The Free Press
Hello and welcome back to my still yet-to-be-named column where I give you a tour of what’s going on in popular culture today. On the name: Thank you to everyone for your many and varied suggestions, including Jessica Laird with “Weissgeist,” Doug Sgarro with “Weisscracks,” and Stan Nadel with the gravest option, “Weiss Column.” I’m still sleeping on what I want to call this thing, but I’ve absolutely loved reading all of your ideas and comments. Keep them coming!
Is Justin Bieber Okay?
We’ve seen it before: A child star with a cherubic face, and enough skill to navigate a bit of choreography, ascends to megastardom on the wings of a new technology. They get some cash, and the wrong people surround them, and eventually their brain breaks. Then they spiral, in public view, until they are wrecked, the same tech that launched them contributing to their ruin.
So went Judy Garland, who came up around when Technicolor films were lifting off and was put on amphetamines to keep up with her filming schedule, and then became addicted to them. So went Britney Spears, who rode the early internet and MTV at its peak. Twenty years later, she’s dancing with knives on her Instagram and recently took a baby doll on a vacation to Mexico. Now, we have Justin Bieber, 31, who hasn’t yet reached the level of enlisting a security guard to carry around a Barbie in a BabyBjörn for him. But given how he’s been behaving, he seems mere weeks away from doing something deranged.
The pop star who gave us “Baby” never got to grow up. He was discovered on YouTube at the age of 12 by manager-to-the-stars Scooter Braun—who stumbled upon videos of Bieber performing pop covers that Bieber’s mother had uploaded. Within a year, Bieber signed with Braun’s label, and soon he was selling out arenas.
Today, we’re watching his crash out, to borrow a phrase from Gen Z, all across social media.
Two weekends ago, at Coachella, Bieber was recorded hunched over and shirtless in the crowd, smoking weed and looking like the kind of guy you switch subway cars to avoid. In videos, you can see his wife, Hailey, ushering his 15-year-old brother Jaxon away. When not scaring everyone in the VIP section of the festival, Bieber’s been scaring paparazzi, scowling at them around town and, in one recent clip, screaming at them outside a coffee shop in Palm Springs.
“You just want money,” he said. “Money, money, money, money, money. Get out of here, bro.”
He was wearing a sweatshirt creatively—half on, half off—and the waistband on his shorts was somewhere between the bottom of his tush and his knees; it was not, generally, the ensemble of a man who is stable.
Naturally, there’s endless theories about what’s going on with the Bieb, including that he’s in a Christian cult; that his wife, who gave birth to their son, Jack, eight months ago, could be a stalker who manipulated him into marrying her; and speculation that he is taking fentanyl. There are also rumors that Bieber’s under pressure to make a “comeback,” because he’s still in debt to a touring company after dropping out of a run of shows two years ago for health reasons. (His representatives deny this debt allegation.)
And then there’s the chilling idea that accused sex trafficker P. Diddy did something terrible to him when he was a kid; as a young star, Bieber went to some of the rapper’s infamous parties, and there’s an old clip of them together in which Diddy proudly tells the camera that, while he can’t say what he and Bieber were up to in the previous 48 hours, it was “definitely a 15-year-old’s dream.” It would be wrong to say this clip hasn’t aged well; it should have set off alarm bells right then.
But also, the speculation is probably making things a lot worse.
“He’s lived at the highest level of scrutiny for 15 years straight,” Jeff Weiss, the music journalist, told me about Bieber. Weiss—no relation, by the way!—has a gonzo book out in June about the early 2000s, and the specter of paparazzi. It’s called Waiting for Britney Spears. And it’s about how “the coy it-girl at the end of history,” under mounting stress, got to a place where she shaved her head and attacked a pap’s car with an umbrella. (It was that same year that Bieber was discovered.)
