But luckily for us all, the nearly three hours of sweeping shots of beaches and ocean, brutal battle scenes, and dazzling special effects that make up Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic poem are available to us for about 20 bucks. The cast is stacked—though some performances pop more than others, sorry Tom Holland—and it comes at a time where the themes, about the cost of war, the limits of hospitality, and institutional collapse, are apt as ever. Nolan is a virtuoso; at this point, if he directed oncoming traffic, it would make hundreds of millions of dollars.

So why is everyone so worked up?

Even before the title card on Nolan’s latest film flashed with the words “A time of apparent magic . . .”, pooh-poohers were looking to gum up The Odyssey’s groove. Elon Musk, who owns X, posted that Nolan “desecrated Homer” and “groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” Nolan’s crime was enlisting colorblind casting; Helen of Troy is played by Lupita Nyong’o, who is black, alongside actors who are Indian (Himesh Patel plays Odysseus’s second-in-command, Eurylochus) and Columbian American in the case of John Leguizamo, who plays Eumaeus, Odysseus’s blind, loyal servant. “In defiance of all common sense and logistics, a bunch of South Asians apparently managed to travel thousands of miles to Greece, where they joined Odysseus’s crew,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh pointed out in his post-game. “The casting by itself contradicts the internal logic of the story.”

Walsh’s bizarre logic begs the question: If this is all supposed to take place in ancient Greece, how the hell did Anne Hathaway, with her deep-plane facial, get there? And come to think of it, why are they all speaking English?

It seems that with The Odyssey, some are forgetting that movies are pretend—there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the accuracy of the helmets on the Spartan warriors and how the ship was a Viking one, not a Greek one—and that directors can do whatever they want with whatever source material they choose. Colorblind casting works here, like it did in Hamilton, and like it would in a movie depicting stories from the Bible, because these are foundational texts full of universal ideas. Anyone can opt in. Besides, the point of a movie isn’t to make you feel like you’re part of an impeccably re-created moment in time; that’s EPCOT, not AMC. But leaving aside silly casting quibbles and meltdowns over helmet plumes, I don’t see the culture war coming for the Trojan War as a bad thing.

Suddenly, my feed is full of debates over the difference between kleos, the Greek concept of glory, and timé, which is honor. There’s analysis over which translation Nolan was relying on; the more florid Robert Fagles or the more plainspoken Emily Wilson, who gave her own read to an interviewer at the 92nd Street Y: “I think this is a film that has some interest in shame, but I don’t think it has any interest in glory.” That the movie of the summer has any interest in shame or glory or revenge at all is a win. Let me remind you of the last few films that owned the summer months: Barbie, Top Gun: Maverick, and a bunch of superhero movies. Do you remember the awe and anguish you experienced during Deadpool & Wolverine? Me neither.

Instead of romantic love, war, or evil, or whether Barbie was a feminist project, Nolan chose to make the centripetal force in his Odyssey “Zeus’s law,” or xenia, the Greek hospitality code that says you should always welcome a stranger in your midst, since they might be gods in disguise. He explores xenia on the island of Aeaea, where the witch Circe turns Odysseus’s men into pigs after welcoming them in and feeding them. Ditto on the island of Thrinacia, where Odysseus’s crew slaughters sacred cows, even though he warned them not to. And on Ithaca, where Penelope waits for years for Odysseus, forced to host the brutish suitors who are vying to become the next king. Some hosts are seductive; like the sirens, whose song Odysseus describes as “all the things you wanted it to be, then all the things you wish you never wished for.”

It’s a stunning movie—with food for thought about when guests become invaders, and when hosts become hostage keepers. Damon’s Odysseus is beset by guilt and haunted by the soldiers who died under his command. But if you think that makes him an anti-war activist who’d campaign for decolonization, you’ve been online too long.

Go see The Odyssey without worrying about whether it’s woke or not, and report back your thoughts. And if you want to hear more of my thoughts—about The Odyssey, but also the World Cup, and that viral raccoon in Seattle—catch this week’s episode of Second Thought:

Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About

Many companies refer to their workforce “like one big family,” but it seems that many mothers are trying to make their homes more like a company. “Every hour I spend folding laundry or scheduling a repair person is an hour I’m not present with my kids,” one so-called CEO parent told The Wall Street Journal. CEO parents hire nannies, assistants, maids, drivers, and chefs to help outsource parenting so that they can drop in for the “high-impact, core memories” as one put it. I’ll give this trend a few decades to see how these moms do on their performance reviews and, for now, I’ll rely on Liz Wolfe, who celebrates the “blessed drudgery” of mothering.

