Vamba Bility's art is formed from objects that have lived other lives: calabashes sourced from African markets, woven mats unraveled and remade, and found artifacts stitched into new relationships. Bility, who grew up moving between Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire before arriving in Rhode Island as a teenager, infuses that experience of movement and cultural exchange into his work.

His latest exhibition, Wild Poems—Loops and Interlaces, on view at Gladwell Projects in Jersey City, is inspired in part by the poetry of Nigerian writer Ben Okri and explores what he calls "the hybridity of life"—the ways disparate experiences, memories, and objects come together to create meaning. Later this year, Bility will exhibit work in Los Angeles and Bologna, Italy. We spoke with him about world-building in fractious times

—JDH

ArtWag: Your work often combines reclaimed objects and woven materials. What draws you to that approach?

Vamba Bility: For me, putting things together is a form of world-building. It gets at the hybridity of life. We are surrounded by all these moving parts, all these things that enter our lives, and we have to find ways of relating to them and understanding them. My work comes out of that impulse.

AW: Have you always worked with reclaimed objects?

VB: In a way, yes. It goes back to childhood. We would gather things that had served one purpose and give them another. We’d find discarded cans and transform them into toy cars. That way of looking at the world stayed with me.

AW: You grew up moving between Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire before coming to New England at 15. How did those experiences shape you?

VB: I can’t say I knew about the art world growing up. But I knew about artists—not in the way we understand them through the Western canon, but through the roles creative people played in society. I was aware of the importance of the griot [West African musician and storyteller]—people who serve as vessels for a community's memory and understanding of itself.

That idea still shapes how I think about being an artist. I think about the blacksmith, too—the act of taking something and transforming it. Taking the gifts of the earth and turning them into something that helps us understand ourselves.

My upbringing wasn’t fixed. My family’s roots are in Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Liberia, so movement between those places was part of life.

Language was always fluid. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, and in her house, we didn’t speak French—we spoke our mother tongue, Malinke. Outside the home, I spoke French.

My mother is from Liberia and spoke English, but there was a deliberate effort to preserve the language and culture we came from. Looking back, I see the importance of that much more clearly.

AW: What language do you dream in?

VB: That’s such an American question. People have asked me that for years. I think I dream in many languages. I’ve been told I talk in my sleep and that different words come out in different languages. That makes sense to me. Moving between languages is how I’ve always moved through the world.

AW: Do you think your interest in found objects—recovering things and bringing them together in unlikely ways—is related to that multicultural upbringing?

VB: One hundred percent. Even within West Africa, there are many cultures, depending on the household, the language, and the community. That diversity was already there. Moving to the United States added another layer to it.

I think it goes back to this idea of world-building. How do these things come together? How are they coming together now? And where are they going?

Sometimes it feels like an abyss, and that's what makes the work exciting. There is an unknown quality to it. Parts of it feel familiar, but much of it feels like a portal I'm being pulled into. I have to trust the work and trust my hand.

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Letter from Quebec Street NW

Dear Wags,

Birthday weekends can be stressful. You may throw yourself into an extravaganza, but past a certain number of candles, it’s hard to beat back the dread that comes with realizing time isn’t on your side. In the case of the 47th president of the United States, rest assured that he will not mark his 81st year on this planet by jotting a few musings into a gratitude journal. Whatever superlatives are slathered atop the $60 million UFC spectacle staged in his honor, it won’t be enough.

No, we suspect the Chief Executive’s thoughts will stray from the grappling on the White House lawn to events a little more than a mile away, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where, as we write this, workers are prying the Trump handle off Carrara marble.

The chiseling began under cover of darkness, after much storming, both meteorological and presidential. Over the past few days, it has drawn a modest crowd, if nothing like the throng Dana White can pull in. Trump and his enemies understand symbolism, and a clean image of that moniker being stripped away is the sort of thing apparatchiks will work overtime to suppress.

Yet it appears to be happening, this weekend of all weekends. And we can only think: Poor You! Because if there is one thing we can say with confidence about the most famous man in the world, it is this: no fawning compliment or humiliating genuflection soothes him for long. Somewhere out there, another ingrate is taking a hammer to the legacy. No one wins the news cycle forever, and no birthday, however lavishly produced, can ever be happy.

If we share nothing else as a nation, it is our intimate familiarity with a single ego: galactic, restless, and fragile. You may find this administration’s excesses entertaining, or regard them as a plague, but even the man in charge knows the curtain comes down on every act. This is the curse the White House is trying to outrun.

After all, the only American constancy is inconstancy. By the time the punditocracy diagnoses a national mood, the country has usually moved on. That being the case, the Politics Desk can say with 100 percent accuracy that this moment, endlessly repackaged and spat back onto your phone, is already over. Wokeism, circa 2020? Over. Revenge-MAGA, circa 2024? Over. Podcast-driven contrarianism? Over. Morons whacking their cheekbones with hardware? So over. Tech broligarchy, trad-wifery, and remaking the republic in one man’s image? Over, over, over!

The trick in this silly guessing game is identifying the latest national delusion while the corpse of the old one is still warm. For clues, it helps to pay attention to quotidian politics. So here is our rundown of recent events, cooked up tangy and digestible:

1) Spencer Pratt was never going to be mayor of Los Angeles.

Let us repeat that for our chums at Bel-Air Country Club: Spencer Pratt was never going to be mayor of Los Angeles! Shed no tears; he can always become Director of National Intelligence. Let’s begin with the obvious: L.A. is an overwhelmingly blue town, turning deep indigo. And if Rick Caruso—a perfectly reasonable moderate ex-Republican—couldn’t win the mayoralty in a better year for the GOP, there was zero chance a reality star running a Trumpy, meme-driving campaign could. Pratt made little effort to broaden his appeal beyond the wealthiest enclaves of Los Angeles, many of which are independent cities anyway. The Free Press crowd and bros who loved AI videos of Karen Bass as the Joker? There aren’t enough of them to carry a mayoral election in the non-virtual municipality where Democrats enjoy a four-to-one registration advantage.

L.A. is not New York in 1993, and the appeal of an old-fashioned law-and-order pitch is limited. In any case, that’s not what Pratt delivered. There are strong arguments for improving the city’s infrastructure and quality of life. Nattering about naked zombies is not one of them.

2) Just because you lost doesn’t mean somebody cheated.

One of the pitfalls of constructing your own reality is losing touch with the real thing. The latest example is the effort by the President and his fans to cast aspersions on L.A.’s mayoral race. Surely Pratt should have finished in the top two because… everybody’s talking about him! This is the best argument for broadening one’s social circle ever devised. (See above, delusional self-soothers.)

Let’s get this straight: Democrats, who are not doing a brilliant job running L.A., were somehow capable of rigging ballots to hurt Pratt. So they arranged for Bass, an unpopular incumbent, to face off against Nithya Raman, a challenger on her left who presumably has a better shot at unseating her than Mr. Naked Zombies ever would. Meanwhile, they also arranged for Fox News B-teamer Steve Hilton to emerge as the GOP gubernatorial nominee opposite the Biden-era cardboard Javier Becerra. What an ingenious ploy by the Socialist International!

The Bass campaign did whatever it could to elevate Pratt, having concluded that her best path to reëlection was facing an opponent who reminded voters of the most disliked politician in Los Angeles: Donald Trump (Pratt looks likely to finish slightly ahead of Trump’s dismal 2024 showing in L.A.). Had The Hills villain squeaked into the runoff, Bass would likely have crushed him in the general. Reality, shmeality! Guess who would still be calling it cheating?

Still, California does itself no favors. The state’s tortured voting process isn’t “crooked,” but it begs for controversy. The world’s fourth-largest economy can’t go on counting ballots for days—or even weeks—after Election Day. A well-intentioned effort to expand the franchise creates an opening for sour-grapes attacks on the process. Conservatives, increasingly averse to mail voting (wonder why?), watch their leads evaporate as later ballots come pouring in. This taps an ancient Republican suspicion of big-city political machines that predates Trump, though the President has weaponized that suspicion to stir up trouble. And more trouble is coming.

California Democrats—not a visionary crew—should hustle to modernize the state’s electoral system in ways that build trust while preserving access. In any case, buckle up for the midterms.

3) Sorry, Graham Platner has a very good shot in Maine.

The reasons are not entirely unrelated to Pratt's downfall in L.A. The old conventional wisdom held that cosseted, left-of-center national media misread voters far from coastal metropoles. The new reality is this: digitally driven media, left and right alike, speaks only to siloed true believers.

Damaging national coverage of Platner (messy love life! idiotic tattoo!) did not dent his Democratic primary victory, where he walked away with at least 70 percent of the vote. Anybody who thinks his candidacy is merely a DSA fever dream isn’t paying attention to Maine. Unlike Pratt, Platner has focused like a laser on actual voters, many of whom are considerably less animated by national coverage of his character lapses. And Maine, unlike L.A., is tiny. A lot of these voters know him.

Platner’s best line is: “You can’t have transformational politics if you don’t think people can change.” He has cannily argued that all the negative coverage proves he threatens elites (running against both the New York Times and Fox News is never a bad idea). Nobody seriously thinks Platner is a Nazi. The final judgment rests on whether he’s too sloppy. Possibly. But he may have turned sloppiness into a political strength that will enrage his critics for decades to come. Trump calling him “a thug” helps.

Whatever one thinks of the blue-collar bona fides of a man who logged time at Hotchkiss, Platner is a formidable politician and a more credible threat to Collins than the cautious standard-issue Democrats she’s spent decades mowing down. Her latest opponent is painting her as the ultimate corporatist lizard in a state trending in his direction. If he succeeds, the talent scout who just called him a thug may well be hosting him in the Oval Office.

4) The rebellion against AI is real and cross-partisan.

From rural Texas to the Upper West Side, rage at tech companies is turning into a political sledgehammer. The fear that rich and powerful interests are foisting resource-draining data centers onto unwilling communities is remarkably pan-ideological. In Michigan, where Democrats hold power, local fury is palpable; the same is true in GOP-dominated Utah.

In Manhattan, Democrat Alex Bores is trying to edge out fellow assemblyman Micah Lasher in a marquee congressional race—one that also includes callow Kennedy heir Jack Schlossberg (a limp campaigner away from TikTok) and professional anti-Trumper George Conway—by hammering the threat posed by AI. Lasher is now attempting to weaponize Bores’ stint at Palantir against him; that this consumes debate in a district that will never, ever host a data center tells you something.

Silicon Valley has displaced Wall Street as the Big Bad, and AI is shaping up to be an issue that subsumes old cultural divides and forges new political coalitions. Chart it by the heaps of money tech companies spend to smother the issue in the cradle.

5) Corruption matters.

You may have forgotten this amid all the talk of gilded ballrooms, $1.776 trillion slush funds, and crony-enabled Albanian resorts, but right-wing populism was meant to be populist. Without the gnawing realization that there was one set of rules for cosmopolitan elites and another for everyone else, Donald Trump, the unrepentant plutocrat, would never have made it to the White House twice.

Trump brilliantly channeled discontent brewing outside the fleshpots of capitalism, but those also happen to be the only neighborhoods he knows. His genius for self-promotion and self-dealing was always irreconcilable with governance. That contradiction was easier to indulge when it didn’t intrude on most Americans’ livelihoods. But on a cellular level, even supporters know he’s tanking America like an Atlantic City casino, saddling the country with unbuilt boondoggles, tacky branding, and a Denali of debt.

Recent history suggests the next American president may well be a stylistic (and generational) departure. After Bush, who figured on Obama? After Obama, who imagined Trump? Oh, we could be wrong, but don’t be surprised if a figure rises over the next two years who is more Boy Scout than bombastic tycoon: someone who spends less time on social media and more time rooting out kleptocracy.

“This is the most corrupt administration of all time,” goes the John Ossoff stump speech. “While you pay more for everything, the first family’s wealth is growing by billions of dollars—because they’re crooks, and everybody knows it.”

That is enough to send tingles up a few pundits’ spines. Ossoff may look like Kal-El, but he still has to win reëlection to the Senate. Naturally, he’s denying presidential ambitions. But after another Gilded Age, the country may well hunger for a reformer in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt—or Eliot Ness. After all we have lived through, it’s hardly a bad bet.

Yours Ever,

—M.V. Fenwick

The Vicar of Deadly

Grantchester, Season 11 (PBS). Grantchester exists only to provide padding between advertisements for Viking River Cruises, but what cozy padding it is! You know the drill: the handsome vicar (Rishi Nair, the third man of the cloth to head up this series) settles into an Oxfordshire village where the locals expire like mayflies. Gruff Detective Inspector Robson Green (Geordie Keating) seemingly cannot solve these crimes without a pitch-in from the Church of England. A cast of quirky supporting players (Al Weaver, Kacey Ainsworth, and most of all, crusty Tessa Peake-Jones) kibitz on the sidelines. The plot twists are telegraphed from six counties over, and everything gets set right by tea time. As demanding as a sentimental Ray Davies song about village greens, but it’ll do for Sunday night.

—Joyce Barnaby

They’re Still Out There!

Disclosure Day (Theaters). Steven Spielberg, the most cherished filmmaker of our era, has a genius for withholding. His best pictures work on the imagination long before It—a ravenous shark, friendly aliens, the unseen driver of a killer truck—ever appears. If we were forced to pick our favorite example of this trick, it would have to be 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the extra-terrestrials tease Richard Dreyfuss before materializing, late in the third act, looking like Victor Wembanyama.

The revelation itself is never the point; the real subject is our human capacity to fill in the blanks. That remains true nearly a half-century later. Disclosure Day, with its hidden aliens, wild-eyed idealists, and sinister operatives trying to keep them quiet, plays like a bookend to Close Encounters, with Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor sharing the Dreyfuss role. She is a television weathercaster receiving strange signals from beyond; he is a shaggy whistleblower determined to expose the Wardex Corporation, run by a menacing Colin Firth.

Wardex has spent decades suppressing evidence of alien visitors dating back to Roswell, and worse. Our heroes, joined by Eve Hewson and Colman Domingo, set out to blow the lid off the operation and liberate a few E.T.s in the bargain. Along the way, they discover their connection to the visitors runs far deeper than they realized.

If none of this is exactly new, it is, of course, dazzlingly rendered. More importantly, it is, as a Spielberg picture ought to be, profoundly optimistic. After all this time, the director remains a Boomer in the best sense: a child of American possibility who looks to the stars and comes away with an irrepressible sense of wonder.

—Claude Lacombe

All the horror and beauty in the world can be found in nature. Few people understand that as deeply as Texas Monthly senior editor Aaron Parsley, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the 2026 Guadalupe River flood, a catastrophe that tore through an idyllic stretch of Texas countryside and claimed more than a hundred lives. Where the River Took Us is the podcast retelling of that calamity, which for Parsley began as a family getaway and ended with the loss of his nephew. It is masterful, devastating, and deeply moving.

—Claude Batiste

Questions or suggestions? Ping intern@culturewag.com and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy. CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. We’re your essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through the clutter to serve smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy.

If someone forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation—and RSVP “Subscribe.” You’ll join the smartest set in Montevideo, Gstaad, Biarritz, and at Si! Mon in Venice, California, where José Carles brings Panamanian deliciousness to L.A.’s hippie coast (load up on the littlenecks).

“You must stay drunk on Wag so reality cannot destroy you.” — Ray Bradbury

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“I turn sentences around. That’s my life,” wrote Philip Roth in The Ghost Writer. It’s also a venerable and sometimes lucrative trade. Dan Gerstein, founder of Gotham Ghostwriters, has built a business around matching aspiring authors with elite writing talent. In 2008, the former journalist and speechwriter launched what he describes as the first-of-its-kind agency, a “one-stop solution for any author or speaker looking for help telling and selling a story.” Since then, Gotham has helped clients craft speeches, produce policy manifestos, and publish hundreds of books, drawing from a network of more than 4,000 writers.

But what happens to sentence-turning in the age of AI? Gerstein sees the deluge of digital content not as a threat, but as an opportunity for human storytellers to “rise above drivel and reach an audience.” We sat down with him to talk about ghostwriting, artificial intelligence, and the future of creative work.

—JDH

BookWag: Every week, there’s another warning about AI devouring the human art of writing. You’re living proof that it’s not so simple. I’d love your take on publishers’ concerns about what AI will do to their businesses.

Dan Gerstein: First, I’d qualify everything by saying that anyone making predictions with certainty about AI is playing with fire. What I believe today could change dramatically within a year or two, given how fast the technology is evolving.

What I can observe right now is this: the amount of content being created and published is growing exponentially, and that has consequences. It makes standing out incredibly hard. And because so much content is either AI-generated or heavily AI-assisted, a lot of it feels formulaic and repetitive. It sounds like everything else, and I think readers are already reacting to that.

Paradoxically, that creates an opportunity for distinctive work: original ideas, a real point of view, unique stories. Work that, in many ways, is the antithesis of AI. Will AI kill publishing? No. But I do think it will put extra pressure on authors and publishers to produce books that feel authentic and distinctive. Books that rise above the slop.

Readers’ bullshit detector is pretty strong. I think there will be cases where people are—I don't want to say canceled as authors—but diminished and not taken seriously because they've been over-relying on AI in the writing of a book.

All that said, I’m still bullish on AI as a tool for authors and collaborators. It can pay dividends in producing high-quality books. It just matters how you use it. If it becomes a crutch or a replacement for authorial voice, you’re playing with fire.

BookWag: One of the biggest demands from Gotham Ghostwriters clients is help writing books about AI. There’s a huge interest in books by humans about artificial intelligence.

Dan Gerstein: There’s no question that a healthy minority of the new business inquiries we get are from prospective authors writing about AI, or the impact of AI on the economy, the workforce, and society.

BookWag: Do any of these clients ever say to you—on the client side, not the writer side—Why don’t I just have AI write this for me? Why do I need a ghostwriting collaborator?

Dan Gerstein: Well, obviously, if they’re getting in touch with us, they’ve crossed that Rubicon. But this is something a lot of non-writer authors are wrestling with. There’s a whole universe of people who aren’t professional writers who want to produce a book. They have something to say, stories to tell, ideas to share. And many are tempted to outsource the manuscript to AI.

But what we’re seeing—and it’s still early—is a meaningful subset of first-time authors who experiment with AI, find the results wanting, to be diplomatic, and then come to us.

This is what most [non-writer] authors don’t appreciate: AI regresses them to the mean. It’s drawing from a whole universe of prior writing and trying to make an individual author sound like everyone else. The writing may be clean. The grammar may be correct. But you’re sanding off the edges.

And that’s the biggest reason I’m still bullish on what ghostwriters do. AI needs to be prompted. But most authors—especially those who aren’t natural writers—need prompting, too. They need someone to push them to go deep, tell original stories, and explain their thinking in an original way.

That is the Achilles heel of AI as a writing partner.

BookWag: Is AI’s core limitation that it can only work with what a person already knows how to express, while a human writer can coax out the stories someone doesn’t yet know how to tell?

Dan Gerstein: Yes. It can do the research to figure out what other books are like, but it can’t leverage that research in a dynamic conversation with an author.

How do you find the sweet spot where your book feels familiar to publishers—they understand the genre and know how to market it—but still distinctive enough that it doesn’t feel like ten other books on the same subject?

That’s why I think, for the foreseeable future, people who care about the quality of their book, whether at the beginning or after a failed romance with AI, will come back to a human collaborator.

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Why, Mr Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

Dear Wags,

Every dawn in Los Angeles, thousands of people rise in service to the famous. They do the driving, cooking, washing up, and scheduling. They arrange gardens, kindergarten interviews, and financial portfolios. They do hair and makeup, style wardrobes, highlight scripts, and promote projects. They prune neuroses, fluff pillows, tone midsections, and banish frown lines. They troll for sex and illicit prescriptions and keep interlopers at bay. Los Angeles is promoted as a city of stars, but it is really a city that runs on the maintenance, worship, and exploitation of personalities. This is a fantasy built on discretion and servitude. A life in service can be humiliating and parasitic. Sometimes, it is exalted as a vocation of loyalty or even love. But loyalty and love can lead you into dark places.

Kenny Iwamasa, the final defendant sentenced in connection with the death of Matthew Perry, pleaded guilty to criminal negligence in the death of his employer — the troubled star he claimed to be devoted to. His defense framed the case as a catastrophically misguided act of service. He faces three years and three months in prison and is “horribly, horribly sorry” for playing a pivotal role in a conspiracy that funneled more than $50,000 worth of ketamine to Perry. It is hardly an apology Perry’s grief-stricken family could be expected to accept.

“He had a responsibility, which had been entrusted to him by all of us,” Perry’s stepfather, the journalist Keith Morrison, said outside the courthouse. “What happens if Matthew gets into any trouble with drugs at all? You call. You call his business manager, his publicist, his agent. You call me. You call his mother, his stepmother, his father. He had us all on speed dial. He could have — he promised he would. His job would have been safe. His money would have been safe. Instead, he controlled him through the use of ketamine.”

You call, of course. That is the ethical and compassionate thing to do. But like so many things in Hollywood, where relationships are both weirdly transactional and oddly familial, boundaries get blurred. “A friend doesn’t ask me to hold her cigarette,” a publicist says. “A friend doesn’t put me on hiatus.” No legitimate friendship or employment arrangement should devolve into a ceaseless hunt for lethal drugs. Yet such abasements require manipulation, charm, enabling, and codependency — the performance of intimacy. If fame is power, proximity to fame is everything. What power does an assistant have? Not just the alarm codes, but closeness: the power to be alone with a famous and lonely person when everyone else has been shooed away.

