Welcome back to The Weekend Press! It’s Saturday, and you deserve a break from the rough and tumble of the week. Here’s where we keep everything deep, delightful, or distracting. Today, that includes Chris Christie’s review of the new Springsteen biopic; Nellie Bowles on the “candy salmon” she makes the kids; Suzy Weiss on the preppers who think hoarding canned goods gave their movement a bad name; and Two Drinks with Erin Foster, who wrote the Netflix hit everyone’s talking about. But first, a moral dilemma for you:

When your favorite writer dies, they will leave behind all kinds of literary litter: half-finished novels, rough drafts of acclaimed work, gorily intimate diaries. If all that happened to fall into your lap, what would you do with it? Burn after reading? Before? Or would you want to share it with the whole world?

The Harper Lee estate has decided: Publish and be damned. On Tuesday, it posthumously released some of the author’s “previously unseen stories and essays”—even though the To Kill a Mockingbird author was famously deliberate about what she put into the world. Even though the last time her rough work was published, in 2015, it did untold damage to her legacy. Even though, reviewers agree, none of the work in The Land of Sweet Forever is any good.

“I myself would rather be torn to pieces by a pack of feral cats than allow people to lay eyes on the deformed abomination that is an early draft of one of my novels,” writes Kat Rosenfield, in today’s Big Read. But as a reader, she understands what it’s like to love an author so much you want everything from them. And to adore the world they’ve built so much that you long for another way into it. In her essay, she asks what’s more important: the dignity of a storyteller—or the demands of their fans? —Freya Sanders

This week, we’ve published plenty of other pieces you can lose yourself in this week, including . . .

How should you spend the rest of this weekend? We asked the Queen of TGIF, Nellie Bowles . . .

📚 Read . . . I just finished a beautiful memoir about pre-World War II Austria, The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig (published in 1942 and translated by Anthea Bell in 2013). He writes about his childhood under the emperor; about the way in which everyone felt such security, such financial and social stability, that it resulted in an adoration of age and wisdom. Zweig leads the reader through meetings with Theodor Herzl, then just an editor, and Rainer Maria Rilke, his gentle friend. He describes living through World War I and the betrayal and shock that was to him and his friends, and then, how an explosion of youthful art and culture coincided with the shattering of the old ways, and the rise of Nazism. It’s really a good book and surprisingly modern in tone, likely thanks to Bell’s translation.

📺 Watch . . . Splitsville! It’s a new rom-com about a couple who opens their marriage and the chaos that ensues. Very funny and off-kilter.

🍳 Cook . . . I’ve been making a soy sauce-butter-brown sugar salmon that’s a real hit with the kids, mostly because it’s technically candy salmon. You mix soy sauce, butter, brown sugar, a little garlic, and lemon in a pan till it melts. You cool it down. You put it on the salmon in a Pyrex and let that all sit for 20 minutes. Then you cover the Pyrex with tinfoil and cook it for 12 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit (open it and add a broil if you’re feeling fancy). Perfect fall salmon. Gotta say, I’ve been trying different salmon types, and Faroe Islands is by far my favorite. Banger salmon. 10/10.

🌀 Listen . . . I don’t believe in audio. I need my ears to myself. I reject podcasts and music alike. But if I were to listen to something, it would be Spiral, our fabulous new true-crime pod—about a mysterious murder that happened in Detroit a couple of years back.

Last but not least, a beautiful thing to feast your eyes on: The crown that was stolen from the Louvre this past Sunday, then found lying on the street outside the museum. Imagine coming across this on your morning baguette run:

That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just send us a picture of your favorite crown; we’re at [email protected].

I want to start with a few disclaimers. I was born and raised in New Jersey. I saw my first Bruce Springsteen show on December 11, 1975, at Seton Hall University. I have been to another 170 shows in the 50 years since that night. I am not objective about Bruce. But just because I am biased doesn’t mean I am wrong.

