The Free Press
Whenever I talk to my parents or older colleagues—or when I’m at dinner with my younger cousins, or catching up with friends who don’t spend much time online—we’ve never seen the same things. We’re not following the careers of the same actors, and we’re not excited for the same TV shows. Instead, we spend half our time explaining to each other what exactly we’re consuming.
So—why is Gwyneth Paltrow kissing Timothée Chalamet? (And who is he again?) Why is David Blaine kissing a snake? Wait, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son is an actor? And he’s kissing his on-screen brother? The other day I discussed Fergie with an older friend for five minutes before we realized that he was referring to the ex-wife of Prince Andrew, Sarah Ferguson, while I thought we were talking about Fergie the ex-Black Eyed Pea. There is so much culture—some of it is great, some is weird, most is horrible, but little of it seems to overlap.
My dear colleague Joe Nocera—born before personal computing, and possibly electricity—remembers a time when all Americans would sit down at the same time and watch Jay Leno, or David Letterman, or the 1987 stock market crash. But it’s the mid-2020s, and we’re lucky if we get one or two collective cultural moments a year between streaming platforms, newsletters, magazines, and various different social media apps.
The New York Times’ bestseller list speaks to one tribe, while the Amazon bestseller list speaks to another. Film critics speak for an elite while Rotten Tomatoes speak for the masses. What’s left of what we used to call the mainstream, like Late Night, or the Super Bowl halftime show or whatever’s on PBS, feels washed out—either because it’s become overly corporate or hopelessly politicized.
The posh way of saying this is: There is no monoculture left.
So how are you supposed to know what’s happening in the world—or at least, what’s worth paying attention to? That’s where I come in.
Here, every week, I want to guide you through the culture: the left, the right, and the there-be-dragons territory that most normal people avoid—both online and in real life. I’m interested in the highbrow, the lowbrow, and the vast, bushy, prickly middlebrow. I’ll be telling you which movies—or foods, books, or trends—you should spend your time consuming and which you shouldn’t. Today, I’m also going to try to prove to you that what they’re saying on the woke prepper subreddit is actually important.
I want to show you that culture is serious. That what begins as a niche ideology on Tumblr or an alarming trend in the hallways of a high school has a way of snaking up—and profoundly reshaping the country. In other words: If politics is downstream of culture, then there are some rapids upstream, and I’d like to take you rafting.
This is a trial balloon; be nice in the comments.
Workers of the World, SnowWhite!
I was one of five people in the entire theater when I went to see Snow White this week, and I’m pretty sure the guy down the row from me just bought a ticket so he could have a place to nap for 109 minutes. When it comes to Disney’s latest live-action remake, everyone’s been making hay about the off-screen drama (we’ll get there), but no one seems to be talking about what actually happened on-screen. And I get why.
So, the acting is dismal. Rachel Zegler, who plays the princess, is a consummate musical theater kid—she was literally plucked from a high school production to play Maria in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story—and it shows. The best part of Gal Gadot’s oddly neutered Evil Queen was her jewelry.
But much worse than either was this: the CGI. Not only are the woodland animals computerized, but so are each of the seven dwarfs. You see, back in 2022—that’s how long the controversy surrounding this film has been going on for—actor Peter Dinklage, who has dwarfism, rang the alarm bell over the “fucking backward story” of Snow White. In response, Disney announced that instead of getting actual actors with dwarfism to play the dwarfs, they’d be rendered using computers so as to “avoid reinforcing stereotypes.” And so, real job opportunities were taken away from real actors—and for this we got Dopey, a cursed demon who made the live-action Snow White a horror film instead of a fairy tale.
In the movie, Dopey’s head and ears are oversized and not in a cute way. He wears this loose robe with a belt where the sleeves droop down, and it makes him look like a child pervert. When that little freak danced and bounced around on top of a table, my blood turned cold. Dopey is nonverbal most of the movie, but when he did finally speak, it was with a devilish voice both too high and too low. Behold:
This isn’t the first time Disney has horrified viewers like me with CGI; Flounder in the new Little Mermaid might have been anatomically correct, but he was nothing like the adorable wide-eyed chubby guy from the original. He was creepy—a little too real.
The extent to which politics has ruined this film does not stop with CGI. Did you know that Snow White was a socialist? “If we can give up our meager scraps, we will inherit what was meant for all of us,” she announces at one point to the dwarfs and bandits, in an attempt to build a coalition. Doc soliloquizes about the Queen’s “greedy economic policies which forced them into a liminal space where ethics are harder to define.” Snow White felt more like a dull lecture on the proletariat than a nostalgia play.
And about that off-screen drama—during production, which cost $270 million and was interrupted by both the coronavirus and the Hollywood writers’ strike, the film became, insanely, a proxy battle in the war between Hamas and Israel. Gadot, the Evil Queen, is Israeli; Zegler, the princess, is woke. She once wrote “always remember, free palestine” in a thread on X to promote the movie—which, we learned this week, led to her co-star getting death threats. Nothing says “See you in the makeup trailer” like “I want your family dead!”
Zegler also called the original plot of Snow White “weird,” because the prince “literally stalks” the princess. Oh, and she showed her distaste for half of America by posting on Instagram, “May Trump supporters … never know peace”—much to the chagrin of the film’s producers. None of those moves exactly appeals to Middle America. Verdict: Skip!
Watch the Magic Show
If you’re looking for something more family friendly to check out this weekend, look instead to the magician David Blaine and his new series, Do Not Attempt. Not to oversell it, but Blaine is the perfect American entertainer.