Iwamasa did not call. Instead, he spent the last days of Perry’s life scouring Los Angeles for ketamine. Despite having no medical training, he began administering the drug himself. On the morning of October 28, 2023, he injected Perry three times. “Shoot me up with the big one,” Iwamasa later recalled Perry telling him at 1:30 p.m. that day. Then he left the actor alone in his Pacific Palisades home to run errands. When he returned around 4 p.m., he found Perry unresponsive in the jacuzzi. Only then did he begin frantically calling — alerting 911, Perry’s parents, and all the others who were on speed dial. He also hid evidence. It was too late.

“He clung to me and the family as if he were somehow the good guy who tried to save Matthew,” Perry’s mother, Suzanne Morrison, said in her victim impact statement. “We trusted a man without a conscience, and my son paid the price.”

Iwamasa had known and worked with Perry for more than two decades. He began in the office of the actor’s longtime manager, Doug Chapin, tending to a roster that included Angela Bassett. A little more than a year before Perry’s death, he became Perry’s live-in assistant at a salary of $150,000 a year. He was 59 when Perry died at 54 — a grown man babysitting a grown man.

In Hollywood, an assistant’s portfolio can metastasize: holding the phone and the Diet Coke, picking up the new Porsche, staying up late to watch movies with an insomniac employer. In Iwamasa’s case, it eventually devolved into messaging a doctor about the “sweet spot” on Perry’s body in which to plunge a syringe.

This was after Perry had already experienced what Iwamasa later recalled as a dangerous reaction to a ketamine injection administered by another defendant, Salvador Plasencia — his blood pressure spiking, his body “freezing up,” leaving him unable to move or speak. “Let’s not do that again,” Perry told Iwamasa, according to the assistant’s account. Yet Plasencia, who later lost his medical license alongside fellow conspirator Mark Chavez, left additional vials of ketamine with Iwamasa anyway. “I know you mentioned taking a break,” he later texted the assistant. “I have been stocking up [in] the meanwhile.”

Greed was an obvious motive for Plasencia, who texted, “I wonder how much this moron will pay,” to Chavez as they discussed feeding Perry’s habit. The roles of Jasveen Sangha, a North Hollywood drug dealer sentenced to 15 years for supplying Perry, and Erik Fleming, the former addiction counselor who connected Iwamasa to Sangha, seem more straightforwardly criminal. But Iwamasa, the loyal retainer, is different. What twisted idea of loyalty or self-interest made him take such foolish risks?

Suzanne Morrison’s statement describes Iwamasa as a conniver who gained unholy leverage over her son. “He had known Kenny, and so had we, for 25 years,” her letter read. “His number one responsibility: ensure that Matthew remained what he wanted to be — drug-free.” Instead, she wrote, “he aided and abetted” Perry’s addiction. “And when he had killed my son, he kept a sharp eye on me. He sent me songs, he drew a little map to help me find my way around the cemetery.”

There is no pain like that of a mother who has lost a child. Behind a mask of servility, Iwamasa betrayed her. But it is also true that he had an accomplice far more devious than the other named defendants: Matthew Perry’s addiction itself. As the actor related in his bestselling memoir, he had spent years and millions of dollars on an industrial complex of failed interventions — rehabs, counselors, doctors, alternative treatments, sober companions — alongside a stream of moving public testimonials about his struggles. He lied prolifically and persuasively to himself and those who loved him, again and again. After all, he was an enormously talented actor.

None of this absolves Iwamasa, but it does expose the nature of a terrible disease. Any Hollywood assistant can tell you it isn’t so easy to say no — to risk being banished from the inner circle, to displease the charismatic figure who doesn’t just pay your bills but gives you a kind of social currency, the specialness of being close to fame. How strange and infantilizing celebrity is. Perry needed someone to give him injections — if not a doctor, then Iwamasa. Someone to do the dirty work behind the curtain. Perhaps it was a kind of mutual hostage-taking: I need you, but you need me, and now we are irrevocably trapped in this deadly game, star and servant, together.

Iwamasa’s attorney, Alan Eisner, argued for a lighter sentence. “He worshipped Mr. Perry, he looked up to Mr. Perry … he didn’t have the spine to say no to his boss. He was unable to say no.”

“Unwilling, not unable,” interrupted Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett. “He could have said no.”

But no one who has toiled in the Hollywood economy — who knows the demands of the fragile famous and has witnessed the genuflections of a watchful servant class — can be terribly shocked that he did the more cowardly thing.

Iwamasa was penitent at his sentencing. “I’m so sorry to all of you,” he told Perry’s family. “I’m just so sorry to have done illegal acts that I will forever regret. I will take it to my grave.” But this correspondent kept thinking of a scene in Joseph Losey’s 1963 psychological drama The Servant, in which a cunning valet, played by Dirk Bogarde, turns the tables on his aristocratic employer, portrayed by James Fox.

“Servant? I’m nobody’s servant. Who furnished the whole place for you? Who painted it for you? Who does the cooking? Who washes your pants? Who cleans the bathroom after you? I do! I run the whole bloody place!”

Is that what Iwamasa thought he was doing in those fateful days with Perry? Taking charge, handling everything, deflecting prying eyes, running the whole bloody place? If so, he was fooling himself. And for his crime, he — like so many servants before him — has found himself cast aside.

Yours Ever,

Hugo Barrett

Rasputin Swims the Potomac by Ben Fountain

Imagine this wacky implausibility: Sometime in the near future, an egomaniacal president guns for an unconstitutional third term. But things are off to a rocky start, thanks to a deeply disruptive pandemic, which causes crowds at campaign rallies to break out in spontaneous wailing. Determined not to be derailed by this so-called “weeping sickness,” the Commander-in-Chief latches on to a professional wrestler named Rasputin, who seems to have mystical powers over the plague. The new vice presidential candidate threatens to eclipse the guy at the top of the ticket, adding fresh complications to the lives of White House comms flunkie Faith Spack and other players in the president’s reality show, The Real West Wing — but it is a whale of a tale for a struggling journo named Clarence Thomas, Jr. (no relation). Fountain’s candy-colored parody is a delight, and perhaps the only take on modern American politics that will leave you in a good mood.

—Judy Molloy

Back to the I.P. Vault

Cape Fear (Apple TV+). Let’s get this out of the way: You’ve seen Cape Fear before. Possibly, it was Martin Scorsese’s chilling 1991 version, which starred Robert De Niro as tattooed psychopath Max Cady, seeking vengeance against the lawyer (Nick Nolte) who suppressed evidence that might have set him free. Maybe you caught the 1962 version, with Robert Mitchum as Cady and Gregory Peck as the lawyer. And if you haven’t seen the 1993 Simpsons parody episode, “Cape Feare,” you haven’t lived. Point being, Hollywood has gotten a lot of mileage out of John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners. But if that makes this latest take on the vengeance thriller derivative, you can’t deny that Cady — a monstrous man who has also been wronged — is an eternally fascinating character. It’s Javier Bardem’s turn to glower in tacky leisurewear, and if De Niro is hard to forget, he could not be more perfectly cast. The shift here is that the lawyer role is now split between a married pair of attorneys (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson). Adams meets Bardem in intensity, ready to do anything to hold on to her cushy lifestyle. Cady may finally have met his match.

—Lori Davis

Nora Ephron said everything is copy, but in a world where everyone carefully curates a persona for online consumption, memorable real-life characters can be surprisingly thin on the ground. Freya Bromley’s new podcast, Character Study, explores how writers, artists, and entertainers shape their own stories, casting themselves as heroes, villains, and comic relief. Is writing about those closest to you an act of truth-telling or betrayal? This thoughtful exploration of the storytelling process features conversations with creators about everything from searing memoirs to stand-up sets. Even if you keep that tell-all tucked in a drawer, these interviews will have you thinking more deeply about how you tell the story of your own life.

— Briony Tallis

Questions or suggestions? Ping intern@culturewag.com and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy. CultureWag celebrates culture — high, medium, and deliciously low. We’re your essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through the clutter to serve smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy.

If someone forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation and subscribe. You’ll join the smartest set in Hollywood, Gstaad, Biarritz, and at Chez Jay in Santa Monica, serving free peanuts, cocktails, fried clams, and other yummies since 1959. We love the iceberg wedge.

In the middle of every difficulty lies the Wag.—Albert Einstein

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Dear Wags,

When the news of Michael Jackson’s death hit, I was having an Arnold Palmer at the Buffalo Club in Santa Monica. This was back when I still worked for the Official Magazine of the Dead Celebrity. We had just finished closing a cover story on another newly deceased famous person, Farrah Fawcett. Now we had to tear up the print issue and start over, Michael trumping Farrah on the celestial V.I.P. list.

In addition to ruining a perfectly good evening, this required telling Farrah’s partner, Ryan O’Neal, that she had been bumped. Ryan, about as irrepressible a Hollywood hustler as there was, didn’t miss a beat. “I hear Michael died of a broken heart when he heard about Farrah,” he said. “Now that’s your cover.”

It was a game effort, but Farrah was banished to a box in the upper right-hand corner, diminished real estate we tried to spin as a “second cover” to disappointed stars, or their survivors. There was only one main stage, and that fateful week it belonged to the so-called “King of Pop.”

The story goes that Michael’s chum Elizabeth Taylor bestowed the title upon him in a most hallowed venue: the 1989 Soul Train Awards. But nobody flogged an honorific like the eternal moonwalker. He willed his royalty into being just as his domestic fame was being overwhelmed by strangeness. Seventeen years after his death, he’s still buffing the image.

At this late hour, telling the truth about Michael Jackson shouldn’t be so controversial: He was a hugely talented and damaged person, and there is disturbing evidence suggesting that he harmed very young and vulnerable people. There may be no clearer example of the warping nature of celebrity in history.

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Letter from Hôtel Barrière Le Majestic

La mer, qu’on voit danser
Le long des golfes clairs
À des reflets d’argent, la mer
Des reflets changeants sous la pluie

Dear Wags,

France is the most sentimental country on earth, stubbornly holding the line on quaint human inefficiencies: the impossibly long lunch, the salaried waiter, the unabashed 80-year-old in a bikini, the unstubbable cigarette, the philosopher on television, the shrug. While the rest of the world paves itself over for data centers, France, charmingly maddeningly, remains France.

The catalog of Gallic agonies is every bit as long as America’s. French chauvinism can be at least as insufferable as our own. Still, the French continue to insist that a good life can be had without a barbaric scramble, without deadening optimization, without that crushing American tax on the soul. For decades, they have met U.S. power with style—loving our movies, rolling their eyes at our pushiness, stirring up enough trouble to keep things interesting. As America confirms every French suspicion about its vulgarity and aggression, it seems they had our number all along.

Your correspondent was first introduced to the Cannes Film Festival in absurdly Bondian fashion, arriving by helicopter from Nice (expense accounts were bigger back then). Pasty and exhausted after a transatlantic flight, he looked down on the Îles de Lérins in the Med and began humming La Mer, the old Charles Trenet chanson: La mer, bergère d’azur infinie!—the sea, shepherd of infinite azure!

Louche and sybaritic, a bolt hole where sheikhs and oligarchs park Lamborghinis and ill-gotten gains, Cannes mounts the movie business’s ultimate fantasy of itself. Who wouldn’t want to be part of such magnificent nonsense, even as the industry shrinks and film festivals increasingly feel like an extravagance from another era?

It would be easy to read this as an American retreat from global culture, the inexorable diminishment of Hollywood’s influence. But the truth is more mundane: Cannes premieres are staggeringly expensive to mount, and the downsides are obvious—boos, bad buzz, and, worst of all, the possibility that a movie might be dismissed as highbrow. The Hollywood view of film as a product has always sat uneasily beside Cannes’s artistic pretensions. Fragmented audiences have only made the tension more obvious. It has never been harder to summon a mass audience. If you’re combing for the next big hit, Cannes is the wrong beach.

Yet Cannes movies are faring better with Academy voters than ever before, a sign of how the industry is shifting. Only four Palme d’Or winners have gone on to win Best Picture, but two have done it since 2020: Parasite and Sean Baker’s Anora at last year’s Academy Awards. At this year’s ceremony, films that premiered at Cannes racked up a historic haul of nominations, underscoring both the Oscars’ increasingly international outlook and tilt toward prestige. As theatrical moviegoing becomes more niche, the gulf between what the Oscars reward and what Cannes audiences embrace has narrowed. We are in a moment of artistic triumph and commercial drift.

The real beneficiaries have been auteurs. Cannes, more than ever, is about filmmakers, not stars. Nobody cares about John Travolta’s beret or Demi Moore’s thoughts on AI, but more than a few pictures are worth ducking out of the sunshine to see. Here are some to look out for.

Yours Ever,

Marcello Rubini

Paper Tiger

James Gray’s tense thriller stars Adam Driver as a hustler who gets entangled with Russian mobsters while trying to make a score in 1980s Brooklyn real estate. His schemes to gussy up the pre-gentrification Gowanus Canal put the rest of his family (the cast includes Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson) at risk. It’s the sort of edgy New York movie Gray does best.

—Dinah Ratner

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Dear Wags,

It sometimes pays to have done time at a publication that will never be confused with The Atlantic. An embarrassingly long time ago, I ran the West Coast office of People and met many of the characters now crashing this clown car of a world, where politics and reality television are fused. One of them was Spencer Pratt.

Spencer and his wife Heidi Montag—or Speidi, as they were known in the golden age of the celebrity-couple portmanteau—dropped by my office after participating in a story on her plastic surgeries. It was 2010. Heidi was 23 and had undergone ten beautifying procedures in a single day, including a nose job, chin reduction, liposuction, fat injections, and breast augmentation to a G-cup, all in an effort, as she put it, “to become the best me.” The payoff was a People cover with the grabby headline Addicted to Plastic Surgery, a story delivered with the magazine’s familiar jujitsu of voyeurism and moralizing:

“I’m beyond obsessed,” says Heidi. “But has she gone too far?”

The Pratts loved the cover shoot, which transformed a very pretty girl from Crested Butte into a vavoom Hollywood blonde spilling out of a Jessica Rabbit gown. Heidi may have fretted over her imperfections, but it was not as though she had begun life as Quasimodo. It was hard to find a “before” picture that truly captured the scope of the renovation. What made the whole thing sing was that caution tape yellow “addiction” line. The wording upset Heidi, a sweet-seeming person, and distressed the conscientious reporter who interviewed her, because one could not shake the feeling that we had cranked the sensationalism to eleven to move magazines and goose clicks.

Which, of course, worked.

But Spencer—always a hale fellow well met, whether in a banquette at Les Deux or at the lemonade counter at Fred Segal—understood what this was. He was protective of his wife of two years (they eloped in 2008, followed by a televised ceremony in 2009). Still, he was also the decider, handler, promoter, and the reason she was telling all in the first place: Colonel Tom Parker in flip-flops, sunglasses perched atop his puffy, corn-colored hair. This was a moment, and he was a diabolical engineer of them.

Then as now, Spencer had Adderall-plus energy, rarely finishing a sentence before lunging into the next. But for all the antsiness, there was a cool understanding of how the game was played. His life was a sales pitch: for Heidi, for himself, for an idea of Southern California he had been hawking since 2005, when Princes of Malibu, a reality series he pitched starring his Crossroads schoolmates Brandon and Brody Jenner, debuted (pop culture historians note that this was just a year after The Apprentice premiered). The show lasted six episodes. Next came MTV’s The Hills, which made Spencer famous for being Spencer: a dentist’s son turned reality-TV villain, crystal huckster, Birkin splurger, hummingbird enthusiast, boom-and-bust spender, sometime believer in the Mayan apocalypse, and perennial Hollywood hustler.

If reality TV is a preposterous lie, it is powered by an antidiluvian truth: people shameless enough to live before the camera are not faking it so much as amplifying their essential selves. What you see, more or less, is what you get.

And now, all these years later, Spencer Pratt—my former neighbor, the unscrapable show business barnacle—is running for mayor of Los Angeles, as himself. And that has power, especially in a year when Americans of every political persuasion are fed up with the status quo. A surprising number of my otherwise reasonable friends and former neighbors support him. I do not mean the grab bag of tycoons and minor celebrities who have endorsed him. I mean people who work for a living.

This sample is not representative of Los Angeles, an unruly civic ectoplasm of nearly four million people splayed across almost 500 square miles in a county of 88 bickering municipalities. The Spencer phenomenon is driven largely by West Siders infuriated by municipal incompetence in the wake of the 2025 wildfires, which cost Pratt, his parents, and thousands of others their homes. They have every right to be angry and traumatized, and trauma has been known to make people from Bangor to Brentwood pin their hopes on outsiders. Still, the West Side is only a sliver of Los Angeles.

At least between Bel Air and Will Rogers State Beach, Pratt has real momentum. It makes sense if you know L.A.—not just the badly rattled, post-pandemic, post-inferno, post-ICE-raids version of 2026, but the deeper weirdness that pools beneath it. This is exactly the kind of stunt Los Angeles pulls. Its sense of common purpose is as thin as the ozone layer. It has always preferred a good show to the unglamorous work of city-making.

Spencerism is premised on the idea that L.A. was once great and isn’t anymore. Los Angeles is still a great city, though it has always been a deeply crazy one. And it is most American in its bloody-minded conviction that self-improvement is the cure for everything: that you can hack your way to happiness; that a new brow, Ozempic, or a reduction to a D cup might finally help you attain the nirvana of the best me; that every setback is merely a plot twist in the heroic narrative of personal optimization. In such a place, it is easy to believe celebrity itself might be an antidote to civilizational rot. Growing up is harder.

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Letter from Hog Wallow

Dear Wags,

Just beyond exurban Philadelphia, about 55 minutes from William Penn’s statue atop City Hall, there is an empire of trees. You come upon it suddenly, not long after clearing the last shaggy strip malls and subdivisions, a few miles past Hammonton, which proclaims itself the blueberry capital of the world. From there, the green belt of the Pinelands stretches toward the shore towns. More than a million acres of pine-oak forest spread across a coastal plain in seven counties from Cape May to Lakehurst, occupying 22 percent of the most densely populated state in the union.

You can walk into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and get hopelessly lost in an expanse larger than Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. You can canoe down long rivers of “cedar water,” stained dark by iron and tannins. You can wander for miles through a march of gnarled, 30-foot-tall pitch pines and hardly encounter a soul, hearing little besides the Eastern Towhee singing drink-your-tea and the rush of wind in high branches, feeling the soft give of sand beneath your feet.

You might stumble, as I did, upon a gnome-like man leaning against an old tree along the Mullica River between the ghost villages of Atsion and Batsto, wearing a white chef’s smock and a red cap, and wonder, in a place famous for supernatural happenings, whether he is flesh or apparition when he says brightly, “It doesn’t get better than this.” Beneath a sapphire May sky, it feels unassailably true.

The Pine Barrens are hardly unknown, but they aren’t quite famous. Millions of people in metropolitan New York and Philadelphia have never heard of them; millions more have roared past on the Garden State Parkway or the Atlantic City Expressway, unaware they exist. To eyes accustomed to grander scenery, the sea of twisted evergreens can seem monotonous, one wind-bent tree after another, mostly the same height, with no dizzying cliffs or waterfalls to break up the monotony.

But the patient hiker will be rewarded. The terrain is almost tidily free of the snarl of underbrush common in the second-growth forests of the Northeast. Amid the profusion of pitch pines grow Atlantic white cedar, swamp magnolia, and scrub oak. The boggy, acidic soil nurtures sheep laurel, highbush blueberries, teaberries, bracken ferns, and pink lady’s slipper. Among the creatures hiding in the thicket are white-tailed deer, coyotes, and tree-climbing gray foxes with their scarlet cousins. Box turtles sun themselves on fallen branches; otters and beavers move through the clean but treacle-colored streams. Pine Warblers chatter overhead, while stranger creatures lurk deeper in the woods: the emerald Pine Barrens treefrog, the eastern hognose snake theatrically playing dead, the elusive timber rattlesnake, and maybe the forest’s biggest celebrity of all, the Jersey Devil, the hoofed, winged demon said to have been shrieking through the Pines since the 18th century.

The New Yorker writer John McPhee wrote the most celebrated book about the region, The Pine Barrens, back in 1968, when it was widely assumed the trees would eventually give way to a massive supersonic jetport and planned city. By the 1980s, McPhee wrote, the last concrete in a megalopolis stretching from Richmond to Boston would be poured not far from where I met the little man in the forest.

That did not happen, in no small part thanks to McPhee, whose work became central to a conservation movement. The Pinelands National Reserve, created in 1979, covers not just state-protected wildlands but also agricultural areas and towns. Overseen by the Pinelands Commission, it was a novel approach to an ecologically and historically unique place. People have always lived among the pines—working in iron forges, making charcoal, harvesting cranberries, gathering moss for florists and turtles for the pet trade, and dodging the law. McPhee’s narrative celebrated how the local “pineys” shaped a stubbornly uncivilized landscape.

McPhee is 95, and the Pine Barrens haven’t changed all that much since he began exploring them in the mid-1960s. In recent years, he has donated royalties from the book to the Pinelands Preservation Alliance. Still, the area is probably better known as the setting for a 2001 episode of The Sopranos—the forest always being a handy place to dump an inconvenient body—even if the show shot the action in North Jersey. That, alongside the Jersey Devil, adds to the Pines’ raffish, sinister reputation. As the outside becomes ever more technologized, their mystery only grows.

