Everyone Thinks Lindsay Clancy Killed Her Kids. Except Women Online.

Another summer, another high-profile trial for everyone to lose their mind over. There was Boston’s Karen Read in 2024, Amber Heard and Johnny Depp’s battle over who abused who worse a few years before that, and now, there’s the case of Lindsay Clancy.

Clancy, whose legal team says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, strangled her three children to death in the basement of her Massachusetts home in early 2023, and neither she nor her lawyers deny that. The murder trial that’s taking place now is to ascertain whether Clancy should spend the rest of her life in prison, or in a mental institution. But on some deep and feminine corners of the internet, there is a chorus growing who believe that Clancy is innocent, and allege that her husband, Patrick, is the one who committed the unspeakable crime.

And then there is a wider, concentric circle of women who believe that Clancy did the murders, but want to stand in solidarity with her. “I could have been Lindsay. Any one of us could have been,” wrote one woman in her defense, echoing a recurring theme. I don’t actually think that’s true; most people are not actually capable of, or at risk of, doing what Clancy did.

The whole Clancy phenomenon has me thinking about the trial of the decade, which happened the year I was born. O.J. Simpson was acquitted of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman after a trial that caught the world’s attention. Back then, there was a race divide about the trial: In one survey, 70 percent of white people thought O.J. did it, while a proportional share of black respondents, 70 percent, said he didn’t. In 1995, the O.J. case became a lightning rod for arguments about race and the criminal justice system; today, Clancy is becoming a proxy for one about gender—specifically, the burden we put on mothers, and how we deal with it when they break.

Dan Ahdoot and I talked Lindsay Clancy, plus Open AI boss Dario Amodei’s mysterious wife, during this week’s episode of Second Thought. You can listen to it here, or watch below:

The Presidential Clinger

President Donald Trump’s dramatic escape from Turkey—Air Force One was under threat from Iran, so Trump got spirited to a military jet, via a catering cart—has minted a new celebrity within the POTUS-verse. Her name is Natalie Harp. She was with Trump in the cart in Turkey, and also hustling across a golf course in Scotland and tucked into the trunk of his SUV on his way to the courthouse in New York. In fact, it seems that she’s by his side every other minute of his second presidency.

The 35-year-old’s official titles include both special and executive assistant to the president but she’s also informally known as “the human printer” since she’s tasked with handing the president printouts of positive news articles about him. West Wingers report that she’s his most loyal aide and that if you want to get to the president, you gotta go through Natalie.

As I’ve noted before, Melania seems not very interested in performing the duties of the First Lady. And who could blame her? No one wants to be picking at a Continental breakfast with the Finnish ambassador when you could be doing damage to the Amex at the boutiques in Palm Beach. So it would seem Harp is a good match for Trump, except for the fact that she’s sending him weird notes about “I want things to always be right between us,” and she had infatuations with other presidents, like George W. Bush, according to her brother, Preston.

“Trump is everything that my mom taught us to respect,” Preston told CNN. He’s in a trucker hat, with long hair and an anti-war poster on his wall. His message to Natalie was: “I love you. I hope that you change and wake up and realize that everybody on this earth is part of the human family, and no country is better than any other country.” Huh?

I’m always fascinated by siblings who go, with the same force, in totally different directions. It begs the question: Where are Mr. and Mrs. Harp in all of this?

A Word on Travel . . .

Everyone seems to be traveling, all the time. To Japan, the Hamptons, the Berkshires, everywhere in Europe. Scroll on any social media and you’ll be hit with stunning views, perfect meals, and charming cobbled streets; all evidence, we’re meant to understand, implicitly, of a summer well spent.

Instead of a leisure activity that people find fun, traveling has become a virtue in and of itself and a rite that more and more people are availing themselves of, boomers and Gen Zers alike. Italy and Spain are reportedly stretched to their tourism limits, and locals all over Europe are incensed by the glut of American visitors and their very blue jeans and green cash.

But just as travel is becoming easier than ever, the experience of being in a foreign country has been hollowed out. There’s barely such a thing, in the internet age, of a truly exotic, untouched place. Translation apps vaporize the language barrier, and social media makes it so your itinerary is written before you arrive. Hotels are insanely expensive; getting a reservation is a catfight, and on top of that, you have to brave the airports and janky flights just for the chance to elbow someone out of the way to see a sunset. In how many zip codes must you sample the hamachi crudo?

Even the movie of the summer, The Odyssey, is about an intractable journey—the most infamous shlep around the Mediterranean that’s ever occurred—though certainly not the only one that took place over the last few months.

I tried to do my own summer jaunt, to Napa Valley. While I can’t deny the wine was great and the views beautiful, hours after I was wandering a vineyard, I was trudging through the Hilton lobby on an unexpected layover in Chicago, begging an AI agent to help me book a hotel. And I was thinking to myself, Was all this even worth it?

More often than not, I think the answer is no. Not least because a lot of the things we travel for—good food, an opportunity to connect with people you love, having fun outside—are all available at home, sans high expectations and inevitable disappointments. Let me know where I should go to cure myself of my aversion to traveling in the comments.

Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About:

For more on the case of the summer: Kat Rosenfield smartly broke down what’s happening on both the berserk left and right when it comes to Lindsay Clancy, and why women are wont to deny the true parts of true crime. “The temptation is understandable to imagine this woman as an innocent victim, be it of a plotting husband or a diabolical disease—and yet, to indulge it is to elide the opportunity of true empathy,” writes Kat.

What if America went completely dark? That might sound like the stuff of science fiction—or a horror movie, but it could be closer than we think. Grid technologists are sounding the alarm about the weaknesses inside our infrastructure, specifically the handmade transformers that are the “industrial equivalent of a Fabergé egg.” My prediction? A big wave of prepping—for an AI apocalypse, rolling blackouts, communication failures, you name it—and soon.

Delsia Bare and her mother, Ida Huddleston, are waging a war against data centers in their small town of Maysville, Kentucky. They just turned down an AI company’s $26 million offer to buy their land, telling them to quote, “kick rocks.” Some of their neighbors are enraged that the two refused a boost to their community’s economy—but they’re holding the line in the name of Jesus. “He said to occupy, wherever you’re standing, you occupy until he returns,” Bare said. “If I step off of this piece of property and it becomes something for an AI hub, then I have failed to occupy and I can be held accountable for that on the Judgment hour.” Rock on, ladies.