The higher that Dunham scaled Fame Mountain, the more unexplainably sick she became. She was dissociating while running lines with Adam Driver for her very own prestige television series, laid across the “cool marble floor in a sleek corporate bathroom” as Oprah Winfrey waited outside to say hello, and battled a migraine the first time that she had sex with her rock star boyfriend. She became addicted to the drug she took for anxiety, Klonopin. Dunham was getting it all and yet, simultaneously, falling apart.

The book is dedicated to all those wunderkinds who never tunneled out of that same addiction, chaos, and pressure to the other side: Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, “and anyone else who was too Famesick to be cured.”

But none of those guys spent their 20s performing nude on television and then reading headlines immediately after, on tiny screens, analyzing the distribution of fat on their bodies. While Dunham’s earlier output defined the hyper-confessional style that ruled the 2010s, Famesick—which, full disclosure, I’m only about halfway through but loving—might define another one, and that’s when people who became famous under the microscope of the internet look back, aghast, at what happened to them, what people said about them, and what they’ve become.

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As host of one of the internet’s most popular pop culture podcasts—The Toast, which she hosts with her sister Jackie—Claudia talks…

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Since running away from home at 15, and then starting a channel where he started posting about New York’s bike lanes and layovers, Casey has amassed millions of followers and billions of views. But I wanted to talk to him not because he’s popular but because he saw what was coming. Casey, who’s 45 now, knew that YouTube would upend media. He saw that self-appointed celebrities—the people we now call “influencers”—would dominate our screens. In our interview, he argues that the one-two punch of iMovie, which is the editing software that came with Apple iMac DV computers starting in 1999, and then YouTube, which launched six years later, would change everything about who gets to make movies and how we watch them.

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On this episode of Second Thought, I ask Neistat about riding the wave of the YouTube tsunami, his love of old technology, and how his care…

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To Have and to Scold

Imagine this: You’re the young, handsome head curator at the Cambridge Art Museum, deciding between which skin-contact wine you’d like to serve at your rapidly approaching wedding to a gorgeous, funny woman whom you adore. And then you find out during a lighthearted game with friends that 15 years prior, when she was 15—not to mention unchaperoned, bullied, and too online—she’d planned to take her father’s rifle and do a school shooting.

There’s the premise of The Drama, which stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as the engaged couple, and which is framed as a dark psychological drama, a rom-com, and a black comedy all at once. The film is more concerned with a thought experiment than virtuosic filmmaking in any genre, and the experiment, done very well, is this: What would you do if you found out something deeply unsettling about someone that you thought you knew? And what if that something was that they were geared up to commit mass violence on innocent children? And you’re geared up to marry them.

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It’s 2024, South Dakota. (That’s the one that has Mount Rushmore in it, not the Fargo one.) Wind sweeps through the prairies, kicking a plastic bag up to a billboard that declares: “Meth. We’re On It.” Across the road, the governor’s mansion, where in the window Kristi Noem is on the phone with a book editor.

“Yes, Laura, I did actually meet with Kim Jong Un. It just wasn’t covered at the time, because of course it wasn’t,” Noem says, in that accent you have to be ancestrally Lutheran to have. “You tell that fact-checker of yours he needs to learn about something called liberal media bias.”

A moment passes. You hear a pop in the distance. Noem’s husband, Bryon, yells apologies from a locked bedroom across the hall. “Just, uh, trying out balloon animals,” he says. Another excuse. Noem rolls her eyes and continues on the phone, exasperated.

“Yeah, so I double-tapped a wirehaired pointer, who gives a shit?” she yells, fiddling with her hair extensions. Human, obviously. What is she, a refugee? “I shot a goat too. Didn’t like his attitude. That’s real America. It’s staying in. Nonnegotiable.”

And scene.

This is how I hope and pray Kristi Noem’s inevitable biopic will begin. Veep is a masterpiece, but not even Armando Iannucci could’ve written a story like Noem’s off the dome. Her bumbling political life is one of the most fascinating to have ever taken place: a woman who destroyed her own chances of becoming vice president by lying about meeting foreign leaders and then admitting to dog murder in a memoir published just months before the Republican National Convention, then became secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), then lost the job amid accusations of adultery, corruption, and incompetence, and an uproar over a multimillion-dollar PSA that prominently featured her on horseback. She’s now serving as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a fake-sounding diplomatic post Trump created for Noem after he fired her from DHS last month.

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At this point I had to accept it: Helen Lewis is right. Millennial feminism, which has apparently committed itself to breaking into male-dominated world of drug dealing, and canceling Gwyneth Paltrow, is past its “use by” date. Or at least it’s become a caricature of itself.