I was introduced to the Pinelands by McPhee. I didn’t meet them in person until recently. The human world, distorted by screens that hector me about the decline and fall of everything, has become too much. Grief coils in my midsection like a fist, and worry chases away sleep. Have we always been this anxious, or are we simply reminded more relentlessly of life’s vise of miseries, delivered in ever more ingenious ways, until escape itself feels impossible?

Then one morning, after another night of reflexive reaches for the phone and slaps from the algorithm, I found myself pulled toward the Pines. I consulted the only Pinelands expert I knew: a cherished editorial colleague and former student of McPhee who grew up in Mount Holly. She suggested a handful of trails. Soon I was in the car with a bottle of water, headed down cluttered highways that, almost miraculously, emptied out and then, before I knew it, into Wharton State Forest, more or less the heart of the Pine Barrens. Wharton is named for the wealthy Philadelphia industrial family that bestowed its name on the University of Pennsylvania’s business school. Their empire once stretched deep into the Pines, where they harvested timber, mined sand, and dreamed grandly of industry and development atop the vast aquifer of startlingly pure water beneath the forest floor.

Like so many Pinelands schemes, it came to nothing. More than 100,000 acres of the Wharton tract, including the family’s country estate and Batsto Village, which operated as a bog iron and glass manufacturing site from 1766 to 1867, were eventually acquired by the state of New Jersey.

The village is an immaculately maintained tourist attraction, complete with a stuffed coyote and Jersey Devil sweatshirts, but it is also a portal into the big woods. I began walking along the twisting Mullica River. The trees closed in around the level path, quiet fell, and by and by the old tangible world worked its way back in as I followed yellow blazes to Atsion, whose name is said to derive from the Lenni Lenape words for “muddy place” or “cedar-colored stream.” But there is something biblical in the sound of it—At Zion—as if in this citadel of nature one might finally stumble upon a holy place. An old folk tune rose from memory:

In the pines, in the pines where the sun never shines
And we shiver when the cold winds blow

And then I came upon a gnome, who reminded me that it doesn’t get better than this: a world given over to tall trees, wildfire-scarred stands, berry bushes, the sound of geese, wind in the trees, and the shadow of the Jersey Devil. Even now, there is all this, just beyond the concrete, ignored and disrespected, waiting patiently for us to return.

Yours Ever,

E. Kite

Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester

Lanchester opens his new novel with a riff on Tolstoy’s famous line about families: every successful marriage has its own private language. After 30 years together, Kate, a teacher, and Jack, an architect, are easing into retirement in North London when Kate discovers her husband dead on the toilet seat. Thrust into uncertain widowhood, she finds comfort in her book club, whose membership also includes Phoebe, a millennial screenwriter. But then Kate notices that Phoebe’s new TV show, Cheating, seems to draw on details from her own marriage that only she and Jack could have known. Which leads her to ask: Who is the cheater here? Someone has stolen a life story, but why? It’s a clever premise for a comic thriller about intergenerational conflict, betrayal, and female rivalry, and quite possibly inspiration for the next season of Beef.

—Mary Fisher

Dispatches from Grief by Danielle Crittenden

Grief is the foreign country none of us wishes to visit, but it’s a mandatory stop on the human itinerary. As Crittenden writes in her moving memoir of loss, the timing of the journey matters. Miranda, Crittenden’s eldest daughter with political writer David Frum, died suddenly on February 16, 2024, at the age of 32. The tragedy did not just shatter her parents; it exiled them to what Crittenden calls “the world’s worst club,” the lonely society of those who have lost children. Nothing would ever be the same.

Crittenden made her reputation as a witty social observer. What distinguishes this book is her frank depiction of grief not just as a bundle of emotions but as a gutting physical force. Coupled with it are the many humiliations of the bereaved—the compulsion of others to avoid, diagnose, or prettify unbearable loss. Sadness doesn’t dull Crittenden’s journalistic knife; she has no patience for TED Talkers who try to turn catastrophe into a self-improvement regime. Her portrait of Miranda, an adventurous spirit and bright spark in her family, is funny and tender. The result is both a wrenching account of maternal pain and a warm celebration of a life cut short.

—Conrad Jarrett

Good Sister

The Other Bennet Sister (BritBox). Jane Austen deserves a long, restful holiday. Her six novels have spawned an empire of adaptations, riffs, and reimaginings. More than 200 years on, Austenland is a pretty crowded theme park, reliably packed with fangirls who can’t get enough of independent-minded ladies in empire-waist dresses batting away suitors in breeches. But just when you thought the last drop of coziness had been wrung out of the genre, we have this jolly take on Janice Hadlow’s novel, which retells Pride and Prejudice from the far corner occupied by Mary (Ella Bruccoleri), the least telegenic of the five Bennet sisters.

Mary is awkward and unmarriageable, as her withering mother (Ruth Jones) never forgets to remind her. Once her sisters have paired off, however, Mary gets a chance to find herself in London under the wing of a warm-hearted aunt (Indira Varma). All of this is a familiar turn through the garden under a parasol, but it’s buoyed by a winning cast (Richard E. Grant pops in as Mr. Bennet, oblivious as always) and a sly resistance to ugly-duckling-to-princess clichés. Bruccoleri, with a long list of supporting credits in Call the Midwife, Down Cemetery Road, and other Brit imports, is the real MVP here. She, and Mary, are stars.

—Izzie Thorpe

What would podcasting be without murder? Just political agitators and celebrities talking to other celebrities about their time on Saturday Night Live. Homicide 360, the latest from the creators of Anatomy of Murder, is determined to freshen up the genre by taking a 360-degree view of homicide cases, centering the victim while layering in forensic and legal perspectives. Hosted by former prosecutor Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi and investigative reporter and former law enforcement officer Scott Weinberger, the podcast builds its stories around the loved ones of the person killed, then brings in the procedural elements. The point is to pack an emotional punch, not just tally toe tags, and it’s brutally effective.

—Michael Kernan

You’re the wall that I keep bangin’ my head against/I’m always sayin’, “This time, I’ll get through.” Frustration sounds very synth-poppy in “Dancing On The Wall,” from MUNA’s new album of the same name. It’s a record stuffed with yearning, politics, and ornate production, and it mostly gels. On the title track, a simple idea works best: I should’ve told you not to waste my time, but/You’re so magnetic, it’s like, what’s the use?/I would wait forever as long as I’m waitin’ for you. Now that’s a romantic dilemma anybody can relate to.

—Dawn Wetherby

Questions or suggestions? Ping intern@culturewag.com and we’ll get back to you shortly. CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. We’re your essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through the clutter to deliver smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy.

If someone forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation—and RSVP “Subscribe.” You’ll join the sharpest set in Montevideo, Gstaad, Biarritz, and at Mirin in Leith, Edinburgh, Sharif Gergis and Elizabeth Elliott’s palace of dumplings and small plates. Go for the bluefin tuna belly and savor Scotland’s best Asian cuisine.

Wag is the only thing that looks good on you forever.—Audrey Hepburn

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Dear Wags,

No creature on earth is more misunderstood than the publicist. I have known, fought with, and admired more than a few, and Wag Emeritus Howard Bragman was the best there ever was. Howard shamelessly embraced whatever we’re calling flackdom these days—spin, messaging, or, God forbid, “storytelling”—because he loved the PR game, but most of all because he loved a quirky array of clients; the more maligned and misunderstood, the better.

Big, loud, potty-mouthed, and generous, Howard was a best-selling author, a talking head on cable news, a crisis manager, and an LGBTQ advocate. To those who knew him best, he was a ferociously loyal son, brother, uncle, and friend. When he died of acute monocytic leukemia on February 11, 2023, a legion of loved ones could not believe the world had been robbed of such a buoyant, irrepressibly hopeful force.

Howard’s diagnosis came just as he was settling down with the love of his life, singer-songwriter Mike Maimone. After meeting on a dating app, the pair began a long-distance relationship that quickly became serious. Over a romantic year, they commuted between Nashville, where Mike lived, and Howard’s turf in New York and Los Angeles, introducing each other to friends and family. The couple was planning their wedding when Howard suddenly fell ill. Within weeks, he was in hospice care. Mike stayed by his bedside, and the two were married just before his death at 66. Suddenly a widower at 40, Mike found himself reeling from grief and planning a memorial service.

Not long after, he began writing a book about their time together. “Because it was a whirlwind, and I knew sort of instinctively that my memories would fade quickly,” he says. “I just knew that I needed to capture our love story.” The result is Guess What? I Love You, a memoir of their relationship, which follows his album of the same name. We caught up with Mike in the midst of promoting the book and his music to talk about what lives on long after we say goodbye.

—JDH

Wag: You and I met a few years back because we shared a special person. I had heard about you from Howard over the year that you guys were together, and I know it won’t surprise you to know that he was not just madly in love with you, but the world’s best promoter of you. He was constantly sending me your music.

But we didn’t meet until Howard’s memorial. I had been talking to him maybe two weeks before his death, and he didn’t say anything about being ill. I didn’t know where he was in his journey. I was totally unaware until I got word that he had died.

Your book captures the dizzying nature of your romance and how quickly you had to shift into being his caregiver. Tell me why you decided to write it all down.

Mike Maimone: I knew pretty quickly that I needed to capture our love story. At first, I was going through our text thread and just memorializing everything—printing out pictures, framing pictures, surrounding myself with our memories. But then, kind of in parallel, I thought, Howard was such a remarkable person, and I felt like I had been given his legacy to be the custodian.

I started thinking, well, let’s see if there’s a world in which someone will produce a documentary about Howard, or maybe something about PR or crisis management where he can be a focal point of a bigger story. So I started rolling those ideas around. I had a treatment, and I just went through his phone for “producer” and started sending it to people.

That was probably the first time I got a sense that my life had really changed through him, because I started conversations with people I never would have predicted, and people were actually responding to me. But across the board, everyone said, great treatment, love Howard, but not… can’t do it at this moment.

One producer said, “This is fantastic, but it might take you over a decade. You should just write a book.” And I had always wanted to be an author. So I just figured this was my chance. I’ve been given this beautiful but tragic story, and I just decided to tell it.

Wag: How soon after Howard’s death did you decide you wanted to do something like this?

Maimone: After his celebration of life, I had some friends come in from Chicago just to be with me. And one of them said, whether you want to hear it now or later, you really just lived a made-for-TV movie, with a tragedy, a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I didn’t want to hear it at that point. But it stuck. I would say it was April—a couple of months after he passed—when I started to jot ideas down loosely.

I sent the first chapter to a friend who’s a ghostwriter, and I said, “Would you work with me on this? Is there something here?” And he said, “There’s definitely something here, but you don’t need me. You can write, so just start writing.”

So it was probably May that I really started putting an outline together. It’s just… my coping mechanism. Music, then writing. I just had to get it out in some way or another.

Wag: And you started writing every day?

Maimone: A lot of it was just notes in the Gmail app on my phone. I would email myself fragments. It started with whatever came to me, which at first was all the time, so I guess the short answer is yeah, every day.

But not in a formal sense, like, I am now a writer and I’m going to be on my laptop. Life got so stressful—moving across the country, interfacing with his family and colleagues, trying to learn more about him, because we only had a year together.

So it wasn’t formal. It was just, as the stories came to me, I wrote them down and eventually pieced them into a narrative.

Wag: How long did it take you to have a manuscript you were ready to show people?

Maimone: About a year and a half for a first draft, then another six months of tweaking it. So about two years from concept to finished draft.

Wag: One of the things that struck me is how beautifully you capture his essence. The positivity that Howard had was really powerful. From the start, you were aware of the differences between your lives in a way he didn’t seem to be.

Maimone: First of all, thank you for saying that, because that was really important to me. He was so bold and kind and indescribable, so I knew that was going to be a challenge. But he was full of empathy, and the way he could relate to anyone made him feel at ease in any situation, even in my little, tiny apartment that was basically a recording studio. He thought that was endearing.

He was drawn to people who were following their passion. And I think one of the biggest gifts he gave me early on was changing my perspective on what I was doing. When you’re in the middle of it, dealing with the day-to-day grind, it’s hard to see it. But he had seen everything—people succeed, people crash and burn. To get his perspective, and his belief in me as a performer, telling me to keep going, that meant a lot.

Wag: Do you think about the kismet of all that? The randomness of meeting someone like him at that moment in both your lives?

Maimone: Yeah. I think spirituality is one of the pillars of the story. I was in a place where I wasn’t really seeing any magic in my life. Relationships had fallen apart, my career felt stalled, the pandemic happened. It was like, there is nothing else out there. You just work your ass off, and then you die.

This experience brought back a belief in something. I don’t know what it is. I’m not going to say everything is part of a plan. People don’t want to hear that when something terrible happens. But I do believe there is something else besides what we can see and touch.

Wag: What was it like to see him go through the diagnosis?

Maimone: It was excruciating, because we were just getting started. We were talking about our happily ever after when he was diagnosed. I thought we were about to get married. I wanted him to keep fighting. But it became clear he wasn’t responding to treatment.

Even these two young oncologists, who didn’t have much respect for end-of-life agency, admitted he would only have a few more months. All he would gain was maybe six months in agony. To see how composed he was in saying, “I don’t want that,” was brutal. And I had to realize it was selfish to want him to go through more pain just so I could have him longer.

But he made that process easier by continuing to be himself. He was expressing gratitude and taking care of his loved ones. In that moment, it was awe-inspiring.

Wag: Do you think it’s changed how you live your own life?

Maimone: Oh yeah. You hear people say don’t sweat the small stuff, but really seeing it and experiencing it hammers it home. At the end of your life, you’re not going to remember what you were stressing about. You’re just going to remember that you were stressed. So it’s trying to figure out how to deal with day-to-day stuff in a healthier way.

Wag: You were also being integrated into his full life at the end, meeting his family and friends. Was that stressful?

Maimone: I always stress out about everything. But in this case, Howard made it easier. He had told his friends and family about me in such a way that there wasn’t a second where I felt judged or tested. It just felt like they were appreciative that I was there for him.

Wag: Early on, you questioned his work representing people in crisis. He helped people with some pretty checkered histories.

Maimone: Yeah. It’s kind of funny to me now that I had that doubt about associating with Howard, because he’s been nothing but a blessing in my life. I can still picture where I was when I raised that question with him. I was walking and talking outside my apartment, asking him, where do you draw the line? Would you represent someone like Bill Cosby? Would you help someone convicted of crimes get their career back?

He said no—he’s not the guy to help someone weasel their way back into making money after being a horrible human being. But if someone just messed up? Humans make mistakes. And if they want to do the work and make amends, they deserve a chance to go back to singing, or acting, or writing, or whatever it may be.

And I think putting his reputation on the line for people like that is admirable. You have to have pretty big balls to stand up and say that someone the whole world has just said no to deserves to be heard. Not many people would risk their reputation like that.

The quote that stuck with me was, “Cancel culture freezes bad behavior in place.” He was working on a book called Uncanceled, but realized he had NDAs with all of these people, so he couldn’t write it.

Wag: Back to your book. What was the hardest part to write?

Maimone: The happy moments were just as hard as the hospital ones, because they reminded me of what I lost. I’d be writing something joyful and crying.

What surprised me was how difficult those memories were, because it was this constant reminder of how perfect Howard was for me. Not a perfect man, but perfect for me. And wondering if I would ever find that again.

All of the funny shit he did, just knowing I was never going to have that again—it was really difficult to write those stories down.

And then going back to the hospital—I didn’t want to go there, but I knew I had to be honest. I hesitated in those moments. Even the songs on the album, like “Helpless,” were excruciating to write. But it felt like I had this story given to me to tell, and that pushed me to be as truthful as I could about those feelings of helplessness.

Wag: Do you find your grief has changed over time?

Maimone: It has. It’s fewer and further between, less intense. But I still miss him every day.

Now it’s more like a daily remembrance. I have rituals—I say good morning to his picture, pour him a coffee, thank him for the time we had. I feel like he’s still in my life.

Wag: What do you miss that surprises you?

Maimone: On the record or off the record? You knew Howard, so you know he had a pretty filthy mind. There are always moments when I think, “Oh my God, Howard would love this.” He’d always have a dirty joke. Nobody could come up with a raunchy remark faster than Howard.

Wag: What else do you miss?

Maimone: Hugs. Just crossing paths in the kitchen, grabbing a coffee, and taking a minute to hug and kiss. It was everything I wanted in life.

Wag: Listening to you now, you seem to have grown around your grief in a way that feels peaceful.

Maimone: A friend told me grief is just love without its intended recipient. And that’s been a mantra, continuing to love him through writing, through music. When people tell me it’s helped them, that makes me feel like he would be proud of this.

Wag: During the process, did you hear him giving you notes?

Maimone: Yeah. I felt him nudging me—nudging my pen. Encouraging me when things were good, telling me to keep going when they were hard. There were definitely moments where I thought, this isn’t working. “Howard, what do you think?”

I could almost hear him saying, yeah, keep going, this is good. Especially when I was struggling, just pushing me to stay with it.

Wag: You said something earlier that stuck with me: we move forward, we don’t move on.

Maimone: Yeah. We carry our loved ones with us.

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Letter from 3100 Massachusetts Ave, NW

Dear Wags,

In War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote that kings are the slaves of history. History, in the form of a firing squad, caught up with his sovereign 49 years after the novel was published. The British monarchy, with a few swipes of the axe here and there, has had a much longer run. But no ruler is beyond time; some survive it more gracefully.

A man who must be king has paid a visit to a man who would be one. Of all the things that might be said about Charles III, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, he could never be called bombastic. And of all the things that might be said of Donald I of the United States, Offender of No Faith, Divider of Americans, Antagonizer of the World, he could never be called reticent. Yet, officially, they have a friendship. Trump is dazzled by Charles. Charles, in his meticulous way, flatters Trump. It is, of course, a special relationship.

I have spent much of my life between Britain and America—dodgy terrain, thick with envy, resentment, arrogance, obliviousness. But mostly, it is familial obligation; no two countries on earth are more obligated to one another, and more implicated in each other’s lunatic schemes. Lately, critics have taken to saying America’s only true special relationship is with Israel; by comparison, that dalliance is a flash in the pan.

If we believe, as Churchill did and Charles evidently does, that a common tongue and liberal values stretching back to Magna Carta are the ties that bind—a relationship that, as he noted in his address to Congress, “spans not merely 250 years, but over four centuries”—then we are stuck with each other.

That remains true, even when the relationship is under strain. No matter what Hugh Grant said, playing a rebellious PM in Love Actually:

“I love that word ‘relationship.’ Covers all manner of sins, doesn’t it? I fear this has become a bad relationship—one in which the President takes exactly what he wants and casually ignores the things that matter to Britain.”

Those lines were written during the War on Terror, just as America was dragging ambivalent Britain into another Middle Eastern conflict. Not much has changed: The Americans do what they will; the British grumble and fall in line. Resentment comes out in the exhausted humor of a junior partner. Many Britons harbor a semi-secret desire to breathe air free of overbearing Americanness. They will, as Grant’s character put it, “prepare to be stronger.” Just not today.

The irritation becomes audible at times like these, as British opinion of America and its president plunges to new lows. The feeling is hardly new. “Shut up! Shut up, you American,” the Grim Reaper tells newly dead U.S. tourists in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. “You talk, and you talk… Well, you’re dead now, so shut up!” All these years later, it still delights the home crowd. How the British long to tell America to sod off. Yet they never quite do. If they did, perhaps Americans wouldn’t laugh so readily at their jokes.

Instead, we read tea leaves not dumped in Boston Harbor, parsing the careful words of Charles on his four-day visit, in which he gently reminded America of its place in the world: its obligations to its allies, the limits of executive power, and even the necessity of saving the polar ice caps. As the King put it, “We do not embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment. We do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future.” He also noted, pointedly, that NATO’s Article 5 has been invoked only once—after 9/11, in defense of the United States—even as this administration threatens to invade Greenland and derides its partners as freeloaders.

Of all people to sell democratic values back to America, we have the fourth great-grandson of George III. None of this is on the Trump agenda. Quite the opposite: Trumpism is a full-flowered revival of American Know-Nothingism and insularity. Charles—the exquisitely tailored institutionalist, the environmentalist, the lover of harmonious architecture, the authentic conservative—could not be more constitutionally opposed to Trump. Beneath those honed manners, one assumes he is appalled by this radically gauche figure.

But that is the old Mandarin’s game: to keep us all guessing, to hint at displeasure so subtly that you may tuck various interpretations into your breast pocket, folded to suit your style. Charles is a symbol and diplomatic instrument of the United Kingdom, a vulnerable island nation caught between Europe and America in tricky ways. Churchill’s genius was to invent Atlanticism and transform Britain from an imperial power into a bridge. And that bridge has been willfully undermined by his American friend. This is an existential problem.

Trump does not believe in alliances. But he adores show business, at which the Royal Family excels. He has the American habit of making everything about personalities rather than governments and systems. Little wonder he has no time for Keir Starmer (“no Churchill”), a party functionary whose premiership is cratering and who can muster little more than limp opposition to American adventurism. For his trouble, he has faced a casual threat to take Argentina’s side over the Falklands. But a King, so rich, so classy, so famous, powerful in the flashy ways that really count, is another matter.

