Welcome back to the Weekend Press! This week, Tanner Nau drinks with America’s first “chief MAHA officer.” Suzy Weiss weighs in on the woman who dumped a friend for going on Wegovy. Judea Pearl remembers living through Israel’s earliest days. And more!
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.
The burger joint Steak ’n Shake hired American fast food’s first “chief MAHA officer” this week. For the last year, Michael Boes has been a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, but now his job is to make junk food healthy again. “We’re going back to what fast food used to be in America,” he said when he sat down with Tanner Nau on Wednesday. Drinking Liquid Death, he explained how a “South Park” episode inspired the flipping of the food pyramid, and swore ice cream is going to become a “superfood.”
“My instinct when I find out that a friend is on a certain drug, unless the drug is heroin, is to have no reaction whatsoever,” writes Suzy Weiss. “That’s not the case for Sophia Ortega, who penned an essay for ‘New York’ magazine on how, upon finding out that her friend was using Wegovy, she promptly cut the friend out of her life.” In her column, Suzy introduces the latest episode of her podcast, in which she speaks to Claudia Oshry—co-host of “The Toast”—about their shared love of GLP-1s, Ortega’s absurd judginess, and the weirdness of internet fame.
When President Donald Trump first ran for office, his campaign revolved around one promise: “America First.” Now, that slogan has taken over our culture and become a crucial bone of contention within the GOP, but long before the country heard it, there was another phrase that defined our role on the world’s stage: “city on a hill.” In today’s Things Worth Remembering, Lydia Dugdale revisits the 400-year-old sermon that established an ethical vision of American exceptionalism.
Judea Pearl is not a Holocaust survivor. Born in Mandatory Palestine in 1936, he is a “New Jew,” a man who grew up as the State of Israel was born and took shape. “New children began arriving in our classrooms—refugees from Europe,” he writes. “And we, the ‘New Jews,’ were cruel to them, because they were not like us.” Only later did he come to understand what those children had endured, and what it would take to create and preserve the world’s only Jewish state. Don’t miss his remarkable life story.
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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.
Apart from Jeb Rubenfeld's softcore take on the outrageous SPLC horror, can I please see another more realistic view of this? To say that just because this nationally renowned bastion of "anti-racism" paid actual hoary KKK racists to do their thing so the MSM could have ammunition to take down a president doesn't mean what they did was -- illegal? What?? It's world-shaking! What on earth is this lawyer thinking?? BESIDES the fact that is, in fact, ILLEGAL?! Unbelievable...
That's not the best shot from Blue Velvet. The best is the one of Rossellini's face filling the screen upside down smiling with her chipped front tooth and the dark blue crescents of her eye shadow below the whites of her eyes and below the bright red of her lips. One of the best ever..