Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Spencer Klavan celebrates the return of “Glee.” Liel Leibovitz on the new documentary that goes inside the Mossad. Suzy Weiss on the rumors that the rapper whose ass Trump complimented is going to be the next press secretary. And more!
But first: Is it safe to celebrate Halloween?
The spookiest night of the year is here. But should you let your kids hit the streets to trick or treat?
“I never wanted to be one of those uncool, Ned Flanders-like people who doesn’t celebrate Halloween,” writes Rod Dreher in his essay today. “But I became just that. Here’s my advice: Never become friends with working exorcists if you wish to preserve your ability to enjoy the holiday.”
A Catholic priest once told him that for Satanists, Halloween is “their big holiday, their Easter, so to speak.” An exorcist deep in the swamps of Louisiana explained that, on this night each year, the devil-worshippers of the bayou conduct rituals that sometimes involve human sacrifice. When he fact-checked this with an occult crimes investigator at the Baton Rouge Police Department, the sergeant told him to believe what he heard.
“It’s easy to sit in the well-ordered environment of a big city, all straight lines and grids, where the lights never go out, and think these are just tales,” acknowledges Rod. We live in an age where most of us are trained to believe from birth that everything can be measured and explained; there’s no such thing as spirits.
And yet, he writes, “human beings need a paradigm to understand dark and light, good and evil, and the paranormal things that many see.” In post-Christian America, some are turning to the oldest churches, the Orthodox and the Catholic, to make sense of it; others are turning to something darker.
“In our neighborhood, the feast of darkness has taken on more macabre tones, skeletons, horror, tombs, and fear,” an Orthodox exorcist in Virginia told Rod. “Increasingly, over the decades of my life, it’s no longer about giving children candy; it’s more about desensitizing and normalizing evil.”
Rod will be staying home tonight—because he’s just met too many people who’ve had brushes with demons to believe that they’re not real.
Read Rod’s spooky story here:
Rod’s worried about your kids’ souls. But online, there’s plenty of people who are worried about their mortal flesh. There are abundant risks to celebrating Halloween, according to the momosphere. For example, did you know that a baby once got salmonella from raw pumpkin?
In our second spooky season offering, Lenore Skenazy, a big advocate of free-range parenting, rolls her eyes at this obsession with the worst-case scenario.
“Parents magazine warns that if you’re going to talk to your kids about candy consumption on Halloween, make sure to do it the right way or they will develop an eating disorder,” she observes—adding that this publication recommends telling your kid: “There are foods that nourish our bodies that we need daily. However, there are other foods that we eat less often for pleasure or celebrations such as Halloween candy or birthday cake.”
To quote Lenore: “That sounds like a totally natural and conversational thing to say to your child.”
Halloween was once the pinnacle of freedom for kids—the night of the year when they could walk off down the street unsupervised, dressed as their favorite film character. When we stop them from doing this, in the name of safety, they lose something important: “their ability to be part of the big, wide, witch-and-Reese’s-filled world.”
Read her full piece here:
Second Thought
Last weekend, the president told the crowd at a rally in Michigan that the rapper Nicki Minaj has “one hell of a beautiful ass”—then asked her to stand up, so everyone could admire it. The latest episode of Second Thought asks: Does this mean she’s going to be the next White House press secretary? Suzy, Dan Ahdoot, and special guest Matthew Broussard break down her prospects, plus the premise of the new movie Wicker, in which a spinster marries a man made of the eponymous substance. This is a sign that we’ve lost faith in modern men, says Suzy. “Women would rather marry a basket.”
Click below to watch the episode, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
This week, the YouTuber Casey Neistat wrote about running the New York City Marathon, year after year after year; Kara Kennedy wrote about the mommy bloggers who say you can’t leave your toddler with another adult for the night; and Kat Rosenfield wrote about yet another case of the media empathizing with a woman who killed her toddler. Catch up here:
Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!
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How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our editor Rick Brooks for his recommendations . . .
📺Watch . . . It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. This wasn’t the first prime-time holiday show to feature Charles M. Schulz’s characters from Peanuts, but I think it’s the best one. There might be no better life lesson than the scene where the gang goes trick-or-treating. Will the next random adult who opens the door like my Halloween costume? How many pieces of candy will I get? Am I good enough? Of course, we all know what happens to Charlie Brown. The lesson is: Sometimes all you can do in life is go to the next house, the one after that, and so on until you finally get that popcorn ball.
🍺Drink . . . a Genesee beer. This is not a beer that will make you a more refined person or send your mind on a journey for the perfect words to describe its taste, mouthfeel, and body. (I found those terms in the “Beer for Dummies Cheat Sheet.”) Brewed in Rochester, New York, for more than a century, Genesee goes down easy, urges you to pop open another one, and brings back memories of my grandfather. He had a hard life, an incredible life, filled with stories that I am starting to tell my own children. One of the best stories is how three generations of us sat around a fire one night during the last few years of his life, bullshitting and reminiscing until the Genesee cans were piled high.
🏃Run . . . the New York City Marathon. Everyone says that this is the best day of the year in New York City, which must be true because no one in New York agrees about anything. I am not running the marathon on Sunday because I love running. I hate running. What I love are all the highs and lows: the view of Manhattan from the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge at the start, followed by the thought, Holy shit! I need to get ALL THE WAY OVER THERE?; what it feels like to own the streets while trying not to trip over the 60,000 other marathoners; and especially the strangers who scream “You’ve got this!” and “You look amazing!” even when I absolutely do not. See you at the finish line. (And give a shout-out to Free Presser Danya Jacobs, who is running her first New York City Marathon and will crush it!)
That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.
