But first: The trouble with celebrating sickness . . .

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when being ill became cool. But sometime in the mid-2010s, it became normal to scroll past black-and-white pictures with long captions about chronic fatigue or generalized anxiety, and with hashtags like #invisibleillness and #healingjourney. In real life, you’d hear the casual shorthand of “I’m so OCD” and “everyone’s a little bit ADHD.”

In 2019, the investigative journalist Christina Buttons “began encountering stories along a similar theme: women discovering, later in life, that they were autistic.” The internet was full of pieces with titles like “The Invisible Women with Autism” or “What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained.”

Throughout her life, she’d struggled socially, become easily overwhelmed, and fidgeted—and when she came across these stories, something clicked into place. She went to the doctor, and got an autism diagnosis.

“Suddenly, every aspect of my life, every little inadequacy or abnormality that had once tormented me, had a medical explanation,” she writes today.

At the time, she was living alone and working remotely, but a couple years later, she became a journalist—and realized that “not only was I competent at socializing, I was good at it, and I improved the more I did it.” She realized having intense interests wasn’t necessarily a symptom. And she began to question the whole idea that she was ill.

The high priestess of the very online millennial women who turned illness into identity is Lena Dunham, who just released a wildly bestselling memoir, Famesick.

While working on Girls, the show that made her famous, Dunham was at war with her own body, suffering from endometriosis or shingles or impetigo, and struggling with an addiction to the anxiety medicine Klonopin. She documented it all on Instagram, posting nude photos to mark the anniversary of her hysterectomy or announcing she’d been diagnosed with something called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

But, writes Kat Rosenfield today, what Dunham’s new book reveals is that real, genuine illness is not aspirational—not a label you should seek—and not in any way romantic. “It made her a person who disappointed people, or clung to them, or betrayed them,” writes Kat. “It made her a person whose boyfriend told her, ‘You are making it hard for me to love you.’ ” Her story is a cautionary tale for anyone who desires a diagnosis. Be careful what you wish for.

​​Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a cold-plunging neuroscience professor based across the pond; a fit, steak- and coffee–loving PhD in politics in Calgary; or a 71-year-old in Florida training for her first Spartan Race (seriously!).

Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to Cupid@TheFP.com.

This week, Will Rahn published a piece on how the Mets are breaking his heart—and the next day, they won! Also, Jamie Metzl explains what it’s like to co-author a book with a chatbot:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our digital editor Josh Kaplan for his recommendations…

📚Read . . . With the first American World Cup in more than 30 years coming this summer, what better time to finally get into what we in Europe call football, but you might know as “soccer”? This week, I picked up a copy of Atlantic writer Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World. Written for an American, soccer-skeptical audience, it dissects how the sport has transformed life for billions of people—and is full of observations that will change the way you think about the world.

🍻Drink . . . a light beer. The days are getting longer, the evenings are brighter, and warmer days are nearly here. As millions of people in bars across the world begin to order margs and Aperols and even rosé, for my money there’s nothing more refreshing than a God-fearing 3-percent domestic beer. I live in London, which for all its perks, is still in thrall to the tyranny of craft beers. When I’m in the U.S., I like to bask in the world’s foremost selection of easy-drinking, refreshing options. I am partial to a PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon) or Miller High Life, but anything light and frothy does the trick.

🥗Eat . . . asparagus. A few years ago, I became what I like to call “season-pilled,” basically hyper-fixating on specific fruit and veg at specific times of year, to the point where my fiancée said that my spending habits on cherries were becoming “financially unsustainable.” Right now, the thing to look out for is asparagus. Pretty much everywhere across the northern hemisphere is about to enter asparagus abundance season, which the Germans call Spargelzeit, or “asparagus time.” They take it to some pretty weird places, and many towns and villages even crown an “Asparagus Queen.” But you can just go to a farmers market and buy a bunch and enjoy a delicious seasonal vegetable at the time that nature intended.

Last but not least, we asked our art director Clara Grusq to tell us about a beautiful thing she’s been thinking about this week. She said: “This past weekend, I had the pleasure of stumbling across a movie theater that was showing the 1986 neo-noir classic “Blue Velvet” by David Lynch—in which Kyle MacLachlan, as college student Jeffrey Beaumont, gets pulled into a dark police investigation and falls for the tortured cabaret singer Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini. Feast your eyes on this shot, in which Dorothy is held by Jeffrey as if his arms are the only place she could find refuge”:

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

But first: What’s best for your child? And who gets to decide?

These are the simple questions behind some of the fieriest debates of our time—over vaccine schedules, free-range parenting, smartphones for kids. It’s a theme The Free Press keeps coming back to because the stakes feel enormous. And because everyone, it seems, has an opinion on what happens inside your home.

One of the places these debates play out most bitterly is the “momosphere,” where maternal influencers have turned ordinary parenting decisions—like where your baby sleeps, and how long you stay home after giving birth—into litmus tests for how much you love your child.

