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Welcome back to The Weekend Press! It’s Saturday, and you deserve a break from the rough and tumble of the week. Today: Infamous Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli tells Suzy Weiss he wishes he could make drugs again. Kat Rosenfield reviews Lily Allen’s marvelously messy album about her open marriage (and the divorce that followed.) Will Rahn makes the straight-male case for Pilates. And more!
But first: Bring back the gentlemen.
Sometimes you read an article that stays with you—not because it contains some eye-opening detail about what’s going on in the world, or because it advances an argument you find unutterably bad, but because it makes you think about how you live your life on a day-to-day basis. How you move about the city you live in. How easily you can turn a faucet and get water to drink. Maybe even how you get dressed in the morning.
Earlier this year, Elliot Ackerman wrote a Free Press piece entitled “How to Dress Like a Gentleman—and Why.” In it, he explained why taking care of your appearance matters. A lot of powerful men, he says, have let themselves go. Tech titans in baggy T-shirts. Politicians in shorts. Streamers who appear basically exclusively in hoodies. “Some men take pride in dressing poorly. Maybe they think they’re too cool to care,” he wrote. “They may have the impression that it’s vain or prissy to dress well.” After all, we live in an age where there are a lot of hang-ups about masculinity.
But, Elliot wrote: “There is nothing emasculating about being deliberate with your appearance, and that, in fact, to appear otherwise is unmasculine.”
I do not have any hang-ups about masculinity (maybe because I am not a man), but for some reason Elliot’s words lived rent-free in my mind. They came back to me when I—a work-from-home gremlin—reached for my sweatpants in the morning. I think it’s because I’ve noticed that, even as people obsess more and more about their online image, we’ve started caring less and less about how we present ourselves in real life.
But Elliot explained, refreshingly, why it’s worth being deliberate about it. After reading his piece, I stopped wearing sweatpants every day, invited him for lunch, and asked: “Will you write an entire series about how to be a gentleman?”
He said yes, but emphasized that the why was more important to him than the how. He’s not interested in being Miss Manners for men, in just telling dudes what to do; he just wants us each to think carefully about how we move through the world.
His series is called A Man Should Know and—drumroll—it starts today! With, appropriately, a column about introducing oneself like a gentleman—“a skill taught to me,” Elliot describes, “by Gunnery Sergeant Robert S. Ressler, a veteran Marine drill instructor.” The series will drop every Friday, for the rest of the year—look out for it in The Weekend Press! And without further ado, get stuck in. —Freya Sanders
Speaking of nontoxic masculinity, this week Mr. Will Rahn finally caved to demands that he write the next installment of The Straight-Male Case—an intermittent series in which he samples a cultural phenomenon usually considered feminine. In this instance: Pilates, which is associated with “affluent women who wish to tone the arms with which they hoist glasses of white wine,” as he writes. But Will thinks Pilates has something to offer men—and was firmly encouraged by his editor to prove it. “That is how I, 220 pounds of American flesh, found myself twisting and straining in a Manhattan gym one recent afternoon,” he writes, “tearing apart my trick knee on a spring-powered device known as The Reformer.”
Martin Shkreli was called “the most hated man in America” 10 years ago—because his company had changed the price of a lifesaving drug from $13.50 per pill to $750. Since then, he’s been to prison, fallen in love, and started livestreaming to hundreds of thousands of people. Recently, he met Suzy Weiss in Manhattan, and answered his critics. “You’re mad I raised the price of a drug?” he said. “The firms set the price, whether you love it or hate it, that’s it.” He wishes he could make drugs again, thinks jail “sucks,” has some relationship advice to offer, and told Suzy: “I don’t want people to hate me.”
Does open marriage ever end well? Is Dr. Frankenstein just a deadbeat dad? Are your neighbors’ Halloween decorations too scary? Kat Rosenfield asks all these questions and more, in the latest edition of Second Thought—where she reviews both the weirdly sexy new Frankenstein film (Kat says: See it in theaters while you can) and Lily Allen’s horrifying new divorce album (Kat says: Taylor Swift had better watch out, because she’s no longer the queen of the breakup song).
We published a few other pieces this week that might make you see the culture differently. . .
How should you spend the rest of this weekend? We asked senior editor Peter Savodnik, who knows a thing or two about the best things in life. . .
🍸 Mix. . . a Bronx cocktail, in honor of New York City’s looming descent into socialism. It’s basically gin, vermouth, and orange juice. I’m fond of the Savoy Cocktail Book recipe, but this one is passable. One note: I recommend freshly squeezed orange juice, if you can swing it.
🎵 Listen. . . to the score from John Adams’ Nixon in China. You can watch the opera as well, on YouTube, but it’s the music that really counts—in particular, “Landing of the Spirit of ’76”—it is magnificent and packed with saxophones and synthesizer. Our current president is not about to touch down in Beijing, but he did just meet with Xi Jinping in South Korea—so if you’re scrolling your phone this weekend, reading about Taiwan, trade deals, rare-earth minerals, and Cold War 2.0, this will serve as lovely background music.
🩰 See. . . The American Contemporary Ballet’s Saturday evening performance of Death and the Maiden—if you’re in LA. The ACB is run by Lincoln Jones, one of the most talented and imaginative figures on the American ballet scene. And the music is, well, Schubert and Handel. With a healthy dose of burlesque. What more could one hope for?
📚 Read. . . Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, possibly the best novel ever written about the best game ever played, which is baseball. After the World Series comes to a climatic end tonight—with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a real baseball team, surely defeating the Toronto Blue Jays, who are from Canada—sink into this story about heroism, courage, the making of a man and, of course, America and the ways in which the game is intertwined with our national character. And after that, you should watch the movie adaptation starring the great Robert Redford, RIP:
That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just send us the scariest Halloween decoration in your neighborhood. We’re at: weekend@TheFP.com.
‘A Man Should Know’ is a great idea. I have been reading ‘Art of Manliness’ (artofmanliness.com) for years. The more of this available to young men the better.
I just love the new podcast series Old School. Course, now I am adding more books to my library--need an article or two on how to read so many books with so little time. Keep this series going!