Dunham’s return to scripted television after a seven-year hiatus, it felt impossibly disappointing—visually flat, almost defiantly unfunny, more cringeworthy in its reliance on Anglo-American culture clashes for charm than Mary-Kate and Ashley trying to get a royal guard to crack a smile. The premise: Jess (played by Hacks’ Megan Stalter) is a New Yorker working in advertising production who’s offered the chance to move to London when her relationship catastrophically implodes. (Dunham, as ever daring us to try to like her characters, has Jess, in the first episode, breaking into her ex’s apartment and terrorizing his new influencer girlfriend while brandishing a garden gnome.) Arriving in London, Jess has a chance encounter with Felix (Will Sharpe), a broke musician, in a particularly vile pub toilet. Both are hapless in different but complementary ways—Jess tells Felix how to wash his hands, Felix helps Jess get home when she accidentally orders her Uber to Heathrow.

These are hard times to be a romantic, especially on Netflix. Two years ago, on a New Yorker podcast lamenting the modern state of the rom-com, Alexandra Schwartz noted that the most crucial quality for any romance is this: “You have to believe that these two people want to be together, and you have to buy in.” On this front, Too Much barely even tries. Stalter is wackily endearing as Jess, and Sharpe adds brooding complexity to Felix’s offhand charm. But as screen lovers, the pair have almost negative chemistry, coming together with a shrug and staying together out of what feels like inertia. Initially, this set my teeth on edge—two characters with seemingly little interest in each other being paired off with the chaotic insistence of a child making her soft toys kiss. But the more I’ve come back to the show, the more its slack, unromantic approach to love looks intentional. Jess and Felix couple up not because they’re giddy with feeling, drunk on proximity and intimacy and connection, but because each offers something specific that the other person needs. Too Much is co-produced by Working Title, and the names of its episodes nod to some gooier rom-coms served up by the company in bygone days: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill. But in the place where the show’s heart should be is instead pure pragmatism: This is love for a cold climate.

[Read: The death of the sex scene]

If you compare Too Much with Celine Song’s recent film, Materialists, in which every character sizes up romantic prospects with the agenda of a hiring manager, you can sense a theme. Can we afford to actually fall in love now? In this economy? Dunham presents infatuation as nonsensical, or even destructive: The best episode of Too Much is one that details the breakdown of Jess’s seven-year relationship with Zev (Michael Zegen), a wannabe music writer who appears like a white knight in a bar one night when she’s lost her friends and her pizza (nobly, he secures another slice) and immediately dazzles Jess into submission, charming her family, devising kissing rituals scored to songs, even massaging her grandmother’s feet. Quickly, though, he sours. When she moves in with him, he’s outraged by the fact that so much of her stuff is pink. He sneers at her love for Miley Cyrus power ballads and mocks her need for affection. “I swear you dress as a fuck you to people sometimes, Jess,” he tells her, when she puts on a sailor smock to go out. The longer she loves him, the more contemptuous he becomes.

Felix, by contrast, is cool from the start. No one is better than Dunham at writing sympathetic fuckboys, men in varying stages of arrested development who are unpleasant in uniquely beguiling ways. At the pub, Felix treats Jess like a kind of curiosity (she is, in fact, wearing the very same sailor smock that we later learn Zev had been so cruel about). It isn’t until he sees the coziness of Jess’s rental apartment that something seems to click in his mind in an enticing way, like a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet reconsidering her feelings for Mr. Darcy after she first visits Pemberley. Jess, somewhat randomly, tries to kiss Felix; Felix, perturbed, admits that he has a girlfriend and leaves. He walks around for a bit listening to Fiona Apple and smoking, then goes back to Jess’s place, where he finds her being hosed down in the shower by a baby-faced paramedic after having accidentally set her nightgown on fire. Somewhat incredibly, he stays.