This is the battlefield where the war over breastfeeding is taking place; where moms declare that bottle-feeding mothers are selfish, and formula is poison.

Kara Kennedy says: That’s nonsense. During her first pregnancy, she concluded she didn’t want to breastfeed, at all—and talked openly about it. In doing so, she came across countless mothers who fed their babies using formula, but couldn’t bear to say so publicly. “You won’t believe the lengths I went to lie about it,” one told her.

So, knowing that moms online will shout at her, Kara has written for us today about why the decision to make parenting a little easier feels so radical—and why she doesn’t regret making it:

But it’s not just influencers who insist on telling you how to raise your kids. For Anna Keating, it was the police. Not long ago, two officers brought home her 7-year-old son; they’d picked him up while he was on the three-block walk to his grandma’s house, assuming he was lost.

Anna, who was born in the ’80s, grew up walking downtown and biking to school without adult supervision. She wants her kids to have the same independence. “Still, when the police brought my second grader home, I felt like a horrible mother,” she says. Read her story here:

​​Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a logical but warm woman from Jamaica (the country, not the neighborhood of New York City); an aspiring writer and producer in Virginia; or a Dutch- and Arabic-speaking widower who retired from the Navy after 35 years of service, but whose sense of adventure is as strong as ever.

Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to Cupid@TheFP.com.

We’ve published a lot of other pieces this week worth catching up on, including . .

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our news editor Rick Brooks for his recommendations…

📚 Read . . . Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. When winter finally let go of New York City, and there were no more slush puddles to leap, I found myself thinking about walking—to the park, to Shenanigan’s Pub, to the Catholic church with the flimsy homilies and streaming sunlight. That’s when I remembered Gros’s book, opened it to a random page, and landed here: “Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found. To walk, you need to start with two legs. The rest is optional.”

🎵 Listen . . . to the playlist “The House That Built Me: Songs About Making and Going Home.” It was created by Natalie Weiner, whose Don’t Rock the Inbox online newsletter celebrates country music that hasn’t fallen to the corporate cookie-cutter, brocentric FM dial. These 30 songs—from Loretta Lynn’s “I Don’t Wanna Play House” to Leon Bridges’s “Coming Home” to Ashley McBryde’s “Light on in the Kitchen”—make me think of the little house where I grew up, the house party that my sister and I stupidly believed we had destroyed all evidence of, and letting myself in with a key every afternoon after school.

🍳 Cook . . . these baked white pepper chicken wings. I have made them so many times that my kids believe this is my own recipe, when in fact it belongs to Kaitlin Leung. You can do the scut work—of mixing the wings with white pepper, Sichuan pepper powder, and vegetable oil—while everyone is still asleep, let it sit in the fridge all day, and pop them in the oven when you get home. Seeing the bones pile up on my kids’ plate is a triumph.

As usual, we asked our art director, Clara Grusq: What beautiful thing has been on your mind this week? She replied: “There’s so much to do in New York, but sometimes I can’t help missing my hometown of Paris, where you could just wander into La Galerie Dior and feast your eyes on the creations of Christian Dior, who reimagined the feminine silhouette with a cinched waist, and lines so precise. His designs seem sculpted on rather than worn.”

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.

But first: the man who went to Michael Jackson’s ranch—and stumbled into an afternoon with Jeffrey Epstein.

The release of the Epstein files forced a lot of people to reflect on their interactions—however innocent—with the man at the center of them. One such person was a literary agent named David Vigliano, who met Jeffrey Epstein once, in bizarre circumstances, and kept very detailed notes. Today, he shares them in an exclusive essay for The Free Press.

In the summer of 2002, Vigliano went to Neverland Ranch—Michael Jackson’s sprawling estate in the Santa Ynez Valley—to discuss the possibility of a Jackson autobiography. The pop star never showed. Instead, Vigliano found himself seated across from Epstein, who had arrived with a harem of college-age women. “In my line of work, I’ve met many extremely wealthy men with girlfriends half their age. None of them had nine,” he writes today. “I guess he just likes to surround himself with beautiful young women, I thought, in all my cluelessness.”

Years later, after Epstein was convicted of pedophilia, and Jackson was accused of the same thing, Vigliano found himself “struck by how easily I was seduced” by the mystique around these two men. His epiphany came after he read Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl; he had nothing to do with its publication but, he writes, it “made me think about whose stories get to be told, and the role I play in their telling.”

​​Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site! Click here to meet a sober, tattooed, curly-haired atheist in Salt Lake City; a well-traveled JewBu photographer based in Los Angeles; or a petite blond woman in the Windy City looking for a love that’s pretty, pretty, pretty good.

Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to Cupid@TheFP.com.

