Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today: Kat Rosenfield dissects the downfall of a magazine that once used the phrase “non-prostate owners.” Suzy Weiss is blown away by Sydney Sweeney’s latest performance. Elliot Ackerman investigates one of life’s great mysteries: Why don’t men call each other to catch up? All that and much more! But first: teenage dreams and the Grateful Dead.
Their parents probably thought they’d joined a cult.
The teenagers who became Deadheads—that is, passionate fans of the Grateful Dead—were often from wealthy families. But, taking an implicit vow of poverty, they grew their hair long and made cross-country pilgrimages, begging for food as they went. This was the America of the 1980s, when God was dead and the ultimate goal of middle-class life was to drive a fast car and work in a bank. So why did a vast subculture of rich kids choose rags?
When our columnist Larissa Phillips heard, this week, that Donna Godchaux, who once sang with the Dead, had died, she was transported to her tween years, when she’d wake up in her home in suburban Connecticut to find it overrun with velvet-clad teenagers talking about the origin story of Buddhism and doing backflips on the front lawn. Larissa’s brother was a Deadhead; she wasn’t.
In fact, she forgot all about the Grateful Dead until she herself was the mother of a wayward teenage boy, who was struggling to find meaning in a world that had slowly, then suddenly, lost so many of its belief systems. Today, in one of her characteristically gorgeous personal essays, she writes about how she “began looking back wistfully to those days when a traveling revival tent of misfits roamed the country, holding out open arms for disaffected kids.”
Here at The Free Press, we’ve closely followed one of the most interesting trends of the moment: the ways in which young Americans are gravitating toward religion; and reading Larissa’s essay, you might see Deadheads as the ancestors not only of Swifties, but of the kids across the country who have turned away from the nihilism that defines their generation, and turned to God instead. — Freya Sanders
These days, teen dropouts don’t go to San Francisco to smoke weed; they go there to become CEOs. This week, three 22-year-olds in Silicon Valley became the youngest self-made billionaires in American history. How? By building an AI start-up, obviously. Teens are racing to Silicon Valley to cash in on the AI bubble before it bursts—and last week, Suzy Weiss headed to San Francisco to meet some of them. In today’s edition of “Second Thought,” she writes about the hacker houses that are the college dorms of our future tech overlords. She also reviews “Christy,” in which Sydney Sweeney crushes as America’s most famous female boxer: a character who is not at all hot.
“Teen Vogue” is dead. It’s the end of a long strange trip. Once the place to turn to if you were 14 and wanted to know how to French-kiss, the magazine morphed into the newspaper of the resistance during the first Donald Trump administration. It published viral articles about how the president was “gaslighting” America and why white women couldn’t use the word “Karen.” It relentlessly criticized Melania Trump’s wardrobe. “We’re a woke brand,” the millennial editor in chief claimed, in a glowing profile, a mere eight years ago; “our readers are woke, too.” But now, Trump is back in the White House, the First Lady still looks great, the word “woke” is officially cringey, and—as of this week—“Teen Vogue” has been mothballed. According to Kat Rosenfield, this is a sign that millennials have well and truly lost the culture. You won’t want to miss her latest piece.
“I don’t talk on the phone with one of my closest friends,” writes Elliot Ackerman. “For more than 20 years, our friendship has existed mostly within the parameters of a single activity: We run together for an hour or more early in the morning.” This, Elliot writes in the latest—delightful—edition of “A Man Should Know,” is how men stay friends. You do something difficult, side by side. Fishing, surfing, golf: Whatever it is, do it consistently, even when you’re exhausted or hungover or growing old. That’s how you keep a good friend.
“They say you should never meet your heroes because you’re bound to be disappointed,” writes Joe Nocera. “But that’s not always true.” He recently knocked on the elegant door of the greatest magazine writer alive, 93-year-old Gay Talese—and found himself wishing he could stay for dinner. In the ’70s and ’80s, Talese didn’t just write stories, he immersed himself in them. While researching a book about the sexual revolution, for instance, he spent six months at the Sandstone Retreat, a resort for swingers where clothing was optional. “I got made fun of during that period,” Talese told Joe. “People said he’s just getting laid. And I was getting laid, but I always thought of myself as a journalist, an observer.”
The AI for problem solvers
Claude is built for people who enjoy wrestling with hard questions—who see complexity as an invitation. Whether you’re researching a story, stress-testing an argument, or exploring new ideas, Claude works with you to go deeper.
Anthropic built Claude on a simple principle: AI should be a force for human progress. That means creating an AI system that’s straightforward to use—a partner to help you think through complexity rather than racing past it. No shortcuts, just better thinking.
With every update, Claude gets smarter, more useful, and more balanced. Try Claude for free and see why the world’s best problem solvers choose Claude.
This week we’ve published pieces on a couple of new books and heard from our favorite prophet, Paul Kingsnorth. Read all about it . .
How should you spend the rest of this weekend? We asked our reporter Maya Sulkin how to unwind after the mayoral election she’s helped to cover. . .
📚 Read . . . The Bonfire of the Vanities. As one of the younger people in our newsroom, I hear a lot about the golden age of magazines, so I wanted to see what it was all about. Tom Wolfe’s novel was first published in installments, in Rolling Stone, and my goal was to underline all the masterful sentences I was jealous of, in the hope of writing better ones myself. But as it turns out, I finished the novel at the perfect time: the night before Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. In Wolfe’s fictional version of ’80s New York, you can see the city of today. There are political candidates who say the right things to win votes, press-obsessed district attorneys, and, of course, drunk journalists. Some things never change.
🍳 Eat . . . I’m not a cook. Following a recipe feels like building an IKEA dresser for me: I have none of the tools, I never know which step I’m on, and it’s just a matter of time before things fall apart. Instead, I have mastered something else: my Thai food order. The issue is that when you order Thai food, you want a few bites of multiple things. So I’ve switched from delivery to pickup, put in some real face time, and fostered a fun rapport with the hostess, who has finally agreed to give me a half order of pad see ew and a half order of green curry. Dinner (for one) is served. If you’re in New York City, pay your respects to Thai Villa on East 19th.
🎨Visit . . . To escape it all, a couple other Free Pressers and I hopped in the car and drove upstate to Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre sculpture garden in the Hudson Valley. We saw a Roy Lichtenstein mermaid. We rolled down the Wavefield Conservation. I marveled at concrete fixtures sitting atop sweeping vistas of perfectly groomed grass. They sell hot apple cider. It is a perfect fall day. Some of their current exhibitions end on November 10; go if you can!
That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just tell us what you’d have done with a billion dollars when you were 22; we’re at Weekend@TheFP.com.
Please don't use animated GIFs (or whatever they are). They are not becoming of a serious media outlet and annoying to the extent that some of us will not read further.
I love these great articles from authors that I wasn't aware of until today.
It's good to make coffee and read The Free Press.