A childhood friend sent me a picture from the camp we used to go to together—and the memories came rushing back. I was wild for summer camp; for my friends, for Color War, the lake, all of it. Peter Savodnik’s latest essay didn’t just make me miss those summers—he brought me right back to them. It’s a story about homesickness, and growing up, how there’s “brief, itsy-bitsy samplings of death” along the way. It’ll make you cry, but I promise some of the tears will be happy ones!

At this point, if I’m Natalie Portman, and a high-brow novelist wants to be my friend, I’d politely decline. First there was the minor scandal of her emails with Jonathan Safran Foer 10 years ago (an editor thought it would be a good idea to publish their pretentious exchanges, and it was rumored Foer left his wife for Portman, who didn’t love him back). And now: Rachel Cusk’s new novel, called Life of M, is apparently a roman à clef about Portman. Second Thought guarantees a review. And Natalie: Stick to movie-star friends; they won’t write about you!

Fergie Chambers, who I profiled a few years ago, is in the news this week after being arrested in Spain on a U.S. extradition request over allegations that he provided material support to Hamas. I met Fergie right after he’d extracted $250 million from his family’s massive empire—they own media outlets, car auction sites, and many, many car lots—but before he’d set his sights on the Jewish state as his ur-enemy. Fergie is a committed communist, a problem child, a recently converted Muslim, and so much more. Read my profile of him from 2023 here, and Jay Solomon on what’s happened since.

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They examine Tom Brady’s increasingly strange post-divorce reinvention and his latest publicity stunt with Logan Paul, asking whether the GOAT is in the throes of a midlife crisis. They dig into the legal challe…

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Pornography accounts for millions of online searches every day, and tens of millions of hours of it are watched worldwide every day. OnlyFans, a platform that allows adult creators to produce and distribute their own explicit material from their bedroom, has exploded; the British company made over $7.2 billion in 2024, and the highest earners on the site—including a former special education teacher—are raking in millions, an X-rated rendition of the American dream. A whole language—there are gooners and pay pigs, findom, and sugaring—has risen up to describe all the various features of this new culture and economy. In short, we’re in the pornverse.

And lately, some U.S. states have tried to put the genie back in the bottle by requiring mandatory verification that those who want to watch adult content are over 18. A proposed bill in Congress declares that “shielding minors from access to online pornographic content is a compelling government interest.” And earlier this month, the Supreme Court voted to uphold age-verification laws, which are on the books in 25 states. Laws like this are already a reality in the UK.

But even if we can all probably agree that it’s bad for kids to watch porn—does that mean it’s just fine for everyone else?

On one hand, it’s hard to argue adults shouldn’t be allowed to make it, or watch it. On the other hand, it objectifies and can exploit women, can show violence or degradation, and may leave viewers coarsened when it comes to the opposite sex, and with their pleasure centers shot. And that’s to say nothing of how exactly a woman comes to decide to have sex in front of a camera for money.

Lowbrow and hush-hush subjects, like porn, are the purview of Allie Rowbottom, an author and my guest on this week’s episode of Second Thought. Her first novel was about plastic surgery, and the fraught psychology of the women who avail themselves of it, and her new novel, Lovers XXX, is about the adult entertainment industry. Specifically: the so-called “golden age of porn,” in the 1980s, in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. “I just wanted to go back in time,” Rowbottom told me. Her book is high-’80s: There’s plenty of lamé, blue eye shadow, and cocaine. But she didn’t want to give the reader a rose-tinted view of the past, even though nostalgia is in vogue, and there is an argument that it was the internet that ruined porn, since before the world wide web, porn cost money, and as Rowbottom puts it: “The bodies were more natural; there were scripts; there was more of an artistic flair to the production.”

Still, “I wouldn’t want to say porn reached its apex of empowerment in the ’80s,” Rowbottom said. The book follows two friends, Jude and Winnie, who chase each other into the high-octane world of porn, power, fame, and drugs in LA as they compete for the trophy of being a Video Vixen: the girl on the cover of the hardcore VHS tapes. She wanted to get into the porn stars’ heads, she said, since “that’s what’s compelling now, especially when there’s so much artifice to everything.”

I love Rowbottom’s writing because she refuses to present neat answers to thorny questions. I asked her if porn is empowering, and she told me she couldn’t tell me, despite writing a whole book about it. “I’m going to look at it from a couple different perspectives,” she said. “But I think it’s ultimately unanswerable.”