Lewis wrote about this in an essay this week about Lindy West’s memoir, Adult Braces. The book is about how West forced herself to embrace an open marriage that her husband insisted on—I will cheat on you and you will like it! Lewis’s point was that the memoir was the nail in the coffin for early internet feminism. “At the beginning, the movement felt intoxicating and liberating, but it soon became clear that sticking with millennial feminism would have required submitting ourselves to a voluntary lobotomy,” Lewis writes. “After all, Lindy West essentially did.”

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One particularly bad question, posed to the British actress Charithra Chandran, was “What does it smell like?,” which made me long for the now unchic “Who are you wearing?”

As for the ceremony itself, the results were deeply mixed. Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress for her role as Aunt Gladys in Weapons? Sure, why not. Sean Penn didn’t even show up to accept his statue—opting instead to hang out with the Ukrainian president. And Javier Bardem wore a picket sign on his lapel to protest war. Groundbreaking stuff all round.

But just when I think I’m out of love with the movies, they pull me back in. Ryan Gosling has come out with a true sci-fi stunner. I know the Oscars were just last weekend, but I’m calling it now: Project Hail Mary should win all the awards next year. My campaign starts now.

The Best Thing About ‘Project Hail Mary’ Is Its Humanity

The second time I shed a tear because a pile of rocks said something moving to Ryan Gosling, I thought to myself, Sister, get it together. Then it happened twice more. The space part of Project Hail Mary, the sci-fi thriller that dropped this week, is secondary to the sheer scale and humanity of it. Which is especially impressive since the lion’s share of the movie features just one human: a science teacher turned astronaut, Ryland Grace, played brilliantly by Gosling. He’s been recruited by an international space organization and tempted out of retirement after mysterious “space dots” showed up and began to cloud out the sun, dropping the earth’s temperature and imperiling the entire population.

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Not so with his latest documentary, Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, which premiered on Netflix on Wednesday. In it, Theroux cavorts with a cacophony of misogynistic internet influencers to practically no effect. Theroux’s subjects are people who spend multiple hours a day in a profitable panopticon of their own making, livestreaming every thought, opinion, and personal detail for public consumption. If nothing is concealed, nothing can be revealed.

This becomes obvious very quickly. The documentary opens with Theroux in Marbella, Spain, visiting Harrison Sullivan, a.k.a. HSTikkyTokky, a 24-year-old British manosphere influencer who is documenting his luxurious life on the lam after allegedly fleeing the scene of his wrecked McLaren in Surrey, England.

“Are we filming?” Theroux asks, looking at Sullivan’s cameraman.

“We are. We are indeed,” says Sullivan.

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Firstly: Free Press Cupid has relaunched, and it’s even better than I could have imagined. I’m not saying The Free Press is a matchmaking service wrapped in a media company, but I’m also not not saying that. If you want to believe in love again, read these ads, then email us at Cupid@TheFP.com with a 200-word or so letter about who you are and what you’re looking for.

Secondly: I’m looking forward to seeing some of you in Manhattan this coming Tuesday! I’m hosting a conversation with Kat Rosenfield about her new, thrilling novel “How to Survive in the Woods.” If you live nearby, there are still a few tickets left—take a break from monitoring the situation and join us!

Which Way, Western Woman?

America’s favorite Mormon mom—and its favorite Mormon mom to hate—is now, at 35, a mom of nine. Hannah Neeleman is a former pageant queen and ballerina, and the face of Ballerina Farm, a lifestyle brand and direct-to-consumer food business. On Instagram, she pumps out gorgeously addictive videos that show her making cheese, bags of bone broth, and hot cocoa mix and organic flour that she sells on her website. She usually has a baby strapped to her somewhere, and often a toddler or two wanders into the shot; occasionally we see her husband, Daniel (whose father has founded five airlines). Though it doesn’t really need to be said, they live in Utah.

Last week, Neeleman announced her ninth pregnancy in a highly produced video featuring some strong brass instruments and a big American flag. Along with the new kid, she promoted some protein powder. She also reflected on the discipline and beauty of ballet. “Before the curtain rose, there existed discipline, sweat, blistered feet,” she said, after a shot of her cradling a massive bump under a gingham dress. “Despite what some people think, that strength never leaves you.”

Then this week, the Neelemans had the baby. It’s a girl, their sixth in a row.

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Welcome to the world of “Chinamaxxing,” aka “Becoming Chinese,” a new TikTok trend that’s part meme, part genuine Sinophilia. Basically, it’s Americans adopting mundane Chinese mannerisms and lifestyle habits like squatting in public, drinking hot water, or wearing slippers inside, both ironically and otherwise. “You’ve met me at a very Chinese time in my life” has become a common refrain.

Most of the content revolves around cozy but simplistic habits that can be incorporated into one’s daily life—an alternative to the increasingly elaborate and consumerist self-care routines that have proliferated on American social media over the past few years. Stoically drinking a cup of plain hot water at night seems a lot easier than starting the day with a 10-step skincare routine and a collagen-infused French press with a thousand different syrups and cold foams from a can.

