Welcome back to the Weekend Press! This week, the 103-year-old wellness guru Deborah Szekely spills her secrets. Suzy Weiss launches a podcast. Madeleine Kearns has two drinks with Catholic professor Luke Burgis, who refused to consult for Anthropic—and said, “I honestly can’t tell whether J.D. Vance is a true believer or not.” And more!

But first: What’s best for your child? And who gets to decide?

These are the simple questions behind some of the fieriest debates of our time—over vaccine schedules, free-range parenting, smartphones for kids. It’s a theme The Free Press keeps coming back to because the stakes feel enormous. And because everyone, it seems, has an opinion on what happens inside your home.

One of the places these debates play out most bitterly is the “momosphere,” where maternal influencers have turned ordinary parenting decisions—like where your baby sleeps, and how long you stay home after giving birth—into litmus tests for how much you love your child.

This is the battlefield where the war over breastfeeding is taking place; where moms declare that bottle-feeding mothers are selfish, and formula is poison.

Kara Kennedy says: That’s nonsense. During her first pregnancy, she concluded she didn’t want to breastfeed, at all—and talked openly about it. In doing so, she came across countless mothers who fed their babies using formula, but couldn’t bear to say so publicly. “You won’t believe the lengths I went to lie about it,” one told her.

So, knowing that moms online will shout at her, Kara has written for us today about why the decision to make parenting a little easier feels so radical—and why she doesn’t regret making it:

But it’s not just influencers who insist on telling you how to raise your kids. For Anna Keating, it was the police. Not long ago, two officers brought home her 7-year-old son; they’d picked him up while he was on the three-block walk to his grandma’s house, assuming he was lost.

Anna, who was born in the ’80s, grew up walking downtown and biking to school without adult supervision. She wants her kids to have the same independence. “Still, when the police brought my second grader home, I felt like a horrible mother,” she says. Read her story here:

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​​Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a logical but warm woman from Jamaica (the country, not the neighborhood of New York City); an aspiring writer and producer in Virginia; or a Dutch- and Arabic-speaking widower who retired from the Navy after 35 years of service, but whose sense of adventure is as strong as ever.

Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

We’ve published a lot of other pieces this week worth catching up on, including . .

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our news editor Rick Brooks for his recommendations…

📚 Read . . . Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. When winter finally let go of New York City, and there were no more slush puddles to leap, I found myself thinking about walking—to the park, to Shenanigan’s Pub, to the Catholic church with the flimsy homilies and streaming sunlight. That’s when I remembered Gros’s book, opened it to a random page, and landed here: “Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found. To walk, you need to start with two legs. The rest is optional.”

🎵 Listen . . . to the playlist “The House That Built Me: Songs About Making and Going Home.” It was created by Natalie Weiner, whose Don’t Rock the Inbox online newsletter celebrates country music that hasn’t fallen to the corporate cookie-cutter, brocentric FM dial. These 30 songs—from Loretta Lynn’s “I Don’t Wanna Play House” to Leon Bridges’s “Coming Home” to Ashley McBryde’s “Light on in the Kitchen”—make me think of the little house where I grew up, the house party that my sister and I stupidly believed we had destroyed all evidence of, and letting myself in with a key every afternoon after school.

🍳 Cook . . . these baked white pepper chicken wings. I have made them so many times that my kids believe this is my own recipe, when in fact it belongs to Kaitlin Leung. You can do the scut work—of mixing the wings with white pepper, Sichuan pepper powder, and vegetable oil—while everyone is still asleep, let it sit in the fridge all day, and pop them in the oven when you get home. Seeing the bones pile up on my kids’ plate is a triumph.

As usual, we asked our art director, Clara Grusq: What beautiful thing has been on your mind this week? She replied: “There’s so much to do in New York, but sometimes I can’t help missing my hometown of Paris, where you could just wander into La Galerie Dior and feast your eyes on the creations of Christian Dior, who reimagined the feminine silhouette with a cinched waist, and lines so precise. His designs seem sculpted on rather than worn.”

(Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP via Getty Images)

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.