You can watch my interview with Allie here, or listen here:

Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About

For a look into porn’s pre-digital golden age, check out the new documentary about Robin Byrd, who had a sex-themed variety show on New York’s public access television through 1998. It’s a love story disguised as one about sex, and it gives you a peek into a short-lived, liberated moment in time, before AIDS, and a subsequent moral panic made it all go away. “The human body is not indecent,” Byrd, now 71 but no less bubbly, says in one interview. “What is indecent?”

If Byrd represents the tail end of free love, Justin McLeod represents the dawn of the algorithmic era of romance. McLeod started the ubiquitous dating app Hinge about 15 years ago, and he announced this week that he’s working on a new AI-based matchmaking company, called Overtone, which he says will be “less like a social platform, more like the experience of working with an all-star personal matchmaker,” adding that “we’re at an inflection point where we can move beyond refining the existing model.” Refining existing models? Are we talking about the assembly line at a Ford plant or falling in love? Justin, please, spare us your gifts this time. No one wants to be assigned their soulmate by a large language model. For singles who aren’t convinced that AI should choose their mate, try Free Press Cupid.

I am not brave enough to see horror movies in theaters; there are too many dark corners. But since Obsession is available for streaming this week, and I could watch it at home with the lights on, I decided to give it a try. It was great, with only a few truly jarring moments—sort of like The Substance but for men. Instead of What if I could be young forever?, it’s What if the object of my affection loved me back? Go for the premise, stay for the dark drama between the sexes.

You may know Rahm Emanuel as the former mayor of Chicago and, more importantly, the former Honestly guest, who may or may not be eyeing a presidential bid. But does he have a chance? Read Andrew Zucker on the Emanuel brothers—one of them, Ari, is a Hollywood superagent who counts MAGA darlings like Joe Rogan, Dana White, and Elon Musk as associates—and how their worlds may converge for the 2028 race.

While looksmaxxers like Clavicular are concerned with looking chiseled, former tech bro Bryan Johnson has gone viral for committing his life to living forever by any means possible. Now, his girlfriend, Kate Tolo, is joining him in his quest. “I’m not a wellness person,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “I’m really doing it because I think that this is our path toward women being understood in the world and being seen.” Godspeed!

Every week I read a letter that a Free Presser writes to Abigail Shrier, and I think, Surely, this person has been wronged so fully, or is righteous enough, that Abigail will take their side in this. It never happens. This week, a scorned woman whose wife left her for a life of “self-indulgent therapeutic bullshit” gets leveled by the great Abigail, dispenser of the best advice, and definitive ender of pity parties. Long may she reign.

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

In this episode, Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot sit down with writer Allie Rowbottom to dig into her new novel, Lovers XXX, set in the cocaine-fueled “golden age” of Los Angeles’s adult film industry. They discuss the evolution of pornography from VHS tapes to OnlyFans and why fem…

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Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were married in Midtown last weekend, and while most of the details have been kept under wraps—guests were made to sign ironclad NDAs preventing them from spilling any beans—what has slipped out is rather odd. To me, the whole affair sounds like a hot mess, and a bit like The Hunger Games.

For starters, comedian Adam Sandler officiated the ceremony. George Stephanopoulos and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver made the guest list. There was a ticketed raffle to win a Chanel handbag, watches, and the same model of convertible that Taylor and Travis rode around in on their first date. The dinner was buffet-style, and included sushi, pasta, chicken, and “a mix of Chinese, Italian, and American favorites,” according to TMZ. And that’s before the fact that all of this took place above New York City’s Penn Station.

I think weddings have gotten completely out of hand; they’re often three-day-long mini festivals in exotic locations. I’ll go on record advocating that bachelorette parties be abolished. But you can’t begrudge a regular girl for wanting to feel like the most important person in the room for a day (or a weekend). But Kelce and Swift have been applauded more often than any two humans on Earth during their mega-successful careers. Why would they turn their wedding into a three-ring circus for celebrities?

I’m sure the method to Taylor’s madness will be revealed—the bride wore custom Dior, and apparently had videographers everywhere—in the form of a documentary, or music video to coincide with her next album. And to be fair: The couple donated $26 million to various charitable causes in the lead-up to the nuptials. That’s a classy move, and earns them license to be as tacky as they want. But the whole thing has surfaced the eternal debate: When does a wedding tip from luxe to Looney Tunes, and is there even such a thing as the perfectly elegant wedding?

