The Free Press
Welcome back to my column, where I take you on a tour of what’s happening in the culture—high and low, online and off. There’s a lot to think about this week, including the Girl Boss Space Mission, The White Lotus’s gift shop, a new photography exhibit at the Met, and the 24 hour surveillance state Gen Z can’t imagine living without. It’s an honor to be your safari guide.
Kill Tony Did Not Kill on Netflix
You'll remember, from the last election cycle, when a comedian at a Donald Trump rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” You might not remember the guy who made the joke. It bombed. But Tony Hinchcliffe burst back into the public’s consciousness this week, with the first of three Netflix specials—and he’s gotten roughly the same reception.
It’s been a month since Netflix announced a deal to run three filmed recordings of Hinchcliffe’s hugely successful podcast, “Kill Tony.” The show’s setup is that Hinchcliffe is on a panel with a bunch of other comedians—including, on the April 7 episode, Joe Rogan and an Elon Musk impersonator. Throughout the night, Hinchcliffe grabs a random slip of paper from a bucket filled with the names of aspiring comedians, and that guy—every performer on the show was a guy, bar one—does a 60-second set. Then, Tony and the rest of the panel roasts them. It’s like American Idol for class clowns. (If you crush your set, you may be invited to come back and perform at a separate ‘Secret Show.’)
Kill Tony is a part of the new alternative comedy world populated with podcasting bros. It’s a male-centric, right-wing adjacent world that prides itself on bucking progressive pieties and pushing the envelope with edgy jokes. Five years ago, all of these guys were outsiders. This was the era of intersectional trauma comedy like Hannah Gadsby’s scolding special, Nanette. Louis C.K. had been forced underground by #MeToo allegations. But now, the upstarts have won—they were credited with sealing the election for Trump, after he and J.D. Vance appeared on several bro podcasts, which were catapulted into the spotlight after the political upset.
That doesn't mean the bros are ready for prime time.
Kill Tony was terrible, but not because of its offensiveness—in the first five minutes Hinchcliffe tells viewers they’re only “two clicks from John Mulaney” (the more palatable comedian) if they get offended. It was bad because no one knew what they were doing.
The show opens with Ari Matti, an Estonian comic, riffing on fancy restaurants. (“It was one of those restaurants, you know, where the menu doesn't even have prices. I thought I gotta a broken menu!”) It only goes downhill from there. The next performer says, “I’m Vietnamese and Jewish, which makes me a Viet-Jew. God bless you!” Silence. Shane Gillis—who got booted from Saturday Night Live in 2019 for “offensive” statements he’d made on his podcast—was on the panel too. He was dressed as Trump, but was less funny than the real one.
You can tell everyone in the room knows the show is going straight down the toilet around the halfway point, when one of the stand-ups tells Hinchcliffe about how, for work, his girlfriend does “marketing onboarding for an at-home care facility.” The panel, made up of men whose job it is to riff, is stone-faced. The guy then offers to mow Rogan’s lawn, “if you need someone.”
Tony keeps saying, “We’re having fun here tonight,” and it begins to feel more like a prayer than crowd work. Rogan looks like he’s at a funeral. There’s a moment when one of the performers presents a lump on his neck and says it’s been there “since the pandemic.” Another calls himself “an evil-looking guy telling racist jokes that everybody thinks is secretly gay.”
And that’s the absurdity of the first Kill Tony special: The whole show is about how Netflix is probably going to send someone out with a hook to stop the assembled bros from “telling racist jokes,” but they never actually tell any. The edgiest material—about bitches and retards—mostly falls flat on its face. In fact, the joke that gets the biggest laugh is: “You know one of the best ways to avoid going to the dentist is to take your car keys and throw those motherfuckas away!”
The lesson of Netflix’s first Kill Tony, and I can’t bring myself to watch another one of these, was that just because you have a popular podcast, where you can be rambly, and weird, and sometimes very funny, it doesn’t mean you’ll translate well to a different medium. Hours-long podcasts have built-in slack—the listener is with you for the ride. A special on Netflix does not—every frame needs to make a case to the viewer not to click away. The audience expects polish. And it's unclear, though becoming clearer, whether the comedians who’ve found themselves in the mainstream are up to the challenge of shining up.
