Welcome back to the Second Thought newsletter. This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about Heidi Montag, the First Lady LA deserves.
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 States, and yet there she is, mournfully decorating Christmas trees and picking out chargers for state dinners when she should be doing damage at a galleria. Rama Duwaji, Zohran Mamdani’s bride, was reportedly unenthusiastic about leaving Astoria for Gracie Mansion. “It’ll be fine. I’ll be down the street from the Guggenheim and the Met,” she told New York magazine.
But on the West Coast, there are so very many first ladies-in-waiting. There, any woman worth her salt is always ready for a close-up, and has a closet full of costumes to play any part. And for the second time, the former reality star Heidi Montag might just be getting the call that she’s been cast as herself.
That’s because she’s married to Spencer Pratt—who, following in the footsteps of both New York’s mayor and the president, is trying to post his way into office. This week, LA had its mayoral primary. The votes still have not been fully counted, but reports have Pratt in second place, with about 29 percent of the vote—which would mean he’s headed for a runoff against incumbent Karen Bass come fall. If he wins, Montag will become the First Lady of the city. But really, isn’t she that already?
Montag and Pratt—though viewers of The Hills will always remember them as “Speidi”—met on a fateful night in 2006 at a club called Privilege in West Hollywood. Their dramatic relationship—Pratt was the show’s villain, Montag the small-town transplant who promptly got implants—was the load-bearing wall of the reality series, which followed a clique of twentysomethings as they got their footing as adults in LA. “I want to be the fun party-PR-girl-in-LA type of thing,” Montag announced on her first appearance on the show, to a prune-lipped college administrator. Later, she’d call her friend Lauren Conrad, who was working a party, to deliver LA’s unofficial motto: “We’re outside. Can you get us in?”
The Hills ended in 2010, Privilege shuttered years before that, and yet against all odds, Speidi stood strong. They’ve been married for 17 years and have two sons named Gunner and Ryker, because of course. Though Montag did not go quietly into the California mom life. Like any good LA reality starlet, she parlayed her celebrity into other reality shows about being a celebrity, like I’m a Celebrity . . .Get Me Out of Here! and Celebrity Big Brother. She started putting out pop music, too. Her newest album, Heidiwood, follows the 2010 release of Superficial, which includes the head-scratching lyric “I wear diamonds for breakfast.” Her Instagram is shellacked with pictures of herself in full glam, edited to poreless perfection, in a bikini walking a German shepherd with palm trees in the background—Caption: “🚨🚨Neighborhood watch🚨 🚨”—and doing an ad for McDonald’s in a gold lamé tube top and matching Daisy Dukes. In other words, she’s already representing the essence of LA.
Besides, she has decades of experience standing by her man. Even Hillary Clinton can’t say she was loyal when her husband spread a rumor that her best friend had a sex tape—which Pratt did, about Lauren Conrad. The affection appears to be mutual: Pratt is often seen campaigning in T-shirts with his wife’s face plastered across it, and told Fox News last week, “Thankfully, I married an angel who is very connected with Jesus and has brought me to the light.”
On Tuesday, Speidi arrived at a Mexican restaurant for an election watch party; she wore a slutty rendition of a Jackie O skirt suit—bright white, with satin 5-inch pumps and a micro miniskirt and full glam. Caption? “Ex Machina,” the title of her latest bubblegum pop single. Like it or not, she was born for this.
Joanna Explains It All
Joanna Stern really wanted her laundry robot to work. “I’m not very good at folding the laundry,” said the woman who is the most readable and funny consumer tech columnist around, if not a domestic goddess. “My wife complains constantly that I’m putting glasses into the dishwasher wrong,” she told me, on the latest episode of Second Thought.
We’re constantly told something big is coming when it comes to artificial intelligence injecting itself not only into our screens, but our lives in the physical world. But: When exactly? And how? Will it be that we each have home robots like Rosey on The Jetsons? A daily pill tailored to each of us to stave off diseases that a superintelligent doctor-bot screened us for? Or should we simply just expect a gusher of AI ads and slop to glut our feeds?
That’s where Joanna comes in. For a year, she invited AI into every corner of her life. She listened to AI-generated music and took self-driving cars. Alas, for all the big talk of menial labor, Joanna reports that the laundry robot was a bust. “It can only fold T-shirts right now,” she said. “And if you’re only wearing T-shirts, you have a pretty big problem.”
But though she gave that bot a failing grade, she told me she’d be all in on AI-assisted medicine. In other words: AI will revolutionize some aspects of our life, and especially the industries that rely heavily on technology and machinery—like healthcare, and car manufacturing and driving—but not all of them. Poetry, film, and music? Better to leave those to the flesh and blood pros. You can read all about Joanna’s great big experiment here, or listen to her on Second Thought. Or watch our conversation—including Dan Ahdoot’s stylings on the culture news of the week—below.
Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About:
The new thriller Backrooms released last weekend, earning $81.5 million domestically—eight times what it cost to make. The twist? The movie was made by a 20-year-old director, who adapted it from his viral YouTube series. Read Spencer Klavan’s piece in The Free Press about why internet kids are taking over the movies—and how they just might save Hollywood from itself.
Speaking of Hollywood: This week marked the season finale of Euphoria and, likely, the end of the series. Across three seasons, director Sam Levinson chronicled the messy, drug-addled, and often tragic lives of the teens of East Highland. Adam Lehrer profiled the man behind the show, and went deep into the psyche and politics of the “god of Euphoria.”
This week, Hoan Ton-That of Clearview AI argued that actually, AI won’t be taking all the jobs: He writes that he’s addicted to Claude Code, having the time of his life—and that this tech will both empower and employ software engineers like never before, to build more and build bigger. Read his piece for a weekend white pill before you dive back into AI Armageddon talk on Monday.
They say that New Yorkers never get along—that it may well be the rudest city in the world. Except, that is, when the Knicks manage to get a small orange ball to go through a hoop more times than their opponent. On Wednesday night, the Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs in Game 1 of the NBA Finals and all was right on the isle of Manhattan. Now, Mayor Mamdani is signing executive orders to extend kids’ bedtimes, and President Donald Trump is planning to come back to New York, where both leaders will cheer on their hometown team. If the Knicks win their next two, expect a new Middle East peace deal by Game 4, inked over a hot dog and $30 beer.
Like . . . who cares, really?