Playboy

Friday

Mike Coté

Oliver North was ahead of his time

In a fascinating blast from the past, two of the main figures in the biggest political scandal of the 1980s, Iran-Contra, have now married. Former National Security Council member Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and his ex-secretary Fawn Hall tied the knot privately last month in Virginia, after it was reported they reconnected at the funeral of North’s late wife in 2024. The pair were key figures in the Reagan-era scandal, with North running the arms-for-hostages operation and Hall providing assistance in smuggling documents, avoiding public scrutiny, and shredding evidence. Hall was granted immunity for her testimony, while North was convicted of three criminal offenses before they were overturned on appeal.

Oliver North

Thursday

Bridget Phetasy

How the Democrats Bud Lighted their brand

Last spring, a marketing grunt at Bud Light sent TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman, custom cans of beer featuring her picture. As intended, Mulvaney posted about the beer on social media, igniting a firestorm and a boycott of the brand. Men revolted. Bars stopped serving it. Bud Light lost its status as the top-selling beer in America; it’s only back up to number three today. I became aware of the left’s man problem when I wrote for Playboy back in 2015. When I’d ask my audience to submit their thoughts about hair loss, erectile dysfunction or dating, I would often receive thousand-word screeds, with a “thank you for actually caring” theme. Thank you for listening. Thank you for writing about men like we matter.

budweiser

Friday

Cockburn

New WSJ chief stunned by so-called American ‘work ethic’

Emma Tucker has had her work cut out for her since she was moved from London to New York, and from the editorship of the Sunday Times to the helm of the Wall Street Journal. The step up to the pride of Murdoch’s newspaper stable from its plucky British cousin was enough of a challenge. Then Evan Gershkovich was arrested by Vladimir Putin’s goons, putting the paper’s leadership into full-blown crisis-management mode. Cockburn understands that the flat-out Tucker has been underwhelmed by the work ethic of her new American colleagues. “What do they all do all day?” she is reportedly prone to wondering out loud.

Wall Street Journal

Saturday

Mitchell Jackson

There’s more to Pamela Anderson than Playboy and sex tapes

Pamela Anderson cites Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the template for her memoir, Love, Pamela. The pop literary critic’s analysis of mythical heroes famously inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars. As Lucas deconstructs the heroes of western literature, Anderson dismantles the banal Madonna/whore template that has dominated tabloid coverage of her life. Unfortunately, Anderson supplants one boring motif with an even more tedious one: the archetype of the celebutante victim.

Pamela

Friday

Alexander Larman

The grand return of Pamela Anderson

The recent Golden Globe awards saw the Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy, a fictionalized account of the theft of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s notorious sex tape, lose out to The White Lotus. It wasn’t much of a surprise. Whether or not you thought the second series of The White Lotus was a worthy successor to the first, it was still much-discussed water-cooler television in a way that Pam & Tommy simply wasn’t. Yet perhaps there was another consideration at play. 2023 marks the grand return of Pamela Anderson — if, of course, she ever went away. She refused to cooperate with the production of the miniseries, and it’s now clear she didn’t want it to interfere with her own ambitions.

Friday

Amber Duke

Playboy’s #MeToo problem isn’t Hugh Hefner — it’s porn

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who died in 2017 at the age of ninety-one, is facing renewed allegations of sexual misconduct thanks to the new A&E documentary Secrets of Playboy. Former Playmates said they were subjected to cult-like conditions at the Playboy Mansion. Hefner reportedly plied them with drugs and alcohol to get them to participate in wild sexual activities, and threatened them with revenge porn if they ever tried to leave the mansion. "I watched him, I watched his game. And I watched a lot of girls go through [the Playboy Mansion] gates looking farm-fresh, and leaving looking tired and haggard," former Hef girlfriend Sondra Theodore told the New York Post.  How anyone could be surprised by this is beyond me.

playboy hugh hefner

Wednesday

Bridget Phetasy

Playboy of the western world

During my years writing for Playboy, I never got to meet Hugh Hefner, although I always wanted to. He was one of my heroes when I was just a young entrepreneur with big dreams of building a media empire. However, long before that, Hugh was an idol of mine during my teens because I actually did read Playboy for the articles. It’s how I learned everything I know about sex and men. I pored over every old edition I could find, educating myself as much as I could about the Playboy Philosophy and the American male psyche. Embedded in between the glossy photos of hi-res nipples were Hef’s politics. He championed civil rights, reproductive rights and was an advocate of the First Amendment. I dreamed of one day seeing myself in those sacred pages.

Playboy

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

Katie Hill’s rehabilitation tour is a failure of media ethics

Former congresswoman Katie Hill is currently engaged in one of the biggest public gaslighting campaigns ever seen outside of Trumpworld. And she has the willing assistance of the mainstream media. Since her resignation last October, Hill has been under the cloud of an ethics investigation for abusing her position to have affairs with junior staff members and then using congressional resources to cover her sins up. This includes the payment of a $5,000 bonus to her own campaign finance director, with whom she was also having an affair. Yet somehow, even in the #MeToo era, Hill has become a media darling, both on and off the air. It helps that she’s not a man. In her resignation speech, she blamed a culture of misogyny and bigotry. She blamed a lack of tolerance for bisexuality (Sen.

katie hill

Saturday

Caroline McCarthy

Who counts as a journalist, anyway?

As a young journalist in the mid-2000s, there was the occasional circumstance where I was asked to ‘prove it’: upon showing up to a news event I was covering, whoever ran check-in insisted that I show some press credentials. You know, those badges you see on episodes of Law & Order to denote that someone’s a reporter. (More often than not, the guest star probably holds it up and indignantly yells ‘Press!’ in order to enter a crime scene.) Working for a digital-first outlet – CNET Networks, later acquired by CBS – I never had anything like it except maybe business cards. To me, it seemed like an antiquated request; to the people checking my legitimacy, it was an obvious question.

journalist