Women Return to Venus
In two days’ time, in West Texas, America’s first all-female spaceflight crew is due to launch. For this, we have Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to thank: The six women will be aboard a rocket built by his aerospace company, Blue Origin. Among them will be his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, plus, for some reason, Katy Perry and Gayle King (as well as three normies: Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn.) You couldn’t pay me to go to space but I am happy for all these galactic divas—even if it’s unclear what, exactly, their mission is.
I looked for answers in Elle, where the women gave a group interview ahead of their voyage to talk about all things barrier-breaking, and about lash extensions. “If I could take glam up with me, I would do that,” said Katy Perry, who apparently has wanted to go to space for almost 20 years. “We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” I salute this crew and the fact that they are willing to test the effect of low atmosphere on implants.
Another one of the women—Bowe, a former rocket scientist—said she’d taken her hair for a dry run before she goes zero gravity by going skydiving in Dubai. And why not? The flight is all of 11 minutes, and it’s not like they’re going to collect water samples from Mars. It seems their mission is, quite simply, to be women, except in space.
In all seriousness: Going to space will never not be a big deal. And now that you don’t have to be a physics genius with hundreds of hours of training under your belt to go to space, we’re all going to get new perspectives on our blue marble—and that’s a good thing. I’ll be watching the blue carpet before liftoff.
Exit Through the White Lotus Gift Shop
Last week, 6.2 million people watched as season three of HBO juggernaut The White Lotus wrapped up. And many millions more breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t catch this season, but the show was inescapable. If you’re online you’re surely sick of the autopsies of every last frame of the finale by now.
Lotusmania has been so ubiquitous over the past few months that I picked up by osmosis that the show took place at a resort in Thailand; that there was at least one incest scene between Patrick Schwarzenegger’s character and his brother; that Parker Posey, playing a wealthy Southern mom, was going on the whole time about lorazepam and white wine and her daughter becoming a “boot-hist”; and there was a whole monologue where Academy Award winner Sam Rockwell admits to autogynephilia.
Did I miss anything?
Look, I’m all for bringing back some collective culture—it’s why I’m writing this column—but this show got too aggressive. It was not just on my news feeds. On my walk to work, I saw that Banana Republic has come out with a collection of White Lotus-themed “resort-ready” clothing, including silk polos and Bermuda shorts. H&M is doing kaftans off the show; Abercrombie & Fitch has a T-shirt; Away Travel did carry-ons in a sand color. The sunscreen brand Supergoop and the skincare brand Kiehl’s each put out White Lotus product bundles. The furniture brand CB2 did branded wallpaper, cocktail stirrers and a couch. Oh, and Coffee Mate put out creamers in Thai iced coffee and piña colada flavors. Who in their right mind is drinking piña colada coffee on a White Lotus sofa?
And does anyone see the irony here? This is a show about how the people who have every comfort in the world are often the most demented. Now, viewers are being sold mountains of the kind of luxurious crap that might fill the luggage of the disturbed characters. Special issue chocolate bars! Official cocktail recipes!
This sort of gimmick got big when Barbie came out two years ago. That movie’s marketing team deployed the color pink so exhaustively, you couldn't leave the house without spotting a bubblegum backpack or a hot pink Barbie billboard. It was a win for them, but it reduced the movie to just one piece of an attention- and money-sucking operation that demanded people not only part with over 10 bucks to see the flick, but outfit themselves as a character in it. If this continues, and continues to work, studios will start to think of the actual show or movie as what businesspeople call a loss leader—a big-budget product that they lose money on, but gain a customer with. The job of the writers’ room will be to get the viewer hooked, but only so they’ll want to buy stuff.
Depending on the show, things could get dark. Think: meat cleavers and Zoloft brought to you by The Bear, or birth control in collaboration with The Baldwins. I hear White Lotus got violent toward the end; let’s hope they stop short of putting out a floral-printed handgun or microwavable sticky rice with poisonous pong-pong tree seeds.
Hell Is Other People Knowing Where You Are
There’s a few debates going at any given time within the Free Press office. Lately the grown-ups have been fighting over tariffs and how to pronounce Qatar, while the kids have been discussing whether it’s advisable to share the live location of your iPhone at every single moment.
A lot of people use apps like Find My Friends or Life360 for normal reasons, like keeping track of their children or elderly parents. But for Americans under 30, it’s become standard to share your location with not only close family members but distant friends.
