There’s some huge news out of the Free Press office this week. It is, drumroll please, that I’ve named my column. It’s called Second Thought! You sent in many great suggestions, and plenty of Weiss puns (Weissass, Weissguy, Weissgeist, Streetweiss—is that all you people got?) but I think this captures what I’m going for here. Second Thought is a survey of all things pop culture—considered, then reconsidered. And if you don’t sign up here, you’ll stop receiving the column, so really, what are you waiting for?
‘After the Hunt’ Never Goes in for the Kill Shot
Summer is my favorite season but it’s a drought when it comes to movies, unless you’ve been holding out for the gazillionth installment of the Alien franchise or Despicable Me 4. Movies turn with the leaves, and usually for the better. Already we have One Battle After Another, which my colleague Will Rahn described as an “absurdist comedy where violence and extremism beget more violence and extremism.” At the end of the month, we’ll have Bugonia, a girlboss thriller starring Emma Stone. In other words: It’s Oscars season. So we’re being blessed with ambitious movies that try to say something about the most pressing issues of the day.
Which brings us to After the Hunt, the new Julia Roberts movie.
It’s about a #MeToo scandal, at Yale in 2020, and it was made by Luca Guadagnino, who is good at capturing weird relationship dynamics. (He made Call Me by Your Name, the film where Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet strike up an affair in Northern Italy, and also Challengers, the tennis one where Zendaya has a threesome.) And there’s a few things this film does well.
After the Hunt is meandering. It’s packaged as a psychological thriller, but all the head games, and the tick, tick, tick of a loud clock that’s sprinkled throughout it, only reinforce the idea that these people take themselves way too seriously.
Guadagnino captures body language on screen better than anyone, with close-ups of hands being crossed, or a silent moment when a character locks eyes with themselves in the mirror and silently says, “Pull yourself together.”
But these things aren’t enough to carry the movie.
This is a story of he-said, she-said. Specifically, Maggie says that after a party at Alma’s extremely well-appointed apartment, another professor, named Hank, assaulted her. “He crossed the line,” Maggie tells Alma—who’s close with Hank—before asking for Alma’s support in potentially pressing charges. Alma doesn’t offer much; she just asks: “Why me?”
She says the same thing to Hank, when he later says he wants to tell her what “really” happened. Hank insists he’s been set up—all because he had threatened Maggie’s academic career by accusing her of plagiarizing. The story about the assault, Hank tells Alma, is “an utter fabrication.” He insists it is he, and not Maggie—who is the daughter of billionaires—who had to claw his way into the ivory tower. Hank and Alma are white; Maggie is black.
“She’s exploiting a shallow cultural moment,” Hank says.
You can guess the rest: Everyone gets paranoid; it snowballs. Hank gets fired, Alma is caught in the middle of it, then gets dragged down. She suffers from a mysterious, crippling pain whose origins lie in a mysterious relationship from a long time ago. It drives her away from her thoughtful, cassoulet-baking husband, and into the arms of Hank.
It’s a good enough premise, but it’s already been done, and spectacularly. Tár, which came out in 2022, explores a lot of the same themes: shifting sexual mores in a hypercompetitive and rarefied world—in this case, that of classical music—and how a woman can be just as vindictive and calculating as a man, to get to the top of a historically male field. Both films feature scenes where the protagonist lashes out at students in a classroom over their silly woke politics, and in both cases, their morality is a bit inscrutable.
But where Tár was monumental, and taut, After the Hunt is meandering. It’s packaged as a psychological thriller, but all the head games, and the tick, tick, tick of a loud clock that’s sprinkled throughout it, only reinforce the idea that these people take themselves way too seriously. The point of the film is to make you overthink, like the characters do, instead of entertaining you; whereas, when I saw Tár, I remember thinking how lucky I was that, for the price of 18 bucks, I could experience such splendor.
The protagonist, Lydia Tár, is one of the great composers of her generation, played magnificently by Cate Blanchett. And the audience understands from the outset that the character, whatever her faults, is a genius. In After the Hunt, we get a few snippets of Roberts droning on about Michel Foucault and then a bunch of her marching around campus and then throwing up from her debilitating pain. She’s under so much pressure to publish—“publish or perish,” she tells her husband, Fred—but for who? The two other people in the world who care about her work, who happen to be at each other’s throats? Pack it in, Alma, no one cares about your close reading of the Frankfurt School.
Someone—possibly the political scientist Wallace Stanley Sayre—once said that “academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” But that quote first appeared in the early 1970s, when academia carried a lot more weight. By 2020, it had all but collapsed under its own weight. In After the Hunt the dean of the humanities department bemoans to Alma, over cheap whiskey, that he’s in the “business of optics rather than substance,” and sadly, so is After the Hunt.
