Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, the trucker Gord Magill thinks his beloved industry is screwed. And paperback books are dead! Suzy Weiss watched a movie, about a woman who planned a school shooting, with her friend who survived the real thing. And Hadley Freeman wonders whether Kanye West deserved a “Nazi ban.” And much more!
But first: the man who went to Michael Jackson’s ranch—and stumbled into an afternoon with Jeffrey Epstein.
The release of the Epstein files forced a lot of people to reflect on their interactions—however innocent—with the man at the center of them. One such person was a literary agent named David Vigliano, who met Jeffrey Epstein once, in bizarre circumstances, and kept very detailed notes. Today, he shares them in an exclusive essay for The Free Press.
In the summer of 2002, Vigliano went to Neverland Ranch—Michael Jackson’s sprawling estate in the Santa Ynez Valley—to discuss the possibility of a Jackson autobiography. The pop star never showed. Instead, Vigliano found himself seated across from Epstein, who had arrived with a harem of college-age women. “In my line of work, I’ve met many extremely wealthy men with girlfriends half their age. None of them had nine,” he writes today. “I guess he just likes to surround himself with beautiful young women, I thought, in all my cluelessness.”
Years later, after Epstein was convicted of pedophilia, and Jackson was accused of the same thing, Vigliano found himself “struck by how easily I was seduced” by the mystique around these two men. His epiphany came after he read Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl; he had nothing to do with its publication but, he writes, it “made me think about whose stories get to be told, and the role I play in their telling.”
In America, the most common occupation for young men without a college degree is trucking. But according to Gord Magill, a lifelong trucker, “the industry is being fucked by a number of forces.” He’s just published a book about those forces—called “End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers”—so River Page drove up to a dive bar in Ithaca, New York, to chat with him about shrinking wages, exploited immigrants, mass surveillance, and the threat of automation. “I want to be a trucker. I love it,” said Magill. “What I don’t love is spreadsheet-brained human resource puritans treating me like a guy that just walked in off the street.”
The pocket paperback—which cost 25 cents in 1939 and has never been more than a few dollars since—is being discontinued. The margins are just too thin. “When I was growing up in 1990s America, these books were everywhere,” writes Andrew Cusack. “From the same spinner rack, the white-collar worker heading to the suburbs could pick up his Tom Clancy, the young autodidact his Alexandre Dumas.” His ode to the format is a reminder that technological innovation doesn’t always make things more convenient.
Kanye West is quite possibly the world’s greatest rapper. But for the past few years, the artist has put out a song called “Heil Hitler,” promised to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” and released what Hadley Freeman can only describe as “swastika merch.” Now, having apologized and blamed all this on mental instability, he’s on a comeback tour. But this week, the UK banned him. Freeman is a Jew living in London who’s horrified at the rise of antisemitism in Britain, but she’s also a Kanye fan, and someone who’s spent a lot of time around severely mentally unwell people. And on balance, she thinks the ban is wrong.
It was never Solveig Gold’s plan to have a child before 30—no other woman in her family had. But at 27, with a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton and a New York Times profile to her name, she got pregnant, and everything changed. “I didn’t have to slow down,” she writes, “but as soon as I started caring for [my daughter], I simply lost interest in most everything else.” In this week’s Things Worth Remembering, she reflects on the children’s book “The Country Bunny” and the myth it dispels: that mothers will “forever lose themselves and their careers if they take too much time away from the workforce.”
Imagine this: You’re the young, handsome head curator at the Cambridge Art Museum, rapidly approaching a wedding to a gorgeous, funny woman whom you adore. And then, in the middle of a lighthearted game, you find out her darkest secret: Fifteen years ago, she planned a school shooting. That’s the premise of “The Drama,” a new movie starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya that masquerades as a rom-com but dives straight into a very dark thought experiment. Online, it’s stirred a drama of its own, with some school shooting survivors publicly slamming it—but when Suzy Weiss took her friend, who lived through a school shooting himself, to the film, he told her he loved it—and that the true premise “had nothing to do with school shootings.”
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We’ve published a lot of pieces this week that you’ll want to read, if you haven’t already—including Frannie Block’s profile of the triumphant head of NASA; a biting Coleman Hughes’s review of a new book by America’s most famous anti-racist; and a fascinating set of stories about how AI is changing everything from cancer treatment to your favorite song:
How should you spend your weekend? We asked our senior editor Peter Savodnik for his recommendations. . .
🥃Drink. . . a classic Negroni, in honor of the arrival of spring, preferably at Florentín, a rooftop bar in downtown Los Angeles—one of the few outstanding outposts of civilization in this town.
🎵Listen. . . to Alisa Weilerstein perform Shostakovich’s No. 2 concerto for cello, with Ryan Bancroft conducting. It’s happening at Walt Disney Concert Hall, which (for the uninitiated) remains the country’s best music venue, architecturally and acoustically—and, helpfully, is just down the street from Florentín.
📺 Watch. . . A Separation, the powerful 2011 Iranian movie directed by Asghar Farhadi about patriarchy, dementia, the end of a marriage, and more. It’s a wonderful film, and, just as important, a reminder that the war over the future of this country is not only about nuclear missiles, oil, and geopolitics, but human beings trapped in a medieval theocracy.
📚Read. . . Badenheim 1939, by Israel’s greatest novelist: Aharon Appelfeld. The novel is about a colorful band of Jews in a resort town in Austria shortly before they’re all herded off to concentration camps, and it’s a brilliant exploration of human beings’ ability to delude themselves. It feels all too timely, alas.
Last but not least, a beautiful thing to feast your eyes on:
This month, four astronauts traveled to the moon and back aboard the Integrity. As someone who has loved science fiction for as long as she can remember, our art director, Clara Grusq, couldn’t help but think of the 1968 Planet of the Apes, a Cold War–era film she thinks is often overlooked, yet arguably one of the most enduring works of sci-fi storytelling. We won’t give away the ending, but we will say: The final haunting image of the ruined Statue of Liberty, half-buried in sand, delivers one of the most iconic and devastating reveals in cinema history.
That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.
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Swalwell?