Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Madeleine Kearns has two drinks with the mom-osphere influencer who says day cares are “warehouses for kids.” Eli Lake remembers Jesse Jackson’s greatest speech. The first round of ads has landed in our matchmaking service! But first, assistant editor Josh Code on a dark chapter in his life. . .
I started smoking weed when I was a junior in high school, and later moved on to prescription pills. The drugs derailed my life. I lied to my family, made friends who cared more about expensive bongs than good grades, and failed to get into any of the colleges I applied to.
This was back in 2017, in California, which had just voted to legalize marijuana. In the years since, other states have followed suit, weed has gotten more potent, and a lot of stories about kids ruining their lives with pot have followed. Across America, parents find themselves asking: What are you supposed to do when your son disengages with society? When your daughter gives up on life?
Some people are fine with their kids passing around a bong in the backyard. Others may not like having a stoner for a son but they can’t fight the instinct to keep bailing him out. And then there are the parents like mine, the parents who say enough is enough.
After graduating from high school, I received an email from my parents, telling me I had to move out of my childhood home. The deadline was nonnegotiable: I had two months.
On my best days, I am grateful for what they did. But the years that followed weren’t easy. This is a story about what happens after the door shuts behind you. It’s a story about my hometown, Palo Alto, where kids crack under pressure, succumbing to addiction—or worse. It’s a story about how easy it is to check out and, more than anything, it’s about what it takes to come back.
—Josh Code
Two Drinks with. . . a Warrior in the Mommy Wars |
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Erica Komisar, psychoanalyst and crusader in the mommy wars, is known for her zingers that go viral on social media. She says day cares are “warehouses for children,” sleep training is “damaging,” and night nurses are a “narcissistic trend.” New mom Madeleine Kearns met her—and her cockapoo, Chester—in her Manhattan condo, and asked: Does it bother her that a lot of what she says makes working moms feel guilty? “The kind of guilt that most mothers feel is warranted,” said Komisar. | | |
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Things Worth Remembering: The Day Jesse Jackson Asked for Forgiveness |
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This week, the civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson passed away at 84. In the latest installment of Things Worth Remembering, Eli Lake recalls “the grace he exuded in one of his hardest moments,” and the virtue with which he delivered one of America’s greatest apologies. “If there were occasions when my grape turned into a raisin. . .please forgive me,” Jackson asked. “Charge it to my head and not to my heart.” | | |
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Can We Stop Trying to Cancel the ’00s? |
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Take a pop-culture product from roughly two decades ago, point out how unsavory it was in retrospect, make the viewer feel somehow complicit, then offer some fairly tepid insight from behind the scenes. This is the playbook Netflix documentaries have been following for a while now—most recently with a show about “America’s Next Top Model.” River Page explains why it fails in this week’s Second Thought, before recommending something that’s worth your time: a baby monkey in Japan. | | |
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This week, we’ve published plenty of other culture pieces this week, including . .
