A couple of years ago, I asked my Twitter followers for help curating some high-quality, not kitschy, thought-provoking films. It’s a thread that surprised me when it blew up, but perhaps it shouldn’t have: we all know how hard it is to find entertainment that qualifies as art, let alone stands on its artistic merits rather than the soft-core pornography that floats most stuff on Netflix. From that thread, I’ve gathered together my favorite four, each of which is ripe fruit for thought and discussion.

Egg-freezing boomed during the pandemic. Precipitated by the pause on dating life that many women in their late twenties counted on to find a husband, and facilitated by an aggressive new marketing push on social media, women took their gnawing fear to Big Pharma, who promised an alchemical peace with little to no side effects. Of course, this wasn’t the only thing pharmaceutical companies lied about at the time or any time before. But as experimental fertility procedures become a more “normal” option for women, the mendacious secrecy about its effects on the female body will catch women off guard. Nobody thinks that the procedure marketed to “preserve your fertility” might kill your fertility. But, as my most recent guest on Girlboss, Interrupted explains, it can and, not infrequently, it does.

A little over a year ago, Mary Harrington wrote in Unherd that modest fashion was having a comeback. In British department stores for middle-class women, high-neck midi dresses and loose-fitting sportswear currently take up the most available shelf space. She explains: “The [traditional] turn in high-street womenswear feels like a mutiny against the long-unchallenged belief that clothing is a vector for self-expression—an idea that usually precedes someone trying to sell you something uncomfortable and expensive.” We can easily detect a similar change in America in woke storefronts like H&M, Old Navy, and the classic department stores, but especially in the explosion of modest boutiques, usually that advertise through social media.

High level political betrayal by apparent friends, siblings, etc is not only perennial, it’s Shakespearian, it’s Biblical…and over time, it’s hitting closer and closer to home

‘Staying together for the kids’ was once the slogan of a marriage in its death throes whose contractually implicated members recognized that the fruit of the union would be directly damaged by its dissolution. Call it no-fault divorce, or the culture of narcissism, or if you can’t see anything wrong with it, cultural evolution, but there’s no denying: this idea that there are goods higher than “self-love” (interchangeably “self-expression,” “self-acceptance,” “self-gratification”) is no longer the norm, especially when it comes to marriage. Cavallari simply says the quiet part out loud. ‘Staying together for the kids’ has been replaced by endless introspection and self-focus, wrapped in the cloak of a therapeutic ‘healing journey.’

The debut novel of Pentagon speechwriter Bill Rivers, the story is set in the sweltering summer of 1968–amid the political and social chaos that presaged our own–observing a young boy’s efforts to save his brother from the Vietnam draft and his family homestead from crooked local politicians.

As Valentine’s Day rounds the corner, as you are perusing our Align Valentine’s Day gift guide for him or her, your mind may begin to wander to the topic of love. You may wonder in stunned gratitude at your own luck in finding a spouse as, over the years, marriage rates continue to fall. If single, you may begin to meditate on the apparent difficulty of the current situation: why are relationships so difficult to achieve? to maintain? to improve? to appreciate?

In the chapter “Soul Dysphoria” from his forthcoming book How to Save the West, Spencer Klavan clearly and compassionately posits that liberal feminism, transgenderism, and transhumanism connect by a single thread: inordinate hatred of the human body. Klavan suggests that these ideological movements exist on a spectrum defined by the desire to transcend the limitations of the physical body, differing only in the relatively superficial matter of subject.

In a healthy society, would everyone and their mother need a complicated cocktail of uppers and downers just to get through the day? Of course not, and we obviously don’t live in a healthy society. Around 13% of Americans take antidepressants, and their use is growing around the world. The long-term use of the drugs is also increasing, year after year. In 2000, around 5 million Americans had been taking antidepressants for five years or more. By 2018, this had increased to 15.5 million. At the same point, almost 25 million adults had been taking antidepressants for more than two years, a 60 percent increase from 2010.

For people who find mainstream politics, usually covered in woke detritus, repulsive, there is a certain temptation to take on the precise inverse version of the thing that most offends you in order to fight it. Don’t like those banshee Democrats whose entire identity is based on the fake news they mined on their side of the internet? Reflexively, the impulse to fight back on the existing terms bubbles up: beat them at their own game! We are better posters! We have better information! We have better arguments! So we simply must take to that comments section and ATTACK! This is how we win! While those sentiments about the superiority of conservative thought might be gratifying, this perpetually embattled position is one of a loser.