Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today: Kat Rosenfield dissects the downfall of a magazine that once used the phrase “non-prostate owners.” Suzy Weiss is blown away by Sydney Sweeney’s latest performance. Elliot Ackerman investigates one of life’s great mysteries: Why don’t men call each other to catch up? All that and much more! But first: teenage dreams and the Grateful Dead.

Their parents probably thought they’d joined a cult.

The teenagers who became Deadheads—that is, passionate fans of the Grateful Dead—were often from wealthy families. But, taking an implicit vow of poverty, they grew their hair long and made cross-country pilgrimages, begging for food as they went. This was the America of the 1980s, when God was dead and the ultimate goal of middle-class life was to drive a fast car and work in a bank. So why did a vast subculture of rich kids choose rags?

When our columnist Larissa Phillips heard, this week, that Donna Godchaux, who once sang with the Dead, had died, she was transported to her tween years, when she’d wake up in her home in suburban Connecticut to find it overrun with velvet-clad teenagers talking about the origin story of Buddhism and doing backflips on the front lawn. Larissa’s brother was a Deadhead; she wasn’t.

In fact, she forgot all about the Grateful Dead until she herself was the mother of a wayward teenage boy, who was struggling to find meaning in a world that had slowly, then suddenly, lost so many of its belief systems. Today, in one of her characteristically gorgeous personal essays, she writes about how she “began looking back wistfully to those days when a traveling revival tent of misfits roamed the country, holding out open arms for disaffected kids.”

Here at The Free Press, we’ve closely followed one of the most interesting trends of the moment: the ways in which young Americans are gravitating toward religion; and reading Larissa’s essay, you might see Deadheads as the ancestors not only of Swifties, but of the kids across the country who have turned away from the nihilism that defines their generation, and turned to God instead. — Freya Sanders

This week we’ve published pieces on a couple of new books and heard from our favorite prophet, Paul Kingsnorth. Read all about it . .

How should you spend the rest of this weekend? We asked our reporter Maya Sulkin how to unwind after the mayoral election she’s helped to cover. . .

📚 Read . . . The Bonfire of the Vanities. As one of the younger people in our newsroom, I hear a lot about the golden age of magazines, so I wanted to see what it was all about. Tom Wolfe’s novel was first published in installments, in Rolling Stone, and my goal was to underline all the masterful sentences I was jealous of, in the hope of writing better ones myself. But as it turns out, I finished the novel at the perfect time: the night before Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. In Wolfe’s fictional version of ’80s New York, you can see the city of today. There are political candidates who say the right things to win votes, press-obsessed district attorneys, and, of course, drunk journalists. Some things never change.

🍳 Eat . . . I’m not a cook. Following a recipe feels like building an IKEA dresser for me: I have none of the tools, I never know which step I’m on, and it’s just a matter of time before things fall apart. Instead, I have mastered something else: my Thai food order. The issue is that when you order Thai food, you want a few bites of multiple things. So I’ve switched from delivery to pickup, put in some real face time, and fostered a fun rapport with the hostess, who has finally agreed to give me a half order of pad see ew and a half order of green curry. Dinner (for one) is served. If you’re in New York City, pay your respects to Thai Villa on East 19th.

🎨Visit . . . To escape it all, a couple other Free Pressers and I hopped in the car and drove upstate to Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre sculpture garden in the Hudson Valley. We saw a Roy Lichtenstein mermaid. We rolled down the Wavefield Conservation. I marveled at concrete fixtures sitting atop sweeping vistas of perfectly groomed grass. They sell hot apple cider. It is a perfect fall day. Some of their current exhibitions end on November 10; go if you can!

A visitor poses for photos in front of Alexander Liberman’s artwork “Iliad” at Storm King Art Center in New York. (Li Rui/Xinhua via Getty Images)

That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just tell us what you’d have done with a billion dollars when you were 22; we’re at [email protected].

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