Harry and Meghan’s Awkward Homecoming. Chris Christie on ‘The Godfather.’ Plus. . .
Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Chris Christie explains why men love “The Godfather.” Suzy Weiss argues that Lindsay Clancy is “O.J. for white women.” Kat Rosenfield on the strange case of “dog racism.” And more!
But first: Harry and Meghan get mugged by reality . . .
And so farewell, America’s prince.
This week, Meghan Markle and Harry Mountbatten-Windsor announced that, after six years making jam and reality shows in a Montecito mansion, they’re moving back to the United Kingdom, a country they once characterized as a racist hellhole.
“This, at a moment when progressives are laughing off the deranged things they said in 2020,” writes Kara Kennedy in today’s lead essay, “is the ultimate example of getting mugged by reality.”
When they left England in 2020, Prince Harry claimed it was because of the media’s “ruthless campaign” against his mixed-race wife. “The UK press is bigoted,” he told Oprah Winfrey. Meghan, meanwhile, said she wanted to live in a country where reporters wouldn’t take pictures of her kids. “That doesn’t make me obsessed with privacy,” she said. “That makes me a strong and good parent protecting my child.”
In America, Meghan tried to become a podcaster, and failed. Infamously, she started selling jam. Meanwhile, Harry spent a lot of his time flying back to the UK to appear in various courtrooms, where he waged a very expensive legal battle against several newspaper groups he claimed had invaded his privacy.
The last of these battles ended last month, when a judge threw out the prince’s allegations about the Daily Mail. This week, he was one of the claimants ordered to pay the paper $13 million in compensation. Happily, at almost exactly the same moment—perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not—it was reported that “sources say” Meghan has a “top secret” acting job lined up in England.
Still, why are these crusaders, these good, strong parents, coming home at this moment? In her essay, Kara argues that it’s nothing to do with their values and everything to do with cash. “They’ve exhausted their Hollywood handouts,” she writes. “In the end, it didn’t matter what the Sussexes’ mission statement was: standing up to racism or straightening out the press or turning the whole creaking shell of the monarchy on its head. When the money stops coming in, they can’t afford to be principled.”
Read the full piece here:
Second Thought
Why has TikTok decided that Lindsay Clancy, the woman who has admitted to strangling her three children to death, must be protected at all costs? Because, says Suzy Weiss, this exhausted mother has become “O.J. for white women.”
With her co-host, Dan Ahdoot, Suzy also has her say on rumors that the president is having an affair with his executive assistant, Natalie Harp (otherwise known as “the human printer” because she prints out nice online comments about Donald Trump to show him), plus Matthew McConaughey’s meeting with the pope, and the Kentucky family who turned down $26 million from a company that wants to build a data center on their land, because Jesus preaches we should occupy the land we’re on.
You won’t want to miss this episode. Watch it below—or listen wherever you get your podcasts!
This week, Kat Rosenfield wrote an essential piece about Lindsay Clancy; Carrie McKean reported on the Texans fighting against a border wall in paradise; and Arthur Brooks explained why women prefer it when men make the first move . . .
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How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked Nick Clairmont for his recommendations . . .
📚Read . . . Shop Class as Soulcraft by the “philosopher-mechanic” Matthew Crawford. When this book came out in 2009, it was one of those freakishly runaway bestsellers that the world of nonfiction publishing sometimes spits out, talked about over dinner tables and named on Notable Books lists. Not to be a popular nonfiction hipster, but books like that are often crowd-pleasing because they’re finding some kind of lowest common denominator in readers’ demands, and many should, in my opinion, be ignored. Imagine my surprise when, on a recent read, this book turned out to be deeper, more well-written, and a lot more fun than it had any right to be. And given that it’s about the satisfaction of manual work in a digital world, it’s maybe even more timely today, in the age of AI.
📺Watch . . . Silo, on Apple TV, is currently approaching the end of its third and penultimate season. If you feel like there is a bewildering array of underground bunker–based televisual content these days (Fallout, Paradise), I get where you’re coming from. Maybe it’s because it’s a way to portray modern life with a plausible and out-of-sight reason why the characters aren’t looking at their phones all the time. I don’t know; I’m not a producer. I just know this one has me hooked. It’s smart, interesting to look at, and, if you start now, you’ll be caught up when the final season runs. It’s always good, after all, when a puzzle-box show actually has a scheduled end, so it doesn’t go all Lost on us.
🌳 Eat . . . Pawpaws! America’s own large fruit, which is native to the East Coast and can grow, usually near water, from the Great Lakes on down to Florida. These tropical-tasting, soft, yellow, mushy delights are most prevalent in the mid-Atlantic region and Appalachia, where I live, and they start getting ripe right around . . . now. In late August on the Shenandoah, you can see kayakers and canoers leaning awkwardly toward the bank, picking this most American fruit, which is sort of like a banana and a mango and something else you can’t name had a baby.
That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.