The Free Press
Good morning, culture vultures! This week, I wrote about Jeff Bezos’s hot fiancée going to space in a tight suit, and it made me wonder what his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, was thinking. Then I saw that another billionaire’s ex-wife had a book out. Today, I bring you a review of Melinda Gates’s memoir, and of a medical drama I think you’ll love. Before we get into all that—and more!—I need your help. We need a name for this column. Weissland? The Take? The Weekly Free Press Culture Department Report? Weissgeist? Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas.
Which Way, Western Woman?
Picture this: your first marriage, to a billionaire, goes belly-up, and you’re in your 50s, and it’s time for your next act. You have two options. The first is to slap on those fake eyelashes and hitch a ride to space courtesy of your new, even richer fiancé, as Lauren Sánchez did this week. The second is to write a curiously petty memoir. That’s what Melinda French Gates did. The result, The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward, was out this week, and I read it so you don’t have to.
It’s about big life transitions—becoming a mother, dealing with death—but the only reason anyone’s picking up this clunker is to see what she says about being married to and, after 27 years, splitting up with Bill Gates. (Apparently he, as Melinda put it, “betrayed not only our marriage but my values” by which she means he hung out a bunch with Jeffrey Epstein.)
Woven through the chapters, you might find a poem Melinda is fond of, or a piece of encouragement Oprah gave her, or a poem she likes that Oprah told her about. This book screams “divorced” as loud as a new shiny red convertible, but is as un-fun as the footnotes to an alimony agreement. She drags us through her normal childhood in Dallas, and her time as a computer science major at Duke, before she gets to the goods.
“In the decade or so before my marriage fell apart, my inner voice faded. With it, I lost my center, an essential part of myself,” Melinda writes, which sounds vaguely profound (and vaguely profound is the best The Next Day ever gets). To find herself again, she does a healing ceremony in Scotland that she called “incredibly prayerful and moving,” and goes on an “unforgettable” trip to India, and spends time with her girlfriends “creating a place and space to focus on spirituality and mindfulness.” You can almost hear the glass of sauvignon blanc being placed on the patio furniture, and imagine Melinda wrapping herself in an oatmeal cashmere cardigan and looking across Puget Sound, when she writes about “carving out a quiet refuge inside myself.” Who is this book for? Her and MacKenzie Scott?
Melinda’s healing journey would have been digestible if it was supplemented with some actual reflection on being the first lady of Microsoft and the responsibility that came with it. Instead, in The Next Day, Melinda has two settings: aggrieved and apologetic. In one section she’s complaining about being the only woman in her hiring class at Microsoft (I mean, it worked out, didn’t it?) but in the next she’s apologizing for her “tremendous amount of privilege.” She goes on and on about how she hated that her work at the charitable foundation she set up with her husband—which has distributed over $77 billion—precluded her from spending more time with her three kids. But then she’s quick to say: “I want to be very clear that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with mothers spending time away from their children—not at all.”
As for the Microsoft co-founder himself, he’s only brought up to be put down. When their eldest daughter was born, the kind nurse suggested they take a parenting class to “make sure Bill would know the basics and be able to help me once we were home.” About a seafood dinner: “Bill kept insisting he’d made the clearly store-bought hollandaise sauce himself, but no one believed him for a second.” When she suggested that her family make a nightly ritual of going around the dinner table and saying what they’re thankful for, Bill “wasn’t totally sold” until one of the kids said she was “thankful for Daddy.”
“I once told Bill that marriage is like a beautiful crystal bowl, each person holding up one side,” writes Melinda. No wonder it ended.
It seems as though Melinda spent 30 years either being annoyed at her husband, or quite stressed. She describes a panic attack during a lunch meant to celebrate their 20th anniversary—before her meltdown, she concedes, “We were actually having a pretty nice time”—and another one after getting off a hot-air balloon in Kenya. “I went behind a Jeep, crouched down in the tall yellow grass, and screamed. I screamed until my mouth was dry and my throat was raw.”
