The Free Press
Welcome back to my column, where I’ll give you a tour of the cultural zeitgeist, both online and off. I was overwhelmed by the response to my debut last week, especially the commenter who said my writing brought the phrase “culture of death” to mind. I prefer to think of this as a Celebration of Life but either way, we’re going to hell. Get in the handbasket.
Last week, we covered the noted socialist theorist Snow White, the endurance of David Blaine, and how cat ladies are preparing for the end of democracy. This week, we’ll get into disability reality television, a fallen temple to teenage girlhood, and a few other oddities that have caught my eye.
Lights, Camera, Autism!
There are two new-ish reality shows about young adults with neurological disorders. One is a delight, the other a disgrace.
Let’s start with the good news. On Wednesday, the third season of Love on the Spectrum arrived on Netflix. The show follows a handful of autistic adults who are looking for romantic partners. Connor, 25, in between showing off his new Viking horn, tells producers that he’s looking for someone that he can share “all my excitements with.” (He admits he has a “weakness for brunettes.”) Madison, 27, in Tampa, Florida, has around 40 American Girl dolls—which she calls her “comfort objects”—and says she wants to find “my person.” And though I have zero dolls, I can relate.
This show emphasizes the ways in which adults with autism are like the rest of us. Yes, most of us don’t yawn uncontrollably on a speed date, or wear two sets of headphones during dinner to drown out distracting background noises. But like the show’s cast, we all know what it’s like to feel awkward before meeting a setup and to go anyway because ultimately we want someone to share our excitements with. We get nervous with the characters; we understand their disappointments. We identify with both their parents’ impatience and their hope.
Compare this to Baylen Out Loud, a series that came out at the beginning of the year on the TLC network. It follows Baylen Dupree, 22, a social media influencer who lives in Virginia with her parents and five siblings and has debilitating Tourette’s syndrome. (Online, she does things like put on makeup and hawk vitamins, all while tic-ing.) The pilot episode sees her making breakfast with her mom and dad, bowling with her boyfriend, Colin, and going out for her brother’s birthday—while constantly shouting things like “tap that weiner” and “fentanyl dick,” and doing things like throwing a plate of French toast up in the air, then doing it two more times because her OCD demands it.
Like nearly every TLC show—whether they’re about dwarfs, or people who are 600 pounds, or polygamists—Baylen Out Loud is the spiritual heir to the freak shows of the 19th century, which said to Americans, Come have a peek at conjoined twins, or at the woman with a beard. Shows like this indulge our basest desires to laugh at people who are different and to closely observe that which we find offensive. Okay, so it’s entertaining when Baylen announces to her Uber driver, “Your mom is built like a falafel.” Or when she yells at the bald sound guy, “You’re bald!” She’s funny, pretty, and likable. But this show does not have her best interests at heart. When a producer asks her and Colin whether Baylen tics while they’re having sex, you can’t help but feel like you’re participating in exploitation, and that’s because you are.
Reality shows about people with handicaps exist in a fuzzy moral area: In some cases, it’s hard to know what the subjects can reasonably agree to, and, if there’s money to be made, where the coercion begins. Here’s a rule of thumb: If you find yourself waiting to see what bizarre thing a subject does next—rather than whether they’ll overcome the challenges they face—consider whether this is a show you want to be watching.
When Baylen goes to the grocery store, you’re waiting to see if she’ll throw a carton of eggs up in the air, not to see whether she’ll accomplish a mundane task. Whereas in Love on the Spectrum, you’re praying that Conor will stop talking about mutualistic symbiosis in turtles so that his date can get a word in edgewise. And when he does, and when the rest of the date goes great—they play croquet and bond over a shared love of animation—you’re thrilled for them both.
Pop Queens Hate Their Fans
We learned this past election that celebrity endorsements are dead. No one cared, in the end, that George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey and Megan Thee Stallion wanted Kamala Harris to win. In fact, voters may have resented the fact that rich elites took it for granted that ordinary Americans would do as they said.
But what we’re learning now is that the feeling is mutual. Famous pop stars are sick of us telling them what to do, too.
