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. *** Do people who are really, ridiculously rich deserve our sympathy? Radical progressives think the answer is no if the murder victim is a healthcare CEO. Certain mainstream journalists believe the same about at least one millionaire socialite who owns keys to a private beach on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.  In case you haven’t seen it, the latest “author telling lies” controversy revolves around Belle Burden, a New York City heiress who wrote a memoir detailing the breakup of her marriage.  “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” started out as a Modern Love column and eventually was turned into a full-length memoir that went viral. Book clubs and avid readers were drawn by the schadenfreude of a rich, beautiful woman being abandoned by her husband of two decades for reasons that are still frustratingly unclear.  Yes, he had an affair and got caught. As Burden’s memoir explained, her husband “James” (really hedge fund executive Henry Davis) calmly explained to her in the aftermath of getting caught that rather than trying counseling or finding a path back to trust, he was unhappy with the marriage and wanted out.  The book was highly praised until it wasn’t. The New Yorker published an exposé at the end of May titled “What’s Missing From Belle Burden’s ‘Strangers,’” laying bare some of the details the author reportedly fudged about her financial situation.  While Burden expressed alarm at the prospect of losing multiple properties after blindly trusting her husband and adding his name to the deeds without protecting the generational wealth her family had built, the publication noted with disdain that Burden would have remained super rich no matter what. Journalist Jessica Winter accused the socialite of overexaggerating the severity of the situation and, crucially, of not being anywhere near poor enough post-divorce.  “No reasonable person would demand that she provide a forensic accounting of her finances in the memoir. Yet its impression of candor may suffer in light of what Burden leaves out of the narrative,” Winter wrote. She later concluded, “[Burden’s] long-term financial security, as opposed to her emotional security, was never at risk. It might be difficult for anyone in her position to separate one from the other.” The fine details of Burden’s tax returns aren’t even the point here. What’s very revealing is how quickly the online discourse changed from sympathy for a woman who had her entire life blown up overnight to scorn for someone who didn’t tell the whole truth about how much money she had. “Belle Burden’s Memoir Made Me Feel Poor,” one Substack writer titled her reaction piece.  It led to questions like, are rich people allowed to be sad? Are they allowed to mourn the loss of their life partners if they still have a lot of money left when that person leaves them?  Burden said in a statement to the New Yorker: “When I wrote ‘Strangers,’ I shared my heartache, my mistakes, and my shame. I owned my privilege as plainly as I could, and I respected the privacy of sealed court records. I stand by everything I wrote, including the fear I felt from my ex-husband’s threats, the contributions I made and could make to my family, and what happened to me financially and emotionally in my marriage and divorce,” she said to the New Yorker. “While I didn’t intend it, I am glad that women have taken my story as motivation for insisting on financial transparency in their marriages.” I’ll admit, as someone who does not boast Vanderbilts in my lineage and who has never owned a vacation home, I found it a little jarring when I read “Strangers” earlier this year. But the moments that stuck out to me most had nothing to do with money. Burden shares three children with her ex-husband, and, according to her, he didn’t fight for custody at all. Instead, he allegedly told her, “I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t. You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids.” According to her book, her husband said, “I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.” Rejection of his wife is bad enough. But a man rejecting his children and, according to her, seeming happy enough seeing them infrequently in the coming weeks and months, is an absolute tragedy. I try to imagine being in a similar situation and would almost certainly feel more heartbroken about my husband abandoning our children than I would about him rejecting me.  Sympathy for any aspect of Burden’s messy divorce is hard to come by after the New Yorker journalist tore her story to shreds. There are multiple think pieces and exposés that essentially say we shouldn’t care anymore because she lied about the finances. Burden was never in danger of ending up homeless, they argue, so we shouldn’t care about her memoir anymore at all. While the financial fallout of her divorce does feature prominently in the memoir, the more pressing issue Burden focuses on is trying to glean an explanation from her ex. She asks why he left her alone when she expected to grow old with him. Why did he abandon what she believed to be a stable, loving relationship in favor of something else?  “This was not just an affair. This was not just a rejection of me,” Burden wrote in the book. “He was abandoning all of it, and all of us.” Anyone who has actually read the book can see this woman’s pain laid bare. Meanwhile, the whole conversation has changed to figuring out how much Burden has in her multiple trusts. As if having millions of dollars makes the sacred covenant of marriage dispensable.  “I don’t know if he made the decision to leave suddenly after being caught, or if he’d carefully planned his exit for years,” she wrote. “I don’t know what role the pandemic played. I don’t know how much of it was about money. I don’t know how much of it was about me.” “I don’t know why he left. I don’t think I ever will,” Burden added. Memoirs in general should be taken with a grain of salt. They are one person’s perspective on a situation and shouldn’t be read as non-fiction. They sit somewhere in between — not totally true, but not untrue. Burden added a disclaimer, saying the book “recounts events as accurately as I can remember them.” Memoirs are meant to be entertaining, and they are always deeply personal and emotionally vulnerable. Would it kill us to show a little grace to the person writing them?  And then there’s the question of whether any journalists would have dug into this woman’s tax returns if she were poor or even middle class. Maybe they would have. But it does seem that any exaggerations or half-truths would have been reported less gleefully if Burden had fewer commas in her bank account. Somewhere along the way, we’ve decided that grief only counts if it happens to the right people. A husband can abandon his wife, reject his children, blow up a family, and leave emotional devastation in his wake. But if the woman left behind still has money in the bank, we’re told not to feel sorry for her. The question isn’t whether Belle Burden is rich or if she really lost everything when her husband left. It’s whether we’re allowed to have sympathy for rich women when they, like the rest of us, often do face tragedy.

The cotton candy-buffet of society. Entertainment on our one-dimensional, flat-screen, wall-mounted televisions that give us endless choices, read our algorithmically trained minds, and feed us limitless but unfulfilling content, we might miss the one thing that is, well, missing: cigarettes. In 1965, 42% of adults in the U.S. smoked cigarettes compared to 11% in 2023. Never has something so prevalent in the culture fallen so far out of favor. Are we better for it? Sure, if we let our lungs dictate public health policy, then bravo cig scolds. You’ve done your job. But from a broader societal view — one where we examine tradeoffs and trends, aesthetics and habits, life’s joys versus the firm hammer of the lifestyle police — it’s a tossup. But there is no doubt that something has been lost. Post-WWII America was ready to settle down and light up. There was a barrage of consumerism-fueled advertisements, the flash-bang of novelty housewares and houses — Plastic! Nylon! Asbestos! Vinyl! The Joneses lived next door, where the grass was mowed on Saturday morning, and the backyard barbecue was fired up at night. There was a trip to Disneyland, kids with coonskin hats, and Roy Roger cap guns with matching cowboy boots. Mom had a Kelvinator Foodarama refrigerator, Dad brought a briefcase and hat to work, and there was a Cadillac Eldorado in shimmering Brenton Blue parked in the driveway. A new RCA television sat on the satin-carpeted living rooms of Suburbia U.S.A., where Groucho Marx bet your life, the White Hat always got his man, Eliot Ness appeared, cigarettes were everywhere, and life was good. Too good to last. The hippies took care of that. And a misunderstood war. And assassinations and civil unrest, and a nation at the cusp of generational change. It was also the release of a new superpower, the combining of government as your mommy and daddy, combined with the limitless self-important smug narcissist-morality complex of virtue-by-action. The ultimate shame game; a nuclear bomb dropped on society that didn’t defer to natural selection — it was selection. Big Tobacco was the villain, and moral scolds looked down their noses at the dirty, working-class cigarette smokers from their jazzercise class and Jane Fonda workouts, dressed in Nike sneakers and spandex, sucking fresh-squeezed pulpous juices from the exotic carrot section of a natural foods co-op, extracted from a Jack LaLanne Power Juicer, and pecking at bran flake cereal. Pedal faster on your stationary bike. Thus was born the true nanny state. We shifted from Robert Young’s Father Knows Best, to the feds and the little foot soldiers of the social justice army, doing their best to boot stomp as life’s-simple-little-pleasures police. Fast-forward past the release of the landmark 1964 Surgeon General report warning of the health hazards of smoking to today. The rate of tobacco use in the United States has fallen significantly and keeps falling, now to its lowest point in the U.S. In 2024, only 9.9% American adults reported smoking at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and currently smoke every day or some days (the CDC’s definition of a smoker). Public health became public business, singled out and stigmatized. But decades of being squeezed into