Hi, all! I’m working on a few stories right now—including about whether God loves AI, and the rise of face tattoos—but I did sneak away from my desk midweek to record an episode of Second Thought with Dan Ahdoot. There’s too much going on in the culture to stay silent.
The biggest story was this: A very thin Ariana Grande announced that she’d be “taking a step back from visibility” following her fans’ and the media’s growing concern about her shrinking frame. According to her reps, the singer is “taking a much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances, which has led to endless, ongoing public scrutiny.”
This comes on the heels of Grande’s new music video, “Petal,” where she appears skeletal in a few 1950s-looking outfits as she auditions for a panel of brutish men whom she eventually, after getting fed up with their brutal judgments, hacks to death with a chainsaw. “Tеll me who’s to blame, is it the people or myself?” she sings in the song. “This is not a cry for help.” Perhaps not, but the video backfired big. “The elephant in the room is impossible to ignore,” read one well-liked comment. “She is really sick.”
Grande’s decision to see out her tour and then take a breather from the limelight has kicked off a frenzy of speculation about Grande’s body, about whether she has an eating disorder, and about whether we should even be talking about it if she does. As Grande herself said when she addressed fans at a recent concert about her decision: A few things can be true at once. Like that she has been touring and promoting Wicked and performing her albums for years. She has also dealt with the dissolution of her marriage, the end of the relationship that followed, the death of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller, the breakup of another engagement, and a terrorist attack that killed 22 of her fans in Manchester, all within the last decade. The girl has taken a beating, and deserves a break. And while no one truly knows what’s going on with Grande’s health except her, and her doctors, looking at her, it isn’t that hard to guess.
Between the therapeutic mindset that insists we accept ourselves as we are, and the supersonic boom of weight loss drugs that allow us to whittle our proportions down to whatever we want, it’s easy to assume that eating disorders are a thing of the past. But anorexia, and the whole constellation of eating disorders around it, is an ancient scourge that we’ll be living with as long as there are young women. And it isn’t actually about looking good in clothes, or even necessarily losing weight—instead it’s about imposing order, and having rigid, punishing standards for oneself. It can be a twisted-up form of perfectionism, or in some cases, a misguided attempt to avoid growing up. It also isn’t about being heroin chic, or any one fashion trend or any one influencer. Hadley Freeman, who chronicled her own yearslong experience with severe anorexia in her book Good Girls, wrote in The Free Press: “I hadn’t even heard of Kate Moss.”
Besides, fame, as we learned in Lena Dunham’s new memoir, can make you sick.
I think Grande is indeed suffering, but I don’t think that she will suffer the same terrible fate as the women who wasted away in front of our eyes, like Whitney Houston, or Amy Winehouse, or, most famously, Karen Carpenter. I think that when she’s good and ready, she will come back with a vengeance.
Watch Dan and I talk about Grande, and a few more stories that caught our eye recently:
Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About
We are in an era of coaches for every aspect of life, whether for your fitness, diet, or career. Now, there’s a new crop of coaches for your marriage, specifically for the “recovering man-child,” as one coach puts it, who needs to be taught how to pick up after himself and pitch in around the house. Fellas: The laundry isn’t going to fold itself.
There’s an editor named Whitney Frick and she’s behind the most talked-about authors of the last few years: Belle Burden, Amy Griffin, Glennon Doyle. They’re memoirists, all women, all who went through some life-altering drama that they let their readers in on, which in turn took over the zeitgeist. Everyone has something to say about what they’ve written, even if it’s not very nice.
Charles Manson always seems to be having a moment. His granddaughter came out with a documentary about growing up in the shadow of his crimes, and another Manson documentary, featuring recordings of conversations with him in prison, is coming out this week. Nearly 60 years later, we’re still obsessed with how one failed musician became the face of American evil—and convinced otherwise normal all-American teenagers to do his bidding.
Speaking of, I can’t wait for when Annie Karni (The New York Times’ congressional correspondent) signs up to write her memoir with Frick. She wrote this week about her divorce, and how she received support in the unlikeliest of moments: before or after interviews with the subjects of her political reporting, including Chuck Schumer, Steve Bannon, and Nancy Mace. “Men are so stupid,” Schumer told her. “Just so stupid.”
I don’t envy parents who have to raise kids in 2026. It’s a minefield. But Liz Wolfe seems to have a good handle on it; she wrote about why she is bullish on chores, including tasking her 3.5-year-old with making a chopped cucumber salad. And when in doubt on how to be a good mom or dad, always trust Abigail Shrier to give it to you straight.
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What's the point of including Sen. Schumer's quote ("Men are so stupid.)?
It's starting to feel like TFP is becoming another platform for angry feminists.