Welcome back to the Weekend Press! This week, the 103-year-old wellness guru Deborah Szekely spills her secrets. Suzy Weiss launches a podcast. Madeleine Kearns has two drinks with Catholic professor Luke Burgis, who refused to consult for Anthropic—and said, “I honestly can’t tell whether J.D. Vance is a true believer or not.” And more!
But first: What’s best for your child? And who gets to decide?
These are the simple questions behind some of the fieriest debates of our time—over vaccine schedules, free-range parenting, smartphones for kids. It’s a theme The Free Press keeps coming back to because the stakes feel enormous. And because everyone, it seems, has an opinion on what happens inside your home.
One of the places these debates play out most bitterly is the “momosphere,” where maternal influencers have turned ordinary parenting decisions—like where your baby sleeps, and how long you stay home after giving birth—into litmus tests for how much you love your child.
This is the battlefield where the war over breastfeeding is taking place; where moms declare that bottle-feeding mothers are selfish, and formula is poison.
Kara Kennedy says: That’s nonsense. During her first pregnancy, she concluded she didn’t want to breastfeed, at all—and talked openly about it. In doing so, she came across countless mothers who fed their babies using formula, but couldn’t bear to say so publicly. “You won’t believe the lengths I went to lie about it,” one told her.
So, knowing that moms online will shout at her, Kara has written for us today about why the decision to make parenting a little easier feels so radical—and why she doesn’t regret making it:
But it’s not just influencers who insist on telling you how to raise your kids. For Anna Keating, it was the police. Not long ago, two officers brought home her 7-year-old son; they’d picked him up while he was on the three-block walk to his grandma’s house, assuming he was lost.
Anna, who was born in the ’80s, grew up walking downtown and biking to school without adult supervision. She wants her kids to have the same independence. “Still, when the police brought my second grader home, I felt like a horrible mother,” she says. Read her story here:
“One of the hardest things about being a Catholic sometimes are other Catholics.” That’s what Professor Luke Burgis told Madeleine Kearns this week, while sipping Sancerre in Washington, D.C. Luke runs the Cluny Institute at The Catholic University of America, which aims to “invest in the human person” at a time when machines are taking over; last month, he declined an invitation from Anthropic to advise on how to make its AI more moral. Maddy and Luke spoke about the “weird” emails he got from the tech company and, of course, the ongoing war of words between the Vatican and the White House over the war in Iran. This week, the vice president told Fox News that Pope Leo XIV ought to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Luke said: “I honestly can’t tell whether J.D. Vance is a true believer or not.”
“As I approach my 104th birthday, I’m often asked about the secret to longevity,” writes Deborah Szekely. “My answer is there are no ‘secrets.’ ” In her gorgeous essay, she tells the story of her childhood in Tahiti and then in California, and how she became “the godmother of wellness”—by setting up the first-ever fitness resort in Mexico in 1940. What does she use on her skin? “Just soap and water.” How does she keep going? “I never worry about things I cannot control.” In her long, long life, Deborah has done everything, from running for Congress to receiving Mexico’s highest honor for noncitizens, the Order of the Aztec Eagle. Read her incredible story.
When Suzy Weiss first started writing her column, Second Thought, she was trying to make sense of our weirdly fragmented culture. A year later, having written about everything from “wealth porn” to the death of Ozzy Osbourne, and having had countless interesting conversations with readers about our weird zeitgeist, she’s decided to have some of those conversations on mic. So, this week she launched a podcast! In the first episode, Suzy returns to one of her favorite topics, YouTube—which might have been the force that fractured our culture in the first place—and interviews the man who pioneered the kinds of videos now watched by billions on the platform every day. His name is Casey Neistat, and he’s a legend.
Having grown up in the halcyon days of the 1990s, before the tragedy of 9/11 and before the dark side of the internet revealed itself, millennials are famously nostalgic. “We literally elevated missing the past to an art form,” writes Spencer Klavan. His generation is mocked for this, but millions of people across time and space have grown up to find that the future is more complicated than they thought it would be. In today’s Things Worth Remembering, he writes about a 12th-century Japanese poem that could be an anthem of millennial nostalgia.
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We’ve published a lot of other pieces this week worth catching up on, including . .
How should you spend your weekend? We asked our news editor Rick Brooks for his recommendations…
📚 Read . . . Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. When winter finally let go of New York City, and there were no more slush puddles to leap, I found myself thinking about walking—to the park, to Shenanigan’s Pub, to the Catholic church with the flimsy homilies and streaming sunlight. That’s when I remembered Gros’s book, opened it to a random page, and landed here: “Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found. To walk, you need to start with two legs. The rest is optional.”
🎵 Listen . . . to the playlist “The House That Built Me: Songs About Making and Going Home.” It was created by Natalie Weiner, whose Don’t Rock the Inbox online newsletter celebrates country music that hasn’t fallen to the corporate cookie-cutter, brocentric FM dial. These 30 songs—from Loretta Lynn’s “I Don’t Wanna Play House” to Leon Bridges’s “Coming Home” to Ashley McBryde’s “Light on in the Kitchen”—make me think of the little house where I grew up, the house party that my sister and I stupidly believed we had destroyed all evidence of, and letting myself in with a key every afternoon after school.
🍳 Cook . . . these baked white pepper chicken wings. I have made them so many times that my kids believe this is my own recipe, when in fact it belongs to Kaitlin Leung. You can do the scut work—of mixing the wings with white pepper, Sichuan pepper powder, and vegetable oil—while everyone is still asleep, let it sit in the fridge all day, and pop them in the oven when you get home. Seeing the bones pile up on my kids’ plate is a triumph.
As usual, we asked our art director, Clara Grusq: What beautiful thing has been on your mind this week? She replied: “There’s so much to do in New York, but sometimes I can’t help missing my hometown of Paris, where you could just wander into La Galerie Dior and feast your eyes on the creations of Christian Dior, who reimagined the feminine silhouette with a cinched waist, and lines so precise. His designs seem sculpted on rather than worn.”
That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.
I'm commenting here to say it's a cowardly choice to not allow commenting on Kara Kennedy's piece on breastfeeding. Free Press commenters are not internet trolls.
And things do happen. Before letting our eldest child ride her bike around town, we went out every night as a family on long bike rides to ensure she knew the rules. One time I was at the kitchen window cutting up a chicken for dinner and I saw her ride past, and I thought. "She isn't paying attention." Sure enough, minutes later I heard her friend coming screaming down the street that she'd been hit by a car. She was fine, but during the ride in the ambulance received quite a dressing down from me.