Fiber Is the New Protein
Imagine explaining this to your grandparents: A famous lady who started a popular ice cream brand says eating fiber gave her the courage to end her marriage.
Jeni Britton, 52, of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams fame, told The Cut that eating a quart of fiber-rich blueberries a day helped her drop 20 pounds, and “get to a place in my life where I could ask for a divorce.” I think middle age, and not fruit, is what generally spurs major marital changes like this, but Britton isn’t taking any chances. She recently started a fiber bar company called Floura to spread good fibes.
“Our mission is really to reverse chronic illnesses,” she went on, calling fiber “kind of” a “miracle drug” that can heal the microbiome in your gut. I do not know what a gut microbiome is and I do not intend to ever find out, but I do think fiber will soon become the white-hot center of the nutrition universe. This week, a Whole Foods trend report came out predicting a “Focus on Fiber” in 2026. “We’re seeing products with added fiber hitting the shelves,” it said, calling out cassava and chicory.
Imagine explaining this to your grandparents: A famous lady who started a popular ice cream brand says eating fiber gave her the courage to end her marriage.
I like to keep one eye on food trends. I’ve fallen for the occasional acai bowl, and I’ve even sampled raw milk, but I tend to stay out of the macronutrient manias. Remember 10 years ago when everyone was talking about the “good type of fat,” like the kind you find in avocados or nuts? And then superfoods? Then: protein. Its popularity—especially after a workout—was fueled by the rise of health nut influencers and gym bros who wanted to bulk up and build muscle. But while the bro-tein craze was male-dominated, fiber is for the girls.
Fiber is all about regulation, smoothness. It’s intimate; it is best known for aiding bowel movements, after all, and it’s poised for a millennial glow-up as the upper range of that cohort approach menopause, a famously constipatory phase of a woman’s life.
I try not to assign mythic qualities to certain foods. No one should be trading their marriage for magic beans—even if they help you go. But a few more pints of blueberries per month can’t hurt. Welcome, all, to the Fiberssance.
Ambassador Melania Takes the Stage
It’s been a great few days for nepo-hires on the world stage. Much attention has been lavished on Jared Kushner, who helped broker the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel. But for some reason there have been fewer calls to give the Nobel Prize to his stepmother-in-law—who seems poised to become the next Henry Kissinger.
Melania announced yesterday that she’d brokered a deal with Vladimir Putin—who’d shown “a willingness to engage with me directly”—to have eight Ukrainian children returned home after they had been separated from their families by Russian forces. “Russia has demonstrated a willingness to disclose objective and detailed information reflective for the current situation,” she added. Give her a week and the war in Europe will be over.
A cynic might raise their eyes at the fact that this news—arguably the first significant headline that’s come out of Melania’s second term as First Lady—came the same week that Amazon announced it is set to release a documentary about her called Melania. (It’s directed by Brett Ratner, who made the Rush Hour movies.) But I’m generally a fan of Melania, and of her icy Slavic ways. The Mother of Barron doesn’t seem to revel in her role as the nation’s Christmas tree decorator and hoster of dinners; Donald Trump, on the other hand, seems to love redoing the Rose Garden, getting petty around decoration, and planning a ballroom.
So maybe at this stage of their marriage they’re doing a sort of modern role reversal: The president minds the chinoiserie and his wife minds the dictator.
Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About:
My colleague Abigail Shrier published a haunting, moving essay this week about parenting a child who becomes sick. It’s a tearjerker, but also one of the most well-written essays I’ve read recently. I was so happy she joined me for a live conversation this week, along with Larissa Phillips—whose gorgeous essay about matchmaking you might have read this morning. If you’re a subscriber you can catch up on our discussion, about love in all its forms, here.
Country singer Zach Bryan went viral with a new song whose lyrics take aim at ICE, which the White House was not pleased about. He also posted part of Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” on Instagram. One choice line: “Denounce the government and embrace / The flag.” But he also insisted his song “hits on both sides of the aisle.” (Last year he said: “I don’t support Trump or Biden.”) Is he trying to become the poet-king of the politically homeless?
This week we launched a new podcast called Old School with Shilo Brooks. If you find yourself wanting to read but lacking the attention span, get in on this audio book club. Check out the first two episodes here, and read Shilo’s essay about how reading great books made him into a man (this one’s for you, performative male readers).
I saw two off-Broadway one-person shows that are getting a lot of buzz. One is called Weer; the other, Color Theories. There’s no plot worth following and little logic in either; but what there is plenty of is clowning. These shows are full of slapstick, gags, props, lewdness, wackadoo schemes, and body humor. There are ponchos, and a Dr. Seuss-like wig with a furry headlamp. It’s delightful—and I think we’ll see more of it. As entertainment is taken over by AI slop and AI actors, there will be a premium on people willing to put their real-life, smelly, hairy, bumbling body on the line and to do ridiculous things with it.