You may remember where you were when the moon landing happened. But what about when Blaine was submerged in water for seven days in a sphere in Lincoln Center in 2006? At the end, he attempted to break the world record for longest underwater breath hold—and failed. This is one of the things that makes Blaine great: He understands the importance of failing, in public, to build tension, sometimes over years. He’s not afraid to show us how taxing and complicated these things are to pull off, or to screw up the trick—and that’s the key for us Blaine-heads. An asthmatic Jewish kid from Brooklyn with a dream: David, you will always be famous.
This newest show is an Anthony Bourdain-style around-the-world concept, but instead of food, Blaine samples magic shows and street performances. The first one takes place in Brazil. It’s available for free on YouTube and it’s an hour-long pyrotechnical delight, the kind of thing Blaine’s been consistently delivering for over 25 years—no CGI trickery to speak of. I’ll be watching every episode.
Why Haven’t I Heard of the Most Successful Novelist in America?
Rebecca Yarros has had at least one book—but usually a few jockeying for position—on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. Her latest, Onyx Storm, the third in her Empyrean series, sold 2.7 million copies in a week (which is what Hillary Clinton’s memoir sold in the first week, plus 2.4 million more copies.) It’s the fastest selling book for the last 20 years: Yarros has people waiting in line at bookstores for midnight releases like it’s the Harry Potter days.
I’d never heard of her. But everyone else seems to have. So in pursuit of bringing you the whole story, I called up my novel-writing colleague Kat Rosenfield, who told me that Yarros is the breakout star in a new mashed-up genre called romantasy—which is like regular fantasy—think Game of Thrones—but with “less war” and “more court intrigue and sex.”
The Empyrean series follows Violet and Xaden, a pair of dragon trainers at a military academy who fall in love—and women are eating it up. Why? Kat explains: “The female-driven popular fiction market is basically just people reinventing the sexy soap opera in literary form, over and over, with some new extra ingredient.”
In other words, if you want to dominate the New York Times bestseller list: Make a sexy soap opera but with vampires, or Norse gods, or—and I keep running into this one—oppressive government overreach.
Woke Preppers
I went to a reading a few weeks back in New York. (Stick with me here.) Billed as “A Night of Desire,” it was organized by the lovely people at Substack, and it was at a bathhouse. That part was great, since it meant no phones, and sanctioned voyeurism. But once the writers got on the mic, I quickly noticed a theme—and it wasn’t desire.
Everyone was talking about what to do when the impending fascist government fully unleashes. A short woman who calls herself the Whore of New York read an essay about the transgressive photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which included the line: “If a censorious, homophobic government decided to burn his explicitly sexual photos, would they throw his lilies into the blaze as well?”
Another bit: “If sodomy is again punishable by death, maybe I’ll recognize kindred spirits by the tulips drooping on their wall.”
Someone else recounted how she’d like to have sex with Luigi Mangione before murdering the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield because she recently got kicked off her insurance.
I realized I was an audience to late-stage Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s past treatment. And in the moment, in the pool, it killed the vibe.
The folks planning for a violent collapse of society aren’t just at the bathhouse. Au contraire. The next day, someone sent me a post about r/TwoXPreppers, which is a group for woke doomsday preppers.
One person, with the handle, Ornery-Ride8742, wrote: “If I end up on foot, what’s the best cat carrier?” (Apparently, the cat is nine pounds.) There are other posts—about “cat food in the long term,” and the advantages of using wood pellets as kitty litter. Someone helpfully pointed out that the wood pellets could also be used to soak up “oil, paints,” and “blood.”
There’s also fashion tips for when we inevitably succumb to fascism. Someone called TheHogDog posted about getting blank red hats—like “the awful ones they wear”—in case they have to blend in before regrouping in the case of, I guess, a civil war. Another tip: “If your hair is purple let it go back to natural, if you got nose rings or lots of ear piercings consider getting rid of them.”
During the Obama and the Biden years, preppers leaned right. They didn’t like vaccine mandates, but were very into guns. But these Trump-era preppers? They are packing “vanilla monkfruit drops” into their go bags as a morale booster for when shit hits the fan. They discuss whether a small rural town or a big city is safer, “if 47”—as in, the 47th president—“decides to start rounding up dissenters.” They are leaving their husbands behind if need be, but by God, the cat comes with.
Here’s What Else I’ve Been Thinking About
In a profile for Vanity Fair, Gwyneth Paltrow put the nail in the coffin for intimacy coordinators, saying, “I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.”
23andMe is going belly up, which means your data is up for grabs from the highest bidder. But wasn’t it worth it to find out you have some Yugoslavian in you? Read Kat Rosenfield on the end of a DNA-testing era.
New mom Kara Kennedy, and veteran mom Bethany Mandel, have a new newsletter called Mom Wars. Don’t miss this, by Kennedy, on learning that it’s okay to say “thank you” to the father of your child.
Is your husband taping his mouth shut before he goes to sleep? Do his skincare products seem to be multiplying? Read my piece on male vanity—and the moment when taking care of yourself tips into American Psycho territory.
Harmony Korine, who directed Spring Breakers, has a movie in theaters called Baby Invasion. It’s about mercenaries breaking into rich people’s homes and doing murder, and it’s shot as if the viewer is the main character in a violent video game, with endless digital effects. It looks twisted and like it will give me a headache. I can’t wait to see it.
For more hilarious commentary on the past week, don’t miss the latest TGIF, in which Nellie Bowles brings grown men to tears—of laughter—with her take on the news.