Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, River Page reviews Louis Theroux’s futile attempt to expose the manosphere. Once (and future?) presidential candidate Andrew Yang tells us mass AI unemployment could end in brutal revolution. America’s forgotten founding mother. And more!

But first: It’s Oscars weekend!

The votes are cast. The predictions made. The dresses fitted. It’s almost time for the lights, the camera, the action of the 98th Academy Awards. The ceremony starts at 7 p.m. ET on Sunday, and to get you ready, we have a fresh piece on each of the three front-runners for Best Picture. You won’t read these takes anywhere else.

First up: Liel Leibovitz takes aim at One Battle After Another, which, according to Polymarket, has a 75 percent chance of bagging the top prize. And yet, according to Liel, Paul Thomas Anderson’s blockbuster is an ugly action movie about some progressives going to war against a version of ICE, and deserves none of the accolades it has scooped up.

He writes: “It feels like the sort of thing written by a committee of socialist college sophomores cracking each other up by casting the rapper Junglepussy—she plays a character by the same name—whose sole purpose is to deliver some silly speech about black power before disappearing from the action altogether 20 minutes in.”

Bishop Robert Barron was himself disappointed by Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which is One Battle’s closest competitor. A vampire movie set in the Jim Crow South, it had the ingredients to be great: epic acting, beautiful cinematography. But, the bishop writes, the underlying morality of the movie—that it’s possible to “divide the world into the easy binary of oppressor and oppressed, good guys and bad guys”—troubled him.

“This sort of moral reductionism obscures the dramatic tension between good and evil that all of us find in ourselves,” he writes.

And finally, a celebration: of Marty Supreme, a film that turns a ping-pong tournament into the fight of one man’s life. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, who is amoral, gifted, reckless—and a breath of fresh air for Rich Cohen, author of Tough Jews.

“I went through my 20s with a beef,” writes Cohen. “I didn’t like how Jews were portrayed in pop culture, or in the minds of my friends”—that is, as suitable husbands and good math students. That’s why he enjoyed watching this corrupt, womanizing protagonist—a Jew who shockingly says, of an upcoming match against a Holocaust survivor named Béla Kletzki, “I’m basically gonna do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn’t.”

“At a time when there is an attempt to redefine what it means to be Jewish, to characterize us en masse, to turn us into villains, Marty Supreme is a gift,” writes Cohen. “Not because it tries to defend Jews or depict them as do-gooders. But because it doesn’t.”

Two Drinks with . . . Andrew Yang, Who Isn’t Happy About Being Right

River Page

In the 2020 Democratic primary, a relatively unknown New York businessman started yelling about how AI was going to take Americans’ jobs at a massive scale—and how if he were president, he’d introduce a $1,000-a-month universal basic income. He lost. But every day, Andrew Yang seems more prescient. So last week, the once-skeptical River Page ate crow—and also calamari—with Yang in Manhattan. They talked about the failures of the Democrats, his new memoir (“Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?”), and whether he’ll run for the top job again. Read full story

Louis Theroux’s Pointless Manosphere Documentary

River Page

Is it possible to actually uncover a deep truth about misogynistic influencers who spend eight hours a day sharing their every passing thought? When he’s not drinking with ex-Democrats, River Page is The Free Press’s brain rot correspondent, and in this week’s Second Thought, he reviews Louis Theroux’s buzzy but bad new Netflix documentary about the manosphere—which tells us nothing new. He also observes a strange phenomenon: All over the internet, the online right is “transvestigating” members of its own tribe. Anons are calling Laura Loomer “Larry.” What’s going on? Read full story

Things Worth Remembering: Our Founding Mother

Norah O'Donnell

At the very bottom of a 1777 version of the Declaration of Independence appears a small but extraordinary line: “Printed by Mary Katharine Goddard.” Goddard, the country’s first female postmaster, didn’t have to include her name; indeed, it meant taking on tremendous risk. But it also meant that hers became the only woman’s name ever to appear on our nation’s founding document. In this week’s installment of Things Worth Remembering, Norah O’Donnell tells the story of our forgotten founding mother, as excerpted from her new book, “We the Women.” Read full story

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