Of course, Melinda is allowed to have panic attacks and get moody despite being rich. But it’s like, you’re telling me you didn’t have any fun as Mrs. Bill Gates? Her family had north of 100 billion dollars—she has an estimated $30 billion net worth post-settlement—and she gives us not one frame of wealth porn. She describes no exquisite meals, no eye-popping hotel suites, no spite-fueled shopping sprees, no golden baubles, no megayacht fixtures, no private jet rides. She could’ve given us a diamond-encrusted Eat, Pray, Love but instead we get Gayle King saying, on Melinda’s 60th birthday, that “aging is just another word for living.” And we could’ve just watched Oprah reruns for that chestnut.
Youth may be wasted on the young but in this case money is wasted on the rich. Which is why if I’m ever fiftysomething, divorced, and superrich, I’m going the way of Lauren Sánchez, who is enjoying herself and her lavish lifestyle. She is not writing—nor, I’m guessing, reading—memoirs or self-help books. She is too busy getting glammed up for her Vogue shoot and posing with a cowboy hat-wearing Jeff Bezos. She is planning the wedding to end all weddings. She is going straight to the stars, with no apologies.
Get Into The Pitt
I was home for Passover this past week and it seemed like every conversation led back to a new medical drama called The Pitt, which my parents had been watching. When my niece was balancing on a stool eating her lunch, my dad, worried about the sharpness of her fork, described some gruesome accident that doctors triaged on an episode of The Pitt. When a family friend’s pregnancy came up, all of a sudden we were talking about a scene where a woman gives birth on The Pitt. “They showed everything,” my mom informed us.
Finally, I sat down to watch The Pitt. And it was amazing. I can see why 10 million people have been tuning in each week since the series began in January—and why 10 million memes and posts were launched with each new episode. The finale just came out, so it’s a great time to binge the whole first season.
The show is about the doctors and nurses who staff an emergency room in Pittsburgh, and each episode tracks one hour in the hospital. It’s an HBO show, so they go full-bore on the blood, burns, and guts, and the pace of it is stressful. But the show earns the anxiety it produces. When you're watching The Bear, for instance, it seems as though the world will come crashing down on the characters if a sausage roll comes out wrong. The stakes in The Pitt are actually life and death. And it made me realize: If my blood pressure is going to go up while watching TV, it shouldn’t be connected to whether someone forgot to turn off the hood in a run-down Chicago restaurant.
Americans love watching people doing their jobs well on TV. To us, shows about work can be as exhilarating as the ones about sex—or even more so. The best moment of The Pitt brings to mind The West Wing: There’s constant walking and fast talking, and crises that pop up which the doctors and nurses solve on their feet. In Mad Men, there was special joy that came with watching Peggy crush a meeting with a client; in The Pitt, when Dr. Robby, the main character, played by Noah Wyle, is right about a patient having low potassium—if he was wrong, she would die—you nearly punch the air.
Doctors, and the institutions and industries they’re associated with, are getting a bad rap lately—some criticism warranted, some not—and it’s nice to watch a show where you’re reminded of the flawed but hardworking people who try their best to heal other flawed but hard working people. The miracles that happen in the ER in the show are staged, but real ones happen every day. And at the very least, the show is an effective public service announcement: Be very careful around forks.
Does This Paycheck Make Me Look Fat?
This week I read a story I wish I’d written, by Emma Goldberg at The New York Times. It’s about Gen Z’s money dysphoria. If body dysphoria is when there’s a differential between how you see your body and the body you have, money dysphoria is the same thing but for bank accounts. Apparently kids today think they have more or less money than actually they do.
The piece blames this on the fact that, through our phones, we’re essentially pressing our faces up against the windows of the richest and flashiest people there are, ogling at their feeds full of impossibly expensive bags and cars and houses—not to mention a constantly updating stream of the latest makeup, clothing, and $30 cocktails. I’m moving apartments, and when I look at all the furniture I have bookmarked on Instagram that I’d like to have in my new place, I realize it would require roughly the same budget as Versailles had. And as I’ve already confessed—I’m an eager consumer of wealth porn. But I concede that it’s enough to make anyone feel poorer than they actually are.