We’ve published a lot of pieces this week that you’ll want to read, if you haven’t already—including Frannie Block’s profile of the triumphant head of NASA; a biting Coleman Hughes’s review of a new book by America’s most famous anti-racist; and a fascinating set of stories about how AI is changing everything from cancer treatment to your favorite song:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our senior editor Peter Savodnik for his recommendations. . .

🥃Drink. . . a classic Negroni, in honor of the arrival of spring, preferably at Florentín, a rooftop bar in downtown Los Angeles—one of the few outstanding outposts of civilization in this town.

🎵Listen. . . to Alisa Weilerstein perform Shostakovich’s No. 2 concerto for cello, with Ryan Bancroft conducting. It’s happening at Walt Disney Concert Hall, which (for the uninitiated) remains the country’s best music venue, architecturally and acoustically—and, helpfully, is just down the street from Florentín.

📺 Watch. . . A Separation, the powerful 2011 Iranian movie directed by Asghar Farhadi about patriarchy, dementia, the end of a marriage, and more. It’s a wonderful film, and, just as important, a reminder that the war over the future of this country is not only about nuclear missiles, oil, and geopolitics, but human beings trapped in a medieval theocracy.

📚Read. . . Badenheim 1939, by Israel’s greatest novelist: Aharon Appelfeld. The novel is about a colorful band of Jews in a resort town in Austria shortly before they’re all herded off to concentration camps, and it’s a brilliant exploration of human beings’ ability to delude themselves. It feels all too timely, alas.

Last but not least, a beautiful thing to feast your eyes on:

This month, four astronauts traveled to the moon and back aboard the Integrity. As someone who has loved science fiction for as long as she can remember, our art director, Clara Grusq, couldn’t help but think of the 1968 Planet of the Apes, a Cold War–era film she thinks is often overlooked, yet arguably one of the most enduring works of sci-fi storytelling. We won’t give away the ending, but we will say: The final haunting image of the ruined Statue of Liberty, half-buried in sand, delivers one of the most iconic and devastating reveals in cinema history.

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

But first: On the way to the butcher, farmers sometimes get cold feet.

If you’re celebrating Easter this weekend, perhaps there’s half a lamb in your freezer right now, waiting to be roasted. If you eat meat at all, you probably get it from a grocery store. But once upon a time, people would’ve been involved in the care and killing of the animals that fed them.

If anyone now understands what that’s like, it’s our columnist Larissa Phillips, who runs a small farm with her husband in upstate New York. When they first moved there, 12 years ago, they wanted to breed animals with the utmost care, then kill them with the utmost respect. “We knew it would be hard,” she writes. “I didn’t realize that every single animal would be fodder for this existential battle.”

Growing up in a city, she was fed stories like Charlotte’s Web and Babe, “morality tales” designed to make meat-eaters feel better, because in fantasy-farmland the very sweetest animals get saved from slaughter. But as a real-life farmer, she couldn’t afford to feed an animal that wasn’t pulling its weight.

Then along came a young ram with a little spot on his nose, who let kids eat out of his hand, and her husband said: “Let’s keep him.” And as a family they were forced to confront what happens when you fall in love with an animal that’s destined for the oven.

​​Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!

A fresh batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site! Click here to meet a bike-riding cinephile in Düsseldorf; a “very” left-leaning graphic artist in Vermont; or a British expat and ex-military theologian working in tech.

Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to Cupid@TheFP.com.

We’ve published plenty of other pieces this week worth catching up on, including Frannie Block’s rocket-watching dispatch from Cape Canaveral, and Freya India’s reaction to Meta being found guilty of profiting from kids’ distress:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked the aforementioned pewsitter Will Rahn for his recommendations…

📺 Watch . . .How did I not know about Shoresy until its fifth season recently dropped on Hulu? Created by and starring Jared Keeso, this Canadian sitcom about an aging minor-league hockey player is exceptionally crude. It also somehow has a heart of gold, and is high in the running for the funniest show made this decade. You now have 30 episodes to watch before the sixth season arrives next year.

⚾Go…to a baseball game. There’s a reason our national pastime may have once again secured its place as America’s second-most popular sport, and it’s not just because Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge are doing their best impressions of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. Get in a game or two this spring while the weather is nice and (almost) every team still has a shot at making a miracle run to the World Series. It’s practically a civic duty.

🍿See...Yes, it’s true: Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling as a lonely science teacher turned Earth-saving astronaut, is both quite good and deserves to be seen on a big screen. It’s beautiful to look at, and while the plot is familiar—think Interstellar remade as a buddy comedy—it’s fun, well done, and a great excuse to hit up your local cineplex.

Last but not least, a beautiful thing to feast your eyes on: Our art director Clara Grusq recently visited The Frick collection and found herself especially moved by one of Anthony van Dyck’s most exquisite paintings: Lady Anne Carey, Later Viscountess Claneboye and Countess of Clanbrassil, circa 1636.

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

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