Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today: “Dance Moms” was awful, so why did Sascha Seinfeld love it? River Page on the song that activated gay-guy sleeper cells this week. Has Jennifer Lawrence been reading Kat Rosenfield’s columns? How to buy a watch. And more! But first: Maya Sulkin reports on a new kind of American hero.
Your parents were born before the internet existed. If they’re anything like mine, they’ll sometimes struggle with tech. When I’m home for the holidays, my job is to add boarding passes to their Apple wallets for them, to make sure the right credit card is on their Uber account, to set up my dad’s Amazon subscription for green juice powder.
There’s an anxiety underlying all this. Our parents are vulnerable online. To understand just how vulnerable, read my latest piece, which begins with the tragedy of Fran Westbrook. The 85-year-old was googling her sister’s obituary when a mysterious 1-800 number popped up. She thought she’d better call it—and the voice that answered destroyed her life.
She’s far from the only elderly American to have her bank account drained by fraudsters. Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission warned of “a growing wave of scams aimed squarely at retirees’ life savings”—a wave that’s mostly coming from Southeast Asia. The year Fran lost her life savings, Americans were scammed out of $158 billion. Our government knows this is happening; it just doesn’t quite know how to stop it.
So: A few citizens are taking matters into their own hands. I want to tell you about an ex-CIA officer, a tech bro, and the TIME Kid of the Year—three Americans who are innovating, or lobbying, or coding, to protect us from those who’d happily drain your 401(k). I call these vigilantes the anti-scammers.
The trouble is, it’s hard to protect your parents from exploitation if they kind of consented to it. Today, we’re also sharing the story of Florina Rodov, who rolled her eyes when her widowed father started sleeping with the housekeeper. Years later, after he’d been diagnosed with dementia, she discovered that this woman had taken over $300,000 from her father.
“It was a daughter’s worst nightmare,” she remembers, “being trapped on the wrong side of the door, listening to someone try to turn your vulnerable father against you.” —Maya Sulkin
It’s been a wild, wild week out there in the culture. Intersex resentment has reached new lows, as unbelievably ripped guys post before-and-after pics on X, only for girls to call them things like “grotesque monster freak.” The most downloaded country song was made by a bot. The leftist streamer Hasan Piker is having a lot of fun in communist China. Matthew Macfadyen is basically playing Tom from Succession all over again, and it’s amazing. Our guide through all this and more is River Page. Dive in.
One of the best-selling memoirs in America right now, Bottom of the Pyramid, was written by a 24-year-old. Her name is Nia Sioux, and she spent the second half of her childhood being screamed at on the reality show Dance Moms, watched religiously by Gen Z. Nia stopped by the Free Press office for an interview this week, which you can watch on our website, but listening to her talk about the darker side of the show got Sascha Seinfeld wondering: Why did her generation love watching Dance Moms so much? And why is the show having a resurgence on TikTok now? Sascha ponders all this and more in her latest essay.
Let’s be real: Most of your possessions aren’t that meaningful. When you die, they’ll go to the Goodwill, or in the trash. But it’s worth having something worth passing on. When Elliot Ackerman thinks about his legacy, he thinks about his watch—which he bought in a Dubai mall in 2006 after a tedious stint on the USS Iwo Jima. “It was on my wrist when I fought in Afghanistan, and when I covered the wars in Syria and Ukraine as a journalist,” he writes. “I was wearing it the day my children were born, the night I met my wife, and the day we got married.” In the latest installment of his series, he writes that A Man Should Know how “to own a thing of value and imbue it with meaning” by living with it, then passing it on when he dies.
When Kyiv-based reporter Aidan Stretch pitched having Two Drinks with a guy who’s been called an “especially dangerous state criminal,” we thought: Absolutely. It was the KGB who gave 76-year-old Myroslav Marynovych that moniker, before throwing him in a gulag for seven years for speaking out against totalitarianism. There, he passed the time by playing a lot of practical jokes on the guards. A dangerous man, indeed. Marynovych met Aidan in a bakery in Lviv; he talked about the easiest kind of hunger strike, why he doesn’t eat chocolate cake—and why we must criticize Ukraine, and laugh at Putin.
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This week we published another gorgeous personal essay by Larissa Phillips, and found ourselves wondering if Jennifer Lawrence reads Kat Rosenfield’s columns . . .
How should you spend the rest of this weekend? We asked Senior Editor Will Rahn for a few recommendations . . .
🎭 See . . . Don Giovanni at The Metropolitan Opera. My wife is the opera expert in the family, so I can say with confidence: If you’re new to the form, Mozart’s tale of a debauched aristocrat is a great place to start—high art that’s both easy to follow and darkly funny.
📺 Watch . . . Pluribus is the latest from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the show everyone’s obsessed with a year from now. It’s best if you watch knowing very little about it—so consider this a spoiler warning—but it’s about an alien virus that turns almost all of humanity into a hive mind. The show’s focus is on the small number of humans who are immune, and how they react to a world that’s at once utopian (humans are no longer violent; everyone works for the betterment of the species) and deeply unnerving. The third episode just dropped on Apple TV.
📺 Then Watch . . . Tombstone! Yes, it was made in the early 1990s, during the great resurgence of Westerns, but it’s one of those movies that’s always popping up as a meme—spend enough time on the internet, and you will encounter a gif of Val Kilmer saying, “I’m your huckleberry.” Kilmer used that quote as the title for his 2020 memoir, and no wonder: His performance as Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Old West gunman and gambler looking for redemption, is almost certainly his best. Loosely based on the legendary lawman Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) and his attempts to bring law to the Arizona frontier, Tombstone is exactly the kind of action-filled melodrama we all wish Hollywood still made today. Behold:
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.
Why are there so few comments on the weekends? Is the content too weak with too much rehash? Why don’t you include the list of contents of Melania’s underwear drawer by the FBI? Maybe Jill Biden would like to defend that action. Mix it up TFP — you love to poke the Republican bear … Epstein and all the other pseudo scandals.
I agree with other commenters. I paid for high quality reporting, not ads.