Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss drinks with pro-pied-à-terre-tax socialite Julie Macklowe, whose politics have made her the skunk at Hamptons garden parties. Spencer Klavan remembers a fallen Irish folk hero. River Page on living in a secular sharia state. And more!
But first: Frannie Block meets the 25-year-old who’s saving local news.
My first job out of college was working the night shift as a cops and crime reporter at The Des Moines Register. I’d sit at my desk listening intently to the police scanner, and hop in my car as soon as I heard a whiff of action and drive straight to the scene. I loved this paper and still do—the people I worked with are among the most dedicated, smart, and kind colleagues someone could ask for.
But while I was there, I knew I was watching a business model failing in real time. In six months, I had survived two rounds of layoffs, watched the boss who hired me take a voluntary buyout to save our jobs, and found out I was getting furloughed for a week over Christmas. My new editor managed more than a dozen writers on his own after the shrinkage.
With fewer and fewer reporters, our owners, Gannett—the largest newspaper chain in the country—told us to shift our focus from long, in-depth investigations to shorter stories with catchier headlines to try to boost our online presence. At weekly staff meetings, we’d brace ourselves for the latest signs of a business in free fall.
By the time I left, I’d seen a Pulitzer Prize–winning paper once lauded for its biting political coverage depleted into a shell of its former self.
The state of local media in America today brings me great sadness, but when I heard about Evan Newton in Monticello, Georgia, I felt a twinge of hope.
Newton is 25 years old, and two weeks ago, he emptied his savings to purchase his local newspaper from its longtime owner to save it from being bought by a conglomerate or shutting down altogether. Young and ambitious, Newton told me he couldn’t just “sit on the sidelines” and watch the paper he grew up reading wither away. So I hopped in the car again and drove to the office he’s now running—to meet someone brave enough to identify a problem in his community and take a risk to fix it.
“I’ve never owned a business,” said Newton cheerfully, who admitted he barely graduated from college. And yet, he’s got a plan. . . —Frannie Block
Not long ago, Julie Macklowe, a thrice-Trump-voting multimillionaire, shocked the other socialites of Manhattan by supporting Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax. It’s gotten her “dirty looks at parties in the Hamptons,” she told Suzy Weiss. Over cocktails made from Macklowe’s own line of single malt whiskey, they talked about why she refuses to become a Real Housewife, whether she’d run for office, and why people hate the rich. Then, a few days after they met, Macklowe found out she’s wrongfully expected to pay the tax she went out on a limb to support. “I don’t even own a pied-à-terre,” she says, exasperated.
What is it that makes live music irreplaceable? Glen Hansard, the Irish folk rock legend—best known for his busker-turned-movie-star turn in the 2007 film “Once”—tragically died this week at age 56 in a motorcycle crash. In this week’s Things Worth Remembering, Spencer Klavan reflects on the movie—which serves as a reminder that music is best experienced in person, in a crowd, in a moment of time that can never be replicated. “It’s maybe the oldest human thrill,” he writes, “that feeling when the music eddies in the air and everyone is caught on its draft, swaying with its motion.”
Second Thought
The journalist Amy Chozick specializes in women who spike the blood pressure of the body politic. Hillary Clinton. Lauren Sánchez Bezos. The Kardashian sisters. She’s profiled them all—and in this week’s episode of Second Thought, she talks about their messy realities with Suzy Weiss. They also chat about Amy’s brand-new book, With Friends Like You—which is about what happens when a girlboss becomes a mom.
“Our generation of women was raised on, ‘You can do whatever a guy does,’ ” Amy says, “I don’t think men were raised to be like, ‘You can do whatever a woman does. You can load the dishwasher and cook every night and do the grocery shopping.’ ”
Watch their conversation below, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And to read Suzy’s reflections on their chat, don’t miss her newsletter!
Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!
A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet a student of Brazilian Zouk dancing; a Philly sports fanatic; or a shih tzu mom “partial to a dirty martini with a rare steak.” 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, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to Cupid@TheFP.com.
This week, Kat Rosenfield wrote about Sophie Cunningham—the college basketballer who said “young girls in sport shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” and didn’t get canceled. Arthur Brooks reflected on the tragedy of looksmaxxing. And River Page complained that the internet forces us to live in a secular sharia state. . .
How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our reporter River Page for his recommendations…
📺 Watch… The New World. Although hated by many audiences and critics upon its release, Terrence Malick’s 2005 take on the Pocahontas story is perhaps the greatest movie about America ever made. Malick doesn’t whitewash conflict between the settlers and natives, but he doesn’t spend a great deal of time moralizing about it either. His main interest is the pure strangeness and curiosity of two completely different societies with no previous knowledge of each other meeting for the first time—a phenomenon nobody in the globalized world will ever truly experience again.
📚Read… A Feast of Snakes, by Harry Crews. It’s one of the few novels that documents the transition from the old South to the new. Set in the small town of Mystic, Georgia, it follows Joe Lon Mackey—a former football star turned alcoholic wifebeater—as he prepares for the town’s annual Rattlesnake Roundup, a festival wherein locals hunt, kill, and eat the town’s snake population. This book has everything: castration, crazy agoraphobic women, adultery, dogfighting, and, of course, murder. And it’s a quick read.
💰Buy… Things on eBay. Almost nothing is made well anymore—from particleboard furniture, to cheap clothes, to AI-slop wall art—but thankfully, whatever it is you’re looking for, no matter how niche, there is a boomer in Wisconsin with a hoarding problem who has a version of it that’s stood the test of time in their garage, and who now wants to sell. Half the decor in my house and a decent portion of my clothes have come from these heroes—and none of it has immediately broken or fallen apart in the way that Amazon trash will. So the next time you want to redecorate, or want to find a vintage wool sweater for $15 (like I did last winter), log on and enjoy the journey. (Author’s note: Ebay isn’t paying me to say any of this, but it should!)
Last but not least: When we asked our creative director Clara Grusq for the most beautiful thing she’d seen this week, she told us that she just rewatched the late ’90s classic, The Talented Mr. Ripley—and she couldn’t get enough of this sun-soaked Mediterranean shot.
That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.