What we see in Trump’s gold-plated redo of the White House is the climber’s aspiration to pomp. As the Pythons would have it, because he talks and he talks, we know the president is a royalist, the son of a Scottish immigrant who followed the monarchy with devotional fascination. “Any time the Queen was involved… my mother would be glued to the television,” he told guests, recalling Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, a Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Lewis who came to the United States as a domestic. “I also remember her saying very clearly, ‘Charles, look—young Charles. He’s so cute.’” He added that his mother “had a crush on Charles,” and wondered aloud what the housewife from Queens might make of things now.

Perhaps Mrs. Trump’s ghost retains enough Britishness to be mortified. In any case, in Scotland, the one thing the Trumps and the Windsors share is unpopularity. Mary Anne’s royal fandom was very American. Her admiration for the pageant she watched on television—the idea that one should admire the gaudily publicized, soap-opera lives of tabloid figures—was plainly the family way.

American fascination with the most undemocratic idea in the world, royalty, has long been useful to Whitehall, which has deployed the royal family to soften Anglophobia for eight decades. Trump is being played, just as Eisenhower was when Queen Elizabeth toured the United States in 1957, after another precarious moment in the alliance. The young monarch’s visit helped heal the transatlantic rift over the Suez Crisis and solidify NATO and the transatlantic arrangements Trump has weakened.

The parallel is instructive, given the Trumpian excursion in the Persian Gulf, which has exposed the limits of American power and the fragility of venerable alliances. In Suez, America put the French and British (alongside the Israelis) in their place, signaling a U.S.-led world order. Now that order is in flux, and the British are again deploying a monarch to cobble things back together.

It has worked before; perhaps it will again. The gamble is that the pretend king need only be charmed a few more years before he passes into history. The monarchy, the genuine article, soldiers on. As he put it, “It is extraordinary to think that I am the 19th in our line of sovereigns to study, with daily attention, the affairs of America.”

It may be that the British routinely misread Americans, assuming they are none too bright and easily dazzled by a flash of ermine—that Charles, among others, takes comfort in the idea of Trumpian Americanness, the world’s greatest power as childlike and in need of taking in hand. The King is a student of history; his opposite number is not. Perhaps he has bought Britain and Europe time and salvaged Atlanticism. Then again, the British have always assumed their unruly cousins can be managed, and Americans, being Americans, have rarely obliged.

Yours Ever,

Henry Brittingham-Brett

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Widow’s Bay (Netflix). The Widow’s Bay Chamber of Commerce has a problem. An island hamlet somewhere near Martha’s Vineyard really ought to be a destination for swells from New York and Boston. The only problem is the place is cursed by lethal fog, sea demons, and worse. The mayor, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), bears it all with the strained smile of a PR man for a toxic waste dump: “Cannibalism? What cannibalism? Look the other way, please.” The other locals (Kate O’Flynn, Stephen Root, Dale Dickey) have their own ideas about supernatural doings on their little rock, and visitors who ask inconvenient questions find themselves in some very dark places. Creator Katie Dippold has devoured Stephen King’s back catalog. But her fusion of ’Salem’s Lot and Schitt’s Creek (or really Northern Exposure) manages to be genuinely spooky and very funny. That’s a hard spell to cast.

—Tessie Hutchinson

Roald Dahl, dead since 1990, is having quite a spring. He’s on Broadway, personified by John Lithgow in Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant, and he’s in your earbuds in Aaron Tracy’s The Secret World of Roald Dahl, which excavates the writer’s colorful past as a James Bondian secret agent, seducer of women, and sometime Hollywood player. Dahl’s legacy as the beloved author of children’s classics, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach, has lately been obscured by his gleeful nastiness—Dahl was an overbearing antisemite whose ex-wife, Patricia Neal, nicknamed him “Roald the Rotten.” Tracy’s narrative reveals that you can’t neatly separate low character from Olympian talent. Dahl was loathsome and gifted at once. His life story is fascinating.

—Helga Eveshim

Out there on the edge of the world, way past common sense / Past the Dairy Queen, the county line, where there ain’t any fences. We ride off with Kacey Musgraves to “Middle of Nowhere,” a deftly crafted song about finding yourself in wide-open spaces. We’ve traveled this stretch of country, with its tumbleweeds, honky-tonks, and broken hearts, before, but Musgraves has a genius for finding her own register in a beloved genre. There’s that clever tempo change when she hits the chorus: Somewhere in the middle of nowhere / I think maybe I’ll just stay there, which conjures images of cowpokes strumming around a campfire. And there’s that wailing, lonesome quality that makes this not slick country pop, but something much rarer: a genuine windblown, high plains Western ballad.

—Elmira Johnson

Questions or suggestions? Ping intern@culturewag.com and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy. CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. We cut through the clutter to deliver smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy.

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“Wags do not need to be shown how to have a good time, for they are unfailingly ingenious in that respect.”―James Mason

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If anyone is curious how doing something like this feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry—for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays. I feel rage thinking about everything this administration has done.

Dear Wags,

Every would-be assassin has his manifesto, the words we are routinely warned not to read, for to read them is to exalt him. But curiosity, whatever it kills, cannot itself be murdered. And so we read the alleged words of Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old alumnus of Caltech, where the acceptance rate is less than 3 percent; a tutor in the anodyne Los Angeles suburb of Torrance; a churchgoer, a gamer. “Soft-spoken, very polite,” says a professor in his graduate computer science program. “A good fellow.”

The sort of fellow who apologizes repeatedly for what he intended to do: murder senior administration officials. And we ask ourselves, again, why a bright young man threw his life away. What he did wasn’t politics. It was madness.

“I am a citizen of the United States of America,” he writes. “What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

The President, of course, has all the answers: “I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you, the most impactful people, the people that do the most … they’re the ones they go after,” he told reporters after Allen was apprehended. “And I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot.” He would also like to reschedule the disrupted White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an event meant to be independent of presidential control, because “I don’t like to let these sick people, these thugs, these horrible, horrible people change the fabric of our life.”

And he has a point, up to a point. If the Trump administration had not been so effective in rupturing the norms that have governed American life, it would not have driven so many people, of all political stripes, mad. Allen does not sound like a thug in his letter, which starts with a sunny “Hello everybody!” and ends with what amounts to a Yelp review of security at the Washington Hilton, along with an admonition for kids to stay in school. He isn’t a visionary but another American coming apart, who decided to take matters into his own hands (apologies to potential collateral damage). Still, his internet fan base has, predictably, exploded.

The more Allen is lionized in certain corners online, the more the Fox News crowd will work itself into a lather about the double standards of “the Left” (see: Luigi Mangione). When asked about Allen’s manifesto on 60 Minutes, the President lashed out at Norah O’Donnell: “Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people… Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist… I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person…I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated.”

“Do you think he was referring to you?” O’Donnell interjected in the midst of that tirade, on a friendly network that had just hosted him at an off-the-record dinner. In a normal presidency, rattling off what a would-be killer thinks might be an etiquette breach, but that is not how Trump remade the role. The great innovator of insult politics can hardly be surprised by the question. He has spent years presiding over a culture that exults in cruelty, traffics in violence, and places few barriers between the unstable and lethal weapons. Understanding these conditions is not an excuse.

We are used to this back-and-forth, to a president going after “horrible people.” It hardly justifies attempted murder. But there’s obviously something deeper at work here: the unhinging of large segments of the public from civil discourse; the assumption that everything is broken and that some derailed individual with a gun may have a rationale for violence; the realization that the baseline rage of a public confronting a system so corrupt it feels sadistic is dragging an unnerving number of people into sympathy with terrorism. How many otherwise rational Americans saw this weekend’s news and thought, well, he had a point—or lapsed into conspiracy-mongering of their own? Too many.

Hello, everybody: this is the country we have all made, full of damaged people, armed to the teeth. Why are they so sick, as the president puts it? And if they are, why don’t we tend to them? Maybe this is what happens when you pulverize the pillars of a civilized society, when you expose life as a zero-sum game rigged for the powerful. Maybe, if you devise elaborate mechanisms to whip up hatred and indulge in fantasies of false flag operations, you summon chaos like a dybbuk.

The number of times Trump has praised violence is absurdly long. He has fantasized about having hecklers “roughed up,” shooting protesters, executing generals, training guns on his political opponents, overturning elections, and destroying entire civilizations. No president has ever spoken with such orgiastic disregard for the power of his own speech. It’s his brand, and it follows that some deranged followers and enemies take him literally. That does not make rhetoric violence, nor does it justify using this episode as a pretext to crack down on critics.

Allen was armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives. Thankfully, he did not get anywhere near the dais at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. His letter, complete with “rebuttals” to those who would point out how misguided his actions were, and a lecture about supposed operational lapses, as if he were doing the Secret Service a favor, is delusional. He has ruined his promising life, a life he is lucky to still have. He has almost certainly devastated his loved ones.

If you find something true in what he says, there are threads of sense in every assassin’s creed. That cannot justify it. What he did was wrong. That should be the easiest sentence in the world to say. But he was right about one thing: this country is a reflection of all its tormented people. What it reveals is the disturbing normalization of rage—and it feels awful.

Yours Ever,

Thomas Stockmann

Babylon, South Dakota by Tom Lin

This is still a country for sojourners, who leave their homes for fresh fields, blooming new identities in the process. Lin’s novel follows Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, who leave China for a 160-acre homestead on the prairie. They arrive with a secret stash of gold and a handful of chrysanthemum seeds, and somehow carve out a life in their harsh surroundings. But after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers purchases a portion of the Hsiu acreage for a missile silo and a mysterious laboratory, odd things begin to happen. Enter a supernatural dog, sleep-inducing spells, telepathy, and prophecy. The Middle American landscape is transformed into something as magical as the worlds invented by Gabriel García Márquez. This isn’t flyover country, but a place where the imagination takes flight.

—Pilar Ternera

True Crime by Patricia Cornwell

Now here’s a life worthy of an autopsy while the subject is still thrillingly alive. Before Cornwell gained fame as the creator of fictional forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, her biography was novel-worthy. There was her movie-star-beautiful mother, plagued by mental instability, and a father who abandoned the family on Christmas Day. Then foster care, and the intercession of Ruth Graham, wife of evangelist Billy Graham, who took young Patsy Cornwell under her wing. A terrible car wreck, an affair with her professor (who became her first spouse), a stint as a police reporter, and a pivot to the Virginia Medical Examiner’s Office that helped launch her as a bestselling author. Add bisexuality, divorce, and remarriage to her longtime wife, Staci, and the arc comes into focus. Cornwell lays it all on the slab. It makes for a bracingly honest memoir.

—Sam Fujiyama

The Rolling Stones by Bob Spitz

Here’s a startling fact: “Satisfaction” hit No. 1 on the U.S. charts on July 10, 1965, which means the Rolling Stones began rattling middle-class sensibilities more than 60 years ago. Mick Jagger, that strutting, pouty-mouthed rebel, and Keith Richards, that unholy magnet for debauchery, are both 82. The days of their anarchic youth may be long past, but somehow they remain defiantly cool. Spitz delivers an expansive biography of a legendary act. We move from Swinging London to Altamont, through drug arrests and untimely deaths, feuding and making up, consorting with supermodels. The other Stones—Charlie Watts, Mick Taylor, and the tragic Brian Jones—play their parts, and Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, and Jerry Hall, among other women, steal a few scenes. But in the end, this was always the Mick and Keith show: a pair of multimillionaire grandfathers who have become surprisingly conventional in their dotage, even as they have outlasted almost every icon of their generation. Theirs may be the most enduring marriage in rock ’n’ roll.

—Polexia Aphrodesia

Wag likes to ask a genius for three gifts from the muses. We couldn’t ask for a better guide than Michael Elias, co-writer of The Jerk, creator of Head of the Class, author of the thrillers You Can Go Home Now and The Last Conquistador, and a comedic force behind a long list of Hollywood movies. His new novel, Bender’s L.A., is a trip back to a great city’s shag-carpet-and-cocaine years—the Los Angeles of Robert Altman, Eve Babitz, Warren Beatty, and Nixon’s Enemies List. Can screenwriter David Bender find his way in that post-Manson fantasyland? We won’t spoil it! We will, however, ask the author about his creative inspirations.

1. My sisters: Susan Elias, a painter in Berlin, and Ruthie Rogers, who runs The River Café in London. We grew up in a small Catskills town; our parents, Fred and Sylvia, produced an artist, a chef, and a writer; surely, they did something right. From Fred, an erudite leftist doctor who loved jokes, I got my politics, learned brevity, and the pleasure of making people laugh. From my mother, the worst advice anyone could give a son on his way to Hollywood: “Always try to see the other person’s point of view.”

   

2. Art Kane’s A Great Day in Harlem, a 1958 portrait of three generations of the greatest jazz musicians ever assembled, and a row of lucky kids sitting on the curb. My idol Sonny Rollins, standing behind Marion McPartland, once said, “I don’t like to go on the road; it interferes with my practicing.” He was the last survivor of the photograph and is buried in the Woodstock Artists’ Cemetery just a few feet from Philip Guston, Milton Avery, Doris Lee, Yasuo Kunyoshi, and my parents. And one day, I will be too.

   

3. My favorite book when I am avoiding writing: The Journal of Jules Renard.
   “Oscar Wilde sat next to me at lunch. He has the oddity of being an Englishman. He does not walk around a table; he moves a table out of the way.” Toulouse-Lautrec: “The oftener you see him, the taller he grows. He ends up being taller than average.” And one more: “I am often dissatisfied with what I have written. I am never dissatisfied with what I am writing, because if I were, I would not be writing it.”

Questions or suggestions for our book supplement? Ping intern@culturewag.com, and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy.

CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. It’s your essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through the clutter to serve smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy.

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“In the middle of every difficulty lies the opportunity to Wag.” — Albert Einstein

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Letter from 550 Park Avenue

Dear Wags,

Forget that line about pink being the navy blue of India. Diana Vreeland, the greatest-ever editor of Vogue, popped off about a lot of things, like some inexhaustible magnum of Champagne. She labored at being witty to the point of parody. It mostly worked, though she was wrong about unshined shoes dooming civilization (that, children, is the media’s job). Style proclamations only get you so far; it’s the sentiment beneath them that counts. And there, she was sometimes wise: What sells is hope, she said. In life and magazine editing, it is kindling for bullshit and dreams.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens on May 1, twenty years too late. It’s a salute to an irrelevant industry—from one circling the drain in its wake. That may not matter. The movie is recognizable IP for the generation of women who liked the first movie, and a fantasy for those too young to have experienced the era it exhumes. What are we selling here? Not glossy magazines and their imperious editors, not fashion, not journalism, not New York as Fun City, not creative industries as viable employment for interesting human beings. No, this is a Barney’s Warehouse Sale of outmoded fantasies, the alternative dimension where that fluff and friendship matter, where we still go to work in an office and bitch about our bosses and take town cars to glamorous events. It’s not real, any more than Narnia is real. It is nothing but hope.

In this Narnia, we have a declawed Aslan, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), and her plucky acolyte and foil, Andy (Anne Hathaway), familiar faces (Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci), and some new audience-tested ones. This is another reboot, like And Just Like That, Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair, or that life-paddle revival of Scrubs. It exists to reassure us that things haven’t changed, and that, with a little buffing out of crow’s feet, the gang’s all here. With help from AI, maybe they’ll never go away.

It’s worth remembering that the ur-text, The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger, was a vengeful book about a mean business. When it became a bestseller back in 2003, Vogue editors did not see it as a promotional opportunity but a hit job from Anna Wintour’s former assistant, who crafted a fictionalized portrait of a lousy boss. It sold not because it was a great novel but because it was a dishy one, a pre-MeToo act of white-collar rebellion. In those days, there were still famous editors, all being impossible in colorful ways. If they were taken down a peg in columns, their well-publicized eccentricities burnished their legends. A legion of put-upon editorial flunkies fantasized about cashing in the way Weisberger did. How they envied her.

And now, there is only Wintour, a persona beyond whatever she does for a living, forever hiding beneath dark glasses and a Louise Brooks bob. By the time Weisberger committed her betrayal, she was already legendary, and in that mythos, a calculating ice queen. Ironically enough, the book enabled a transformation into a cartoon. And cartoons, unlike bad managers, can be lovable. The genius responsible for this makeover was Streep, whose portrayal of Miranda in the 2006 adaptation of the novel turned Weisberger’s domineering editrix into a layered character. Streep’s Miranda was scary, but she was also admirable, her toughness hinting at a maimed heart. She wasn’t the devil at all, but an antihero and inspiration.

As Vogue slid into decline, Wintour’s profile kept rising. Whatever Weisberger intended, her former employer, 76, has survived any number of career assassination attempts and is now, as Chief Content Officer of Condé Nast, more viable than any of the shrinking brands and unengaging editors she oversees. A cynic might say she is the ultimate Boomer, luxuriating at the top as generations of aspirants watch their ambitions wither down the vine. But she’s far more interesting for having survived and even eclipsed the beat she’s covered since the 1960s. Wintour was Vogue’s editor for 37 years. Who are all those Andys but bit players in her movie?

The sequel to The Devil Wears Prada is another showcase for this persona, a symbol of the fashion world that’s become a designer label unto itself. The movie franchise revolves not around its whiny millennial protagonist but Miranda Priestly, a creature as likely to stalk the halls of a modern media company as a Stegosaurus is to lumber through Times Square. The workplace without her, run by the HR compliance committee, by the sensitivity-trained and mealy-mouthed, isn’t much fun at all.

The Devil Wears Prada, 1.0, is a perfectly amiable romantic comedy. It is elevated by a great cast and its most celebrated scene, in which Miranda coolly dresses down Andy for not seeing anything particularly remarkable in the styling of an outfit—why should one belt matter any more than the others? She’s just learning about “this stuff,” as she calls it.

This “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet, and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? …and then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers, and then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”

That is the way the system sort of worked back then, if one forgets that fashion is a two-way street, with all those bin-rummaging nobodies influencing the doyennes at the top of the pyramid. The last Casual Corner was liquidated the year The Devil Wears Prada opened. Still, it’s a terrific moment, because it’s really about craft and taking what you do—however frivolous it may seem to others—seriously. It is also a eulogy for a whole way of doing creative business.

The other great moment in the film is the very beginning, a montage of bright young things getting dolled up for work in the canyons of Manhattan, set to K.T. Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See.” The old-fashioned romance of that—getting dressed for the office, running for the train, splurging on a cab. Suddenly I see, this is what I wanna be! Who wouldn’t be nostalgic for that nasty, lovely New York? The place floated on hope.

Yours Ever,

Margaret Prescott

Letter from the Washington Hilton

Dear Wags,

At this point, the Chief Executive has earned a considerable reputation for having a reverse Midas touch: from the Straits of Hormuz to the Kennedy Center—even America’s reputation—every bauble this ruler grasps blackens, shrivels, and crumbles in his clutches. We have the presidential equivalent of Keith Moon, the doomed Who drummer who never met a hotel room he didn’t trash. And once the pillaging is over, it’s somebody else’s job to haul the Lincoln Continental out of the swimming pool.

We have a headline for Weijia Jiang, the current head of the beleaguered White House Correspondents’ Association: the group’s annual hootenanny is dead. It doesn’t matter that you can still pack a cavernous room full of Beltway desperados hungry for a “red carpet experience.” It doesn’t count just because Nicki Minaj will come as a guest of Fox News, or that Michael Chiklis is having his tuxedo pressed, or that Qatar and Grindr will host after-parties. This weekend’s extravaganza isn’t the “nerd prom” it cringingly tries to brand itself. It’s a corpse viewing.

And it really doesn’t matter that instead of an edgy comedian, the event’s emcee will be a “mentalist” named Oz Pearlman who, apparently, is renowned for guessing Joe Rogan’s ATM PIN. Perhaps he should use his powers to change the President’s attitudes about tariffs, NATO, and the profligate use of gold leaf.

The President will attend the dinner for the first time since 2011. The lore goes that he was “ridiculed” from the podium by President Obama and that year’s host, Seth Meyers. We were in that crowded room, and the origin story never made sense. By 2011, Trump was already gunning for the presidency and cranking out birther conspiracies; he was getting ribbed because of it. The idea that all this wouldn’t have happened had the libs not been so nasty? Please—that’s classic Trump victim-spin.

In the years that followed, Trump-slagging at the WHCD ratcheted up alongside his political star. The President didn’t attend, but he did spend the intervening years honing attacks on a free press. Trump labeled journalists “the enemy of the people,” a libel straight out of the 1930s, made more potent because it stuck. In the face of sustained Orbanist assault, most of America’s mainstream media institutions will emerge from this era compromised and terminally hollowed out. In their place are legions of newsletters (some very good) that few people pay attention to, and a handful of influencers who are avidly followed. There is no shortage of hot takes on America’s misadventure in the Persian Gulf, but the quality of actual reporting—real, bot-free information gathered at great risk and expense—is a scandal.

Attacks on journalism by those in power are not new. In more complacent days, the whole point of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was to celebrate the First Amendment, to poke fun at the most powerful human being on earth, and to underscore that one of America’s many strengths, guaranteed in its Constitution, was a free press. This administration, in its vanity and ignorance, has nothing but contempt for all of that.

