Welcome back to The Weekend Press! It’s Saturday, and you deserve a break from the rough and tumble of the week. Here’s where we keep everything deep, delightful, or distracting. Today, that includes Chris Christie’s review of the new Springsteen biopic; Nellie Bowles on the “candy salmon” she makes the kids; Suzy Weiss on the preppers who think hoarding canned goods gave their movement a bad name; and Two Drinks with Erin Foster, who wrote the Netflix hit everyone’s talking about. But first, a moral dilemma for you:
When your favorite writer dies, they will leave behind all kinds of literary litter: half-finished novels, rough drafts of acclaimed work, gorily intimate diaries. If all that happened to fall into your lap, what would you do with it? Burn after reading? Before? Or would you want to share it with the whole world?
The Harper Lee estate has decided: Publish and be damned. On Tuesday, it posthumously released some of the author’s “previously unseen stories and essays”—even though the To Kill a Mockingbird author was famously deliberate about what she put into the world. Even though the last time her rough work was published, in 2015, it did untold damage to her legacy. Even though, reviewers agree, none of the work in The Land of Sweet Forever is any good.
“I myself would rather be torn to pieces by a pack of feral cats than allow people to lay eyes on the deformed abomination that is an early draft of one of my novels,” writes Kat Rosenfield, in today’s Big Read. But as a reader, she understands what it’s like to love an author so much you want everything from them. And to adore the world they’ve built so much that you long for another way into it. In her essay, she asks what’s more important: the dignity of a storyteller—or the demands of their fans? —Freya Sanders
When Erin Foster converted to Judaism in 2019, having fallen in love with a devoutly Jewish man, a rabbi asked her, “Are you ready to be hated?” A few years later, Foster wrote a Netflix show based on her experiences—and everybody loved it. Nobody Wants This is a perfect rom-com, in which an agnostic sex podcaster meets-cute with a hot rabbi in LA, and soon finds herself attending her first bat mitzvah. On Thursday, it returned for a second season, so we sent Suzy Weiss to have Two Drinks with Foster—who talked about refusing to hire people in their twenties, why “we never say Israel or Palestine in the show,” and whether she’s a girlboss. “I’m really just trying to be a stay-at-home mom,” she said, “but nobody will let me do it.”
There’s a new generation of preppers in town—and they just want you to be able to climb the stairs without getting out of breath. “The body is the one piece of real estate we truly own. Everything else is pretty much owned by the banks,” said Noah Neiman, founder of a new exercise class that is all about training you for the apocalypse—or the streets of New York City, at least. It’s called The Pack, and Suzy went along this week. In the latest edition of Second Thought, she writes about the survivalists who think stockpiling condiments is kind of dumb, because it’s push-ups, not peanut butter, that will save you. She also reviews Bugonia, the film Emma Stone shaved her head for (spoiler: Suzy hated it) and reacts to Grimes’s new face tattoo.
This week, we’ve published plenty of other pieces you can lose yourself in this week, including . . .
How should you spend the rest of this weekend? We asked the Queen of TGIF, Nellie Bowles . . .
📚 Read . . . I just finished a beautiful memoir about pre-World War II Austria, The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig (published in 1942 and translated by Anthea Bell in 2013). He writes about his childhood under the emperor; about the way in which everyone felt such security, such financial and social stability, that it resulted in an adoration of age and wisdom. Zweig leads the reader through meetings with Theodor Herzl, then just an editor, and Rainer Maria Rilke, his gentle friend. He describes living through World War I and the betrayal and shock that was to him and his friends, and then, how an explosion of youthful art and culture coincided with the shattering of the old ways, and the rise of Nazism. It’s really a good book and surprisingly modern in tone, likely thanks to Bell’s translation.
📺 Watch . . . Splitsville! It’s a new rom-com about a couple who opens their marriage and the chaos that ensues. Very funny and off-kilter.
🍳 Cook . . . I’ve been making a soy sauce-butter-brown sugar salmon that’s a real hit with the kids, mostly because it’s technically candy salmon. You mix soy sauce, butter, brown sugar, a little garlic, and lemon in a pan till it melts. You cool it down. You put it on the salmon in a Pyrex and let that all sit for 20 minutes. Then you cover the Pyrex with tinfoil and cook it for 12 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit (open it and add a broil if you’re feeling fancy). Perfect fall salmon. Gotta say, I’ve been trying different salmon types, and Faroe Islands is by far my favorite. Banger salmon. 10/10.
🌀 Listen . . . I don’t believe in audio. I need my ears to myself. I reject podcasts and music alike. But if I were to listen to something, it would be Spiral, our fabulous new true-crime pod—about a mysterious murder that happened in Detroit a couple of years back.
Last but not least, a beautiful thing to feast your eyes on: The crown that was stolen from the Louvre this past Sunday, then found lying on the street outside the museum. Imagine coming across this on your morning baguette run:
That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just send us a picture of your favorite crown; we’re at Weekend@TheFP.com.
Pains this gal in Alaska that you like farmed salmon from the Faroes.
Sigh.
Zombieland (2009) Rule # 1 Cardio
"When the virus struck, for obvious reasons, the first one to go were the fatties".