Culture

It’s officially Spotify Wrapped season! For the uninitiated, this is the time of year when Spotify subscribers receive their year-end data on what they listened to the most throughout the previous twelve months. The streaming app tells you your top songs, artists, albums, genres and any other cookie they’ve been tracking. Every user’s Spotify Wrapped is packaged up nicely into an immensely shareable infographic that dominates social media for days. I do not share mine because my music listening habits when no one is watching are completely embarrassing! But a lot of people do, usually to show how cool or niche their music or podcast tastes are.

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I plopped on the couch for a quiet evening in and turned on the new Netflix comedy special Natural Selection by Matt Rife. We were both vaguely aware of Rife because he’s posted some videos of his crowd work that have gone viral on social media. Young women in particular seem to like him because he can be quite charming on stage and will openly flirt with female audience members (Gen Z would describe Rife’s charisma as “rizz,” I think). The set was fine but not super memorable, so I was caught by surprise when I recently saw an article on BuzzFeed explaining that Rife’s fans were furious with him over a joke he made regarding domestic violence.

You shouldn’t make a habit out of watching the daily White House press briefings unless you want to get much dumber, but every now and then they are good for some cheap entertainment. On Monday, for example, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre decided to dedicate precious podium time to “Transgender Day of Remembrance.” GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ activist organization, says that Transgender Day of Remembrance is meant to commemorate “transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.” TDOR (they really like their acronyms, huh?) was started in 1999 by a transgender activist in memory of Rita Hester, a transgender woman whose murder remains unsolved. I found it a bit interesting that the catalyst for TDOR was an unsolved murder case.

All of my ladies out there who read this newsletter are probably familiar with the food blog “Half Baked Harvest.” Tieghan Gerard, the thirty-year-old founder and owner of the blog, has posted a cozy and delicious recipe nearly every single day since 2012, inspiring women everywhere to dust off their crockpots and grease their baking pans. Fellas, if the woman in your life suddenly decided to try her hand at pumpkin cinnamon rolls or made white chicken chili for game day, there’s a good chance she snagged the recipe from Half Baked Harvest. Gerard has millions of loyal followers and naturally this has led to criticism from bitter, jealous losers. The New York Times recently managed to snag an interview with Gerard (no, Tieghan, run!

When this newsletter launched in June, it opened with my exclusive report on the disturbing nature of the New York Times’s kids section. Across a handful of issues, which are sent out monthly and tucked into the Sunday edition of the NYT, the NYT for Kids encouraged children to explore their gender identity in online chatrooms, cheered on a child drag queen who had money thrown at him by grown men, insisted that “gender-affirming care” for children is totally safe and saves lives and instructed children to ignore adults who reject the left-wing propaganda in its pages. I’ve still been reading the New York Times for Kids every month and am happy to share that subsequent issues following my report were mostly free of agitprop... until now.

Allow me to introduce you to Sabrina Carpenter, a former Disney actress (red flag #1) and current rising pop star. Carpenter has had two songs on the Billboard Hot 100 this year and opened for Taylor Swift on her history-making Eras Tour. Carpenter’s latest single, “Feather,” has nearly 90 million streams on Spotify. She released the track’s accompanying music video, which already has 2.3 million views on YouTube, on Halloween. Carpenter is petite, blue-eyed and blonde-haired, and her performance outfits leave little to the imagination. Her artist persona is somewhat dependent on the profane; live performances of Carpenter’s song “Nonsense” went viral among Gen Z fans for her ad-libbed, often R-rated outro lyrics.

I’m back! As I mentioned in my last newsletter, my husband and I recently set off on our ten-day honeymoon to Morocco. We went to Casablanca, Meknes, Fez, Marrakesh, the Agafay Desert and Essaouira. I didn’t travel much growing up and so this trip was really special for me. We toured one of the largest mosques in the world and a fifteenth-century synagogue that is still active today, visited the Roman ruins of Volubilis, trekked through the Medinas, haggled in the souk, watched artisans create their handmade crafts with techniques handed down for centuries, rode camels and enjoyed traditional Berber food and music. Before we left for our trip, we fielded a lot of safety concerns.

Peep the new byline! I got married on Saturday and have decided to take my husband’s last name, which is nice because hopefully now there will be no confusion about how to pronounce Athey (for those who always wondered, it has a long “a” sound, but I wasn’t really in the business of correcting people). My husband (still weird to write!) and I first met on a dating app about two and a half years ago. On our first date, when I found out that he was raised Southern Baptist, I warned that I only intended to get married in the Catholic Church. We got engaged last September, my husband converted to Catholicism at this year’s Easter Vigil, and we got married on October 7.

One of the most anticipated films to hit theaters this October is The Exorcist: Believer, a direct sequel to one of the greatest horror movies of all time, The Exorcist, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. Coincidentally, the original film’s director, William Friedkin, passed away just a couple of months ago. In the wake of Friedkin’s death, Matthew Walther reexamined The Exorcist in a guest essay for the New York Times. He posited that the film hinges on the acknowledgment of supernatural evil and the use of longstanding Catholic theology and tradition in defeating it.

It was a tale of two events Tuesday night at Georgetown University, the oldest “Catholic” university in the country and my alma mater. Michael Knowles was set to speak about whether President Joe Biden is more evil than Putin and Xi in an event organized by the Georgetown University College Republicans (GUCR) and Young America’s Foundation (YAF). After GUCR announced the event, left-wing campus groups denounced Knowles due to his alleged transphobia (read: denying that people can — or should! — change their sex). I spoke to a couple of leaders for GUCR who told me they’d been on the receiving end of a lot of online vitriol and that flyers they put up for the event wouldn’t last for more than ten minutes before being ripped down.