The President’s return to the Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t a sign of democratic restoration, but further evidence that the norms of old official Washington have been blasted away. The gala was never a good time, but a cattle call for toadies, desperate to rub elbows with a few bewildered celebrity guests. All that star-fuckery, which did reach an apex in the Hollywood-friendly Obama years, was never a good look for serious journalists. And like so many institutions wrecked in the Trump era, it will never recover.

Maybe that’s a good thing. In his vainglorious need to grandstand at every party, Trump did expose the clubbiness and corruption of official Washington. His impulse, of course, is simply to take over a racket and bankrupt it. Whatever he touches withers, but when it’s all over, maybe Americans will find an appetite for genuine reform in media and so much else.

Meantime, avoid this rubber-chicken dinner like the plague.

Yours Ever,

M.V. Fenwick

This Vast Enterprise by Craig Fehrman

“Ocian in view! O! the joy!” William Clark wrote those words in his journal on November 7, 1805, glimpsing the Pacific after traveling two years, four months, and 10 days across a continental wilderness. That 8,000-mile adventure of Clark, Meriwether Lewis, and their intrepid Corps of Discovery is all about the glory of striking out into the unknown, even if the topic is well-trod territory. What makes Fehrman’s account feel fresh is his wide-angle approach to the saga. Commissioned by Thomas Jefferson to explore the vastness of the Louisiana Purchase, the explorers could not have made the journey from St. Louis to the Pacific Northwest without an enormous supporting cast. There was, of course, the pregnant Sacagawea, a Shoshone teenager and guide, trapped in a chattel “marriage” to the reprobate fur trader Pierre Charbonneau. There is York, the enslaved man who served as the volatile Lewis’s valet, and there are the sergeants who kept the expedition from disaster as it followed the Missouri and traversed the Rockies. Along the way were the Native peoples—Mandan, Hidatsa, Lakota, Shoshone, Nez Perce, and Chinook—who had their own ideas about the interlopers and, often, helped them survive. Fehrman’s sweeping account smartly incorporates this diversity of perspectives into an odyssey that still fires the imagination. It is a broad and generous all-American tale.

—Alexander McKeag

Nail-Biter

Criminal Record Season 2 (Apple TV+). “We’re in intelligence,” snarls the gizzardy Peter Capaldi, one hawk eye bulging. “Our job is to put out the fires before they start.” Surely, that’s on page one of the manual. It’s also the cue for something in central London to be blasted to smithereens. The second installment of Paul Rutman’s steel-colored cop drama has to do with some nasty ethno-nationalists up to no good in the British capital, but really, it’s a showcase for Capaldi as DCI Daniel Hegerty, the only man standing between London and total damnation and a far more compelling tough guy than the creepsters in Richard Gadd’s Half Man. Begrudgingly by his side is Cush Jumbo as DS June Lenker, who is tormented by the death of a teen at the hands of those white supremacists. The oily baddy is played by Dustin Demri-Burns, who was so lovable on Slow Horses. The difference is that intensity is never leavened by jokes over a pint. No pub breaks here.

—Sidonie Baker

Wag loves to ask a genius for three gifts from the muses. And what better brain to tap than the one belonging to Adam Mansbach—father, funny man, and author of the legendary Go the Fuck to Sleep, the 2011 bedtime-story parody that channeled the universal agony of trying to tuck in a wakeful kid. “The inspiration was to try to capture my own inner monologue and juxtapose it with familiar, snoozy, bunnies-and-kitties-style bedtime-book rhymes,” he says. “I thought that by giving voice to what I felt, maybe we—the parents of the world—could laugh together instead of crying alone.” Well, time flies, and the Mansbach spawn now handle lights-out just fine. His latest work of humor hits a different familial milestone: leaving the nest.

What to do when your bundle of joy is packing up for the dorms? You can tell her you love her to death while she rolls her eyes, convert her room into a gym, and hope she soars but never strays too far. And of course, you’re officially allowed to swear in front of her. Mansbach’s Go the Fuck to College arrives just in time for commencement season. Here are a few things that inspire him creatively.

1. I watch a lot of NBA basketball, and my two favorite plays are polar opposites—and not really plays at all. The first is when somebody falls down, and players from the other team help him back up, which is fairly rare. And the other is when a player takes a shot after the whistle (a shot that doesn’t count in any way) and somebody from the other team grabs it out of the air before it reaches the hoop because WE’RE NOT GIVING YOU A PRACTICE SHOT! WE'RE NOT LETTING YOU GET A BOOST FROM WATCHING YOUR SHOT GO IN! Somewhere in the duality of these two acts—the essence of community and the essence of competition—lies my entire personality.

   

2. Elvin Jones’s drum solo on “Pursuance” from John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. I was Elvin’s roadie for seven years; he was like a grandfather to me, and the depth of his devotion to his art was both humbling and inspiring. Listening to Elvin—especially on this album, which is a sacrament to so many people—reminds me of who he was and inspires me to try to carry on in the spirit of what he created.

   

3. My text thread with Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel. These guys are my comedy heroes. I grew up watching Zweibel’s SNL skits and reading Dave’s column in the newspaper, and I kind of can’t believe that now we all write books together. Every morning, Alan texts Dave and me his Wordle score, and that’s our cue to start making fun of him for the rest of the day. It’s the next best thing to being on tour together.

Questions for us at CultureWag? Please ping intern@culturewag.com, and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy. CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. It’s an essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through a cluttered landscape and serving up smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy. If somebody forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation and RSVP “Subscribe.” You’ll be part of the smartest set in Hollywood, Gstaad, Biarritz, and at Crown Shy on Pine Street at the tip of Manhattan, where we can’t get enough of the Gruyère fritters.

Between the Wag and the thing the world lies waiting —Cormac McCarthy

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Dear Wags,

Now, we could twist your innards with a week’s worth of provocations. But someone just sent us the photograph above, and it stirred memories of the good old days. If your brain can still rewind past whatever came before Trump posed as Jesus, recall those happy seconds when images from Artemis II flickered across your feed.

Why did the 10-day NASA mission around the Moon, with a crew of four photogenic astronauts—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency—thrill so many punters down below? The first humans to fly beyond Earth’s orbit in more than 50 years, those voyagers left an angsty planet and beamed back a little joy.

It’s useful to step 238,855 miles away from terrestrial nonsense and gain a little perspective. What did they glimpse at that great height? Not the ugliness on our screens, but a perfect blue marble turning in the void, the miracle we get to share. Of all the beautiful things on Earth, Earth itself must be the most beautiful thing of all: a shimmer of ocean and cloud, desert and forest. It only takes a little altitude to see our mistakes and crimes shrink toward irrelevance. This is our patch, our garden to tend or despoil. Look around you and take in that incredible stroke of luck.

Every star is a hearth, radiating warmth. For a planet to support life as we understand it, it must lie in what NASA scientists call the Habitable, or Goldilocks, Zone—a sweet spot neither too close to its sun nor too far away. The average temperature on faraway Neptune is -360°F (-220°C), while an afternoon on Venus can reach 900°F (475°C), hot enough to turn lead to broth. This place, our home, lies in that narrow band.

There are as many as 100 billion planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, and of these, scientists estimate there may be at least 500 million Goldilocks worlds—quite possibly billions more. And yet, our first tentative explorations beyond our home sphere haven’t turned up any rivals. Then again, we have barely nibbled at the edge of the known universe. Our galaxy alone is roughly 100,000 to 200,000 light-years across, and a light-year is equivalent to 5.88 trillion miles. In other words, we are at the very beginning of our longest adventure.

Artemis II is not some billionaire’s plaything. It did not rocket starlets in skin-tight jumpsuits into the stratosphere for a quick looky-loo. It is not an expression of some galactic ego trying to export Randian delusions to the outer limits. The privatization of space has been a pretty dreary affair, a mogul’s scramble for dominance. If it has an animating ethos, it’s that stewardship of our generous home planet is beside the point. Once things here are tapped dry, the idea is to plop some pre-selected remnant somewhere else and live in an oxygen dome under the thumb of some erratic tycoon. To go where no one has gone before, not to marvel and learn, but to escape earthly regulators and grab the largest market share. What a pinched dream.

There is more to us than that. It isn’t our ability to drive revenue that distinguishes us as a species, but our capacity to grasp the universe beyond the material, to look up from the spreadsheet and dream. “Trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful, and from up here you look like one thing,” said Glover as Artemis passed overhead. “Homo sapiens are all of us; no matter where you’re from or what you look like, we’re all one people.”

And it is true, you know. We are not only what the loudest and worst of us say. We can still do great and generous things for each other, at home or hurtling toward the farthest star. We only need to take the long view.

Yours Ever,

Famesick by Lena Dunham

A long time ago, Mick Jagger said that in England, people will key your limousine if you get rich and famous, while in America, they want one of their own. That’s not true. In America, they want to see you in a seven-car pileup. The American fixation on celebrity—all-consuming, unhealthy, and routinely deadly—rots the soul. Your reviewer came down with this debilitating condition and is in tenuous recovery. Maybe the best thing about Dunham’s new memoir is the title, which might actually be a national diagnosis. We are all fame-sick; it’s a malady that belongs in the DSM.

Dunham is a very funny writer. After an operation on her uterus, she describes the badly compromised organ as “the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws.” That is a good line from somebody who knows one. It still has to be said, because Dunham’s compulsion for self-exposure irritates people so—and she has internalized that hostility. If you wanted all the barbs hurled at Dunham over the past 14 years to wound her, rest assured, she’s been in epic pain.

There is the physical toll—Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, fibromyalgia, phantom torments that lead to surgeries, including a hysterectomy at 31. But none of this seems to be the underlying condition, which has to do with becoming famous at 25, a symbol of navel-gazing millennial hipsterdom, humble-brag entitlement, and unserious feminism.

Here, we may say, Cry us a river, Lena Dunham. Except that, however wittily she writes it, her relentlessly examined life really does sound terrible: money, famous friends, and one-liners can’t retouch the baseline torment of betrayals, breakdowns, addiction, and endless online insults. To be called not just a privileged narcissist, but physically repulsive, again and again. To have people wish you dead for taking off your clothes. To lean too hard on your Klonopin prescription. It’s no stroll through McCarren Park.

But of course, Dunham keeps exposing herself. Her many critics seem to think this is a selfish choice, rather than simply her nature. She opens the kimono, or shows up without one, not just because she is a cynical self-promoter, but because she is an instinctual one. She tells unflattering stories about feckless Jack Antonoff, volatile Adam Driver, and, most of all, her former creative partner Jenni Konner, whom she claims told her she was getting too thin for her role on Girls: “‘It’s not that hard,’ she hissed. ‘Just put food in your mouth.’ This didn’t sound like concern to me.”

She also tells unflattering stories about herself, of course, taking a page from her mentor Nora Ephron and making everything copy. Dunham went from crashing with her artist parents in Tribeca to a very public life, toting her stuffed animals along the way. But she wasn’t really a kid. She was a New York young adult—sophisticated and sheltered at once, spoiled for sure, and old enough to be working for a living. Her formidable mother helped secure financing for her first movie, which led to Girls. She is precocious and naive about the world, the sort of person who goes to couples therapy with her business partner, who can’t stop talking about her rough sex and wonky plumbing. She speaks of things because they are on her mind; it never occurs to her not to.

Some people—no, many people—will never forgive her for this. There’s jealousy in that. But you’d have to be blind not to see the talent, and how she’s suffered for it. Famesick has plenty of celebrity dish, from a sharp observer who knows to knock herself before any of her targets. The real star of Dunham’s misadventures is her father, who looks at her with love and exasperation and asks, in various ways, why must you make things so hard for yourself? And the answer is obvious: the girl can’t help it. Never could.

Dunham is hardly the first writer compelled to confess, or spin, everything about her little life. She’s not even the first young, hip New York female writer to do it; the city produces them by the bushel. She is not the first American to confuse attention with love and reach for it with admirable will. But the lesson in her revelations is this: fame really does make you sick. All your gifts and connections won’t save you from having your insides twisted. And maybe the only worthwhile cure is to find, in middle age, a subject that compels you more than yourself.

—Undine Spragg

Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez

Gonzalez returns with the story of Brooklyn-bred Alicia Canales Forten, an ad copywriter trying to hang on in the borough of her birth, and her friendship with her glamorous neighbor La Garza, a fashion designer at the center of Fort Greene’s bohemian scene. It takes a minute for Alicia to realize that the queen bee has an agenda: La Garza is in love with her married cousin Devon, the finance bro she fell for years ago. Only Devon’s type-A wife, Marla, stands in the way. Meanwhile, Alicia, who is engaged, begins to doubt her own commitments, and La Garza’s pending IPO is tangled up with underworld characters. What separates this from the pack of novels about young strivers and their romances is its keen observation of Brooklyn’s stew of ethnicity, class, and real estate. Gonzalez writes sharply about a world she knows, in journalistic detail. Edith Wharton would approve.

—Sillerton Jackson

Small Town Girls by Jayne Anne Phillips

Almost heaven. West Virginia doesn’t always live up to those lyrics, but it did produce a celestial writer in Phillips, a Pulitzer-winning novelist born in the Appalachian town of Buckhannon. This essay collection explores the challenges and rewards of a writing life, but it really sings when Phillips looks back on a childhood spent in a close-knit community of formidable women, starting with her mother, whose death is the subject of the final essay here, “Premature Burial.” Along the way, she touches on her coming of age in the rugged hills—discovering literature, terminating an early pregnancy, and finding her way as an author. It makes for a searching, lyrical, and deeply rewarding portrait of a singular American artist.

—Billy Colman

American Men by Jordan Ritter Conn

There is, somehow, a crisis of American manhood at a moment when a poisonous cartoon of it seems to be running amok, trashing everything in its path. That may drive some feminist critics crazy, but of course two things can be true at the same time: men behaving badly are men in deep trouble.

Ritter Conn has plenty of company when it comes to writing about embattled maleness, but this is a deeply empathetic effort that seeks to understand rather than condemn—or worse, offer a bunch of pat solutions to what troubles so many boys and young men. Instead, the author spent time with four very different figures: a Mohawk MMA fighter, a West Point graduate, a law student, and a young Ohioan trapped in rural poverty. Each is wounded in his own way—by violence, questions of sexuality and gender, economic anxiety, and shifting status. It took the author five years to report this dispatch; the result is a portrait of men struggling to ask for help, and a society that doesn’t quite know what to do with them.

—Tyler Durden

American Fantasy by Emma Straub

Who designs Straub’s book covers to look like all her other book covers? Why must they be done up in pastel colors, as if they’re about to be plonked into a beach bag? We’re sure this is market-tested, but she’s a clever writer who deserves better packaging.

In any case, her latest novel tells the story of Annie, divorced and about to turn 50, who books a cabin on a boy band nostalgia cruise. It’s a five-day voyage for aging fans of a bygone ’90s pop act called Boy Talk (the ladies refer to themselves as Talkers), and perhaps a chance for Annie to chart a new course. Straub nails the cheesy delights of female fandom; the ship is packed with eccentrics who, at least for a few days, reconnect with what it meant to be 13-year-olds with Tiger Beat posters plastered on their bedroom walls. Once aboard, our heroine meets Keith, a Boy Talk member who is now a troubled man, trying to figure out what his brush with teen pinup fame really meant.

Well, you know how the old theme song goes: Love, exciting and new—come aboard. We’re expecting you.

—Sophie Fisher

Questions and suggestions for BookWag? Please ping intern@culturewag.com, and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy.

CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. It’s an essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through a cluttered landscape and serving up smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy. If somebody forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation and RSVP “Subscribe.” You’ll be part of the smartest set in Hollywood, Gstaad, Biarritz, and at Burro Covent Garden, where we always start with anchovies and butter.

Wag on those who subscribe, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.—Diogenes

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Dear Wags,

What is architecture if not the imposition of human will on the fickle natural world, the Ozymandian delusion that concrete, glass, and tatty gold plating might outwit time? All our imperial monuments, however showy or hideous, wind up in the muck.

There is folly in most human effort. Publishing a Substack newsletter must rank pretty high on the list of flailing stabs at immortality. But there is crazy, and there is batshit crazy. In recent weeks, America, always a little unhinged, seems to be decompensating before our eyes.

On Easter Sunday, the president dropped an F-bomb on Truth Social and threatened to drop many more bombs on Iran. By Tuesday, he was warning that “a civilization will die tonight,” which is as close to an open flirtation with nuclear holocaust as we’ve heard in 80 years. The moment was so unhinged that it had Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene invoking the 25th Amendment.

A few hours later, Trump walked it back, announcing a two-week ceasefire in the war he had launched on February 28. The Strait of Hormuz is supposed to open again, though no one seems entirely sure. For the moment, it reads as a ratification of Iran’s control over one of the world’s most critical choke points.

All this before talks have even begun, with no clear sense of where things stand or where they are heading. As for the goals of Trump’s War, whatever they were—to end Iran’s nuclear capacity, strip it of ballistic missiles, avenge 47 years of state-sponsored terrorism, or maybe, but not really, spur democratic revolution against a repressive theocracy? Details. At the cost of thousands of lives and a further erosion of American credibility, the Iranian regime is richer, angrier, and harder-line than before. In a life defined by outrageous stunts, this may be one table-flip too many.

The fissure within MAGA has widened into a chasm. “How dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country? Who do you think you are?” Tucker Carlson said on his podcast. How dare he, and why do we keep letting him do it? Which civilization is in mortal jeopardy: the one in the hands of a low-information narcissist, or the medieval theocracy, unimpressed by bling and unafraid of apocalypse?

On these swampy foundations, we place architecture. Not just the imperiled bridges and power plants of Iran, but the ponderous edifices of the Trump regime, with its atavistic attachment to monument-making. The demolition of the East Wing to make way for a $400 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom—complete, if the renderings are to be trusted, with fake windows and a grand staircase leading nowhere—is meant to be an emphatic symbol of triumph.

But symbols will betray us. In its Brobdingnagian profligacy, its gaudy pointlessness, the ballroom is a perfect emblem of a corrupt age, a Tweed courthouse for 2026.

As the administration plunges the United States and the world into crisis after crisis, the president returns to this preposterous project, as if he were selling the public a Florida timeshare they cannot afford and never wanted. In the middle of the war he inflicted on himself and the world, his brain loops back to gold-plated excess and baroque indulgence, “a gift” to the nation—l’état c’est moi—from grateful tech oligarchs and crypto hucksters.

The ballroom is part of an aesthetic program. Tally the rest: gold-leafed surfaces across the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, the paving over of the Rose Garden, the transformation of the West Colonnade into a bizarre presidential walk of fame with sneering captions from the Don Rickles in Chief, and signage in looping script imported from Mar-a-Lago or some aspirational exurban country club.

As John Ruskin might say, the architecture of Trumpism is crap. It lacks the high trailer-park crapitude of, say, Graceland or Caesar’s Palace—fun crap. Those places are genuinely popular, tourist shrines built on a shared fantasy. Disneyland throws open its doors to the hoi polloi. Trump’s monuments are the gaseous excretion of a single insufferable ego, a deeply impoverished one: solipsistic vulgarity chiseled in stone.

This tackiness is not even amusing; it is as overbearing as the potentate who commissioned it. It is the hulking monumentalism of Benito Mussolini, Enver Hoxha, or Saddam Hussein, columns and ramparts as compensation for more intimate shortcomings. Architecture as a Viagra-dosed phallus aimed at democratic ideals, so crudely executed it makes you long for the light touch of Albert Speer.

As the clock runs out and the country wakes from this unprecedented act of national self-abuse, the buildings grow more insistent. You will never be rid of me, they scream. Behold the 250-foot, 20-story “Arc de Trump” near the Lincoln Memorial, a Philistine’s ripoff of the Arc de Triomphe, already drawing lawsuits from veterans groups who say it would desecrate Arlington and the dignity of the capital.

Like the president’s rule-bulldozing, litigation-spawning grands projets, it looks like something scribbled on the back of a Palm Beach cocktail napkin. It will be paid for with private donations—kickbacks that in Asmara or Almaty might be called baksheesh, but in the United States pass as tax-deductible charity.

Architecture, at home and abroad, has always been a way to launder money, flatter vanity, and funnel bribes. Trump, a developer—or at least a marketer of developments—has been at that trough since his days in Queens and, as the emir of Pennsylvania Avenue, has turned the globe into his own Monopoly board. The Trump princelings and son-in-law have roamed the world doing “deals,” or shakedowns, folded into what passes for U.S. foreign policy: a galling scandal and a black eye for a republic that once claimed to stand for the rule of law.

Here, the aesthetic and the ideological are one. When Vice President J.D. Vance travels to Hungary to fawn over Viktor Orbán, he underscores America’s drift from the Enlightenment inheritance it shares with its allies toward the spangled lawlessness of a kleptocracy.

Always a family business: the slavish apparatchiks, the fawning oligarchs, and the clan, from Assad to Marcos, making bank. In the midst of the Iran war, Eric Trump released a social-media video unveiling the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, a hulking Miami tower, complete with an on-site hotel and emblazoned with the family name, yet another shiny escalator to glory.

What we have here is another shyster’s Babel, plonked down in the American city most threatened by rising seas. Consider it a small consolation that, if the worst climate forecasts come to pass, residents may be spared too many decades of its glittering, Marriott-on-testosterone blandness.