Dan Ahdoot, my Second Thought co-host, and I got into all of the wedding scuttlebutt in this week’s podcast episode. We also talked about a new South Korean company that makes holograms of your dead relatives, and Paris Hilton’s win against a notorious Utah boarding school where she said she was abused. Watch Second Thought for our takes on popular—and unpopular—culture:

A Toast to the Jackasses

The specter of the Jackass haunted my adolescence. First as an MTV series in the early aughts, then as a movie franchise—and then in real life, because in 2005, boys loved nothing more than imitating the ridiculous and dangerous stunts performed by the Jackass cast. At the time, the crew of Jackass was derided as bad influences. They were harmful—physically, to themselves, and spiritually, to everyone else. Steve-O, a mainstay of the crew, whose signature thing was being on drugs and lighting himself on fire, proudly declared that he wanted to “make the world a dumber place.”

The new, final Jackass movie came out last month, and half the footage in it is a look back on their most notorious stunts. In hindsight (I wrote in my piece this week), you can see the value of their chaos. The Jackass guys weren’t efficient, or healthy, or effective; unless you count the effectiveness of relentlessly hitting each other in the groin, causing trauma to their testicles, but they were committed to their craft. They took being extremely stupid very seriously, and they were, unlike so many young men today, having fun in the real world with each other.

Man vs. Machine

Joe Allen is a Trump-supporting anti-tech activist, the “transhumanism editor” for Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, and a former concert rigger. When we met for a few glasses of red wine at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, to talk about what AI is going to do to us all, he was wearing a hoodie from a Rihanna tour he worked on. He’s a little disappointed that the president is cozying up to tech bros, but as a true conservative, he doesn’t think it’s entirely the government’s job to protect us from the robots; he’s all about personal responsibility.

“If people aren’t really careful and really intentional, then they’re just going to become slavish vessels for corporate algorithms,” Allen told me.

We talked about aliens, growing up Southern Baptist, where Lady Gaga went wrong, and why Allen thinks the Satanic Panic was “directionally right.” Read all about it:

Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About:

There’s been a lot of buzz about how Americans aren’t reading anymore. But one New Yorker named ​​Mendel Uminer is trying to make up for everyone else. After collecting about 10,000 books in his studio apartment—“Every book I own, I need,” he told The New York Times—his landlord deemed the volume of books a hazard. Read the full story of his righteous biblio-battle here.

Liquor stocks are taking a massive hit, and are on pace for a crash that resembles the reckoning with Big Tobacco. I’m all for drinking responsibly—but the country’s about to get a whole lot less fun if no one’s drinking at all. Readers, for the Republic, share your favorite cocktail recipe in the comments below.

Many American women, including Nicole Kidman, are training to become “death doulas”—that is, they’re sitting by strangers’ deathbeds to support them into the beyond. Kat Rosenfield reported on the macabre trend this week, but the story runs far deeper than a wacky career, and asks whether we should be rethinking how we treat death—and who we should be inviting into the room for the most momentous, and sacred, last days of our life.

I’m not one for sporting events, but sports documentaries? I am in. I just started the new Netflix series on the tennis great Rafael Nadal, and it’s beautifully done. It’s almost enough to inspire me to sign up for tennis lessons—I’ve only ever embarrassed myself on a court, whether grass or clay—but only almost.

Why must women always invent a new way to torture themselves? I’ve been seeing way too many videos of women working out in weighted vests, for vague reasons related to bone health, or maybe weight loss. I say: Stop shouldering weight that is not your own. Take off the vest this summer, and be free.

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

They dissect Taylor Swift’s unhinged Madison Square Garden wedding, from the “schizophrenic” buffet menu and Chanel bag raffle to the bizarre guest list (why was George Stephanopoulos there?)—p…

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We live in an age of outsider politicians who are deftly using social media to get and hold onto power—to the surprise of everyone else, including their wives. Melania Trump never thought she’d be First Lady of the United Sta…

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And how they will make beautiful meals with ingredients sourced, of course, from the Park Slope Food Co-op.

The Co-op is one of the oldest cooperatively run grocery stores in the country. It is both an institution and an idea, that in exchange for volunteering shifts reracking carts or weighing out wedges of cheese, you too can have access to cheap, choice produce and single-source artisanal chocolate bars. The building is big and charming. About 17,000 people are members, and there’s always a chance you could run into a Brooklyn celeb—Ezra Klein!—or even a real one, like Maggie Gyllenhaal, among the dry goods.

Who wouldn’t want to be a part of it? Well, me.