[Read: The reality show that captures Gen Z dating]

Too Much gestures at the rom-com, but it seems more enamored with the sitcom, particularly the low-fi, edgy, slightly manic mode of British comedies on BBC Three: Fleabag, Pulling, Coupling. Compared with Dunham’s Girls, whose direction and cinematography specifically emulated Woody Allen and Mike Mills, it’s a strangely unprepossessing show, the kind that more typically gets pulled together cheaply on the British TV viewer’s dime. In a bottle-ish episode early on, Jess and Felix stay up all night in her apartment, having sex, eating takeout pho, and ignoring each other’s emotional cues. (He tells her about being grossed out by an ex when he once saw her eating cold Chinese food with a look of blank desperation; later, in secret, Jess shovels cold noodles into her mouth with the same vacancy.) The characters do antic, no-stakes things that require little explanation and often defy logic. Felix goes to claim unemployment, telling the officer assessing him that if he gets a job, he won’t have time to write music. Jess goes location scouting with a hotshot director, almost has sex with him in a firelit four-poster bed, then shows up outside Felix’s window, begging him to move in with her. Late in the series, Jennifer Saunders appears playing a character identical to Absolutely Fabulous’s Edina, down to the selfsame styling and vocal delivery.

But with help from flashback episodes, the show also starts to lay out why Felix and Jess might be drawn to each other. Jess, still devastated from her breakup and friendless in London, finds instant stability in Felix as someone who’ll care for her, even if, subliminally at least, she seems to see through him. Like so many Dunham heroines, Jess is a perplexing mix of intuition and delusion; she offers Felix a joint bank account after they’ve been together barely a week, but also correctly identifies that his total lack of ambition fits awkwardly with her pride in her work. If, as an actor, Stalter sometimes seems less convincing than Dunham was at pulling the combination off, it’s because it’s an exceedingly difficult register to play in. Walking up to a guest at a wedding, Jess introduces herself by saying, “Wearing neutrals is like a way of saying you’ve given up, right?”—a line so thoughtlessly rude that even Hannah Horvath might blanch. Felix, whose childhood is revealed to have been unloving and unstable, seems to see in Jess something like instant security: not just a warm person with a home that’s much more welcoming than his chaotic squat full of eco-warriors, but an insta-family. If their relationship skips the heady, obsessive crush phase to get straight into a comfortable, stolid, domestic mode, maybe it’s because that’s what both of them are really yearning for.

Initially, something about Too Much’s insistence on citing rom-coms in its episode titles while so stubbornly resisting romance felt galling to me. The quality that draws us to, say, the tortured off-on dynamic of Connell and Marianne on Normal People or the unbreakable bond between Nora and Hae Sung in Past Lives is the idea that love is somehow transcendent, that it elevates humans above the level of mere existence. But realistically, what is love if not care and attention? And what are care and attention if not expressions of tenderness and regard? Dunham buries clues throughout Too Much that seem to suggest what she thinks about men and women: Matrimony, Felix’s father tells his wife late in the show, comes from the Latin words mater, meaning “mother,” and monia, meaning “activity”—it’s about preparing a girl to be a mother, and in many ways, a maternal dynamic is exactly what both Felix and Jess are craving. “You’re like this alien,” Jess tells him in the final episode, “but you also feel like home.”

Thank God for The Bear

2025-06-26T07:30:00-04:00

“You ever feel like you’re stuck in the same day, like over and over again?” Carmen Berzatto asks another chef early in the new season of The Bear. Carm, of course, played in fine haunted fashion by Jeremy Allen White, is the jolie laide centerpiece of the series, the sad-eyed Chicago son whose face launched a thousand “Yes, chef” memes and whose grief and PTSD preoccupied almost all of Season 3. Stuck? I can forgive The Bear almost anything, because it’s one of the few shows on television now still willing to wrangle with the mess of being human—with what it means to try to live differently. We all know what it’s like to feel stuck. Most of us have loved The Bear since it debuted in 2022: an impossibly gorgeous and teeth-grindingly stressful show that put viewers through the restaurant-kitchen wringer so that it could reward us with moments of transcendent payoff. Season 3, relentless in its examination of the sticky contours of Carm’s trauma, offered fewer bursts of that kind of respite.