Maren Morris, a country music artist who won a Grammy for her debut single “My Church,” announced in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that she is officially leaving the genre. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out! Announcing her departure from country music in the LA FREAKING TIMES should tell you everything you need to know, but let’s dive a bit deeper into why Morris is so upset.  According to Morris, country music is toxic and filled with “misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic” people (really capturing all of the buzzwords there, Maren!) . She apparently got tired of trying to “burn it to the ground and start over,” instead feeling satisfied that country music is “burning itself down.

Today we’re following some good news out of Virginia, which will be holding elections for the state legislature this fall. Republicans are trying to retain control of the General Assembly and flip the State Senate in hopes of getting a “trifecta” — control of both chambers of the state legislature and the governorship — for the first time in a decade. Governor Glenn Youngkin has been incredibly hands-on with the GOP’s efforts and has raised a record amount of money through his associated political action committee, Spirit of Virginia PAC. I recently traveled down to Virginia Beach to attend one of the governor’s “Parents Matter” listening sessions.

There are plenty of reasons to despise TikTok, the most downloaded app in the world and certainly the most popular among teen girls and young women. It poses a national security threat to the US due to its connection to the Chinese Communist Party, which uses it as both spyware and a means of socially engineering our youth. In a previous edition of this newsletter, I discussed the devastating effects that social media use can have on young women, from screen addiction to body image issues and deeper mental health problems.Photo and video-based apps such as TikTok and Instagram provide young women with more reasons to hate themselves than ever before.

It was once said by somebody, and then repeated ad nauseum, that Brian Wilson invented California. Or, at least, the California of our dreams: sunshine, surf, cars, girls, rock ’n’ roll; the bronzed surfer boy, cradling his longboard in one arm and his sun-kissed, golden beach bunny in the other, getting ready to drop in on some tasty swells at Doheny or Rincon before throwing on a Pendelton and cruising down to the hamburger stand in his flathead deuce coupe or ’62 Impala SS with the 409-cubic inch scalloped head W-series. (Or perhaps, her T-Bird.) In much the same way, Jimmy Buffett invented Florida. Or, at least, the Florida of our imaginations: rum, sand, humidity, boats, weed, weirdness.

About ten years on from the first appearance of a San Francisco “poop map,” which documented human waste incidents on the city’s streets, the Bay Area gem is struggling more than ever. It boasts a 25.7 percent office vacancy rate, nearly ten percentage points higher than the average rate across the United States. The city’s population fell significantly during the pandemic. Property crime rates are the highest of any city in the country. The streets are filled with homeless encampments that foster grime, drug abuse, sexual assault and violence. Just a few days ago, fashion retailer Nordstrom closed its five-level store in San Francisco after thirty-five years of business. The store had been a fixture of the city’s downtown area.

Friends from my hometown are often shocked when they come visit me in the DC area and find that many Americans are still adhering to long-expired Covid restrictions. Thankfully I recently moved to the suburbs, but whenever I travel into the city — or even Arlington or Alexandria — for work, it’s not uncommon to see people driving alone in their cars with a mask over their face. People here still wear N95s into the grocery store, “socially distance” and otherwise behave like paranoid hypochondriacs.  We are now more than three years out from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

America’s girls are in a serious crisis. Mental health maladies are becoming more common among all teens, but the problem is particularly acute for young women. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that almost 60 percent of US girls said they felt persistently sad or hopeless. More than twice as many girls as boys reported experiencing poor mental health in the past thirty days. And 30 percent of high school girls in America said they were seriously considering suicide, while 13 percent have already made an attempt on their life, almost twice the rate of boys.

Trust in the public healthcare system declined among Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s no wonder: public health bureaucrats pushed for various insane policies that ran counter to common sense, admitted to deceiving the American people and worked to shutter debate surrounding the national and global coronavirus response. But instead of doing everything they can to restore trust in the system (and prove that they’re still deserving of it), government officials and medical associations have continued to politicize the healthcare field, sowing discord between patients and their doctors.  A consistent theme throughout the pandemic was that while Americans were less likely to trust the medical establishment, they mostly liked their personal doctors.

The entertainment world has been in shock the past couple of weeks because Ariana Grande, the pop artist behind the song “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored,” stole another woman’s husband.  And once again, the mainstream media is on a mission to convince us that we’re not allowed to blame women when they get involved in extramarital affairs.  Grande, a Grammy award-winning singer and former Nickelodeon actress, has reportedly been dating her co-star in the upcoming Wicked movie adaptation. The only problem is that both Grande and the co-star, Ethan Slater, are married.  It’s a classic on-set Hollywood drama (even though the movie is filming in England).

Cuss out a cop, spit in his faceStomp on the flag and light it upYeah, ya think you’re toughWell, try that in a small townSee how far ya make it down the roadAround here, we take care of our own That’s a sampling of the lyrics to “Try That in a Small Town,” the new Jason Aldean single that led left-wing Twitter trolls to try to “cancel” the country music star. Critics claimed the song was racist, particularly because the music video was filmed in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Tennessee (which was the site of a lynching back in 1927) and features news clips of BLM and antifa riots.