Which brings us to the latest chapter in the career of Bruce Springsteen—the theatrical release of the new movie Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere on October 24. Bruce himself was on set almost every day. He spent a lot of time advising Jeremy Allen White, who was cast to bring his younger self to life.

When the apocalypse comes, will you be ready? At the very least, will you be able to climb the stairs without getting out of breath?

The Pack, a new group workout class, is betting that when the aliens come, or the AIs decide to bite back, you’ll want to feel your best. “The body is the one piece of real estate we truly own. Everything else is pretty much owned by the banks, or we’re leasing it. This is what we have,” Noah Neiman, the founder of The Pack, told me this week.

The website for The Pack claims the workout is aimed at “GO muscle, not SHOW muscle,” and that “We’re not chasing beach bodies. We’re forging battlefield bodies.” In other words, function over form. The “real world” approach is also a hedge against the threat of weight-loss drugs to the entire workout industry. You can get skinny with a push of a button; so now there’s a new anxiety that’s risen up to replace the desire to be thin, and that’s the desire to be strong, and ready. If the Big One—whether of a natural, political, or economic variety—is coming sooner than we thought, it makes sense to have a fitness regimen that, according to the letters pasted on the gym’s window, is “built for the fight before the fight comes to us.”

Neiman opened the studio in Chelsea last month (it’s only in New York now, but his last venture, Rumble, a boxing gym, has outposts all over the world). When I called him to ask him why he started The Pack, he said: “If you have the Citizen app, if you look at the news, you know that it’s a little crazy out there.” He had just done a two-hour Muay Thai training. “There’s a lot of angst, there’s a lot of murder porn, and hostility.”

Neiman is a celebrity trainer, meaning he trained celebrities—like Justin Bieber—and became one in the process. He started Rumble in 2017, but now, he’s all in with self-defense.

For years, no one believed Hamas was interested in—or even capable of—crossing the border into Israel.

Yaakov Katz has just cowritten the definitive account of what went wrong on October 7: the false assumptions, the ignored intelligence, the absence of human sources, and the political and military failures that led to the largest targeted massacre of Je…

In the early 1990s, around the time my fellow tweens were getting obsessed with Beverly Hills, 90210 and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I developed my own fixation—just as sweaty, but far more peculiar—on a middle-aged man named John Bellairs.

Bellairs was the author of gothic fantasy books for children, all with formulaic but enticing titles like The [Sinister Characteristic] of the [Spooky Occult Object]; my favorite of these followed the adventures of a bookish, bespectacled 13-year-old named Johnny Dixon—who, along with his best friend, a crotchety retired professor named Roderick Childermass, had a penchant for getting accidentally entangled in plots involving haunted mansions, demonic figurines, or steampunk robots that played baseball and also sometimes did murders. It was all so utterly calibrated to my preadolescent taste that the stories seemed to have been written just for me.

It was in March of 1991—after I had voraciously consumed every Bellairs book in existence and was eagerly awaiting the release of the next—when my mother looked at the newspaper, frowned, and said, “Oh, no.” Then she looked at me, and said, “John Bellairs has died.”

I don’t remember how I responded. Maybe I said, “oh, no,” too, but only because I was 9 and someone else had said it first. But sometime later, as I cracked open The Eyes of the Killer Robot for what would be the first of many rereadings, I realized with sudden and terrible clarity exactly what that death notice truly meant. There would be no more stories, now. Johnny Dixon would never accidentally bring home another cursed antique from the thrift store; Professor Childermass would never again risk a beatdown by heckling the Yankees at Fenway Park. John Bellairs was gone, and with him, an entire world—and everyone in it—that existed only because he had imagined it into being.

The death of an author is a different thing from the loss of a loved one, but what comes after is grief all the same. The bereaved reader experiences despair first, then frustration, then anguished yearning for narrative closure that can never come now that the world built by the storyteller has been plunged into eternal darkness. But then, as always, comes the bargaining stage: What if the story doesn’t have to end? What if it could go on—for a while, or even forever?