“That level of fame is like a biblical plague,” said the other Weiss. What we’re seeing is a Bieber in a bind: He’s never been an adult who isn’t super famous, which means, as Weiss puts it, “He’s never had an honest interaction with anyone.” Someone is always trying to get close to get something out of him, and it’s impossible for him to grok who or what is real. When Bieber inevitably lashes out, he only ends up making more content for the rest of us to feed off of. There’s no winning unless he goes completely underground, or moves overseas—although Harry and Meghan proved to us that it’s easier said than done.
Is a Bieber breakdown inevitable? Is every star in danger of flaming out? “It’s the heart of the Britney question,” said Weiss, “like, ‘Did the fame and America’s bloodlust toward her make her crack, or was there something already cracked?’ ”
A Comedy of Human Error
No one goes in blind anymore. We look up where our favorite influencers like to eat before we make a reservation. We rely on therapists, to help us game-out hard conversations, and on artificial intelligence chatbots to write the first draft of important emails. We want to control all the variables, to make sure things go perfectly the first time; we don’t want to bother with pesky things like chance, or trial and error.
Into this cultural moment arrived comedian Nathan Fielder’s documentary series, The Rehearsal. In it, Fielder prepares people for completely normal interactions. He enlists teams of actors and builds elaborate, hyperrealistic sets in warehouses so that his subject can train for their big moment as thoroughly as possible. In the last season, which premiered in 2022 on HBO, Fielder helped a Brooklyn man, Kor, prepare to tell his trivia teammate Tricia that he did not, in fact, have a master’s degree. “My whole educational situation is a fraud,” Kor said over and over again to an actor posing as Tricia, who played out a different reaction each time. (When it came time for the road test, the real Tricia took it gracefully.)
In another episode, Fielder helps a woman imagine what it would be like to be a mother by renting out a rural house in Oregon where she cosplays as a homemaker, complete with an actual robot baby to care for. It’s like The Truman Show in reverse: The principal knows they’re being placed in a fake world, but they have to act like it’s real.
The second season landed this week, and the stakes are much, much higher. The first episode is about preparing for potential plane crashes. In it, a pilot called Moody rehearses the moment he meets his co-captain before a flight. Fielder creates a perfect double of Moody’s local airport terminal, including the Panda Express where Moody gets lunch. This is all an absurd attempt to work out the root of miscommunication between pilots—a major cause of aviation catastrophes. “Every relationship starts with a beginning,” says Fielder in a voice-over. It’s as if he’s implying that calibrating your fingers just so while shaking someone’s hand might protect you from disaster.
It’s as if it’s hard to accept that you can’t control the future, and there’s no amount of practice that can predict how it will go.
“I just want what’s real,” Fielder reminds Moody, who, during the first rehearsal, sits in the fake pilots lounge, saying nothing to the actor who’s been assigned the role of his co-pilot—because, as Moody explains, they usually don’t talk to each other before getting into the cockpit. Moody spends his preflight downtime clicking around on his iPad.
Perhaps you can’t rehearse every interaction after all, and we should instead get more comfortable exercising our own mettle by putting down the script and just going for it. That may be the deeper message of The Rehearsal, but it’s hidden so deep in the details, you lose sight of what exactly they’re rehearsing. And call me old-fashioned, but I like my comedy to be funny, and funny this show is not. Verdict: Don’t think too hard about skipping “The Rehearsal.”
The Nepotism Has Not Yet Even Begun
I know what people are thinking when they read my byline. I’m not naive. They think, Weiss? As in, daughter of Pittsburgh carpet salesman Lou Weiss? And: guilty. I get gorgeous wool broadloom at cost, and I make no apologies for it. But the favoritism I enjoy is small potatoes compared to the nepos coming down the pike, as the megamoguls of the Silent Generation die off, and their sons take the reins.
The nepo babies I’m talking about aren’t like the actors whose headshots get moved to the top of the pile because their dad is a big-time producer, or the potential employee who gets a second interview because their mom knows someone at corporate. I’m talking about the billion-heirs who are being installed at the levers of incredible political power, courtesy of their father’s vast empires of investments, philanthropic ventures, and media properties. In England, being royal is a family business, but they don’t actually have real power. Here, the kings of capital are taking up their thrones—and we don’t even know who they are.
