Welcome to the Bright Side, a weekly roundup of all the good news and ideas you might have missed from the past week. *** Bone Thugs-N-Harmony just got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If you’re wondering what everyone was doing in 1996, they were listening to the hip-hop group’s hit “Crossroads” on repeat. Now you can snap a selfie with BTNH’s star in front of The Fonda Theatre. (Still holding out for Ginuwine to get a star for “Pony.”) I’m also feeling floral vibes this summer. And casually thinking of starting a GoFundMe to afford the Jasmine Damask Rose candle from Los Angeles brand Flamingo Estate, which I accidentally fell in love with at White’s Mercantile in Franklin, Tennessee. It’s “spendy,” but smells exactly like the fresh-blooming star jasmine that makes even grimy Hollywood streets smell bougie and enchantingly “plantsy.”    View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Flamingo Estate, Los Angeles (@flamingo_estate) I’ve always wondered how fragrance triggers such vivid memories. It turns out that, unique to our other senses, aromas skirt the thalamus relay station in our brains and go straight for the olfactory bulb, which instantly connects with the amygdala and hippocampus. In short, one sniff and you’re transported to the exact moment and feeling of the first time you smelled that smell. Just so I don’t sound like a total snob, I also get a scent-memory from Marlboro cigarette smoke, which reminds me of childhood vacations to the Jersey Shore. (Fuhgeddaboudit!) The girl with Erling Haaland’s face Newsflash: Most of us agree that a sense of humor is one of the most attractive traits. Capitalizing on comedy and genetics, Russian model Anastasia Kostromitina is totally leaning into looking like a man, no doubt a famous one: Norway’s star striker Erling Haaland. She’s taking a timely break from high fashion to pose like the goofiest memes from the World Cup.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Мария (@mariya___kos) Anastasia seems to be having fun with comments jokingly suggesting “Erling” get back to playing soccer, instead of focusing on a modeling career. The son of former pro baller “Alfie” Haaland, Erling has scored seven goals so far in the tournament, and Norway faces England in the quarterfinals on Saturday. In the meantime, even non-soccer fans have fallen in love with Erling’s fluttering lips, “zen celebrations,” kit-coordinating scrunchies, and “cyborg” walk.  When he’s not trying on cowboy hats and boots at Bill’s Western or doing the Viking row, he makes not having eyebrows summer’s hottest look. He deserves that World Cup trophy made of 1.36 million LEGO bricks, or no one does.    Wanna check the “sharkcast” for your next beach vacation? This year’s super El Niño brings warmer tides and sharkier oceans. (Yeah, you’re gonna need a bigger boat.) It’s not yet fully functional everywhere, but a scientific alert system will allow surfers, swimmers, and sharks to co-mingle without reenacting “Sharknado.” The forecast “feels like” dolphins … right?    View this post on Instagram   A post shared by National Geographic (@natgeo) The “sharkcast” concept is long overdue, especially if you’re like me who went surfing — once — and spent the whole time thinking about lurky-loos under the surface as I tried not to look like a juicy seal in my head-to-toe wetsuit. With shark populations on the rise since the ’90s thanks to conservation efforts along U.S. coastlines, text messages about different types of shark sightings, ocean temperatures, and AI-powered SharkEye surveys of great whites could take some of the edge off the galeophobia you get from simply imagining sharks in the deep end of your backyard pool.  Get ChatGPT out of your head. Read that again. We’ll never “cognitive surrender”! Well, we’ll do what we can while we can still think for ourselves. As AI becomes a ubiquitous life hack, let us preserve our most smartest minds.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by freud intensifies (@freud.intensifies) Just like you wouldn’t hire a trainer to lift weights and run on the treadmill for you, the way you utilize AI matters, too. “The goal shouldn’t be to use AI to avoid cognitive effort, it should be to use AI to deepen it,” Anthropic researcher Judy Hanwen Shen advises. AI is awesome at summarizing, generating ideas, and streamlining tedious tasks. But our brains can stop braining and “fall asleep at the wheel” after relying on AI for just 10 minutes. AI isn’t always right, but we’re biased toward thinking it is! Asking follow-up questions and excluding it from creative spaces such as conceptualizing and writing helps preserve our uniquely human executive function. “AI removes the productive struggle through which people develop not only accurate knowledge but accurate self-knowledge,” Carnegie Mellon University researcher Grace Liu notes. “Without opportunities to work independently, people never learn what they are capable of.” Here’s to keeping those robots on their toes. A former homeless teen’s inspiring graduation speech Prince Weeks used to pretend to be sick in the ER just to get something to eat. Now, at 19, he’s inspiring others to go for their dreams by graduating as valedictorian of his class.