zones, taxed, ostracized into frozen huddled masses behind the dumpsters in the dead of winter, and subject to rude comments from passers-by — all in the name of “public health” or as the grannies say, “For your own good.” For your own good. What does that mean? How far are we willing to go? How much are we willing to moralize our neighbors to soothe a sense of do-gooder attitude toward complete strangers? Now Gen Z — the kids who got the fuzzy end of the lollipop over Covid mass hysterics, had the environmental neuroses of the world heaped on their backs, and are drowning in the inherited miasma of youth sculpting, health-maxxing, green-drink, bio-hack, and Silicon Valley godsplainers — are on a steady diet of kombucha and anxiety (and, it turns out, vaping, which doesn’t count because it’s gay). We have access to eye-popping amounts of personal data, we have health trackers, bio-cryo-genesis, cell rejuvenation, fillers, plumpers, GLP-1s, and personal trainers. Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, The Biggest Loser, Gold’s Gym, L.A. Fitness, Planet Fitness, Equinox, Washington, D.C. Sports Club, New York Sports Club, and Pure Barre. Spinning, plyometrics, resistance training, martial arts, therapy art, AI therapists, personal dietitians, life coaches, meditation coaches, sleep coaches, sleep trackers, and mind-body spiritualists. We’ve had fat-free, sugar-free, cholesterol-free, high protein, high fiber, low-carb, no-carb, natural flavor, no flavor, non-GMO, organic, fair-trade, small-farm, farm-to-table, vegetable-forward, cage-free, free-range, grass-fed, raw, steamed, canned, flash-frozen, dehydrated, rehydrated, sustainable, oil-based, natural color, no seed oil, no artificial color, no color. Filtered water, ultra-filtered water, mineral water, distilled water, reverse-osmosis water. Bottled water, water bottles, canned water, and lugging around jugs of water. Eggs are good, bad, and good again. Same with coffee, alcohol, fat, bacon, steak, fruit, fruit juice, soda pop, ice cream, caffeine, sugar, milk, sunlight, sunscreen, anti-perspirant, underwear, processed fibers, processed foods, ultra-processed foods, preservatives, vitamins, supplements, and MSG. Now there are PFAS, PVB, PVA, UVAs, and UVBs. Yet we are constantly told we are the unhealthiest beings on the planet. What good does it do? Eh, not a whole lot, except to encourage people to obsess over things that, a generation or two ago, we didn’t even know existed. We had more common sense and common experiences. We went to bars and smoked cigarettes and met girls and had drinks. It wasn’t a five-alarm fire waiting for Karen to write in the comment section about how bad smoking is. Guess what? We know. It’s right there on the pack of Luckies, Marlboros, American Spirit, Camels, and Newports. It’s been drummed into us since grade school. But after years of “guidance” from the government on everything from vaccines, masking, heart health, weight, junk food, seatbelts, exercise, sleep, eating, and drinking, along with social pressures from the same mentality of people who wiped down their groceries during COVID, who believe non-electric vehicles should be banned and that firearms spontaneously leap up and shoot people, and who think it’s their right to moralize habits, vices, and pleasures for a sense of self-importance and righteousness, it’s time to knock it off. Cigarettes come with an attitude. What that says about the smoker is up to the smoker, but right at this moment, it’s a small act of rebellion against the nanny state and the health-and-wellness scolds. The truth is, we’re not really well. A person can follow all the right rules (or at least the rules of the current minute) and die a tragic, untimely, and unfortunate death. Another person can break all the rules and live to 104. The rise in the prevalence of smoking, or at least its visibility, was a recent Vulture essay in New York Magazine by writer Xochitl Gonzalez. She discusses why smoking is attractive, “But I loved the culture of the whole thing: the intimacy of someone getting close to light you up. The matches, the Zippos. The way, over the course of five minutes, small talk could fall into something like deep conversation.” (Even though she acknowledges the risks and dangers of cigarette smoking, there are still comments accusing her of shilling for Big Tobacco and warning of the health consequences, completely missing the point of the piece.) Are there other ways to accomplish this? Sure. But for some people, it’s enchanting: A tactile experience that evokes the simplicity and freedom of the past; a rebellion against the health obsession and neurotic worrying of our present. It’s the aesthetic of the movie-house big screen, where people used to laugh and cry together. It’s the wild west, the punk rocker, the Monte Carlo gambler, the race car driver, the farmer, the guys at the track, and the ladies at the bar. It’s in the hands of athletes, musicians, artists, movie stars, inventors, presidents, soldiers, and writers. If you look through the smoke screen, you might find something in that slim smoldering stick. You’ll find what you’re looking for, whether it’s unyielding confidence of Clint Eastwood’s Blondie in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, with