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In 2007, when Scooter Braun stumbled upon a video of a 12-year-old Justin Bieber singing a cover of Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” on the streets of Ontario, he knew immediately what to do: make the teenager a global superstar. “Sometimes you get a download,” Braun told me. “A blueprint just gets sent into your head, and it’s so clear what you should be doing, and it doesn’t matter what anyone in the world tells you.”

Braun, who I recently interviewed in Los Angeles for my podcast Second Thought, told me he saw explosive talent in the young Bieber—“He was charismatic, he was brave”—and envisioned him as the 21st century’s answer to a young Michael Jackson; a kid, soulfully singing love songs for the masses. He was right. In 2008, after flying the tween Bieber and his mother to Atlanta—it was their first-ever plane ride—he signed Bieber as a client. Over the next 15 years, Bieber, with Braun behind him, would sell millions of tickets to world tours, and become the youngest-ever solo artist to have eight No. 1 Billboard 200 albums, breaking Elvis Presley’s record.

It wasn’t only Justin Bieber. Braun went on to engineer the meteoric rises of Ariana Grande, J Balvin, David Guetta, Demi Lovato, and even, for a spell, Kanye West. “If I like something, why shouldn’t millions of other people like it?” Braun told me about his populist and very “ordinary” sensibilities. On his way up “Mount Pop Music,” Braun made early bets on tech companies too—Spotify, Uber, and Dropbox among them. In other words, Braun was getting rich, his clients were selling out stadiums, and he seemed to have a Midas touch when it came to cultural resonance.

Then it all came crashing down.

One of the things that Braun understood earlier than most was the power of social media. These networks were not just for discovering acts but for cultivating and mobilizing fan bases that would stream their music, buy their merch, and sell out their concerts. “We involved them so intimately in the building that they are just as responsible for the success of these artists as I was,” said Braun, who, in part, architected the transition from old-fashioned fan clubs to hyper-online fandoms, as his acts became hugely popular on- and offline.

But in 2019, one fandom, the Swifties, who idolize the country-singer-turned-pop-phenomenon Taylor Swift, came to consider Braun their archnemesis. Turned out, hyper-intimate fan relationships cut both ways.

Here’s what happened: Swift signed with Big Machine Records, based in Nashville, when she was 15. For years, she asked to buy the rights to her masters—the original studio recordings of her, which are typically owned by record labels, and from which they get a profit when songs are streamed—but she and the label couldn’t come to an agreement. “For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work,” she wrote in a Tumblr post in 2019.

Then, after a deal saw her catalog come under Braun’s ownership, she went nuclear.

“I was denied the chance to purchase my music outright, my entire catalog was sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings,” Swift thundered while accepting Billboard’s Woman of the Decade Award in 2019. “This just happened to me without my approval, consultation, or consent.” She went on: “The definition of the toxic male privilege in our industry is people saying, ‘But he’s always been nice to me,’ when I’m raising valid concerns about artists and their rights to own their music.” Swift vowed to rerecord her own songs as an act of defiance; meanwhile, her fans descended upon Braun on her behalf. He was the subject of death threats and endless online ire. Leave it to Swift, a master in storytelling, to take a complicated legal dispute and thread it into a story about betrayal and exploitation—with Braun at the center.

WATCH MY FULL INTERVIEW WITH SCOOTER BRAUN BELOW, OR LISTEN TO IT HERE:

It’s a story reminiscent of The Little Mermaid: A young woman sells her voice for access to a world she idealizes but doesn’t totally understand—except in this version, she fights back, unwilling to let the private equity–funded powers profit from the music she put her heart into. The saga had an air of truthiness, even if it seemed a little pat.

Except: It seems that all the contracts that Swift signed were standard for the music industry, and that the label offered her the opportunity to buy her masters—and later warned her that a deal was forthcoming. What’s more, Swift’s dad was an investor in Big Machine Records, and netted around $15 million from the sale. Braun also offered Swift the chance to buy back her masters after he acquired the label, which he off-loaded for a profit in 2020, but she refused because it required her to sign an NDA, and because Braun would continue to profit off of them.

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India’s new book, Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, examines how algorithm-driven platforms push young users toward extremes in beauty, body im…

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On Tuesday, I wrote a piece about how, in the season of the show that’s currently airing, Sweeney’s character, Cassie, plays an aspiring OnlyFans star who is willing to do anything, pretty much, for money and attention. That includes donning a ridiculous baby costume (though more often she’s donning nothing at all), and fulfilling the requests of her thousands of male followers: for her to humiliate them, eat hot dogs in front of a camera for them, or simply whisper their name.

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