Welcome back to The Weekend Press—where this week we ask pressing questions like: Should Fox News really be turning the Bible into a podcast? And should tech bros be turning dead people into AI avatars? Could lonely young men benefit from more body positivity—and could Ariana Grande benefit from less? But before we get to all that . . .
Dasha Nekrasova was supposed to be in Utah this week, filming a psychological thriller. But last Friday, her contract was abruptly rescinded, her talent agency dropped her, and someone told her to hire crisis PR. So when Suzy Weiss asked the Succession actress if she wanted to have Two Drinks in Manhattan, Dasha said sure, she was free.
How come her acting career blew up in her face? Because Dasha is also a podcaster—she co-hosts the infamously provocative show Red Scare—and recently she had the white-nationalist antisemite Nick Fuentes on as a guest.
And how does she defend her decision to platform a man who’s described Adolf Hitler as “awesome”? Does she think her career is doomed? Why does she “kind of hate” Elon Musk? And why, when the nation voted for Donald Trump in 2016, did she drunkenly think, I was elected to be born in this age?
She answered all these questions, and many more, while drinking beer in the bar where she recently held her wedding reception:
"The Chair Company" is the most relatable comedy on television right now. It’s about the see-red rage you feel when, say, IKEA puts you on hold for the sixteenth time, even though it’s their fault the flat-pack wardrobe arrived without a crucial part. Do not miss River Page’s hilarious review of it in Second Thought—or his reaction to the news that Brian Cox will be voicing God in Fox News’s retelling of the Bible.
It’s seductive, right? The promise, peddled by a new AI company, that soon you can talk to your late grandma again, or ask the advice of a friend who died too young. But in this beautiful essay, Peter Savodnik insists that we can’t let tech bros “solve” grief—without it, we’ll be worse humans.
Online, young straight men seem increasingly convinced that unless they look like Brad Pitt, they’ll never marry or have sex. To this, Will Rahn says: “That is not how the world works. That is not how women work. That’s not how mating works.”
“When some significant event occurs and I don’t know what to make of it, I find myself checking a group text I’m on with two close friends,” writes Elliot Ackerman. He never agrees with these guys, mind you; he just knows you’ve got to hear every side of the debate before you draw any conclusions.
We published a few other pieces this week that might make you see the culture differently . . .
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How should you spend your holiday week? We asked The Free Press’s Joe Nocera . . .
📚 Read . . . Is it really possible to write a fascinating history of the wind? It is if you’re Simon Winchester, author of popular histories of everything from modern geology to the Oxford English Dictionary to the California earthquake of 1906. The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind came out earlier this week, and it’s a “banger,” as my young Free Press colleagues like to say. Wind, he writes, is “the unseen force that bent grasses, swayed branches, chilled the face, toppled structures, sometimes made it impossible to walk—how to explain this invisible, mysterious, and, in its power, often frightening entity?” Explain it he does in this deeply researched, and highly enjoyable, work.
📺 Watch . . . Wake Up Dead Man, the third film in the series of entertaining Knives Out mysteries, hits theaters on Wednesday for a short run before moving to Netflix on December 12. Written and directed by Rian Johnson, an avowed Agatha Christie fan, the movies have Christie-like plots (a dozen people in a house, one of whom is the killer), and a Christie-like detective in Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig), who has an ego to match her fabled hero Hercule Poirot. If, after watching the movie, you find yourself wanting a taste of the great lady herself, might I suggest Christie’s 1926 classic, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? It’s the book that set the standard for the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
🍳 Eat . . . Susan Stamberg’s cranberry relish. The beloved NPR mainstay died last month at the age of 87. As just about everyone who has ever listened to NPR knows, every Thanksgiving, for decades, Stamberg shared her family’s “distinctive cranberry relish made with horseradish,” as the New York Times put it in its obituary of her. Over the years, her reading of the recipe became a ritual, and with the holiday right around the corner, I thought I would share it with Free Press readers. Here you go!
🎵 Listen . . . Haunted Heart, a remastered collection of jazz legend Bill Evans’s sublime Riverside recordings is available for streaming, as of yesterday. Recorded during the two years after Evans served as the pianist on the most famous jazz album ever, Kind of Blue (with Miles Davis and John Coltrane), they still dazzle more than half a century later.
🏈 Catch . . . the game! Is there a tradition more venerated on Thanksgiving Day than football? Well, other than turkey for dinner? Of the three games on TV this Thanksgiving, I recommend the battle between the Green Bay Packers (6-3-1) and the Detroit Lions (6-4). Two good teams vying for supremacy in a very tough division. The game starts at 1 p.m. ET. Hold off on the feast till it’s over.
Last but not least, behold the gorgeous image we stumbled across last Thanksgiving, while wondering how to tastefully illustrate Larissa Phillips’s amazing piece about killing turkeys:
That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just send us a recommendation; we’re at Weekend@TheFP.com.
Body positivity is one of the most detached from reality views advocated by postmodern social justice theory other than the trans issue. Look, if you want to get to 400 pounds and think you are beautiful, have at it. I’m just not getting on that boat with you….live your life and I’ll live mine
I plead with all viewers to watch the interview below as it is so important for us all as a moral society hoping for peace.