his silent, piercing eyes; the toughness of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in his Casablanca-white tuxedo coat, a taut, complex face of a man deep in thought over the hill of beans he’s found himself in as the Free World hangs in the balance, a cigarette lingering in each scene as if it were an extension of his hand. Audrey Hepburn’s delicate, gloved hand with a comically long cigarette holder perched between fingers that seem like they could wave away the worries of the world, as only Holly Golightly could, draped with simple elegance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And then there’s the sex — and lots of it. Sharon Stone is notoriously dripping with sex as if she found a natural wellspring and bathed in it for Basic Instinct. Lighting a cigarette in that famous scene, as a room full of bulging-eyed men look on, objecting to her casual flicking of the lighter just to see what she would do. She lit the cigarette. Smoking is the thousand-colored beam of light that radiates from a single prism; an act of defiance and rebellion, comfort, power, greed, lust, love, connection, grief, loneliness, confidence, satisfaction, sex, and contemplation. Film director David Lynch was a visionary and a creative in the purest sense, never succumbing to the indignities of conformity or to a world that restricted the possibilities evoked by great art. He was also a smoker. In an interview with Sight and Sound, he described the relationship between his art and cigarettes, “Smoking was something that I absolutely loved but, in the end, it bit me. It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful.” The split screen of the American psyche runs through the moving images that form our collective consciousness. Nothing is more prevalent as we shuffle through the Baby Boom generation, with their privilege of living in a sheltered shadow of post-WWII America: the land of space dreams and cosmic urgency, shaken up with the rising passions and fears of the escalating Cold War; hot rods and surfers and rebels, with or without a cause; rock and roll dancing to The Stroll, duck walking with Chuck Berry, and hips shaking with a king; Gunsmoke and the Duke; the Rat Pack and Vegas. The mid-20th century evokes the images that shape our present, especially popular culture. Maybe we’re longing for something that we lost, and in smoking, we see a glimpse of that past and are addicted to the feeling that we could get it back, even if it’s only for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. Lynch cited the contradictions of life in his work and his art, observations indicative of his genius. “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.” ***

This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars.   Over the past decade, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment prohibits excluding religious institutions from public benefit programs. Yet some states have resisted this clear constitutional mandate. The Court has agreed to hear yet another case involving rules that allegedly discriminate against religious schools seeking to participate in Colorado’s universal pre-K program. Other states, fortunately, are embracing the First Amendment, revising their laws and regulations to put religious institutions on equal footing with other private entities. In recent months, Oklahoma, Florida, and Iowa have taken meaningful legislative or administrative steps to dismantle unconstitutional laws and regulations. These states should be applauded for recognizing that they cannot treat religious Americans as second-class participants in public life. For years, courts misinterpreted the Constitution’s Establishment Clause as requiring the exclusion of religious institutions from government funding programs, even when those programs extended funding to virtually every other private organization. As a result, federal and state laws became littered with “sectarian” provisions expressly excluding religious individuals and institutions from otherwise generally available public benefits. But since the turn of the century, the Supreme Court has steadily corrected course. It first made clear that government may include religious institutions in public programs on equal footing with other private entities, then ultimately held that the government may not exclude religious institutions and religious conduct from public programs open to everyone else. As the Court explained in its 2022 decision in Carson v. Makin, “a State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.” The Court further emphasized that “[a] State need not subsidize private education . . . but once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” The problem is that the Court’s new doctrine did not, by itself, force governments to revisit the statutes and regulations that entrenched these exclusions. As we have catalogued, hundreds of laws across the country continue to keep religious institutions out of otherwise generally available public programs. Moreover, when plaintiffs affected by these laws have sued, government officials often have attempted to evade their constitutional obligations. In some instances, states have imposed new conditions on public funding