There are some weeks where this Friday roundup basically writes itself. Those are the weeks when there’s really just one big story and I want to share how we covered it. But this week we had a lot of great stories on a whole host of subjects that I want to share with you.

We’ll get right to it. But first, I want to talk about our new podcast, Spiral. It’s the story of Samantha Woll, a beloved Jewish community leader in Detroit who was murdered two years ago this week. It’s a shocking story about a remarkable woman, and I’m very proud of all the work reporter Frannie Block and producer Poppy Damon put into it. If you’re a Free Press subscriber, you can listen to all five episodes here with reduced ads. Trust me when I say that this show is worth your time.

Also, you might notice that my picks look a little different this week. It’s a new format we’re playing with. Subscribers, leave your reviews in the comments! In the meantime, let’s get to some of my favorite stories of the week.

“Bad ideas are like cancer. If you don’t deal with them quickly and decisively, they spread.”

Those are the words of Seth Dillon, the CEO of The Babylon Bee, the conservative satire publication. The Bee spends a lot of time making fun of progressive ideas. But Dillon is increasingly worried that the right is becoming so obnoxious that it will start alienating Americans just as the far left did over the last decade.

“What the radical right is demanding of conservatives like myself is that we unify with our extremists to ‘win,’ ” he writes. “But in what sense are we winning if we’re giving up our principles and tolerating evil in our own ranks? How does that advance our cause? How could it do anything but hurt our cause?” It’s a fantastic piece. Read the whole thing.

While you’re at it, check out Eli Lake’s story on how Nick Fuentes—a young, antisemitic internet figure—has increasingly become mainstream thanks to the help of people who should know better.

“There are a few reasons why Fuentes did not fall into obscurity like Richard Spencer, who was the leading MAGA racist of 2017,” Eli writes in this really must-read piece.

“To start, Fuentes has incandescent talent as a broadcaster. He can be legitimately funny. And like earlier generations of AM talk radio hosts, he knows how and when to switch trolling and rage on and off. But Fuentes can also be menacing. His diatribes against Jewish conservatives like Mark Levin and Josh Hammer pulse with venom. He yells into the camera and says: ‘You’re the filth. You are traitors. You are scum. You do not belong here. You are not American. You’re not home.’ ”

Read it to understand not just the rise of one far-right racist, but to understand how internet media works today.

Is there any company more mysterious than Palantir Technologies, the data firm co-founded by Peter Thiel and led by Alex Karp? The company has many critics who warn that it’s sucking up all our information and using it for nefarious ends. Or that it has some sinister relationship with the CIA or ICE or the Army.

But both critics and fans alike often have some trouble articulating what Palantir does. So we sent Maya Sulkin to find out. She started out by asking individual employees what they did for a living.

Is this a case where, to paraphrase one Palantir employee, people just fear something that they don’t understand? Or is there really something to worry about here? Or, perhaps, it’s maybe a little bit of both? Read Maya’s whole piece to find out.

Is President Donald Trump’s new habit of blowing up suspected dope boats in the Caribbean Sea legal? Jed Rubenfeld, our resident Yale constitutional law professor, thought the answer was simple: no. But as he looked into the issue further, he discovered that it was a bit more complicated than that. Read his piece on the legality of Trump’s aggressive new drug war.

But while we’re on the subject of things that get Americans high, you must read River Page’s dispatch from the Wild West of the recreational drug industry. It involves the competition between the makers of two drugs that have had some success staying legal: kratom, a plant that has been used in Southeast Asia for centuries, and 7-OH, which is a distilled version of kratom’s psychoactive ingredient. Both can get users extremely intoxicated. And both, needless to say, can be very dangerous.

So should both be banned? Or maybe just one and not the other?

Now, I wasn’t familiar with either of these things when River gave me his pitch. But this is a big story, and there’s nobody better to tell it than him. Check it out here.