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) After bouncing around between living situations all over the East Coast, Weeks earned his high school diploma equivalency in two months through the Pathways to Graduation-Staten Island program from the New York City Department of Education. “There’s many times where I could have done the wrong thing to make ends meet, but I didn’t want to go down that path,” he said in his speech. “You will always prosper when you put in the hard work and you show up.” Now employed by LaGuardia Airport as a sanitation tech, he’s saving up for college. Emboldened by his natural love of learning, he hopes to get into science. “Stay determined and never falter,” Weeks told his classmates. “Everyone here has greatness inside of them waiting to be unleashed.”  *** We’re not leaving here without animals! Here’s 30 seconds of baby Tibetan foxes that will have me booking a trip to Nepal by tonight, and Neil the Seal moves his 2,200 pounds surprisingly well on land. I love reading your comments and hearing your stories. Always feel free to email me and share the fun! See you next week — Lauren  This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

The pitch was uneven and poorly maintained. The referees were loath to call most fouls, even the hard ones, so the players dug into one another. The player wearing 20 for the away team and the player wearing 2 for the home team quickly developed a grudge, despite never having met before, constantly slamming into one another, subtly shoving, not-so-subtly shoving, and tackling. Each was called for fouls, but no yellow or red cards were pulled from the referee’s back pocket. At no point did either player take a dive or dramatize the severity of their falls; instead, they popped back up and plowed right back into the battle. On the drive home, number 20 commented that number 2 was wearing the correct number, because she was a turd. Such was a Saturday when one of your daughters played competitive soccer. Such was the commentary when the player was nine years old, I think, at the time of that match. Even then, though, there was one glaring difference between those little girls and the men who played in the pros: the little girls hated taking dives and flopping about as the professional men are wont to do. It wasn’t specific to my daughter’s club, and this isn’t about girl power, but the art of the flop is perhaps an under-discussed aspect of why soccer hasn’t taken off in the United States. We already have one professional sport in which players are rewarded for flopping — the NBA. We don’t need another, even if the soccer players have a patina of logic to their predilection for thrashing about on the ground like someone just removed one of their vital organs with a spork. FIFA has attempted to address this, but it remains too averse to simply stopping the clock, which is ridiculous. As such, players remain incentivized to flopping about instead of staying engaged in battle. There’s also the truth that stoppage is imprecise, no matter what the governing bodies claim. Anyone who has watched the sport on any level has held their breath as their team drives for that last chance to win — or tie, since ties are okay in soccer, which is a whole other matter — only to hear the final three blows of the whistle just as the offense was advancing toward the opponent’s goal. Apologists for the current system will point out that NFL players also find ways to kill time. Rather than pointless passing, they’ll run the ball to keep the clock moving. They can also kneel at the end of the game. Football teams also play to win, and it’s unseemly to run up the score on a team that’s already lost. Also, football players suffer many more injuries than soccer players, so they don’t need to feign them. That is, male football players suffer more injuries than male soccer players. The concussion rate for girls who play soccer is higher than that of boys. (Number 20 had at least three before retiring to focus on choir.) So not only are the girls flopping less, but they’re getting injured more. Not that concussions are something to be celebrated. Head injuries are bad, and maybe the girls need to learn a little something from the boys about being more focused on self-preservation, though when they get kicked in the head (third concussion) while stopping a goal (no call), that’s when the refs need to remember that one of their jobs, at least in youth sports, is to protect the youth. Encouraging more toughness in soccer might not directly help American teams win or boost widespread interest in the sport. As a country, we may not have the capacity for another sport to become truly popular. However, that shouldn’t stop us from trying. The United States Women’s National Team is the most successful in World Cup history, and its players rarely spend time on the ground. They stay on their feet, inspiring young girls to look up to them, even as men’s teams often expect boys to keep their eyes on the ground. *** Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4