programs designed to create fresh obstacles for religious institutions seeking to participate on equal terms. By contrast, some states have taken major steps to conform their laws to the First Amendment. Oklahoma has emerged as a leader in this effort. In 2023, the state enacted legislation that treated the sectarian exclusion of religious institutions from government benefits as a substantial burden on religious liberty. Then, in 2025, Governor Kevin Stitt issued an executive order directing state agencies to identify and eliminate laws, regulations, and policies that exclude religious individuals and institutions from public programs, funds, and benefits. The order specifically instructed agencies to review state rules in light of the Supreme Court’s modern Free Exercise decisions. Most recently, Oklahoma repealed several “sectarian” funding restrictions embedded in its law, including provisions barring religious organizations from participating in programs administered by the Oklahoma Historical Society and Arts Council. Oklahoma is not alone. Last month, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued a formal opinion concluding that state laws excluding religious institutions from public benefits violate the First Amendment. He announced that his office would no longer enforce such provisions. Most recently, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed legislation repealing multiple sectarian statutory provisions. Among other things, the law removed longstanding anti-religious restrictions embedded throughout Iowa’s education code, which barred religious institutions from participating in programs or required them to refrain from religious conduct in order to participate. These recent developments may signal the beginning of a far healthier constitutional trend—one that does not require wave after wave of costly litigation simply to secure religious liberty for Americans. As Judge Daniel Traynor observed in 2024, “Time and again the First Amendment rights of American citizens have been the subject of litigation. . . . Organizations must continually sue to keep the . . . government from infringing on basic and well-settled rights to freedom of religion.” Rather than forcing religious individuals and institutions to spend years vindicating rights that the Supreme Court has already recognized, states should take seriously their independent obligation to bring their own laws into compliance with the Constitution. Thankfully, Oklahoma, Florida, and Iowa have begun to do exactly that.   *** This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here. Michael A. Helfand is the Brenden Mann Foundation Chair in Law and Religion at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, Visiting Professor at Yale Law School, senior legal advisor to the Orthodox Union’s Teach Coalition, and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Nicole Stelle Garnett is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow of the Religious Liberty Initiative.

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 moment you get pregnant, it’s as if your family, your friends, and even complete strangers are issued a license to offer unsolicited opinions about your body, your eating habits, your birth plan, and occasionally your entire future. As I write this, I’m less than a month away from giving birth to our son — or, as I prefer to call it, serving him with his official eviction notice. I’ve always been jealous of those women who say they love being pregnant. That is not me. What I do love, though, is motherhood. It’s been by far the best chapter of my life. I’m obsessed with being a mom, and it’s made me a better person in more ways than I can count. If having children didn’t require pregnancy, I’d probably have 20 of them. It’s the cooking process that’s a horror show for me. From the moment I get pregnant, my body seems to launch a full-scale rebellion. I swell up. Think of Violet Beauregarde from “Willy Wonka.” That’s me. I spend nine months counting down the days until I can comfortably tie my own shoes again. Part of the reason pregnancy is such a sensitive subject for me is that my first experience was emotionally and physically traumatic. Around the 20-week mark, my husband and I were told our daughter was measuring small and might not be getting enough nutrition. Thankfully, she arrived perfectly healthy. She’s still petite and still not a big eater, which turns out is just who she is. As difficult as that pregnancy was mentally and physically, it paled in comparison to the fear. For half my pregnancy, I lived with the possibility that something might be wrong with my baby, and there was nothing I could do except wait. Everything hurt, but the uncertainty hurt the most. By the time it was over, I was convinced I never wanted to do it again. Thankfully, God had other plans. And my daughter can’t wait to have a built-in best friend. What I wasn’t prepared for the second time around was how many people would treat my pregnancy like a public discussion forum. So before you approach a pregnant woman with an observation, a prediction, a warning, or a “helpful” piece of advice, allow me to offer a few examples of what not to say. 1. “Are you going to breastfeed?” I have never