These newfangled drugs might be alien to me. But I went to college. I know what marijuana is. But what I didn’t know, until Josh Code told me, is that its widespread legalization has led to emergency rooms filled with patients suffering from a very unpleasant ailment called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS). Josh got all the data on CHS and talked to the people who suffered from it until they chose the only cure: quitting weed for good. It’s a great piece. Read it here.

That’s it for me. Check out The Free Press Weekend tomorrow and Sunday for some truly awesome stuff from Suzy Weiss, Kat Rosenfield, and Nellie Bowles, among others. I’ll see you next week.

Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, the new tell-nothing tell-all by former Joe Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, is framed in the introduction as the patriotic diatribe of a once-loyal Democrat who’s now “free to speak for myself” and “eager to say what I think,” thanks to a dramatic decision:

After being a party insider for 20 years, I now believe I can fight harder for my country from outside the Democratic Party than from within it. From here on, I am politically an independent.

Just a few pages later, however, Jean-Pierre claims she noticed something wrong with Biden only once, during his infamous debate performance last June 27. “Whoa . . . he must be sick,” she deadpans, then reframes Independent as an answer to a book she hasn’t even read:

CNN anchor Jake Tapper kicked off the debate. He later wrote a supposed tell-all about Biden, Original Sin . . . accusing [Biden] of a cover-up of his mental decline and how his aides quashed concerns. I was technically a part of the president’s inner circle and saw Biden every day and saw no such decline. I never read Tapper’s book and don’t ever plan to because that does not track with what I saw in the White House.

It’s all entertaining stuff (the “technically” is hilarious). Jean-Pierre announces she’s finally free to tell the truth, but begins by declaring that Tapper’s Original Sin—another book marketed as “the full, unsettling truth . . . told for the first time”—was wrong not because Tapper was lying about how long it took for him to notice Biden’s problems, but because Biden never had any problems to notice.

Jean-Pierre is generating significant negative internet wattage this week, battered everywhere for insisting she never saw anything concerning in Biden’s private behavior. In a wild exchange with Gayle King of CBS, she doubled down on a book passage claiming she didn’t even see an issue with Biden before the critical debate, even though she traveled to it with him on Air Force One (“Maybe I was too nervous . . . to notice whether or not he was sniffling?”). Apparently, that trip was a rare instance in which Jean-Pierre not only didn’t talk to Biden on the plane, but didn’t have conversations with anyone who did. “I had no clue Biden had a cold and was off his game,” she wrote, “until he began to speak at the debate.”

Independent reads like an oxygen-deprived sequel to Tapper’s book. The humorous premise of Original Sin involved Tapper’s sources insisting Biden “stole an election” because if he’d stepped aside earlier, the party might have had a “robust primary”—exactly the scenario they spent years fighting to avoid, savaging Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and smearing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the arms of Trump. The CNN man insisted “insiders” who had a “better window into Biden’s condition than the general public” saw things that “shocked them” before last June’s debate, when the truth finally became obvious even to the media. But according to Tapper, the problem wasn’t that insiders lied, but were lied to. His first chapter was titled “He Totally Fucked Us,” a quote about Biden by Kamala Harris aide David Plouffe.

Never mind that the world could see Biden was in drool-cup mode as far back as 2019, or that Special Counsel Robert Hur made it legal record that Biden likely couldn’t be convicted because a jury would see him as incompetent, an “elderly man with a poor memory.” No, the problem was “Biden fucked us.”

That was funny as hell, but Jean-Pierre just one-upped Tapper by insisting nothing was wrong with Biden and that—get this—the real problem was that the press undermined the president, and not after the debate, but all along! “Pretty much since the day he’d stepped into the White House,” Jean-Pierre wrote, “the press had taken every opportunity to imply Biden was too old or mentally unfit for the job.” She is referring to the same press corps that insisted Biden was “sharp as a tack” for four and a half years, while he was serially sternum-poking voters, staring into space, walking off set in the middle of interviews, and turning every public ceremony into a potential Chevy Chase routine:

Still, the idea that nothing was physically wrong with Biden was merely the introductory absurdity of Independent. Scenes like the bit with King will get the viral energy, but the book purported to have a larger purpose, and that is where the real hilarity lay. Jean-Pierre, in her “Declaration of Independence” introduction, announced herself free to level criticisms at the Democratic Party that “defined my life.”