For years, millions of women were told they didn’t have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) because they lacked ovarian cysts. The recent rename to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS) is a course-correct that admits medicine misunderstood the condition all along, and we could not be more pleased. The “cystic” framing has misled patients and clinicians for decades. Women presented classic symptoms — high insulin, stubborn weight, acne, irregular cycles, and facial hair — only to be told their ovaries looked “normal” on an ultrasound, so they didn’t have PMOS. The diagnosis hinged on a feature that isn’t even the central problem, and countless women have spent years suffering with a real condition that was never properly named. The rename puts the truth front and center. PMOS is a multi-system condition affecting metabolism, hormones, skin, and mental health, with insulin resistance at its core, and women will now be seen and diagnosed even when their ovaries look normal on a scan. Roughly one in eight women are diagnosed with this condition, but around 20% of women in their fertile years suffer undiagnosed.   At its roots, PMOS is the same metabolic slowdown postmenopausal women experience with waning hormones and declining muscle, except it’s hitting women in their teens, twenties, and thirties, when their metabolism should be thriving. To every woman with this condition, we see you and know what you’re facing. PMOS is chronic, but there is so much hope. Chronic doesn’t mean unmanageable, and for many women it can go into deep remission.  My (Pearl’s) daughter Meadow was diagnosed as a teenager, and the standard advice of a strict low-carb diet actually made things worse. When she shifted to gentle, fiber-rich carbs, anchored her meals around lean protein, added movement and more veggies, and incorporated a supplement called myo-inositol, her insulin numbers dropped, her cycles normalized, and the condition went into deep remission. It’s an encouraging pattern we’ve seen with other women, too. Some women need more powerful tools, and we’ll get to those. But for every woman with PMOS, lifestyle is the foundation to healing, and we believe four things consistently move the needle. First, anchor every meal in protein, 25 to 30 grams four times a day. Protein is the body’s natural GLP-1 stimulator, the same incretin hormone the new weight-loss drugs mimic. Women with PMOS produce less GLP-1, and protein repairs the body.  Second, don’t shun healthy carbs and get in wise fats. Do ditch sugar and processed foods. When anchored with protein, fiber-rich carbs like beans, legumes, and mid-glycemic fruits such as apples and papaya are an insulin-resistance weapon.  A 2018 University of Saskatchewan trial found that women with PCOS who ate lentils, chickpeas, and beans saw significantly greater drops in insulin response than those on a standard diet. Because insulin resistance makes blood sugar testier, go easy on higher-sugar carbs such as white potatoes, bananas, and grapes until yours is better controlled. Wise fats such as avocado, whole eggs, butter, and coconut oil (in moderation) are crucial for endocrine health. For fat loss, the Trim Healthy Mama approach effectively separates fat-focused and carb-focused meals while keeping protein in every one. Third, add more veggies. Intramuscular fat droplets are one of the largest drivers of insulin resistance. Non-starchy veggies help scrub them out. Fourth, move your body. You don’t have to boot camp yourself to exhaustion, but two to three strength training sessions a week turn muscle into a glucose sponge. Gaining back lean body mass is key to combating insulin resistance. Beware punishing cardio; it spikes cortisol and works against you. A simple rhythm of strength training paired with walking is doable and effective. Finally, a word about the pill. The standard medical answer for PMOS has long been the birth control pill, and visible symptoms can seem to improve with it. But the pill doesn’t fix the underlying condition; it puts the ovaries into a chemically induced menopause. It raises C-reactive