My younger colleagues and friends—who have been accepting the Terms and Conditions of various gadgets and apps since before they could hold their own heads up—love having, and being, sanctioned stalkers. It’s convenient. You can check that someone’s home before you give them a call. And it’s fun. You can prod a friend and ask why they’ve been spending so much time on the Upper West Side—a new beau?
But this week I opened my own seldom-used Find My Friends app, and saw to my shock and horror that 20 people could see where I was, at all times. Some were my close friends, but others were acquaintances from college, or someone I shared a single class with in high school. I was also tracking them. Closely. I have friends on Oak Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia; on Fifth Avenue in Denver, and 31st Street in Oakland, California. When I checked, I could see my friend from college, who is now in business school, traveling down Locust Walk on the University of Pennsylvania campus. She ended up on the Schuylkill River Trail for the next 30 minutes.
Who knows when I gave any of these people permission to track my every move; it’s widely accepted, and even expected among people my age. (Think: You’re in the park and want your friend to be able to find you—so you share your location, and just never turn it off.)
That’s especially true if you’re in a relationship. Why exchange 10 texts about when the other will be home or if they’re near the grocery store if you could just look it up, like the weather? A few friends told me it’s a nonnegotiable for their husbands to share their location with them—“10,000% dealbreaker for me!!” said one. But I tend to side with my colleague River, who says: “If he’s following your location via GPS, that ain’t your boyfriend, that’s your probation officer.”
Young Americans, famously, don’t care about existing in a state of surveillance—a few years ago, nearly a third of Gen Z was pro the government putting surveillance cameras in every home. But it’s not the state watching us, it’s the people closest to us, which is somehow more oppressive. So I turned off Find My Friends. And I’m praying for the friend who told me, “It’s my favorite social media.” She watches the dots, each representing a cell phone representing a friend, moving around on the map before she goes to sleep. Like a Stasi lullaby.
The Original Selfies
The first photographs were called daguerreotypes: silver-plated copper sheets treated with mercury and iodine to create an image. Then came the tintypes, carte de visites, and gelatin silver prints. I learned this at a new exhibition at The Met called The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910. It’s a quiet meditation on the earliest photos of American life—and it made me think about a time when getting your picture taken was incredibly rare, and sacred.
The ones on display were presented in ornate tin frames, or in red velvet boxes. One had a blonde lock of the sitter’s hair, pinned with dried flowers to the velvet lining. The images themselves—of a newly married couple, of a tinsmith, of a little boy dressed as Copernicus next to a model of the planets—were black-and-white and formally staged. There was one tiny picture of a squirrel and even he looks like he's posing for the camera.
Walking around the glass boxes filled with pictures that were likely the first and only images made of the people in them, you can’t help but think that we lost something meaningful when we blasted into the 21st century and awarded an arsenal of cameras to every living person.
What will an exhibit of photography look like in 200 years? Will there be an exhibition dedicated to Snapchat’s megapopular Puking Rainbow Filter of 2015? Or a room dedicated to belfies? (And yes, belfie is a portmanteau of butt and selfie.) God forbid my great-great-grandchildren will be shuffling around a museum squinting and nodding at a meticulously conserved photo dump, shown on an original iPhone, just as the photographer intended.
I only hope that when shows are mounted chronicling the photo habits of the everyman in 2025, future curators give us the dignity of leaving out thirst traps.
Here’s what else I’ve been thinking about:
Queen of homesteading Hannah “Ballerina Farm” Neeleman has opened a new farm stand in Kamas, Utah, where she’s selling protein powder, kitchenware, and jugs of raw milk. My prediction: micro-stores where influencers, homemakers, and craftsmen sell their goods. Like a trad wife lemonade stand.
The first episode of Meghan Markle’s podcast about female entrepreneurs is out, and her guest is Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble. The Duchess is so very relentless in putting out shows that no one’s asked for, I’m starting to like her.
Officials in Beijing announced they would be importing “moderately” fewer Hollywood films in response to Trump’s tariffs. The China Film Administration also claimed that U.S. government’s tariffs on China “will inevitably further reduce the domestic audience’s favorability towards American films.” The culture/trade war is on.
Prom season is upon us, and the “it” dress is a $750 corseted toile monstrosity. It’s good to know that no matter how sophisticated-looking modern teens get, they will always wear something to prom that they will later regret.
The new season of The Last of Us is coming out this Sunday. I loved the first season, until I found out it was based on a video game. But then I read this piece from Aaron Bronfman, who makes the case that far from being a waste of time, video games might actually make you a better man.