Ninety-four-year-old Rupert Murdoch appointed his eldest son, Lachlan, chairman of News Corp. Warren Buffett, 94, is hanging onto his Berkshire Hathaway empire for now, though his kid Howie is in line to take over as the nonexecutive chairman if his dad ever retires. And this week all eyes are on Alex Soros, whose multibillionaire dad George is also 94. Alex was just profiled by New York magazine, which wanted to know how he is liking being in charge of the charitable Open Society Foundations.
The profile of Alex is brutal. In it, his own mother described him as “sort of difficult to live with.” One OSF insider said, “Every single person who knows the family knows that Alex was exactly the wrong person to lead the foundation.” Another described him as “smart but fucking impossible.” And Alex did himself no favors. At one point he recalled telling his father, “I’m going to be your loyal parasite,” and it’s sadly the most charming he comes off the whole time.
Take Alex’s read on a Holocaust exhibition he went to with the reporter: “It’s a good exhibit. I mean, being a connoisseur of these types of things, I’ve seen one in every European country in my life.” I give you, the prince of progressivism.
All the retiring fathers scrambled to the top of their mountains by virtue of their character as much as their talents. Take Murdoch’s apparent stubbornness and intense need for control, or Buffett’s epic patience for returns, or Soros’s tolerance of risk. They weren’t likeable, but they were impressive. Alex, though, just comes across as pompous and severe.
When the reporter asked about the wisdom of investing in uber-progressive criminal justice reforms, as the OSF has for many years, Alex got angry. “Just lock them up? Throw away the key? Start killing people? What do you want?” People want to feel safe, Alex, when they’re walking around this thing called “the street,” or on the subway—it’s sort of like a shared public jet, but it’s underground and filthy.
Alex seems all too keen to double down on his father’s bets, and given his unlimited funds, we’re sure to see plenty of good money thrown after bad. Marxist DAs: Meet your new mark. Not that anyone is asking, but if this was my new job, I’d take all the money I was expected to give out, wire it to Melinda French Gates, apologize profusely for what I’ve ever written about her, and beg her to please distribute the cash for me.
Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About: Walmart is locking up raw meat to prevent theft. I hate the term “recession indicator,” but when the grocery store is placing a rib eye under arrest, it should make you nervous about the economy.
After the death of Pope Francis, Google searches spiked with people betting on the next head of the Catholic church. Not to pontificate, but it seems a little crass to bet on a cardinal rule.
The “Florida Man” gets all the credit for being the craziest archetype in the country, but a Florida Woman was arrested this week for impersonating an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in order to kidnap her ex-boyfriend’s wife, who is applying for citizenship. I salute you, Officer, and respect your authority.
If you’re looking for a blues-inflected period piece about the Jim Crow South with tons of gore, guns, cultish vampires, and meditations on the healing power of ethnic music, have I got the movie for you: Sinners.
Pete Hegseth spent thousands in government funds to build a makeup studio in the Pentagon, which I respect. If he’s going to bomb Yemen, he should at least be powdered. (Hegseth did deny his glam station via X, “Totally fake story. No ‘orders’ and no ‘makeup.’ ”)
Male birth control always seems to be around the corner but a new one called Adam—it’s an implant that prevents sperm from mixing with semen—shows promise. But will men ever consent to being injected with this thing?
Tyler Cowen just joined The Free Press as a columnist, and he’s already on fire. Here he makes the case for living an online life. He uses the internet to meet people who share his many interests, while I use it to observe up close how to curl an eyelash, and we’re both the better for it.
Read Jack Baruth’s ode to his Ohio township, a place where the whole government is four men in canvas work pants. Given how many people are getting fired in D.C., that could be our national government very soon.