protein inflammation and the risk of depression, blood clots, heart disease, and breast cancer, while lowering libido. It can also worsen thyroid problems—a real concern for women with PMOS, who already trend low on thyroid and on the incretin hormones that regulate appetite and blood sugar. For women whose symptoms don’t yield to lifestyle changes alone, three tools are worth discussing with your doctor. First, get a full thyroid panel. Most doctors stop at TSH and T4, but women with PMOS need free T3 and Reverse T3 measured too. Restoring thyroid function with the right hormone support can be a game-changer. Second, ask about bioidentical progesterone, which some endocrinologists believe may help the brain and body restore normal rhythms disrupted by PMOS, with the bonus of tamping down the hormonal cascade that drives acne. Third, a small, carefully prescribed dose of a GLP-1 medication can fill the gap when the body isn’t making enough on its own — a bridge, not a crutch. Used wisely, these tools meet the body where it is. PMOS is real. But so is the room to heal, and women deserve to hear that too. *** Pearl Barrett and Serene Allison are the founders of Trim Healthy Mama and New York Times bestselling authors of the forthcoming title “The 7 Skills to Lasting Health.” This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Every woman struggling with infertility deserves to know what’s wrong with her body before someone sells her a $30,000 workaround. That conviction is my life’s work. Yesterday, it landed my homemade butter in The New York Times. The profile made sure to note my homemade raw milk butter — a “MAHA elixir,” as they called it — alongside our sourdough, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and my request to be called “Mrs. Waters.” My actual work promoting root-cause care for infertility received less airtime, unless you count the academic naysayers quoted throughout. Restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), something I “evangelize,” was framed as a scare-quote “natural” approach that “many medical experts argue may give false hope.” One reproductive endocrinologist dismissed it as “essentially a repackaging” of standard fertility care, while others allege RRM is a backdoor scheme to steer couples away from IVF “until it is too late.” Notice the trick. RRM is simultaneously an ideology with no clinical basis and care that fertility clinics already provide. Both cannot be true. Either it’s just an ideology, or they already offer it. The reality is neither: RRM is not an ideology (the medical approach has been around since the 1970s, or so), and fertility clinics are not offering it, which is perhaps why more and more patients are rethinking the “one-size-fits-all” model of IVF in favor of personalized approaches to treating the underlying causes of their infertility. When I joined Heritage in 2022, I pitched them on the idea of building out a conservative policy platform addressing reproductive technology, infertility, and promoting the health of men, women, and babies. At the time, it was a niche issue, to say the least. I had an intuition that it would become a major one, and in 2024, right as the presidential election cycle reached a fever pitch, that hunch paid off. With the Alabama Supreme Court decision — which declared frozen human embryos are persons in the case of a Wrongful Death of a Minor suit — IVF moved to the forefront of the political debate, with both parties positioning themselves as the “pro-family, pro-IVF” side. What quickly became apparent then, and is the basis of my work now, is that even if social conservatives managed to enact protections for parents and human embryos undergoing IVF, or even if others managed to enact an IVF mandate, both approaches would fail to answer the deeper and far more consequential question: how do we help couples who are dealing with infertility have the children they desire? To unpack this, it is helpful to begin with what infertility is. Infertility is not a standalone disease or condition. It doesn’t present itself like a cancer tumor, heart disease, or a ruptured appendix. Infertility is a symptom of underlying conditions such as endometriosis, PMOS, thyroid dysfunction, insulin resistance, and hormonal imbalances in women, or low sperm count, low sperm motility, and other lifestyle factors in men. And, unlike the impression one often has, the burden is shared roughly equally between men and women, with research finding an average of four or more such conditions in one or both partners when a couple is diagnosed. That’s why restorative reproductive medicine works with the body to diagnose and treat these underlying causes, relying on cycle tracking, targeted lab testing, lifestyle interventions, medical and hormonal therapies, and corrective