What criticisms, you ask? I made a mental top-10 list of guesses during the introduction, and the only one I got right was “Will say some shit about Nancy Pelosi.” The rest? It’s like one of Kevin Spacey’s diaries from Seven, only the author is on the loose and getting green-room invites:

Take the titular premise that Jean-Pierre is now an “independent.” In Chapter 3 Jean-Pierre argues, seemingly sincerely, that the two-party system in America is flawed compared to the “range of parties” offered in European parliamentary democracies, where a person can identify as anything from a Communist to a “far-right Rassemblement National.” In America, the closest thing to such diversity is the ability to register as an Independent, which she hails:

While some of those alliances may garner only a few seats in the legislative body, the fact that they are viable parties offers an option to a vast range of voters, whether they are socialists or citizens with protectionist, even xenophobic views. Given that the United States lacks such variety, registering as an independent may offer many the purest, most authentic political fit.

A few pages later, Jean-Pierre says that as much as “I completely get” the frustration with entrenched parties, she’s not looking to add new options, and is only choosing Independent status as a way to more effectively influence/aid Democrats.

Being an independent does not necessarily mean you need or want to vote for a third party. . . . In fact, I want to encourage people not to. While I completely get the frustration many have with both the Democrats and the GOP. . . in my lifetime I’ve watched third parties hand the White House to Republicans twice. . . . We have to be realistic about the fact that choosing a third-party candidate who has little to no possibility of garnering enough popular or electoral votes to win the office can result in a more dangerous dominant party claiming victory.

When Erin Foster was converting to Judaism in 2019, she sat in front of the beit din, a council of rabbis who were assembled to pepper her with questions to test her knowledge of Judaism. “I thought it was pronounced baked in,” she told me over coffee in Manhattan this week. She recalled one of the rabbis asking her, “Are you ready to be hated?” and frankly, she thought the rabbi was being a little dramatic. “I was like, Come on, lady, no one hates Jews anymore. You’re just very sensitive to it. I grew up in LA, all my friends were Jewish!”

“The rabbi said, ‘Just wait.’ ”

When I met her this week in Tribeca, Foster was wearing a gray turtleneck, jeans, and a sweater from her brand, Favorite Daughter, which she created with her sister Sara. She was in town—from LA, where she still lives—to promote both the clothing line and another thing she created: Nobody Wants This, the rom-com juggernaut that returned to Netflix for its second season this week. It’s about a blonde sex podcaster who falls in love with a rabbi, and is loosely based on Foster’s own story: She fell in love with the music executive Simon Tikhman at 35, then converted to Judaism to marry him.

Foster, now 43, both writes the show and co-produces it with her sister. Her phone was blowing up while we were chatting—a Hollywood Reporter cover about season 2 was dropping the next day—but she was relaxed, and motorized. She ordered an almond milk latte before pausing to pick up a call from Justine Lupe, who plays Morgan, a version of her own sister. “Hello, my actress.”

The White House is getting a $300 million facelift, and some of the largest corporations in the world are footing the bill—with the help of MAGA lobbyists.

Construction began this week for Donald Trump’s “big beautiful White House ballroom,” with workers tearing down the East Wing. Trump has said the work won’t cost taxpayers a dime and will be privately funded by “many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly.”