In fairness, the grim Obama Presidential Center, a swollen thumb looming over the South Side of Chicago, is no Taj Mahal. It aims to be an education center, not the former president’s official archive, and, whatever its faults, it is at least the work of serious architects, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams. The Trump Library—guess which of these presidential pillars is taller—looks like a knockoff of David Childs’s One World Trade Center, less a building than a vertical billboard for a name.

This egregious self-promotion predates Trump. The very conceit of the presidential library has always been a little hinky. Why should elected officials be memorialized in donor-funded temples at all? Why not a single national center? In practice, these institutions create a sanctioned channel for sitting presidents to solicit vast sums from undisclosed sources under the guise of legacy-building.

These taxpayer-subsidized shrines are less about preserving the historical record than about influence peddling and Pharaonic delusion. The idea is neither constitutional nor especially old. It begins with FDR, who understood the value of safeguarding his papers and shaping how posterity would read them. By 1955, Congress had formalized the model: presidents raise private money to build their libraries, and the public pays to keep the lights on. A tidy arrangement, if you are the president or a crony in need of a pardon.

All of that was bad enough in an age when presidents mostly bent to democratic norms. Under Trump, it is another irresistible real estate grift. Of all Trump-branded projects, only one might plausibly be called public-spirited: his 1986 renovation of Central Park’s Wollman Rink, which helped burnish his image as a red-tape-cutting businessman.

That legend did not survive prolonged contact with reality. New York City terminated the Trump Organization’s contract after the January 6 Capitol riot; by 2025, it was reportedly lobbying former mayor Eric Adams to regain management rights. Nothing holds this president’s attention like the chance to see his name emblazoned in chrome and gold.

Two hundred and fifty years after the American Revolution, he might recall that another fragile ego, George III, was once honored with a 4,000-pound gilded statue of him in New York. It stood for just six years before colonists tore it down after the reading of the Declaration of Independence, a document whose bill of particulars reads at moments uncomfortably close to a contemporary brief. The figure on horseback was hacked to pieces, melted down, and cast into roughly 42,000 musket balls for the Continental Army. It remains the most literal No Kings demonstration in American history.

These monuments to imperial Trumpism may not last that long. The world turns, and the damage of these years will be pushed aside by the inevitable shift in public mood that follows every presidency. Of all the things this era has wrought—the devastation of institutions, the undermining of alliances, the further unraveling of American promise—these buildings may seem the least of it. They are not. Architecture matters. It tells us who we are, and who we might yet be.

When this astonishingly corrupt age is finally behind us, the most democratic architectural act we can commit will be the simplest one: tear these abominations down.

Yours Ever,

Stourley Kracklite

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

Over the past two decades, London has transformed from an important world capital yet still a recognizably British city into something else: a hyper-globalized finance node, a place where dirty cash is parked and laundered, a hive for unsavory actors from the former Soviet bloc, the Persian Gulf, and beyond. This glitzy criminality has its victims. Keefe’s dive into what happened to Zac Brettler, a teenager who leapt to his death from the balcony of a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames, is about far more than a doomed young man drawn to London’s high life; it is the biography of a city devoured by greed. Mere affluence was not enough for Brettler, who masqueraded as Zac Ismailov, an oligarch’s son. The charade put him in dangerous company and may be connected to his demise. But the real villain here is London itself, a place that has deregulated itself into a den of thieves. If the title is a little on the nose, Keefe has delivered another meticulously reported thriller of moral descent.

—Roland Auburn

Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein

Monica Lewinsky, it turns out, is a serious reader, a fan of T.S. Eliot who has been known to quote The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. One wonders what she would make of Langbein’s fictional appropriation of her persona, in which Lewinsky appears as a medieval saint and apparition—part guide, part sidekick—to Jean Dornan, a 45-year-old court translator in New York City.

In 1998, the year Lewinsky unwillingly became a public figure, Jean was involved with a professor while studying abroad in France. That entanglement derailed her life and binds her, years later, to a figure whose tribulations she recounts in the style of The Lives of the Saints. This vision of Lewinsky as holy intercessor sends Jean on a quest to reckon with her past and reclaim her present. Langbein’s conceit is both delightfully odd and deft, refracting a legendary scandal through the language of martyrdom and redemption. Lewinsky herself may find the echoes of her celebrity strange, but the result is ingenious and heroic.

—Flora Poste

Exit Laughing

Hacks Season 5 (HBO Max). In the 2020s, good television has settled into certain lanes: darkly comic takedowns of the very rich, thrillers of economic insecurity, and melancholy eulogies to show business. More often than not, the characters at the center of these stories violate the supreme orthodoxy of bygone network programming: they aren’t likable.

What has sustained Hacks for five seasons and brought it all those awards is that veteran comic Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her foil, comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), while not exactly endearing, are scrappers you root for. It’s a buddy show, and like all shows about show business, it has a sentimental streak. In the end, Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky have written a show about a business they like, populated by hustlers and weirdos they like.

The series finale finds Deborah fighting for relevance after being banished from her late-night hosting gig, under a performing ban so absolute that some fans seem to think she is actually dead. If comedies of Hollywood decline are everywhere, this one puts the jokes front and center. Hacks is smart, but its real trick is disguising the fact that, at heart, it is an old-fashioned sitcom.

—Rosie Greenbaum

Tech Crunch

The Audacity (AMC). Timing, in life and IPOs, is everything. This blue-chip offering from Jonathan Glatzer (Succession, Better Call Saul, Bloodline, and Bad Sisters) delves into the lives and excesses of Silicon Valley bullshit artists, starting with Duncan (Billy Magnussen), a tech broligarch coming apart, and his “performance psychologist” wife (Sarah Goldberg), who uses information gleaned from clients to shore up the family’s big-ticket lifestyle.

At work, there is talk of grappling with the ethics of AI—or rather, no grappling at all, as the players scramble to make as much money as possible. At home, the kids, mostly banned from using the social media their parents foist on the world, are most definitely not all right. The talent is as deep as a Google recruiter’s list, with Rob Corddry, Meaghan Rath, Simon Helberg, Zach Galifianakis, and Randall Park capturing the mortifying obtuseness of the tech elite. But for a show about the cutting edge of American business culture, it does feel like we’ve been here before. And if this send-up of tech arrogance is spot on, it’s also pretty depressing. These people are awful. But then, you already knew that.

—Mae Holland

Kill-de-Sac

Big Mistakes (Netflix). New Jersey, in the imagination of outsiders, is a perilous place where mayhem lurks at every turnpike exit. Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott start there and are off like a shot in this antic story of Nicky (Levy), a minister hiding his gay lover from his flock; his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega), a teacher; and their high-maintenance mom (Laurie Metcalf), who find themselves entangled with organized crime after the siblings swipe a fake diamond necklace to give to their dying grandmother—or “nonna,” in Hollywood’s version of New Jersey. Surprise: those rocks are real. And they’re hot.

The craziness spills out from there. Levy has a particular gift for banter—if you liked his badinage with Annie Murphy in Schitt’s Creek, you’ll fall right in with uptight Nicky and loopy Morgan. Off we go, stuffed into the backs of vans, quipping about sleeping with the fishes. None of it makes much sense, but a likable cast keeps things humming.

—Angela de Marco

Questions or suggestions? Ping intern@culturewag.com and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy. CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. We cut through the clutter to deliver smart, funny recommendations to the most switched-on audience in the galaxy.

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— Alexander Pope

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Dear Wags,

We came up on it on a Chesapeake sand spit. In foggy midmorning half-light, we were almost on top of the corpse before we saw what it was. Dead bird, dead bird, my sister-in-law called out in warning.

There it was, an inch from my foot, the large, feathery mound of a bald eagle, neck stretched and twisted, mauled by something, picked over by scavengers, left to rot on a lonely shore. Dead things are everywhere in rural Virginia, so much so that I sometimes think the state animal is roadkill. But a dead bald eagle is something else: a mystery to be solved, an actual federal case.

Dead bird, dead bird. Of all the broken things that litter the earth, none repulse us more. The child on rollerskates comes upon the scrawny hatchling splayed on a steaming sidewalk, swarmed by ants. Maybe it is the first dead thing we meet, and maybe that is why we hold onto dread that leaps in the throat. It is all flightless indignity, stench, and cadaver, a dinosaur’s horrid, accusatory eye.

The nature-loving family I married into, fearless about so many living wild things, has a folkloric aversion to dead birds, or “d.b.s,” as if saying the words might summon a zombie flock, an avian Betelgeuse. I have been dispatched with a trowel and a garbage bag to remove an outrage from the garden path. It is my small masculine service to be unsentimental about the creepy crawlies, to scoop up a wild invader and deposit it on the far side of the screen door. It does make me feel useful.

And yet, a dead eagle is not one of the everyday casualties of rural America. Hustling away from the remains, the pair of us were rattled. The thing with a d.b. is to get as far away as possible from a d.b. Still, avoidance can only take you so far down a narrow beach before you have to double back to your parked car. We gave death a wide berth, but death calls you back.

The upside to an encounter with the grotesque is that you leave with a yarn. We had found a dead bald eagle in a country thick with live ones. In my childhood, our national bird was on the brink of extinction in tidewater Virginia, whittled down to a handful of breeding pairs. The culprit was dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT. The pesticide accumulated in fish eaten by eagles and other raptors, disrupting calcium development, thinning eggshells to rice paper.

The use of DDT from the 1940s to the 1970s had catastrophic effects on bird populations. That devastation inspired Rachel Carson’s 1962 exposé, Silent Spring, the bestseller famously credited with launching the modern environmental movement. DDT was effectively eliminated from domestic agricultural use ten years after Carson sounded the alarm, an early victory for environmentalists. Numerous species, including peregrine falcons, brown pelicans, ospreys, and bald eagles, rebounded.

Now, there are around 3,000 breeding pairs of bald eagles nesting along the Chesapeake Bay, more than in any region south of Alaska. On the marshy shores of Maryland and Virginia, you may happen across a few. Eagles swoop low over salt creeks, shad flapping in their mouths. They send ospreys keening in alarm, sun themselves on rotting stumps, and steal heron eggs. They may be everywhere, but they are never common. No wild species in America commands more awe.

We defer to bald eagles out of custom and by force of law. Benjamin Franklin, their most prominent critic, called them out for “low moral character”: strutting bullies, cowards, and thieves forever mugging ospreys for their hard-won catch. Schoolchildren know Franklin pulled for the unfussy, “more respectable” wild turkey as our national bird, hokum dusted off every year around Thanksgiving.

Turkeys, like eagles, have returned in numbers to their old haunts along the Atlantic littoral. In dun homeliness and simple gifts, they encapsulate the rustic Americanness Franklin wanted so badly to publicize: a New World free of European pretension, untethered from aristocracy, outsized in plebeian qualities. The wild turkey advertises a new republic as a humble brag.

But this is only one aspect of the American character, and rarely the dominant one. The bald eagle is a flashy predator, a preening con artist, a celebrity with a chiseled profile and a puffed-up chest. It strikes a regal pose while raiding garbage dumps. An eagle talks a good game, but can be chased away by a testy red-winged blackbird a tenth its size. Franklin knew a primping fraud when he saw one, but after 250 tumultuous years, it’s pretty clear Americans love a phony.

Eagles are the spokescreatures of American dominance, emblazoned on military patches, painted on bombers, flexed across burly torsos. When the U.S. men’s hockey team defeated Canada at the 2026 Olympics, the White House posted a meme of an eagle mauling a Canada goose. Canada’s national bird is in fact the loon, and in one of the more revealing real-world encounters between the two, a bald eagle that tried to raid a loon’s nest in Maine was pierced through the heart by the defending bird’s beak. The bald eagle soars above lesser creatures, powered by its publicity.

Being America’s mascot has its privileges. Since 1940, the U.S. government has enforced the eagle’s sacred status. It is illegal not only to harass, hunt, or disturb the bird—playing loud music near an active nesting site can qualify—but to move or interfere with its nest; or to “take, possess, sell, purchase, barter, transport, export, or import” any eagle, or any part of one, including feathers, eggs, or remains.

These protections, extended to golden eagles in 1962 and reinforced by overlapping federal laws, have woven an intricate regulatory armor around a quixotic species. Though bald eagles are no longer listed as endangered, killing one can still bring a $250,000 fine and a two-year prison term. Any human meddling with the bird generates an aerie of paperwork.

Our beach sighting, then, was not just an anecdote, but an incident. “You have to report it,” my wife said, something that hadn’t occurred to me, no more than I’d consider drawing a chalk outline around the remains of a cormorant. But of course this had to be so. She knew this because last year a friend had found herself in reluctant possession of a Lakota eagle-feather headdress, an object collected by her late father, a character who played fast and loose with the law.

This magnificent heirloom turned out to be the definition of hot property; it could not be kept, sold, or donated without migraines and the risk of prosecution. Somewhere in a bureaucratic labyrinth, my wife’s friend located a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent responsible for eagle feathers and other contraband derived from rare and protected species. In her city there is a warehouse full of elephant ivory canes, rhino horn virility tinctures, tortoiseshell clutches, and eagle feather crowns, all seized at the port of entry, awaiting state incineration.

I called the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources and left a message. To my surprise, they called me back and referred me to the local federal special agent investigating the illegal taking of federally protected species. Taking, in eagle management terms, is what it sounds like: the poaching, trapping, capture, or persecution of the national bird.

There is no single national database tallying crimes against bald eagles. Yet their growing numbers have led to more investigations. In the Southeast alone, nearly 250 eagle carcasses were submitted for diagnostic evaluation between 2014 and 2018, roughly 50 a year. These unfortunate birds ran afoul of civilization in all the usual ways: shot, poisoned, electrocuted by power lines, and struck by wind turbines.

Most often, they were victims of cumulative lead poisoning, having eaten contaminated prey. Eagles are not especially choosy scavengers, and they often ingest fragments of bullets and shot with the carrion they find. Experts say nearly half of America’s bald and golden eagles have chronic lead poisoning. At high levels, the toxin can cause neurological damage, muscle failure, and starvation.

The genial officer who returned my call was a veteran of such investigations (Fish and Wildlife officers are not authorized to speak to reporters without official clearance, so I’ve withheld his name). There is a protocol in such cases, and it starts with leaving the scene exactly as it is. “We don’t have the manpower to investigate every death, now that they’re so common,” he told me. “But we want to get the remains removed so they don’t upset the public.”

He kept returning to this point—the imperative to banish a dead eagle from view. I explained the remote location: a wildlife refuge in a rural area where the Potomac meets the bay, two hours from any major population center. Maybe some local game warden had already collected the evidence (only authorized officials with permits can handle a dead bald eagle). Maybe the corpse had been devoured or washed away. It felt faintly foolish to run through the logistics, trying to pinpoint exactly where I’d stumbled on the bird.

The agent was patient and thanked me for my public-spiritedness. He’d run the details down; the eagle, or what was left of it, would be tracked, scooped up, and, if not examined, entered into some log. Its feathers, talons, heart, and gall bladder would not fall into the wrong hands. I would later learn that the Fish and Wildlife Service operates a National Eagle Repository, or N.E.R., in Commerce City, Colorado, which processes, stores, and distributes eagle carcasses and feathers to Native American tribes for religious and cultural use. The facility processes around 2,000 dead eagles each year, drawn from across the country.

It was curious, this preciousness about eagles. Americans roar past a grim menagerie every day on their highways—pulverized skunks, possums, countless white-tailed deer—without a second thought, but the sight of a single fallen eagle is apparently too much to bear. Dead bird, dead bird, a grim symbol, a terrible prophecy.

It’s a human compulsion to pin symbolism on what takes wing. Death, for bald eagles and people alike, is mostly a grueling, prosaic business. An eagle may live as long as 40 years in the wild, but it will be lucky to dodge lethal hazards and survive past the age of five. The bird on the beach was not a symbol or an omen, a crime scene or a relic. It was just another splendid creature, humbled and returned to the elements. All the laws, rituals, and stories we supply ourselves.

Yours Ever,

Dirty Old Town

Ladies of London: The New Reign (Bravo). Reality television is on its way out. Is this such a bad thing, given that it cratered civilization? Meantime, Andy Cohen serves up these “ladies” to appall us. These broads ain’t ladies. They’re all styled as if they were in the cast of All About Eve. As Bette Midler put it, when it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London. Apparently, Bravo has taken this literally. Its latest crop of faux-socialites has the marcelled hair and painted-on eyebrows of bygone Ziegfeld chorines.

In the case of Martha Sitwell, a recovering party girl with a ledger of hard-luck stories, the effect is appealing. By midseason, we’ve decided that goodhearted Martha, who has left the pages of Tatler for a shabby flat with a pet magpie named Hecate, is a star. In the right light, she looks like Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle.

Martha (sadly no relation to the literary Sitwells, Edith and Osbert) sees decency in lousy people—namely, the vengeful, rubber-faced Kimi Murdoch, a “Haitian-American shipping heiress” who becomes viperous when she drinks, and on Ladies of London, it’s always five o’clock somewhere. Kimi, who has one of those transatlantic accents you can’t unhear, lunges for the role of reality villain, locking horns with Margo Stilley, an American actress who tells us she was, a million years ago, in “the most scandalous British movie ever made,” which is also a movie you’ve never heard of. Smiling tightly through these shenanigans is another Yank, Myka Meier, the “Marie Kondo of etiquette,” suggesting she picked up the wrong fork when it comes to television opportunities. Lady Emma Thynne, the aptly reedlike Marchioness of Bath, is on hand to hype the family safari park. Lottie Kane, who has put “It Girl” in her Bravo bio, roots around on the margins for a storyline, and Missè Beqiri is a Swedish Albanian model with a tragic past she’ll gladly tell you about. And (most definitely) lastly, there’s Mark-Francis Vandelli, our only male lady, lugging bitchy remarks and a tragic cackle into the first-class compartment.

It’s impossible to root for these harridans, but Bravo knows you’ll show up for a lavishly overdone face-plant. As for London, this might as well be Costa Mesa or Paramus. Globalization has turned the world into a garish playground for backstabbing climbers with plumped-up lips. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz may yet deflate the whole carnival. Consider this a farewell postcard from a gloriously vulgar era.

—Cordelia Flyte

Norway Out

Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole (Netflix). In 2023, there were 40 murders in Norway, a country of less than 6 million people—a homicide rate of about 0.72 per 100,000. Yet somehow, thriller novelist Jo Nesbø has convinced the world that the land of fjords is crawling with serial killers. The new Netflix adaptation of his rule-breaking detective Harry Hole is a Scandinavian fairy tale gone dark, in which a perfectly pleasant country becomes grim, edgy, violent, and not the sort of place one leaves a baby stroller unattended.

Nesbø executive-produced this take on his 2010 novel The Devil’s Star, giving us a Hole (Tobias Santelman) much closer in spirit to the books than Michael Fassbender’s turn in 2017’s The Snowman, a Hollywood adaptation best forgotten. Joel Kinnaman plays the dirty cop paired with Hole to investigate a spate of bizarre killings. It’s no Department Q, but it is slickly executed Nordic noir, and far more faithful to the source than Prime’s ghastly Scarpetta.

— Stina Hurlén

Eat the Rich

Your Friends and Neighbors Season 2 (April 3, Apple TV+). Men, op-ed columnists will tell you, are a problem. Worrying about masculinity has created a minor content boom (if you want to be repelled, watch Netflix’s Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere). Popular culture hasn’t reflected this distress especially well, but Your Friends and Neighbors gives it a fair go. Like so many high-gloss series, Jonathan Tropper’s medium-black comedy is about class—it’s yet another slick extravaganza that both reviles and fetishizes wealth. The show’s weakest conceit is having its star, Jon Hamm, doing a pitchman’s patter about various luxury goods, like some aging Patrick Bateman.

What’s more compelling is its Cheever-esque dissection of suburban American manhood, with Hamm as Andrew Cooper, a Princetonian in crisis, roaming Westchester looting his neighbors’ mansions (a larcenous take on The Swimmer).

It’s probably sacrilege to suggest this is a better part for Hamm than Mad Men’s Don Draper, because Draper was a repressed man in a gray flannel suit, while this update allows for broader comic moments and a knowing smile. Coop is an easier patriarch to like, and his dilemmas—keeping up with the Joneses, protecting his kids, winning back his ex (Amanda Peet)—are more relatable. Season 2 ups the ante, introducing the reliable James Marsden as a flashy new neighbor who is on to Coop’s criminal enterprise, and Olivia Munn, back as Coop’s ex-lover, who set him up for murder (bygones). It’s a cut above the usual caper.

—Neddy Merrill

When April showers may come your way/ They bring the flowers that bloom in May/ So when it’s raining, have no regrets/ Because it isn’t raining rain, you know/ It’s raining violets.

Awful March is over, finally. The Cocktail Team suggests you celebrate with something refreshing on the patio. When the daffodils bloom, we turn to our Maple Bourbon Smash, which holds onto bourbon’s wintry appeal but adds a warm-weather citrus lift. It’s perfect for a transitional season—warm enough to fortify you against a stiff April breeze, but refreshing enough for a balmy afternoon. Our go-to fruit for this libation is grapefruit, though blood oranges make a lively alternative.

—Connie Allenbury

Elements

• 3 lemon or lime wedges

• ½ grapefruit, juiced

• 2 ounces bourbon

• ¾ ounce real maple syrup (or substitute simple syrup)

• 4 mint leaves

• Garnish: mint sprig

Alchemy

1. Squeeze the lemon or lime wedges and the grapefruit into an ice-filled shaker. Some bartenders muddle these ingredients; we don’t bother.