surgeries to restore natural fertility for both men and women. And, unlike IVF, which bypasses the body to create human embryos, RRM works to improve egg and sperm quality, decrease miscarriage rates, balance hormone levels, and optimize a woman’s body to support the child in utero. And, despite the claims made by dissenters in the article, there is a large and growing body of clinical evidence to back this up. In an Irish general-practice study of 1,239 couples, most of whom had been trying to conceive for over a year, such restorative treatment produced a 52.8% live-birth rate over two years. An international study spanning 10 clinics in four countries found 44% of couples achieved a live birth despite averaging nearly five diagnoses per couple. In one of the largest cohorts studied, 62.1% of couples took home a baby after a median of 11 months. In another study, among women who had already failed IVF, restorative care achieved a 32.1% live-birth rate, with 92% of those babies delivered at term, with a single twin pregnancy in the entire cohort. Compare the incumbent: $15,000 to $30,000 per IVF cycle, a live-birth rate of roughly 32% per cycle, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an average of more than two cycles per baby, and success rates below 10% for women over 40. Indeed, cost estimates for RRM range from $2,000 to $16,000, depending on surgery and insurance, but with success rates comparable to or higher than IVF. And, if a couple’s natural fertility is restored, they don’t have to restart more cycles if they want to have more kids. Moreover, while IVF bears much higher risks for the mom and baby — including higher rates of preterm birth, low birth weight, and multiples — RRM is the only approach that actually improves the health of mom, dad, and baby. Which brings us back to Dr. Kallen’s claim in the New York Times that this is all “repackaging” of standard care, to the detriment of patients who cannot conceive with these kinds of treatments.” If restorative medicine were already standard, Arkansas would not have needed to pass a first-in-the-nation law to get it covered. RRM physicians would not be forced out-of-network because insurance coding has no language for the diagnostic work they do. And medical residencies would presumably teach it, and yet researchers reviewing training programs found that “knowledge of fertility does not change throughout residency training.” As for the claim that RRM delays essential care (i.e., IVF), it is important to keep two things in mind. First, given that infertility is a symptom of underlying conditions or pathologies, targeted treatments to restore health are the treatment. And second, even if a couple later decides to move on to IVF, their success rates will likely be higher, as their own bodies are much healthier than if they had just done IVF first. Indeed, what I appreciate about RRM is that restorative physicians don’t promise a baby. They do, however, emphasize and work exceptionally hard to improve the overall and reproductive health of men and women, including their ability to conceive and birth children. As journalist Madeleine Kearns found in her reporting, couples told her it was the IVF doctors who tended to make promises they couldn’t keep, whereas restorative physicians were more honest: no guaranteed baby, but no stone left unturned in figuring out and treating the problem. For example, a March 2026 survey from Carrot found that 89% of women would prefer to try a less invasive option for treating infertility before anything else, and 78% said they would choose these options first if they simply had better information about them. Other polling shows that nearly 80% of Americans want personalized care that treats the root causes of infertility. The demand is clearly there; what has been missing is access and awareness. The Times also noted my view that IVF, egg freezing, and delayed marriage could mean more women “[run] out of time.” I stand by it, because this is the deeper problem with treating access to reproductive technology as the solution: the promise of these technologies’ shapes when — and whether — we marry and have children at all. Indeed, one of the most common and unsupported claims in modern discourse is that more IVF will raise the birth rate. But as Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies has argued, IVF subsidies don’t boost fertility; they change who has babies, and when. Younger women become slightly less likely to have children, older women slightly more, and the net effect is a wash, except that the woman who might have had three children starting in her late 20s now has one or two starting at 40. The numbers bear it out: IVF accounted for about 2.3% of first births in 2022, but only 1.8% of second births and 0.9% of third. A technology sold