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The new Netflix docuseries Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model opens with a flurry of Zoomer influencers staring into their phones cameras, mouths aghast in feigned horror and outrage. Headlines pop up across the screen: “The TV That Aged like Milk,” “The Problem with America’s Next Top Model,” “The Legacy of America’s Next Top Model Is Anything but Fierce.” To borrow a phrase, the past is a foreign country, one where a size six was fat and Tyra Banks could force aspiring supermodels to dress up like homeless people, drug addicts, and different races. But now we’re a new people in a new land, and it’s time for everyone to atone for the sins of who we once were: television viewers in 2003.

Reality Check is the latest production of what I like to call the Reckoning Industrial Complex. Prominent examples from the last few years include Quiet on Set (about the Nickelodeon channel being terrible behind the scenes), White Hot (about Abercrombie & Fitch being terrible behind the scenes), and Britney vs Spears (about Britney Spears’s life being terrible behind the scenes).

The formula goes something like this: Take a pop-culture product from roughly two decades ago, point out how unsavory it was in retrospect—even if this was obvious and remarked upon at the time—then make the viewer feel somehow complicit, and then offer some fairly tepid insight from behind the scenes.

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Brontë on Steroids

The new Wuthering Heights, timed to release for Valentine’s Day, has been panned as “smooth-brained” and “extravagantly superficial,” but what it lacks in intellectual heft it more than makes up for with emotional thrust, and deep-seated perversion, and that’s nothing to scoff at. Those looking for a faithful adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel should look elsewhere, but those looking for a good time are very much in luck.

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I’ll be watching the opening ceremony—let’s hope, for everyone’s sake, that they do a better job showcasing their country’s culture than we saw in France in 2024. And yes, I’ll also watch the field activity that happens on either side of the halftime show this Sunday.

Let the games begin!

The Ice Dancers Cometh

Whoever wins the 100-meter dash during the Summer Olympics is considered the fastest man in the world; if you win enough swim races, you become a national superhero. But making the national curling team, or huddling your helmeted head against your fellow countrymen in a bobsled, makes you a guy with a very fun fact. Sure, the skiers have a bit more star power. Who could forget Linsdey Vonn’s epic, gold-winning, downhill run in Vancouver in 2010? But the stars of the Winter Olympics are all so geared up, it’s hard to get excited watching them.

Or at least, that’s what I used to think.

Then I watched a new series on Netflix called Glitter & Gold: Ice Dancing, which is all about figure skating, the theater kid of all the Olympic events, with its lycra and pumping music and panache. There are no goggles or snow pants here; the athletes’ chests are heaving, their personalities are very much on display, the behind-the-scenes drama is off the charts. And that’s especially true when it comes to ice dance, the most subjective of the four figure skating disciplines, and the focus of the documentary.

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Melania’s Version Is Tight-Lipped, If Lavish

When the Slovenian-born First Lady Melania Trump, in a smoky eye and a false lash, is getting a benediction from a priest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on the anniversary of her mother’s passing while a gospel rendition of “Amazing Grace” rings out, you won’t be able to help but think to yourself, Well, ain’t that America. It’s one of many bizarre yet beautifully captured moments in the new documentary Melania.

Given the subject, and the potentially political particulars of the doc’s distribution deal through Amazon, which paid $40 million to acquire it and $35 million to promote it, and given that director Brett Ratner hasn’t made a film since being accused of sexual assault almost 10 years ago, the documentary got quite a lot of attention before the lights went down. Rolling Stone did an investigation into the apparently chaotic conditions on set. Ticket sales are being studied as if they’re contested presidential ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. My own theater basically had only reporters in it; everyone had a notebook out, and luckily, someone had an extra pen.

But what actually happened during the 104 minutes that promised an inside look into the mind and world of the elusive First Lady? Well, many dress fittings, and many, many trips in Chevy Suburbans.

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As has been noted in these pages, I spent last week in the woods of California without a phone or access to the internet, and let me tell you, it was glorious. Endless stretches of time where there was no app to reload, check, log in to, or scroll on. Just my own thoughts—the poor man’s algorithm—and the sweet sounds of my retreat facilitator assuring me that it is all my parents’ fault. I’m not saying I’m better for it, only that you’re worse, and please note: I go by only my Sanskrit name now, which roughly translates to “Bari’s little sister.”

The bright light in me honors the less bright light in you. And now, finally, back to the culture at hand.