Take Ariana Grande’s brand-new ballad, “Hampstead.” It comes off, at first listen, like a love song. And—bear with me—it’s widely understood to be about the scandalous origins of her relationship with current boyfriend Ethan Slater. The couple fell in love in 2022—while filming Wicked together just outside London, and not far from Hampstead—despite the fact that both of them were married. When news broke, fans lashed out, calling her a “home-wrecker,” accusing her of playing the victim, and arguing that Slater, whose other main credit until Wicked was the titular role in SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, was not good enough for her.
And in “Hampstead,” Grande goes after these fans, throwing out venomous lines like “You’re still wrong about everything,” and “To be so dumb must be nice,” and “What makes you think you’re even invited?” It seems like Grande is sending a message, and it’s this: I don’t care if you love my songs, you don’t get to control my life.
It’s not just Grande. Taylor Swift, who spent years telling her fans that they knew her deepest self, has also lashed out at them in her latest album—according to The Free Press’s resident Swiftologists. In 2023, they tell me, Swift briefly dated a man so problematic in the eyes of her fans that one actually wrote her an open letter telling her to dump him. And this made Swift, who has always been fawning about her fans, flip. Last year’s album included a song called “But Daddy I Love Him,” where she sings, “I just learned these people only raise you to cage you,” and, “I don't cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.”
You could say these women should never have been so forthcoming with millions of teenage girls. But I say: Good on both these divas. Their fans need slapping down. Relationships with pop stars should not go further than buying their album, and maybe a T-shirt. Telling them who to go out with is just a few degrees away from sending your toenails to them through the mail.
In Memoriam, Forever 21
Everyone’s been talking about tariffs in the office this week. Apparently it’s the economic story of the moment. But discerning business journalists like me know that the real pressing issue is that Forever 21 is over. The fast-fashion store has gone bankrupt for the second time—and, it confirmed last week, will be liquidating its more than 350 stores across the U.S.
This is probably very good news for the planet. At Forever 21, clothes were sourced and slapped onto the rack as quickly and cheaply as possible to keep up with trends that cycle in and out of style as quickly as an Instagram feed refreshes. But the news made me feel almost nostalgic for when teenage girls actually left the house to go to the mall, instead of sitting online endlessly adding to cart.
The stores were bright-white-and-neon monstrosities; pulsing with pop music and bloated with tinny jewelry. It was where you went to get something new to wear to a party that weekend—a peplum top or a cursed babydoll dress which would become unwearable, and often unrecognizable, after the first time you washed it. The one in Pittsburgh was situated next to an Urban Outfitters and across the street from a Cheesecake Factory, which meant you could make about 30 bad decisions in two hours before calling your parents to pick you and your friends up.
Chemically speaking those jeans were closer to a microwave than pants. But quality was certainly not the point at that time. The price was. We were teenagers—with allowances or after-school jobs if we were lucky—but to shop at Forever 21 was to grasp at adulthood. It was about using the twenty dollars your mother gave you to buy a tube top that she would not approve of, and that did not do your body any favors.
So farewell to that third place where girls might buy a new persona for the low price of $19.99, a temple of teenagehood as good as any soda fountain or food court. Though you will soon be gone, at least you will always be 21.
Better Eyebrows, and No Wrinkles, Thanks to AI
Until last week, imagery made by AI was clunky and off. There were glitches; people often had extra fingers or oddly shaped appendages, or had a general uncanny and computerized look. But last week, OpenAI put out a new version of ChatGPT and something clicked. The technology had gotten good enough to take a source image and reimagine it in any recognizable style—think The Simpsons, or the Muppets—and do it with a high degree of verisimilitude.
And people loved it. Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, said at one point the company had gained a million ChatGPT users in an hour. He added that the site was experiencing “biblical demand” and that “our GPUs are melting.” (A GPU is a graphics processing unit.) It was a great day to be Sam Altman, and a great day to be on the internet.
On X, the look that took off was that of Studio Ghibli, the beloved Japanese animation company co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki, who made the cult cartoon Spirited Away. The look is cute, and flat. Ghibli-ified people all get expressive eyebrows, wide grins, and usually a delightful pad of blush on their cheeks. Plants are greener, and plumper. Pets are fluffier. Hard lines are softened.