as insurance against the biological clock could, in practice, have the unintended consequence of further delaying fertility. That is why expanding real access and awareness is what my work focuses on, and it has been succeeding at every level of government. In the last year and a half alone, Arkansas became the first state to enact the RESTORE Act (promoting such root cause care), with other states following suit. The Texas GOP even included Natural Procreative Technology (part of RRM) in its party platform. Federally, Congress has introduced a bicameral RESTORE (Reproductive Empowerment and Support Through Optimal Restoration) Act, with the Department of Health and Human Services advancing several grants this year alone, promoting innovative root-cause approaches to infertility, fertility tracking, and body literacy. Moreover, the Departments of Labor, HHS, and Treasury proposed a rule allowing employers to offer standalone fertility benefits covering diagnosis and treatment of infertility’s root causes. The deadline to submit a public comment closes on Monday, July 13. Even President Trump, the self-described father of IVF, now says such root-cause care “will hopefully reduce the number of couples who ultimately need to resort to IVF.” He’s right. It’s not about being “anti-IVF” or trying to limit options. Quite the opposite. It is about ensuring couples have more options than ever before to treat their infertility, starting with the least invasive root cause approaches first. And, as for the birth of more “beautiful babies,” one recent simulation found that expanding restorative care could raise the U.S. fertility rate from 1.77 toward 2.02, which is within reach of the fertility replacement rate. Meanwhile, the associations dismissing all this as “ideology” are the same ones that recently redefined infertility to include a person’s relationship status, meaning that two men or a single woman could be deemed “infertile” despite their own bodies, if properly united with the opposite sex, bearing no causes for infertility. Let that sink in. No two men, no matter how hard they try, can conceive a child, and yet certain states and leading fertility organizations redefined infertility to include them. So, while the Times wonders what to make of a 28-year-old who likes raw-milk butter, I am far more interested in empowering men and women with access to real fertility care. Besides, if it’s just an ideology, doesn’t work, or is already being offered, Big Fertility should explain why it finds it so threatening. *** Emma Waters is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation and the author of “Lead Like Jael: Seven Timeless Principles for Today’s Women of Faith” and host of the new podcast Rethinking Fertility. 

The playwright Oscar Wilde, in “A Woman of No Importance” (1893), quipped that “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry,” suggesting that the institution of marriage has a way of smothering romance under the weight of habit and familiarity. This same institutional cynicism animates A24’s latest comedy, “The Invite,” Olivia Wilde’s loose adaptation of a 2020 Spanish film, “The People Upstairs.” From the outset, we are introduced to Joe and Angela, played by Seth Rogen and Wilde, a bickering couple trapped in the throes of a loveless marriage, held together primarily by resentment and their 12-year-old daughter. Wilde, who also directed the film, has a masterful grasp of Angela’s archetype. Her performance wonderfully exudes the insecurities and frustrations of a repressed housewife, functioning on a cocktail of prescription medication and channeling her anxieties into perennial redecoration. This leads to such vexing domestic inquiries as “Is that a new rug?” when her husband stumbles home, weary and stupefied, from work. The reason Angela has procured this new rug, we soon learn, is to impress their hip and suave upstairs neighbors, Hawk and Piña, played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz at her most seductive. Indifferent to conventional mores, the couple throw lavish swinger parties and express affection in such excessive and saccharine degrees that they begin to resemble villains in a Larry David sketch. Joe and Angela know this because, every other night, they can hear what sounds like a brothel operating directly above their ceiling. For Angela, this bohemian hippie lifestyle presents something of a buoy. Her sexuality is so thoroughly repressed that she sees Hawk and Piña’s arrival as a last-ditch opportunity to “spice things up.” The film is appreciably cleverer than simply sending its vanilla couple tumbling into a lewd spiral of orgies and erotic humiliation. Its real interest lies in the awkward and comic realization that a sexually fallow marriage is often a symptom of emotional detachment. Rogen, whose