understood why complete strangers feel entitled to ask pregnant women about their future feeding plans. Imagine walking up to someone and asking detailed questions about their breasts. Weird, right? Yet somehow, the moment a woman gets pregnant, all social norms go out the window and everyone suddenly becomes a lactation consultant. The truth is that breastfeeding can be an incredibly personal and emotional topic. Some women breastfeed for years. Some can’t breastfeed despite desperately wanting to. Some choose not to. Some supplement with formula. And some spend weeks crying in the middle of the night feeling like a failure because breastfeeding isn’t going the way they hoped. Before my daughter was born, I thought breastfeeding would come naturally. It didn’t. Because she was so small, she was losing weight, and I wasn’t producing enough milk to keep up with her needs. I ended up supplementing with formula during a nationwide formula shortage. (Living through that is a story for another day.) Like so many parts of motherhood, feeding your baby comes with a learning curve, frustration, guilt, and plenty of moments when you wonder if you’re doing enough. A pregnant woman doesn’t owe anyone an explanation for how she plans to feed her baby. If she wants to talk about it, she will. If not, trust me, there are plenty of other topics to discuss. 2. “Sleep while you can.” This one always makes me laugh because by the third trimester, sleep is already a distant memory. I haven’t slept well in months. Between the constant trips to the bathroom, the inability to get comfortable, the back pain, and a tiny human using my ribs as a jungle gym at 2 a.m., I can assure you that I’m not exactly banking extra sleep hours before the baby arrives. Whenever someone tells me to “sleep while you can,” I’m always tempted to ask if they have any suggestions on how, exactly, I’m supposed to accomplish that. The truth is that newborn exhaustion is real. I know I’ll probably feel like I’ve been hit with a serious case of jet lag for a while. But at least when the baby arrives, I’ll finally get to meet the tiny roommate who’s been keeping me awake all night. And somehow that makes it feel worth it. 3. “You’ve gained a lot of weight!” I’m on the shorter side and usually weigh around 100 pounds. So when I go from 100 pounds to nearly 200 pounds during pregnancy, my appearance changes. Dramatically. One day, while I was eight months pregnant, I was on FaceTime with a close family member. We weren’t discussing pregnancy, weight gain, or anything remotely related to my appearance when she suddenly stopped and pointed out the obvious. “You don’t even look like yourself,” she said. “Your face is huge — you have a double chin — you’re usually a stick. I just don’t get it.” Then came the follow-up. “Maybe you’re just holding the camera too close to your face.” Sadly, I wasn’t. If anything, the camera was farther away than normal because I was trying to fit my entire face into the frame. As if that wasn’t enough, a few months earlier my husband committed his own pregnancy-related offense. Before I tell this story, I need to defend him: My husband is one of the kindest people I know. He’s also the type of person who occasionally sticks his foot in his mouth. During this pregnancy, I started a new remote job. A few months in, my boss wanted the new employees to get together for a team bonding trip. For most people, this probably sounds fun. For me, it was my worst nightmare. I love clothes. I love dressing up. And suddenly I had nothing professional that fit me. I was already feeling uncomfortable in my own skin, and now I was about to meet all of my coworkers for the first time while six months pregnant and feeling approximately the size of a small parade float. For days, it was all I talked about. I worried about what I was going to wear. I worried about how I looked. I worried about making a first impression while feeling physically miserable. At one point, I realized the only clothes I could fit into were my husband’s. I told him I was going to have to raid his closet because baby boy had made me too big to fit into any of my own clothes. Trying to be helpful, he reminded me that I wasn’t just gaining weight because I was growing a human. “I think the strawberry milkshakes from McDonald’s are playing a role too,” he said. Now, to be fair, I had developed a slight addiction to McDonald’s strawberry milkshakes. So he wasn’t wrong. But there are moments in life when being correct is not the goal. This was one of those moments. To his credit, my husband spends the other 99% of his time making me feel beautiful, especially when I feel my worst. He simply learned the hard way that when a pregnant woman is venting about her appearance, she is not looking for a detailed breakdown of her eating habits. And that’s really the point of both stories. If a pregnant woman has gained weight, trust me, she knows. 