Online, people Ghibli-ified everything from the Trump “Fight” image from the summer of 2024 to the hoisting of the flag at Iwo Jima to the Kennedy assassination to Bari’s conversation with our new columnist, the proper economist Tyler Cowen:
I'm still a bit skeptical about the power of AI (though I’ll be at our debate in San Francisco where I hope to be convinced). I mean, that looks nothing like Bari. The guy on the right looks like Tyler insofar as he has a beard and glasses. And regardless, this kind of image reimagination is a trick. It’s a toy. An impressive one, but I’m still waiting for the day when AI becomes embedded in everything we do. Or when I’ll come in to work to find that ChatGPT has taken over this column—or else decided to take revenge on humanity for melting its GPUs.
Immortal Monsters Come to Broadway
Speaking of cartoons, the man who produces them for The Free Press is getting some shade. David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross is on Broadway for the fourth time, and according to the papers, this epic play about Chicago real estate agents hasn’t aged well. New York magazine lamented its "open racism and self-evident misogyny.” The Daily Beast concluded that the play is “painfully offensive and dated.” Its review also somehow managed to weave in conversion therapy and transness—and how, under Trump, audience laughter over “lines degrading Indian Americans” are extra ominous.
And really, aren't the tariffs and the fact that it rained yesterday kinda Mamet’s fault, too?
This reception is probably because David Mamet won’t play nice with the progressives. (He told The Wall Street Journal, “Nobody really believes boys turn into girls and girls turn into boys—no one does,” and at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books subtly ruminated, “DEI is garbage.”)
In other words, it has nothing to do with the baddie words uttered during the show.
I went to the premiere, and it’s aged like a good leather briefcase. The “fuck”-tastic script about accounts and accountability roughs you up before breaking your heart. The writing is so sharp and so tight, watching it acted out is like watching Simone Biles land a double layout with a half twist. Kieran Culkin is Ricky Roma, and he’s a live wire, slicing into the office manager, Williamson (Donald Webber Jr.), for costing him “six thousand dollars and one Cadillac,” but Bob Odenkirk as Shelley Levene, desperate, triumphant, then ruined, steals the show. There’s competition and greed, and the question of whether or not you can self-determine while getting hopelessly screwed by a faceless and unfair system; the monsters the men on stage wrestle with aren’t dated, they’re immortal.
Also: The audience laughed because it was funny. And we clapped because the dialogue was alive. But if other reviewers are looking for something a bit more politically palatable, I hear Aladdin is playing down the block.
Here’s What Else I’ve Been Thinking About:
Yesterday, the much-anticipated show Dying for Sex arrived on Hulu, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: A woman with terminal cancer leaves her husband to have a lot of one-night stands. My colleague Kat Rosenfield watched the entire series—and wrote a very smart piece, which you can read right now.
Chappell Roan, the female drag queen and pop star, isn’t so hot on the whole parenting thing. “All my friends who have kids are in hell. I don’t know anyone who is happy and has children at this age,“ she said on a new episode of Call Her Daddy. “I have not met anyone who is happy, anyone who has light in their eyes.” Note to parents: Stay away from Chappell Roan—she may kidnap your children to bring your joy back.
Drake put out a new music video for his nostalgic song “Nokia,” and it’s an early contender for song of the summer. Verdict: Stream this!
Also stream the first two episodes of The Studio. The new Apple TV+ show stars Seth Rogen as the new head of Continental Studios; he desperately wants to hit it out of the park, but keeps getting in his own way. It’s like The Bear, but good, and for Hollywood. Each episode is done in one spinning, warm-toned take.
Radhika Jones is out at Vanity Fair. She joined as editor in chief in 2017 and was meant to fill the shoes of the impresario Graydon Carter, who in turn filled the shoes of the legend Tina Brown. But Jones couldn’t fill a magazine with anything worth reading; her tenure was more like an extended funeral for the golden age of print, which my colleague Joe Nocera remembers, and mourns every day. Read his piece about Carter’s recent memoir.
The New Yorker has come out with a deep dive into the world of The Knot, a popular wedding planning website. It’s even more evidence that current wedding culture means you don’t have the wedding, the wedding has you.
Iyad ag Ghali, the al-Qaeda leader rampaging through Mali with 6,000 fighters, used to be a hard-partying songwriter for a rock band. Since those days, he’s banned the “music of Satan” in his burgeoning West African caliphate. Someone take down Hadith Richards!