Jennette McCurdy Goes the Whole Way

Jennette McCurdy is used to making everybody uncomfortable. Her first book, a memoir, was literally called I’m Glad My Mom Died—and was about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her stage mom, who she claims was “obsessed” with turning her into a successful child actress. In the book, she wrote about how her mom inflicted an eating disorder on her, and performed sexually invasive “exams” to exert her control. She wouldn’t let McCurdy shower alone.

McCurdy did become a star—as a teenager she acted in Nickelodeon’s iCarly, and later in Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande—but she also became severely bulimic, very unhappy, and later an alcoholic.

During these dark years, she dated a man she met on the set of iCarly. She was Half His Age. That’s the title of her debut novel, which came out Tuesday. Having read it, I can tell you: It’s going to make people even more uncomfortable than her memoir did.

McCurdy has been frank about the fact that it’s based on her own experiences. Her stand-in is the character of Waldo, a tragic yet wry teenager who lives in Anchorage, Alaska—and whose life is utterly upended when she first lays eyes on her new creative writing teacher, Mr. Korgy. He is nearly 40, 20 years older than she is, but Waldo finds herself fantasizing so forcefully about her teacher—a married, failed novelist sure only of his own artistic genius and taste—that she finds herself in a living nightmare beside him.

The novel is narrated exclusively by the 17-year-old, and McCurdy does a terrifyingly good job of putting to the page what it’s like to be inside a teenage girl’s head. Waldo aches for the rush of purchasing fast fashion and cheap makeup that she hopes will transform her into a self-assured, beautiful woman, and she is a fiend for hyper-palatable junk food, social media, and, of course, Mr. Korgy. McCurdy captures what it’s like to have an obsession that verges on psychological violence, torture followed by release in ever-tightening cycles, with a fidelity that only someone who’s experienced it can create.

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When I was 13 my family hired a “manny” named Marcus Johns from Tallahassee, Florida. He was in his late teens, and he was more than a babysitter; he was an entertainer, singer, dancer, game inventor, video editor, freestyle rapper, and drummer, a grown-up kid with an outsize personality and cartoonish lifeguard six-pack. At my bat mitzvah he was the star of the show as my friends swarmed around him. But I didn’t mind, as I was, obviously, infatuated.

One afternoon my mom showed us a new social media app she’d heard about. It was called Vine, built on six-second looping videos—created, consumed, and “revined” (reposted.)

When the app was launched in 2012, the time constraint felt oddly specific, like Twitter’s original 140-character limit. But users found their footing, embraced the parameter, and started to break through. A driver passes a sign and says, “Road work ahead? Uh. . .yeah, I sure hope it does!” A little girl with a lisp stands in a field of geese and marvels, “Look at all those chickens.” A Frenchman asks the camera, “Why is everybody afraid of love?” then screams “Love!” at a woman shopping for groceries. A boy in a choir uses a helium balloon to reach a high note. Suddenly, the limitation wasn’t a bug. It was a revelation. Turns out, six seconds is plenty.

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It’s 2026—if you missed our Honestly predictions episode, including some musings from yours truly, you can check it out here—and there’s countless shibboleths, trends, good movies, great books, and bad TV yet to be dissected, discussed, and debated. If you want to follow along with the culture, subscribe to Second Thought here.

The Finance Guy Is Back on Top

He was a punch line for so long, we began to count him out all together. The finance bro, a vested-up, boring grad of Wharton, Michigan, or even, God forbid, Duke, was the type who drove up rent in once-cool urban neighborhoods and ruined once-off-the-beaten-path restaurants. He worked at Goldman, or Blackstone, as a junior analyst, and while the white-hot rage directed at bankers from the Occupy Wall Street movement had fizzled by the late 2010s, finance guys were still urban bugbears. Late to every trend, obnoxious in every bar, they were the anti-hipsters, and we never let them forget it.

But then, in the past couple years, the waters shifted. There was the meme song in the summer of 2024 that looped the words: “I’m looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6′5″, blue eyes.” A raft of banker-coded performance enhancers like nicotine pouches, meal replacement shakes, and high-protein slop bowls best eaten standing up in Midtown Manhattan flooded the market. Trump II brought a renewed focus on cash, and on living the high life. And then there was the rise of Industry, the HBO show about hyper-ambitious, vicious, and promiscuous young bankers working at a London investment bank called Pierpoint & Co.

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But there were simply too many albums, too many trends, too many TV shows, and too many celebrity faux pas to choose just one winner and loser. So instead, I’ve selected a few cultural shifts that sum up 2025.

The Year of Doubling Down

The celebrity apology died this year. And the death was quick and seemingly painless, almost as if no one ever cared for the performative ass-covering in the first place?

In August, there was uproar after Sabrina Carpenter put out the art for her new album Man’s Best Friend. The cover photo showed the former Disney star on her hands and knees, in a skimpy dress, while an anonymous suited man roughly gripped a handful of her hair, holding it almost like a leash.

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