2. Add the maple syrup and mint leaves. Shake until well chilled.

3. Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice.

4. Garnish with a mint sprig.

5. Sit back and watch the world bloom.

Questions or suggestions? Ping intern@culturewag.com and we’ll get back to you shortly. CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. We’re your essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through the clutter to deliver smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy.

If someone forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation—and RSVP “Subscribe.” You’ll join the sharpest set in Montevideo, Gstaad, Biarritz, and at Mirin in Leith, Edinburgh, Sharif Gergis and Elizabeth Elliott’s palace of dumplings and small plates. Go for the bluefin tuna belly and savor Scotland’s best Asian cuisine.

Wag is the only thing that looks good on you forever.—Audrey Hepburn

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Dear Wags,

We’ve been pondering two blueprints for the future of civilization.

The first comes from the libertarian tech tycoon Marc Andreessen, cofounder of one of the world’s largest venture capital firms, who says he practices “zero introspection” in his life and career, because, you know, all that thinking bogs you down. “As little as possible,” he told the podcaster David Senra. “Move forward. Go… I find that people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It’s a problem at work, and it’s a problem at home.”

We do wonder what it’s like at Casa Andreessen, with the man in charge forever in motion, sharklike, without a care for the bloody chum left in his wake. The cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and AI cheerleader seems to believe that self-reflection is some sort of plot, hatched by that villain Sigmund Freud and other eggheads, to castrate visionary entrepreneurs. “The great men of history didn’t sit around doing this,” he said. “It’s all a new construct.”

This may come as news to William Shakespeare, who had Hamlet fretting over whether to be or not to be back in 1600. But it does speak to the spirit of our age. We are a society at war with thoughtfulness, convinced that thinking things through, God forbid, is weakness. Move fast, break things, blunder into cataclysm without a plan, or even a concept of a plan. This, apparently, is what Great Men of History do.

We are confronting the real-world consequences of that mindset: needless death, social and economic chaos. It makes a mess of international relations, criminal justice, and divorce court. Decisiveness, we all know, sounds sexy; better to be strong and wrong, etc. But the byproduct of being a bull in a china shop is more than shattered glass. It’s a recipe for shattered lives.

We know that, too. But we are forever drawn to the my-way-or-the-highway types, who grab the wheel with supreme confidence, then slink away from the inevitable crash, leaving the little people to clean up. Andreessen can fight introspection all he wants; you might as well campaign against breathing. Human beings can’t help but look back at the havoc they cause and worry about what comes next. That’s not a Freudian invention, but our nature.

The flight from thought and consequence isn’t tough. It’s cowardly. The war-strutting of the current administration, the creepy exaltation of cruelty and stupidity as Guy Stuff, is, if we must go there, deeply unmanly. Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, T.E. Lawrence, George Patton, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were not contemptuous of introspection. They understood the power of history and the importance of scholarship. They weren’t held back by thought. It moved them to action, and, like it or not, they mulled over the consequences.

The Pentagon’s current assault on military education, part of a broader governing approach that treats rules and empathy as effete impositions on gleeful sadists who get the job done, isn’t just devastating to this country’s values; it’s an assault on civilization. The truth is, the damn-the-torpedoes, to-hell-with-the-fallout approach flames out “at home and at work,” too. Ask the swordsmen, hustlers, and deadbeats who’ve tried it—they’re a dime a dozen in the jails and rehabs of America.

What’s the alternative? We heard it the other day from podcaster Sam Harris, who believes that the disruptions of AI may have a silver lining: the rebirth of the liberal arts and a shift away from the ruthlessly technological and transactional approach to life, art, and making a buck.

“My expectation is that there is going to be something like the revenge of the humanities,” he said. “What the world is going to need are well-educated generalists, with good aesthetic taste. People who have read good books, and gone to good museums, and can make good arguments, and can create companies using robots that have learned to code that produce things that we actually want and that benefit our culture. We’re going to want a beautiful culture. We’re going to want human curation of increasingly powerful tools put to good purpose. I would be much more bullish on a degree in philosophy or even English literature, quite frankly, at this moment than certain STEM fields. And I would certainly put computer science in that category.”

Andreessen, who majored in computer science, somehow believes that AI won’t displace humans in the mathematical calculations of venture capitalism. But if we had to choose between a world made by Hegseths who steamroll everything in their path and Hamlets who reckon with their actions, it’s an actual no-brainer.

Yours Ever,

Edward Ashburnham

The Keeper by Tana French

Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop, isn’t having a restful second act in Ireland. Since settling in the hamlet of Adnakelty in County Mayo, he keeps tripping over bodies. The final volume of French’s Hooper trilogy is suitably chilly, damp, and twisty, centering on the death of Rachel Holohan, a missing girl pulled from the drink with antifreeze in her system. The townsfolk are quick to deem the tragedy a suicide, but Cal’s teen ward, Trey Reddy, is sure it’s the grim handiwork of a local enforcer with development plans for the village. Meddling in the case ruffles feathers—and puts Cal’s relationship with his fiancée, Lena, at risk. As always, French’s knack for atmosphere overcomes plot holes, and beyond the whodunit, she has created a compelling surrogate family in Cal, Lena, and Trey.

—Claire Boyle

In the Days of My Youth I was Told What it Means to be a Man by Tom Junod

Life with Father can feel like a blue haze of mysteries: the old man plays it close to the vest, dodging intimacy for work and drowning his troubles in martinis. Junod, one of the great writers of the last golden age of magazines, reckons with the legacy of his own father, “Big Lou,” a traveling handbag salesman who lit up every room he entered. The elder Junod was what they used to call a lady-killer—a suave, movie-star-handsome operator with a string of conquests in every town he hit, and a wife and kids waiting at home in suburban Long Island.

After Lou’s death, Junod sets out to find the man behind the Don Draper–esque persona, pushing through that lingering blue haze in search of something solid. What emerges is a portrait of a midcentury rake and the sensitive boy who grew up in his shadow. Big Lou’s exacting ideas about manhood formed and maimed his son, even as his life of risk and secrets left a trail too rich to ignore. The result is a searching meditation on American manhood and the meaning of family.

—Bob Benson

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel

What a heady, ambitious novel this is, from an author who sets the bar high. Martel (Life of Pi) returns with the story of Harlow Donne, a Canadian classical scholar who discovers an epic poem called The Psoad. Cobbled together from pottery shards, it offers a grunt’s-eye view of the Trojan War, centered on Psoas (pronounced “so as”), an ordinary soldier dragooned into the conflict by greedy overlords. War, it turns out, is a literal hell: Psoas is plunged into the underworld, where Hades dispenses some divine wisdom about puny human striving.

Meanwhile, Donne’s own academic obsessions crowd out the people who love him in the here and now. His notes on the ancient text reveal a modern man succumbing to the same old delusions. As Hades might say to those who have crossed the River Styx: When will you mortals ever learn?

—Ethan Nakamura

Nothing Random by Gayle Feldman

A million years ago, we foolishly decided we wanted a career in books. This caused considerable family distress. “Well,” pronounced our stepmother, witheringly, “you’ll never be Bennett Cerf.” We didn’t know who that was, but it was clear we’d never measure up. A bit later, we went to a publishing party at the Harvard Lampoon hosted by an alumnus—Christopher, son of Bennett—another Cerf who was not a serf. Who would not want to be part of their fizzy, sophisticated world?

Feldman’s biography of Bennett, the founder of Random House, is a portrait of an intellectual entrepreneur, one who leveraged information in more salutary ways than contemporary media moguls. Born rich, he used his family’s money to buy the Modern Library, where he published Fitzgerald, Stein, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway. From this cultural fulcrum came Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher. The list of writers Cerf helped launch is long, but what distinguishes it is its heterogeneity: Maya Angelou, James Michener, Truman Capote, and Dr. Seuss. Along the way, he shamelessly promoted himself as a smart-guy celebrity—newspaper columnist, humorist, game show panelist. Cerf’s appearances on What’s My Line? annoyed stuffier publishers, but they worked wonders for his business. We’re biased, but his high-low sensibility not only predicted the future of modern media, it made him the ultimate Wag.

No, we’ll never be Bennett Cerf; this book makes clear he was lightning in a bottle. What he brought to the business of culture was not just voracious ambition, but a boundless spirit of curiosity and fun. How impoverished we are without it.

—Hazel Aden

Guess What? I Love You by Mike Maimone

Wag Emeritus Howard Bragman was both a dear friend and a champion of this dispatch. When it comes to his life and legacy, we’re as shamelessly boosterish as he would be, had he not departed this mortal party on February 11, 2023. Among other things, Bragman (such a name for a PR man!) was a publicist, crisis guru, author, gay rights pioneer, and a lover of Randy Newman songs, the Michigan Wolverines, and pot. He was fiercely devoted to his family, friends, and a hodgepodge of famous and controversial clients. Most of all, he was a hopeless romantic. In the last year of his life, Howard met singer-songwriter Mike Maimone, a relationship that began on the apps and quickly flowered into a great love affair.

The pair were planning their wedding when Howard was diagnosed with leukemia. Mike stood by him through a brief spate of grueling medical interventions that left Howard determined to exit the stage on his own terms at 66. “Hey, who wants to go out old and decrepit?” he declared shortly before entering hospice. “I get to go out a star!” That he did.

Before Howard’s death, he and Mike were married; it was the last production of his life, and the one he was proudest of: “I did everything I ever wanted to do. And I got to experience true love.”

Mike’s tender memoir captures the voice and spirit of a warrior who was as brave as he was hilarious. It’s an exceptional account of what is lost—and gained—when we dare to risk our hearts.

—JD Heyman

Questions or suggestions? Ping intern@culturewag.com and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy. CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. We’re your essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through the clutter to deliver smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy.

If someone forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation—and RSVP “Subscribe.” You’ll join the sharpest set in Montevideo, Gstaad, Biarritz, and at King Barbecue in Charleston, where Shuai and Corrie Wang team up with Brandon Olson to fuse the flavors of China and the American South. Dive into the moo shu chopped smoked pork.

A woman must have money and a Wag of her own if she is to write fiction. —Virginia Woolf

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Dear Wags,

One summer, too many years ago, I worked for John F. Kennedy Jr. It was my introduction to New York magazines, at a time when I was desperate to make a career in them. Like many irrational ambitions, mine was both galvanizing and oppressive. I had a hurting need to be a writer in the city, a yearning that got in my way.

Pressed in among all the other young graduates in the office towers of Midtown, I didn’t feel like I had found my tribe so much as a terminal sense of dread. There simply wasn’t enough oxygen in Manhattan for all of us to breathe. The city, the only place I wanted to be, was suffocatingly small: a closed circuit of connections I didn’t have, pedigrees I couldn’t compete with, and inside lanes I couldn’t divine. I was forever looking up at the lighted windows of big apartments, imagining the parties I’d never be invited to.

I was rejected endlessly and each denial landed like a verdict. I wasn’t good enough, obviously. So I became a faker. I acted as if I had money when I had none. I talked as if I’d spent weekends in places I couldn’t afford. I wanted to pass for the kind of New Yorker found only in 1930s screwball comedies.

It was a derivative stab at self-invention, this flailing need to be interesting. I obsessed about writing, but stopped altogether. Instead, I walked for miles across the city, from Eastchester to Ozone Park, pacing what felt like every gumstained inch, convinced my only contribution to letters was a paraphrase of Sartre: Hell is other writers.

I had never read Sartre.

How did I briefly land at George? It’s all a bit fuzzy, but back then I pounded on the two doorways into the glossies, pitching pieces and fact-checking. I did front-of-the-book items and advice columns. I tried, haplessly, to cultivate editors a few years older than me, all of whom possessed that New York mix of confidence and cruelty I envied and hated. I assumed it was my job to make them love me, and routinely ended up feeling betrayed. And then the call came from John Kennedy’s new political magazine.

This fleeting episode has come back to me, courtesy of Ryan Murphy’s Love Story, a television adaptation more discussed than watched—at least if the chatter about nineties hair bands and Kangol hats is any guide. It’s eerie, and unwelcome, to see your youth defrosted and repackaged as retro. This exercise isn’t for the people who wore the clothes the first time.

I can’t imagine taking in a minute of Love Story, not because it’s more tacky Kennedy exploitation, but because, having stood in the same room as the principals on a few occasions, it feels like an uncanny-valley pantomime. The actors—look, who can blame them for wanting work?—resemble the real thing just enough to make the stomach churn.

At this late date, nobody should be precious about the Kennedys; the reporting is all in. They are a vast and imperfect family, and their positioning as domestic royalty was always sycophantic and, frankly, un-American. I’ve encountered more than a few Kennedys in my time and never came away humming “Camelot.” But I did momentarily work alongside John. And he came as advertised.

George had a small staff: a trio of associate editors, a couple of senior hands, and, down the hall in the Hachette building, the publisher, John’s formidable assistant RoseMarie Terenzio, and John himself, who sometimes arrived with a Canaan puppy named Friday tucked under his arm. The interns all seemed to have landed there on wealth and connection. One was a Harvard blonde from Marblehead; another wore bow ties and published columns in The Dartmouth Review. We, the fact-checkers, sat beside them, doing the same grunt work.

My colleague Lawrence was a gentle soul from Vassar, the son of Park Avenue psychiatrists who had started a blog called Flâneur. Our job was to check long features, which felt high-stakes. I worried constantly about missing something, the consequences for George, and my inevitable banishment back to the sticks.

What I remember most, though, is calling elderly Black women in the Deep South about a campaign against degrading rap lyrics. When they heard I was calling from the magazine, many spoke movingly of their memories of John and Bobby Kennedy, two fallen men who had meant so much to them. In those moments, I began to understand the spell of that name, and what it was like to dance with myth.

This was my first experience of being around someone extremely famous and feeling the alchemy of celebrity. To be John was to be the show. George was a magnet for rich and curious looky-loos, all trooping through the office to catch a glimpse of him. He did not acknowledge it. But he used it.

He had the trick of seeming normal: talking about sports and kayaking trips, lugging his bike, introducing people to his cousin “Willie,” as if nobody knew that cousin, William Kennedy Smith, had been the subject of a tabloid scandal. John, in performance, was an impossibly face-tuned version of a Big Ten fraternity brother—genial and funny, yelling on the phone behind closed doors.

Whatever his other gifts, his genius was this naturalness. He was startlingly easy with all kinds of people. And it could not have been easy.

Once, John asked me to go downstairs to buy a copy of Time from the newsstand. There it was: a commemorative issue of Life, featuring him in a Christopher Robin coat, saluting his father’s coffin. He was only three. What could it possibly be like to spend an over-chronicled life passing through John F. Kennedy Airport, forever encountering your murdered father, memorialized in the world’s drab boulevards, libraries, and schools?

George was a reflection of John, the cautious prelude to what might have come next. It’s a slight heresy to say it wasn’t a very good political magazine, in that it had no polarizing point of view. But it was a deeply hopeful one, presenting public service as something worthy, even aspirational. Its tagline, Not Just Politics As Usual, was delivered earnestly. In the middle of the Republican Revolution, the magazine imagined politics as a game where everyone shook hands at the end. There was no venom in the exercise; it was the opposite of a hate read. In its studied even-handedness and its assumption of an underlying civic goodness, it misread the next few decades of American life.

Had he lived, John would have moved on from George, likely from politics as a lifestyle brand into politics as usual. His politics would not have resembled QAnon fantasies, but the familiar currents of New York and the Democratic Party establishment. In that transformation, he would have made mistakes and become a magnet for criticism. Not a golden boy on a bicycle, but another flawed character in the national pageant. He was robbed of a good bruising.

The problem with hagiography is that it blunts the edges, reducing a complex persona to a Disney prince. Like anywhere else, there were low politics at George—star-fuckery and everyday meanness. An associate editor once told me an article I’d sold to New York had been killed, just to watch me come apart. There were hangers-on, desperate to elbow their way in. But I never saw it touch the man at the top of the masthead.

From the Siberia of the fact-checking pit, you could see all that jockeying. John’s political talent, like that of all great stars, was to arrange his life in concentric circles of trust. He let in only a chosen few and kept them close.

I spent time with Carolyn Bessette only once, when I walked into the office of her friend, the creative director. She perched on a chair in the corner, waiting for him to finish, her long blonde hair pulled back untidily. She did not strike me as some dewy American Cinderella, but as a sophisticated New York fashion girl who had no time for stray fact-checkers. That is a compliment.

To suggest that such impressions are definitive—that a delusional kid’s perception of famous strangers amounts to a character verdict—is about as foolish as trusting Ryan Murphy with your life story. Who can know another person, especially an overwhelmingly famous one? I can tell you that John Kennedy took the staff to dinner at Elaine’s when we closed the magazine, that he shook my hand and gave me—unhappy, hungry me—a cheap pencil case as a thank-you for guarding George against misspelled last names and errors of geography.

I didn’t know him. Very few people did. But I do know that it mattered to him to be decent, in a way that now seems almost alien to the toxic politics-as-usual of today. And of course, that’s what people are searching for in these bizarre reenactments, lookalike contests, and fashion merchandising: a time before the rage and the phones, a New York that leavened its many cruelties with hope.

It was humbling, that crucible of ambition and disappointment, but it was also good. How lucky we were to share that New York, to look up at the lighted windows and glimpse his world, all those years ago.

Yours Ever,

Peter Fairchild

Ground Control to Major Tom, Etc.

Project Hail Mary (Theaters). Now, children, the thing about movie stars is that they have the power to take something deeply ridiculous and launch it into the stratosphere. Wag Supremo Ryan Gosling, with those puppy-dog eyes, works that trick with this silly adaptation of Andy Weir’s sci-fi bestseller, which asks you to believe that the fate of humanity rests with a middle-school science teacher with a pageant name (Ryland Grace!) who rockets to a distant star to stop a sun-sucking virus.

You see, our hero was once a visionary scientist, banished to public education by the establishment. But he’s been pressed into this last-ditch mission by an icy project head (Sandra Hüller), who alone grasps his genius. Off Dr. Grace goes to the galaxy’s hem, where he finds himself on his own after the other members of his team expire.

Enter Rocky, a friendly alien voiced by James Ortiz, who, like so many friendly aliens, has no grasp of auxiliary verbs: “Rocky help.” If it’s not The Martian, it’s still a pretty amiable interstellar journey, pitched at the level of a third-grade humanoid.

—David Bowman

Office Space

Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat (Prime). The charm of Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky’s 2023 reality series Jury Duty wasn’t that it was an elaborate prank—a civilian named Ronald Gladden was fooled into believing he was sequestered with a cast of oddballs played by actors—but that the duped protagonist proved so conscientious and sweet.

The same is true of Anthony Norman, a 25-year-old Tennessean who thinks he’s been hired as an HR assistant to help out at a family-owned hot sauce company’s annual retreat. In fact, it’s all an elaborate hoax, with the jokes growing more outrageous after it’s announced that the company is about to be acquired by a soulless conglomerate run by ginger-haired McKinsey drones.

What’s missing here is James Marsden, who stole the first season by playing a narcissistic version of himself, called up for jury duty. This mild follow-up gets points for touching on a deeper theme: in the age of AI, Americans remain deeply attached to the old-fashioned notion of going to work.

—Deangelo Vickers

Cheekbone Week!

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (Netflix) and The Madison (Paramount+). We present two very good-looking shows, with stars whose jawlines you could crack an egg on: a feature-length sequel to Peaky Blinders, with Cillian Murphy returning as Birmingham mobster Tommy Shelby, and a six-parter from Taylor Sheridan, with Dame Michelle Pfeiffer as a Manhattan matriarch relocated to Montana in The Madison.

Both are ridiculous, if dazzling, soap operas, but Blinders has the edge, with a plot that finds Shelby battling fascists to win back his long-lost son (Rebecca Ferguson shows up as twin witchy ladies). This distaff A River Runs Through It is too pretty for its own good—a thin excuse for fly-fishing shots bathed in honey-colored light.

Go with the Brummies.

—Isaiah Jesus

Comeback Kid

The Comeback Season 3 (HBO). Lisa Kudrow crafted a comedy of decline back in 2005, introducing the world—or at least a relative handful of devoted fans—to Valerie Cherish, a has-been TV star forever clawing her way back from somewhere lousy. How much you loved Valerie always depended on your tolerance for show-business desperation, which can be funny but is also pretty sad.

After trying to jumpstart her career in sitcoms, reality TV, and, in the 2014 revival, an HBO dramedy that strip-mined her own messy backstory, Valerie is back. This time, the big joke is that Hollywood has caught up to her free fall. Now Valerie’s new show is being written by a bot that recycles jokes from Mama’s Family, and everyone is clinging by their fingernails, pasting on tight smiles and praying they’re not the next to be fired.

Your comedy mileage will vary depending on how real the threat of Hollywood’s collapse feels to your own livelihood. But it’s uncomfortably true—and the best season of Kudrow’s series yet. As they say at the San Vicente Bungalows, we’re all Valeries now.

—June Gudmundsdottir

Maybe you’ve heard of the Georgia Guidestones, those soaring slabs erected in rural Elberton in 1979, inscribed in multiple languages with apocalyptic commandments like “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000.” For 42 years, the bizarro roadside attraction was a magnet for internet mystics and conspiracy theorists—until one day somebody blew it up. Who Blew Up the Guidestones?, a new six-part audio investigation from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Goat Rodeo, dives into the twin mysteries: who built the monument, rather grandly nicknamed “America’s Stonehenge,” and which member of a long roster of fundamentalists and tinfoil-hat enthusiasts finally destroyed it? The result is a labyrinth of American folkways and paranoia, complete with Confederate monuments and TNT.

