Welcome to the first Weekend Press of 2026! It’s a bumper edition. Two Drinks with the youngest female billionaire. Kat Rosenfield has a message for the artists who don’t want to perform at The Trump Kennedy Center. Abigail Shrier writes to a mom of three who’s fallen out of love with her husband. Kara Kennedy breaks down the hand-wringing obituaries of Brigitte Bardot. And much more.

But first. . .

Mainstream Christianity is having a tough time. Especially in the UK, where church attendance has dropped by 21 percent in the last decade. But on a remote Scottish island, a Romanian monk with a master’s in creative writing is trying something new.

As a young man, this Orthodox devotee, known as Father Seraphim, was engrossed by the story of an ancient order of monks who lived on the tiny rocky island of Iona, the original home of Celtic Christianity.

And so, he decided he wanted to revive it. To raise money, he traveled to the U.S. “People there asked me if we had a business plan or a vision,” he tells reporter Huw Paige in today’s wonderful piece. “And I had to be very blunt and say I have no idea what I’m doing.”

This is the story of how—with some thousand-year-old teachings, a YouTube channel, and a tiny wooden chapel—a handful of nuns and monks built something new in a place where everything is very old.

We’ve published plenty of other pieces this week that’ll help you procrastinate on your New Year’s resolutions:

As life returns after the holiday season, how should you spend the first week of 2026? We asked our reporter River Page for his suggestions…

📖 Read…Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh. It’s about a strange young woman who works at a boys’ prison and dreams of life in the big city. That is, when she’s not dealing with her paranoid alcoholic father or stalking one of the guards she has a crush on. When the prison hires a glamorous new counselor called Rebecca Saint John, Eileen thinks she’s finally made a friend. But things get very strange from there. Come for the freak factor, stay for the twist ending.

🎧 Listen…to Ethel Cain’s album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. It was my favorite record of 2025. A story runs through it that’s kind of a prequel to her considerably darker 2022 debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, which is about a teenage runaway who falls victim to a cannibalistic serial killer. Nobody ever really thought to make Southern Gothic pop before, and thank God someone finally has. If you’ve ever wondered what handing Flannery O’Connor a synthesizer might have resulted in, this is for you.

💵 Buy. . . a membership at a cheap gym. Here’s the thing: You may or may not keep your New Year’s resolution to get fit. You may think that spending more money will motivate you to work out more. It will not, and also, wandering around a gym that looks like a Russian oligarch’s dacha will only depress you. You need to be among the masses: There is nothing in this world more motivating than seeing hot people with no money.

The Weekend Press was saddened to learn of the death of Cecilia Giménez, a Spanish woman who went viral late in life for her efforts to restore a fresco of Jesus Christ in her small town in Spain—which gave the world “Monkey Christ.”

Cecilia Giménez poses with Ecco Homo one year after her “restoration” of the famous painting. (Fabián Simón via Alamy)

That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just tell us your New Year’s resolutions; we’re at [email protected].

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