raspy disposition I usually find grating, portrays Joe with such conviction that you would think he had personally experienced the same failures and resentments. A defeated jazz musician, Joe has been relegated to teaching at a third-rate music conservatory and smoking pot — his version of prescription Xanax — in an apartment he inherited from his parents. Eventually, he concedes to being a failure who amounted to nothing. Joe and Angela live in a constant state of misery, unwilling to connect with each other except through complaint. “We haven’t had sex in a year,” they confess later in the dinner party. It is under these grim and isolating circumstances that Angela tries to bring fresh friends into their lives by inviting over the upstairs libertines. “We’re not cancelling; we don’t have friends,” she scowls at Joe after he suggests they are unprepared to host, having arrived home worn out from work and without the wine she had asked him to fetch. Hastily finalizing her charcuterie before the guests arrive, Angela whips out a perfectly fine bottle of champagne from the fridge and asks, “Is this weird?” Joe, confused, replies that yes, it is: “What is this, New Year’s?” This is plainly wrong. Champagne is the perfect aperitif for any dinner party at any time of year. It is refreshing, sprightly, and naturally pairs with anything. Are these people so estranged from pleasure that even champagne seems suspicious? Among the most celebrated episodes of NBC’s “The Office” is “Dinner Party.” It is engrossing precisely because of how difficult it is to watch, capturing clawing awkwardness and discomfort with almost sadistic precision. It is a testament to Wilde’s directorial talent that “The Invite” captures a similar feeling of morbid embarrassment and unease. Complementing intimate camera shots with tense, brooding string arrangements composed by Devonté Hynes, Wilde creates a palpable sense of claustrophobia inside the couple’s apartment, such that the rooms themselves often feel like part of the cast in the evening’s slow-motion collapse. I have rarely recoiled with as much discomfort and internal pain as I did watching a wide-eyed, wickedly desperate Wilde coerce Rogen into opening a 1982 Château Haut-Brion, the legendary first-growth Bordeaux from Pessac-Léognan, to serve their guests in the absence of literally anything else in their apartment. The indignity is compounded by Joe pulling it out of a cupboard and uncorking it without even bringing it to proper cellar temperature, to say nothing of decanting the bottle. It is an act of vino vandalism, made worse by the knowledge that nobody in the room is emotionally stable enough to appreciate what has just been sacrificed. Returning to Oscar Wilde, the film ultimately pushes back against his aphorism. Marriage has not stripped Joe and Angela of affection; their reluctance to communicate has. Their love has withered under years of avoidance and disappointment. This becomes exceedingly clear when their lascivious guests begin divulging their raunchy escapades and give the beguiled Joe and Angela what amounts to a TED Talk on swinging. “There’s a menu you mark off: bondage, pegging, whatever you’re into,” Hawk explains, as if he were a waiter reciting the specials. Despite its R rating, the film is largely suggestive in dialogue rather than explicit in action. Its most revealing moment comes when Angela and Joe, both brimming with sexual frustration, indulge their guests’ amorous advances, only to botch their attempted orgy with the grace of Woody Allen trying cocaine in “Annie Hall.” This barely qualifies as a spoiler, since the film’s tone is decidedly conservative. This is hardly some avant-garde French exercise where orgies are as encouraged and commonplace as cigarettes. What Joe and Angela come to understand is that intimacy and physical affection are manifestations of love and mutual trust. Detached from that context, sex becomes a vapid hedonistic pursuit, thrilling in the moment and hollow almost immediately after, leaving you chasing the same high in perpetuity. “The Invite” is a thrilling minimalist comedy about love, marriage, and family. As Wilde’s third directorial feature, it is easily her strongest, conveying a palpable conviction in family as something worth preserving rather than escaping. There is a memorable scene in which Angela bellows at a moping Joe, “You have a daughter who worships you,” reminding the erstwhile musician that there are far more important things in life than stardom and sold-out shows. Oscar Wilde’s skepticism toward marriage holds no weight here. The reason to marry, “The Invite” suggests, is precisely to remain — and always be — in love. *** Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com. This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.