And it’s enough to make anyone act like they’re richer than they actually are. America’s twentysomethings are carrying on average $94,101 in debt, over $30,000 more than the average millennial. Which makes sense: Gen Z did not grow up handling cash, and researchers tell us that when you’re using a card, you spend more. And even swiping a credit card is considered a high effort for this group, who tap their phones to check out. Money is but a number on a screen for them. Sensing an opportunity, companies like Afterpay and Klarna have been targeting young Americans with one-click layaway plans. It makes it so Gen Zers can get what they want instantly, but of course it saddles them with late fees and debt in the long run. Besides, it’s sad to finance a sandwich.
To be fair to Gen Zers, anemic paychecks and gluttonous taste aside, they grew up in a state of uncertainty. They were born around 9/11; then there was the financial crash in 2008; then around 2012 they all got smartphones, which promptly melted their brains. Then there was the pandemic, which sent them home from school for a year and a half. You can't blame them for spending like it’s their last day on earth—they’ve internalized the sense that it might well be.
But what happens when the bill comes due? My prediction is that declaring bankruptcy will no longer be a taboo, and there will be a resurgence of those tiny homes that were big in the 2010s. Or a flurry of weddings between Gen Zers and established millennials, who will meet at the inflection point when the latter is figuring out, at last, that they can’t live without a partner and family, and the former is realizing that they just can’t live without a daily $8 matcha latte.
If that doesn't work out, there’s always the option to go work for your dad.
Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About:
Young boys are starving themselves in an effort to look more like Timothée Chalamet and other skinny stars. Yet another example of biological males elbowing their way into a women’s sport.
I don’t have a television so I can’t watch 60 Minutes, but I do have an X account and can watch the internet’s version: And that’s Khloé Kardashian interviewing Dana White—the longtime Trump supporter and head honcho at the Ultimate Fighting Championship—on her new podcast. At one point Kardashian asks White why we’re all so into watching people beat each other up and he tells her: “We are fascinated by who the toughest person in the world is.”
Speaking of Kardashians, and I know I’m nearing everyone’s threshold but stay with me, they collaborated with Crumbl cookies to put out a box of six desserts, one for each sister and one for their mom, Kris, who is represented by a classic yellow layer cake. My feed is clogged with people trying out these desserts, which I guarantee you have never passed the lips of a Kardashian. It doesn't matter. Their brand is that powerful.
This week, Free Press columnist Kat Rosenfield wrote about guru du jour Mel Robbins and her “Let Them” theory—which is the exact message we need in 2025 when it’s so tempting to become a narc. Don’t use the “Let Them” theory for when your kid asks if he can ride a motorcycle, or when home invaders come around. But for everything else.
Forty years after its members first got together, Phish is still going strong. I’ve been to one of their shows—one of the four nights they play at Madison Square Garden each year—and it was one of those very fun things I’ll never do again. I saw how it’s easy to get sucked into the carnival of mesmerizing lights and 40-minute songs and hours-long sets—and I worried I’d never come out.
Bernie Sanders made an appearance at Coachella, the fashion show dressed up as a music festival. Yet another reason you’ll never catch me in that desert.
Neo-harems are on the up. That’s when a man leverages advances in social media (it helps if he owns the platform), fertility technology, and his own money to mint as many reproductions as possible—sorry, I meant to reproduce. Pavel Durov, who founded the app Telegram, apparently has over one hundred children. (He offers free IVF to any woman who will have his baby.) Elon Musk has at least 14 kids by four women. But it’s not all roses for the Musk mommies. Case in point: Ashley St. Claire, who dated Elon and with whom he shares a son, has gone to The Wall Street Journal with her tale of woe.
Don’t miss Suzy’s last column. It’s about the worst comedy she’s ever seen. And also the insane products birthed by the third season of The White Lotus. Among other things.