The White House did not comment on how much Trump himself will give, but it did share a list with The Free Press—you can view that here—of almost 40 donors. It includes companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Google, crypto giant Coinbase, and defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton. It also includes wealthy Trump supporters like oil and gas magnate Harold Hamm and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman as well as crypto entrepreneurs Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

Welcome back to TGIF, where we review the news. What we do here is serious. This is objective. Separately, if you don’t laugh at every single one of my jokes, Bar’s hot new bodyguards will break your arms. If you didn’t already see, the New York Post has a story this week on the situation of the “beefy” and “chiseled” guards whose job is to surround my wife at all hours. I haven’t seen her in weeks—I don’t have the clearance. So I learn about what she’s up to like the rest of you do, in the New York Post. And according to their photo evidence, Bari’s main beefy and chiseled guard is one Sean Fischer. I always thought of Sean as my TG worker bee, my elegant intellectual, my wife’s lithe chief of staff. I had no idea his real role here, but I’m looking at this paparazzi shot and realizing that the Post’s mistake comes from somewhere real: Men who glare at a camera like Sean have conquered continents. Sean, I’m sorry for ever calling you “my little blue-eyed cupcake” and “my delicate ginger.” Let’s have a reset, please, okay seriously stop tasing me and telling me the Inquisition is coming I said I’m sorry!

→ “Your mom did”: After President Donald J. Trump announced plans to meet with Vladimir Putin in Budapest, a reporter for HuffPost texted White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about the politics of the meeting taking place in Budapest. HuffPost was so great when Arianna Huffington was in charge of it, and now—now it’s just sad. Anyway, their reporter asked, “Does he not see why Ukraine might object to that site? Who suggested Budapest?”

This windup is just to tell you that Leavitt wrote back: “Your mom did.” I need everyone who argues that women in positions of power would act so very differently from men to sit down now. We’re living in a teen boy’s fantasy of presidential politics, and it is being ushered in by hot blondes named Karoline who respond to a journalist’s requests with, essentially, “That’s not what your mom said last night.”

Regardless of whose mom was or was not involved, and how fat she was, Trump called off the Putin meeting this week. Likely, he suspected his arm-wrestle-diplomacy strategy might have met its match since there was a nonzero chance Putin would have arrived shirtless on a tiger. And Trump is now imposing sanctions on Russian oil companies.

→ My Little Totenkopf: Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat challenging Susan Collins for her Senate seat, found himself in some trouble this week because of an old tattoo. A tramp stamp? An ex’s name on his bicep? No, it was a large totenkopf on his chest, the Nazi skull symbol worn by guards at concentration camps. Platner claims that he picked the symbol at random from the tattoo parlor’s wall with his Marine buddies (I hate when that happens!) and had no idea that there were any Nazi implications. Which is funny because according to an old acquaintance of his, there was nothing random or secret about it at all, and he would call it his totenkopf: “He said, ‘Oh, this is my totenkopf,’ ” the acquaintance told Jewish Insider. “He said it in a cutesy little way.” Platner, who described himself as “a communist” and an “antifa supersoldier” back in his old Reddit posting days, also apparently spent time in “a socialist paramilitary group.”

The best part is that the left has now painted itself into a corner with Nazi iconography, because they can no longer quite articulate why it’s bad, since killing Jews is neutral to admirable. Here’s a popular leftist commentator trying to explain why Platner’s Nazi symbol is bad:

“This isn’t just a Nazi tattoo, this is the symbol of the concentration camp guards, the guys who ran the death camps. The men who murdered socialists, communists, and liberals. They mass-murdered all black men in the French army. This is on par with a swastika.” (The commentator deleted it so I won’t name and shame. But isn’t it interesting?)

The news of Platner’s previously avowed communism and Nazi tattoo have only strengthened him. A poll that came out this week shows him 34 points ahead of his leading opponent in the Democratic primary. We’re getting to the point where it’s a red flag for Zoomers if you don’t have a Nazi tattoo.

My favorite thing about Platner, though, has nothing to do with any of this—it’s that he describes himself as a “working-class Mainer” but went to a $75,000-a-year boarding school. Yes, Platner went to Hotchkiss (gorgeous, fabulous). I’m also a boarding-school brat—but I’ve always identified as a debutante, a coastal elite, and a perfect 10. Mr. Platner, don’t run from your people.