—Nadine Hurley

You were hurtin’, anyone could see it / Heartbreak and the Holy Spirit / All worn out from teaching Baptists how to dance. Knoxville’s the Montvales (Sally Buice and Molly Rochelson) deliver soulful Americana in “Loud and Clear,” a twangy ode to finding a kindred spirit outside some dusty roadside tavern. I was never any good with names or faces / But I remember yours from somewhere, they sing, like a radio cutting through the darkness, loud and clear. Make it two for the road.

—Mac Sledge

Questions or suggestions? Ping intern@culturewag.com and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy. CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. We’re your essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through the clutter to serve smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy.

If someone forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation—and RSVP “Subscribe.” You’ll join the smartest set in Montevideo, Gstaad, Biarritz, and at Trullo in London, where it really does take Chef Conor Gadd eight hours to prepare the pappardelle with beef shin ragù—and every single minute is worth it.

When in doubt, add more Wag. — Julia Child

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Dear Wags,

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with itty-bitty Wolfgang Puck pizzas. For years, the Academy Awards have been sliding toward a cultural abyss. Still, any child who visits a playground knows that slides can be fun.

We were reminded of this by Timothée Chalamet, who dropped this bomb a few days back: “I admire people — and I’ve done it myself — who go on a talk show and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to keep movie theaters alive, we’ve gotta keep this genre alive.’ And another part of me feels like if people want to see it, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they’re going to go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it…I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, Hey! Keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.”

This sparked a limp social-media flap. Nobody really cares that Chalamet dissed the classical arts, which have pirouetted into the 21st century largely Barbie-free (we’ll say more about what shooting from the lip did to his Oscar chances below). The star of Marty Supreme isn’t the first ingrate to suggest that an art form’s popularity defines cultural relevance. That may be true, even if it’s not nice for a ballerina to hear.

The problem is that moviegoing itself is already a niche activity. Thanks to Chalamet’s fame and hustle, Marty Supreme is A24’s biggest-ever hit. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s still a sweaty little flick about ping-pong. Dumping on Tosca isn’t going to restore Hollywood’s luster.

The more Hollywood frets about its decline, the more obvious that decline becomes. The massive, debt-fueled consolidation of legacy studios into an even smaller clutch of vulnerable media entities, along with the budget and job slashing to follow, is happening no matter what Chalamet says. Americans went to an average of seven movies a year in the 1990s; now they are lucky to make it to three. The tilt toward watching as a momentary, highly individualized activity rather than a grand, mass-audience experience feels irrevocable. The international appetite for Hollywood’s output is waning. YouTube is now the world’s largest media company, valued at more than $500 billion.

So if your standard for success is the box office for two pictures that came out in the summer of 2023, Timmy, welcome to the abyss.

But here’s the silver lining: the real estate occupied by Lincoln Center, Teatro alla Scala, and Ronnie Scott’s isn’t exactly Siberia. Serious diversions persist long after their white-hot moment of mass popularity fades. There may be no accounting for taste, but art of quality has a habit of sticking around.

If we’re using only a Chalamet Scale to assess this year’s Oscar nominees, the film industry is in ulcer-inducing trouble. And indeed it is. Yet beyond ticket sales and premium downloads, the nominated films offer an engaging example of Hollywood’s creative ingenuity in the face of staggering headwinds.

The Academy Awards, more than any other Hollywood institution, are in an eternal dither over whether they salute commercial success or artistic quality. As audiences have fragmented, it has become clear that the artists have won. That’s been terrible for ratings, but not so bad for taste. These Oscar pictures are sophisticated, challenging, and relevant for those who bother to stream them. Decline can be liberating.

One byproduct of this slide is a small renaissance of the filmmaker as the main event. As the mass audience contracts and movie stardom fades, the people still watching the Oscars increasingly resemble those who vote on them — devotees who love moviemaking as an art form rather than broad entertainment.

The real stars of this year’s Academy Awards aren’t Chalamet or Jessie Buckley, but the nominated directors Ryan Coogler, Chloé Zhao, Paul Thomas Anderson, Josh Safdie, and Joachim Trier. Alongside the Best International Film directors Jafar Panahi and Kleber Mendonça Filho, auteurs are now as much the focus of Oscar attention as actors. There are still big names among the performance nominees — Leo DiCaprio, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Hudson, Sean Penn, Emma Stone — but the overall sense of the ceremony as a globally magnetizing spectacle continues to ebb. Like YouTube, the Oscars are increasingly for makers, not those they cast.

If that’s an existential dilemma for a global industry, it may be healthy for a cinema. Official Hollywood will contract. Along the way, it will make grotesque political and moral compromises in a fight for survival. But that doozy of a slide is freeing directors to tell very interesting stories. And as anyone who has caught Swan Lake knows, good stories tend to last.

Yours Ever,

Marcello Rubini & Sarah Brown

Best Picture

• Bugonia

• F1

• Frankenstein

• Hamnet

• Marty Supreme

• One Battle After Another*

• The Secret Agent**

• Sentimental Value

• Sinners

• Train Dreams

There are all kinds of cold, hard, logical reasons to stick with One Battle After Another in the race for Best Picture. It has run away with most of the major laurels in the run-up to the Oscars, with the notable exception of the SAG award. It’s popular with critics and with the overseas constituencies that are increasingly pivotal in Academy voting. It couldn’t be more timely, and it’s also the most successful film a beloved director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has ever made.

But lordy, the vibes.

We are succumbing to the tidal wave of affection for Ryan Coogler’s dark, dazzling Sinners. We’re besotted, and probably deluded. We really ought to be sensible and double down on the more likely choice, but so many Hollywood hobgoblins say they also ticked the Sinners box.

Now, if life were fair, we’d give it to The Secret Agent. But this one is likely to be neck-and-neck between the year’s two major original hits.

—S.B.

Best Director

• Ryan Coogler, Sinners*

• Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme

• Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

• Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value

• Chloé Zhao, Hamnet

We should note (again) that Warner Bros., which business columnists have lately treated like a wig shop on the distressed side of town, is responsible for the two Oscar frontrunners. Will the Ellisons greenlight pictures like Sinners or One Battle After Another, or will it all be The Bari Weiss Story? The suspense is killing us.

In the meantime, we think Paul Thomas Anderson is taking the Oscar home. Ryan Coogler is the obvious rival in this category, but we’re playing it safe here. Which really means we should change our Best Picture vote, but we’re too bloody-minded.

—M.R.

Best Actress

• Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

• Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You

• Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue

• Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value

• Emma Stone, Bugonia

Nothing is derailing Jessie Buckley in this category. Not even The Bride! — the laugh-out-loud-awful Bride of Frankenstein movie that luckily opened just after Oscar voting closed. She’s taking the statuette home to Killarney.

—M.R.

Best Actor

• Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

• Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme

• Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another

• Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon**

• Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent*

In contrast to the leading actress slot, this category has been all over the place from the start. Let’s begin with Chalamet, whose campaigning seemed to turn Academy voters off even before his “nobody cares” crack. Maybe the line between his grasping Marty Supreme character and reality got a little too blurred, or maybe the feeling is simply that it’s not his turn. Either way, he’s gone from presumptive frontrunner to dark horse. If he wins, it will be a shock.

Leonardo DiCaprio can never be discounted in this race, but he has never built much momentum. The same might be said of Ethan Hawke, despite deep voter goodwill. In our view, Wagner Moura is the real spoiler here, for timely work in a movie voters clearly want to reward.

Still, everything seems to be lining up for Michael B. Jordan, who took the SAG award for his dual role in Sinners.

—S.B.

Best Supporting Actress

• Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value

• Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value

• Amy Madigan, Weapons

• Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners*

• Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another**

The main obstacle for Amy Madigan is that she’s in a horror movie. Historically, some Oscar voters have been fickle about that (though it didn’t hurt Kathy Bates). But her distinguished body of work should overcome the genre bias.

We’d like to see Wunmi Mosaku, who won the BAFTA, get recognized, but her time will come. This is Madigan’s race.

—S.B.

Best Supporting Actor

• Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another

• Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein

• Delroy Lindo, Sinners

• Sean Penn, One Battle After Another

• Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value*

There’s a plausible path to victory here for Stellan Skarsgård, who won the Golden Globe for Sentimental Value. But the Globes—which also gave One Battle After Another’s Teyana Taylor the Best Supporting Actress nod—now feel like a million years ago, and their voting body is very different from the Academy’s. Sean Penn, meanwhile, has been on a surly, chain-smoking roll, taking the BAFTA and the Actor award.

Maybe some voters will bristle at the air of inevitability and decide to give Skarsgård his due. But everything points to Penn.

—S.B.

Best Original Screenplay

• Sinners

• Marty Supreme

• Sentimental Value

• It Was Just An Accident

• Blue Moon

This one looks settled. The two front-runners for Best Picture should divide the screenwriting awards, with Ryan Coogler carrying the original category for Sinners.

—M.R.

Best Adapted Screenplay

• Bugonia

• Frankenstein

• Train Dreams

• Hamnet*

• One Battle After Another

We could sing the praises of Maggie O’Farrell and director Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of O’Farrell’s novel all day, but it won’t change the outcome. Paul Thomas Anderson is winning this.

—S.B.

Best International Film

• The Secret Agent (Brazil)

• It Was Just an Accident (France)

• Sentimental Value (Norway)*

• Sirāt (Spain)

• The Voice of Hind Rajab (Tunisia)**

There are two plausible outcomes here. Sentimental Value, Norway’s sedate but wrenching relationship drama, arrived bathed in critical acclaim. Voters will want to acknowledge director Joachim Trier and his excellent cast. We’re bucking conventional wisdom here by not picking it.

That’s because Sentimental Value lacks the heat of Team Brazil. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s political thriller The Secret Agent is startlingly original, timely, and fun. What may put it over the edge is the bravura performance of Wagner Moura, who comes out of this Oscar season as a major international star.

—M.R.

Best Animated Feature

• Arco

• Elio

• KPop Demon Hunters

• Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

• Zootopia 2

Netflix lost out on the Warner Bros. deal, but it will console itself with this prize in what has been a pretty grim year for animation. Everybody but us sourpusses loved this relentlessly slick, positive pop extravaganza. We’re putting in a word for Little Amélie, but she might as well stay home in France.

—S.B.

Best Documentary Feature

• The Alabama Solution**

• Come See Me In The Good Light

• Cutting Through Rocks

• Mr. Nobody Against Putin*

• The Perfect Neighbor

As in the animated feature lane, Netflix has the reach to push its documentary nominees successfully. That makes Geeta Gandbhir’s tale of a Florida subdivision feud turned deadly the frontrunner here.

We’d happily make the case for Mr. Nobody Against Putin or The Alabama Solution, but The Perfect Neighbor will be hard to catch.

—M.R.

Best Original Song

• “Dear Me” from Diane Warren: Relentless, Diane Warren

• “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters, EJAE, Mark Sonnenblick, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seon and Teddy Park

• “I Lied To You” from Sinners, Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson

• “Sweet Dreams Of Joy” from Viva Verdi!, Nicholas Pike

• “Train Dreams” from Train Dreams, music by Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner

How great it would be to see the music from Sinners or Train Dreams recognized. Or for 17-time nominee Diane Warren to finally get a win. Not happening. Expect the nonsensical garble that is “Golden,” a derivative, synthesized ode to self-care from the spin class from hell, to take it.

—M.R.

Best Casting

• Sinners

• The Secret Agent

• Hamnet

• Marty Supreme

• One Battle After Another

A brand-new category, and yet another pander designed to pack the room with big names. Francine Maisler should take the Oscar for assembling the ensemble for Sinners, especially since the cast already won the Actors award.

What Gets Handed Out While Everyone’s in the Bar

Cinematography

One Battle After Another

Costume Design

Frankenstein

Film Editing

One Battle After Another

Makeup & Hairstyling

Frankenstein

Original Score

Sinners

Production Design

Frankenstein

Sound

F1: The Movie

Visual Effects

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Animated Short

The Girl Who Cried Pearls

Documentary Short

All the Empty Rooms

Live-Action Short

Two People Exchanging Saliva (Spoiler: A Friend of Dorothy)

Life imitates Wag far more than Wag imitates life.
—Oscar Wilde

Letter from Watertown

Dear Wags,

In politics, Napoleon and others remind us stupidity is no handicap. It may even be an asset when your movement’s ideology holds that knowing things is for suckers and losers. Ignorance and sycophancy are hardly barriers to success in most administrations; characters chosen for those qualities rarely distinguish themselves by probity or management chops.

This president’s cabinet, however, was cast like a reality show, packed with contestants forever trying to outdo one another in debasing genuflection and cartoonish owning of the libs. And it works: try to remember the names of pre-Trump cabinet secretaries.

The catchphrase of the guy in charge may have been You’re Fired, but this is a hard outfit to get sacked from. Kristi Noem, booted from the Department of Homeland Security after an epically catastrophic run, is the very first of these jokers to be cashiered. In truth, the president doesn’t like firing people because it runs counter to his monarchical instincts: if the state and the sovereign are one, then every fumbling functionary and failed policy is a reflection of the Sun King’s majesty. A better job-protection racket there never was.

If Trump is famously loyal only to himself, his instinct for juicy television is ingenious. The silver lining for banished toadies is that they can always be brought back by the producer-in-chief when ratings sag. Characters in the MAGA Cinematic Universe have nowhere else to go, and so they never really go away. Noem, the Omarosa from the Dakotas, will not be riding into the sunset. Instead, she’ll roost somewhere on the margins, cheering on the man who just humiliated her in front of millions until he calls her off the bench.

Noem’s particular Elba will be to serve as an envoy to something called Shield of the Americas, a coalition of Latin American countries meant to help make the Western Hemisphere safe for Trumpism. Nobody is buying that as a lateral move, and nobody will be surprised when that initiative vanishes like a mirage somewhere south of the Rio Grande. This may be read as a sign that even Trump has limits when it comes to bureaucratic malpractice, and that even the most theatrical displays of loyalty can’t stave off the axe forever. But really, Noem is gone because she gave bad TV.

Noem’s increasingly humiliating appearances before Congress might have been tolerated if she hadn’t said the president signed off on the $200 million television ad campaign she starred in, supposedly intended to promote Homeland Security. That boondoggle funneled taxpayer money to a fly-by-night contractor run by the husband of her spokeswoman. If this White House is laid-back about corruption, it assumes ill-gotten gains flow only to El Jefe. Her second mistake was to be caught in a pecadillo involving luxurious private jets and the president’s former aide, Corey Lewandowski—an extramarital relationship Noem tried to dismiss as “tabloid garbage,” even though it was exposed in a salacious rag called The Wall Street Journal. The third, and perhaps most lethal, was to assume the president would tolerate self-aggrandizement in what will always be a one-man show.

Noem’s Lewandowski-guided attempts to position herself as a top-tier MAGA politician have been a meticulously charted calamity. Her campaign to be named vice president nosedived after she published No Going Back, a memoir that revealed she’d shot her dog (true) and met Kim Jong Un (false). Noem’s tone-deafness didn’t prevent her from heading up a $100 billion agency with more than 260,000 employees. Lack of depth is hardly a disqualifier in the Trump cabinet, but her inexperience—and command of an armed law-enforcement force bigger than most of the world’s armies—made her exquisitely vulnerable. Her run at Homeland Security, with Lewandowski as her enforcer, was doomed from the start.

The women in Trump’s cabinet are magnets for criticism and uniquely disposable, as Attorney General Pam Bondi may soon find out. But Noem, an albatross with Fox News hair extensions, was so terrible at her job that even the Trumpiest diehard couldn’t give it a pass. The aggressive ramp-up of ICE and Border Patrol incursions in American cities, the deaths of U.S. citizens at the hands of agents, and the soaring unpopularity of the president’s immigration policies all happened under Noem. But she didn’t craft those policies, and those who drive them are as safe as houses.

Noem’s dismissal isn’t going to shift the agency’s agenda an inch. Her proposed replacement, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin—a former third-tier MMA fighter with a double corona-sized neck—is another reality-TV rogue eager to triple down on Stephen Miller’s anti-immigration campaign. Mullin once threatened to deck the president of the Teamsters at a Senate hearing, but the one thing he’s unlikely to do is saddle up for an ad blitz. In Trumpworld, the most dangerous place to be is between the president and a camera. Mistake yourself for the main character, and it’s happy trails.

Yours ever,

M.V. Fenwick

You Can’t Go Holmes Again

Young Sherlock (Prime Video). Guy Ritchie has a very specific take on England: everybody sports a flat cap and knows martial arts. The camera speeds up and slows down to capture mayhem set to Britpop. Wisecracks are made, tweed waistcoats are worn, and bones are crunched in a simultaneous celebration of the Krays and Horse & Hound. What’s on offer may not always be good, but it certainly moves at a clip.

Ritchie first sent up Conan Doyle in 2009’s Sherlock Holmes; this is a prequel of sorts, with Hero Fiennes (yes, that is the poor lad’s name) as the detective before he invested in a deerstalker cap. The mystery here involves dead scientists and Holmes’s father, played by Joseph Fiennes (our Hero’s uncle in real life). You will not strain to assemble these puzzle pieces, but the action merrily zips you around Europe and Asia.

In this telling, Moriarty (Dónal Finn) was Holmes’s sleuthing partner before Watson. Zine Tseng plays a sort of proto–Irene Adler, and Colin Firth shows up to chew some scenery. If you are attached to the source material, best to forget all you’ve read and treat this as a genial Boy’s Own adventure.

—Langdale Pike

Here’s to You, Prof. Robinson

Vladimir (Netflix). What is going on on campus, apparently, is that the oldsters feel besieged and the brats are entitled. Only so many jokes can be wrung from this premise (check out HBO’s Rooster to hear them all again). Better to spend the semester with Julia May Jonas’s crackling adaptation of her 2022 novel, which is far too smart and wicked to fall into the usual college clichés.

Rachel Weisz is fantastic as a tenured academic adrift in her marriage to a fellow professor (John Slattery), who is in hot water for sleeping with a few generations of his students. His wife has known about that for ages—what really bothers her is the sense that her own allure is slipping away. Enter a sexy new faculty member, Vladimir (Leo Woodall, who majors in this), who happens to be married to a rival. Everyone is compromised in this acid manners comedy. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

—Christine Callaghan

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Dear Wags,

No country hates and loves war with the intensity of the United States. America has officially declared hostilities just five times, yet it has engaged in roughly 200 military interventions since the colonial period. At this fraught moment, the U.S. is involved in multiple conflicts around the world, including Venezuela and Iran. When a country can wreak havoc abroad for decades without unsettling daily life at home, it begins to believe the bill will never come due.

America’s dilemmas overseas reflect a dual inheritance: an inborn suspicion of foreign entanglement endlessly colliding with the pull of unmatched power. As long as the United States wields cataclysmic global force, it will be tempted to use it. Regrets, we’ve had a few.

That temptation beguiles presidents, most recently one who rose to power by defenestrating the Republican establishment over costly Middle Eastern escapades. Once, the public might at least have been offered some thin rationale for an American campaign against Iran. The current administration has no patience for that pantomime. It strikes first and expects justification to follow, confident that institutional resistance and political opposition are flaccid.

Still, there are limits to that old routine. We already feel the hangover coming on. The conflict in Iran will not be determined solely by Israeli ambition or Iranian aspiration. It will be shaped as much by fragile American psychology. The enthusiasm of hawks will be broken by a public dragged into another fight it didn’t choose.

If we must speak of forever wars, the United States and Iran have been locked in one since 1979. It began under Jimmy Carter, who framed his foreign policy around human rights. It continues under Donald Trump, who dismisses that agenda as weakness. That is a pickle, rhetorically and otherwise. This administration prefers transactions to liberation. But wars, in the end, are morality plays. Americans want to believe their sacrifices serve a worthy cause.

Stripped of poetry, an American war had better be short. Its pitchmen will scramble not to call it a war at all. MAGA’s aversion to overseas entanglements was blunt and appealing. Not long ago, our current vice president said: “Our interest, I think, very much is not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.” Last week, he was fumbling to thread a needle: “The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight — there is no chance that will happen.”

No chance. At this late date, who trusts the Americans when they say such things? Not even the Americans seem to.

Once, a defining theme of U.S. foreign policy was a dangerous idealism: the reflexive conviction that truth and justice were permanently on our side. Vietnam shattered that faith, exposing the ruthless gamesmanship beneath it, the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. Reagan and the end of the Cold War revived a kind of providential confidence, as if history had ratified American virtue. That triumphalism collapsed in the long, grinding catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The trauma of those wars, landing alongside economic upheaval at home, reshaped our politics. The nationalist populism Vance now strains to rebrand did not emerge from nowhere. It fed on betrayal and rage at neoconservative crusades that delivered not Pax Americana but exhaustion and decline.

The raw aggression of Trumpism disguises dread of yet another entanglement that looks rosy on Day 1 and leaves more scars. Conflicts blamed on the “military-industrial complex” and loathed by populists across the spectrum tend to stick with us longer than any politician’s happy talk. The real danger in this moment is the president’s sudden faith that history can be rewritten from the air with minimal American casualties. Experience teaches different lessons.

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