4.”Just wait…”  If you’ve ever been pregnant, you know exactly what I’m talking about. No matter what you’re experiencing, someone always has a “just wait” ready to go. Tired? “Just wait until the baby gets here.” Feeling overwhelmed? “Just wait until they’re crawling.” Then it’s walking. Then it’s potty training. Then it’s school. Then it’s teenagers. Then, somehow, it’s grandchildren. It’s as if pregnancy and motherhood are one giant game of people trying to convince you that your current stage isn’t actually difficult because something harder is always coming. The problem is that these comments almost always come from a good place. Most people aren’t trying to be negative. They’re trying to relate. They’re trying to share their own experiences. But when you’re pregnant, especially for the first time, it can feel like nobody is allowing you to enjoy the stage you’re in. Not every moment of pregnancy is magical. Trust me, I’ve spent enough time swollen, uncomfortable, and unable to tie my shoes to know that. But not every moment has to be overshadowed by what’s coming next, either. Instead of saying “just wait,” try saying, “You’re going to love being a mom.” After all the swelling, anxiety, weight gain, sleepless nights, the comments on this list, that’s the part that matters most. Honestly, I can’t wait. Every minute with my daughter has somehow been better than the last. The lack of sleep, the endless messes, the tantrums, the worries — it’s all been worth every second. 5. “Because she’s fat.” This one is by far my favorite because it came from my innocent daughter, who was three years old at the time and therefore legally exempt from having a filter. As every parent knows, toddlers have a unique gift for saying exactly what they’re thinking with zero regard for timing, context, or social consequences. It was the week of Valentine’s Day, and I was driving around town (probably headed to McDonald’s for a strawberry milkshake, if we’re being honest) while happily working my way through the Valentine’s Day candy my husband had bought me. My younger sister called, and because the phone was connected to the car, the conversation was on speaker. “It sounds like you’re eating,” she said. “I am,” I replied. “I’m eating the Valentine’s Day candy Hunter got me.” Without missing a beat, a tiny voice chimed in from the backseat. “Because she’s fat!” Silence. Now, in fairness to Rayne, watching her mom transform into a swollen, waddling version of herself over the course of several months was probably a little confusing. Thankfully, my sister jumped in immediately. “Rayne! She’s pregnant! Tell your mom she’s beautiful.” There was a brief pause. Then came the response I’ll never forget. “Mom, you’re beautiful — and fat.” Honestly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry every time I think about it. Of course, it turned into a teachable moment about how we don’t ever use the word “fat.” But it was so innocent. She wasn’t trying to hurt my feelings. She was simply making an observation in the brutally honest way only a three-year-old can. And that’s why it remains one of my favorite pregnancy stories and one of my favorite examples of what not to say to a pregnant woman. So if someone you know is pregnant, here’s my advice: Tell her she looks beautiful, ask how she’s feeling, and then immediately stop talking. It’s a strategy that’s worked surprisingly well for my husband ever since he survived the Great McDonald’s Strawberry Milkshake Incident of 2026.

California’s notoriously slow vote count left several races unresolved late Tuesday night, but with nearly half of the votes counted in both the gubernatorial primary and the Los Angeles mayor’s race, both appear headed for runoffs that include Republicans. Republican Steve Hilton led the field of more than 60 candidates with 26.9% support, narrowly ahead of Democrat Xavier Becerra, who had 25.8% of the vote. Both were solidly ahead of billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer, who was at 19.7%. The top two finishers will advance to a runoff in November’s general election. The race to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom was unusually wide open from the start. Some of California’s biggest Democratic names — including former Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Alex Padilla, and Attorney General Rob Bonta — all passed on the race, leaving a crowded field of many lesser-known candidates to battle for position. Polls showed an unsettled electorate, a large number of undecided voters, and a cluster of candidates tightly packed near the top of the field. Political strategists described the race as one of the most volatile California gubernatorial primaries in recent memory. With 47% of the vote counted in the L.A. mayoral race, incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass led with 36.6% support, while Republican Spencer Pratt had received 29.5%. Far-left Councilmember Nithya Raman trailed with 20.8%. The candidates appeared on the ballot without any party affiliation. The top two votegetters in the mayoral primary, regardless of party, secure a place in the November 3 runoff if neither receives more than 50% of the vote. If Bass fails to secure a majority, she will be the first incumbent L.A. mayor to advance to a runoff since 2005. Bass would normally have a major advantage over other candidates — but discontent over her handling of the Palisades fire and the homelessness crisis led first to Pratt joining the race and then to him resonating with many of the same sentiments felt by other Angelenos.