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
Second Thought: Nobody Wants to Date the Hulk |
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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. | | |
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My Generation Needs ‘Dance Moms’ |
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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. | | |
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A Man Should Know: How to Own a Watch |
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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. | | |
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