These new episodes, though, bear fruit, in the form of progress, and forward momentum, and the impossible optimism of people changing for the better. In Season 1, Carm—a burner-scarred veteran of some of the world’s best kitchens—returned to Chicago to try to save his dead brother’s hopelessly dysfunctional sandwich shop, sparring with Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), his coke-dealing “cousin” and a poster boy for woeful masculinity. In Season 2, with the help of his protégé, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Carm prepared to open the restaurant he’d always dreamed of, while Richie found his own sense of purpose. At the end of Season 3, the Bear—the restaurant—received a thoroughly mixed review from the Chicago Tribune, leaving the team scattered and uncertain.

[Read: It’s easy to get lost in The Bear]

On the plus side, this means there’s no time left to waste. The motif of the new season is a clock that Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) unceremoniously plonks down in the kitchen, counting the number of hours until the restaurant runs out of funds. If the team is going to save the Bear, it has to be now. Christopher Storer, the show’s creator, turns the last minutes of the first episode into a rousing, synth-scored, preparing-for-battle montage reminiscent of a Cold War action movie. Every Second Counts reads the sign on one wall. “Why am I crying?” I wrote in my notes, as lockers slammed shut and knives rasped against sharpeners ahead of service. The biggest obstacles, beyond money, are the ones in the chefs’ heads: Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is still slower and clumsier with the desserts he’s trying to perfect than he can afford to be; Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) can’t turn the pasta around quickly enough; Sydney can’t decide whether Carm’s genius in the kitchen is worth the risk of sinking her own career and mental health.

The Bear has always had an expansive understanding of what restaurants represent—the task not only of elevating food into an art, but also of making every guest feel cared for, affirmed, at home. And for the people who spend 80-hour weeks sweating all the intimate details of service, the job means so much more than work, the team so much more than colleagues. “Please, help me out with this place,” Richie prays one night. “If it’s fucked, then I am fucked. It’s like the last thing that’s actually keeping me attached to anything, so please, help me out here. Amen.” Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson), whose work in the sandwich window is the lone financial bright spot in the Bear’s books, seeks a mentor to try to figure out how he personally might be able to help. Sydney agonizes over the question of whether to abandon Carm and the Bear for a more functional (if annoying) chef who’s trying to poach her.

The new season, as is series tradition, makes space for some intriguing curveballs. An episode co-written by Edebiri and Boyce takes Sydney outside the restaurant to a hair appointment at a friend’s house, where she considers what it means to have people who really know her, and to feel like she belongs. Another episode that runs upwards of an hour brings together virtually everyone in the show’s history for an event that seems to promise chaos and destruction—say, a car driven through a house, a gunfight—but goes somewhere wholly unexpected. Almost more than ever, The Bear is preoccupied with what we as humans inherit and what we pass on in turn, and whether we can actually choose, as Carm wanted in Season 3, to “filter out all the bad.” Carm’s sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott), trying to raise her own child differently, starts using gentle-parenting techniques at work, almost unintentionally, with understandable lapses in patience. Richie’s work on himself continues to, in my opinion, sustain all hope for humanity. (“Neil Jeff, you’re beautiful,” he whispers to his and Carm’s childhood friend, Neil Fak—Matty Matheson—in a heartbreaking instant of pure television.) Marcus and Sydney, both of whom have lost their mothers, interlock neatly with Carm, who still dreads seeing his own. In Season 1, the show seemed intent on conveying how toxic masculinity poisons not just kitchen culture but all hierarchies; now, because the team members have opened themselves up to more nurturing models of care and communication, their potential is fully unfurling.

All of this wrestling with pain and purpose and guilt and growth is intermingled with Storer’s musical callbacks and quick cuts of dishes being plated, red lines on charts running menacingly downward, clocks ticking, casual conversations that become so unexpectedly profound that they rip your heart right out. The pace isn’t always so rapid-fire—when episodes slow down, it’s for a reason. There are still a handful of dream sequences and surreal interludes that seem to want to underscore the show’s deep psychological curiosity, and its unwillingness to be an easy watch. But after the slow-drip, languorous suffering of Season 3, it’s thrilling to see the characters and the action move so purposefully and gratifyingly forward.