In a culture notorious for rewarding victimization, Sydney Sweeney is going viral for symbolizing something we’ve all been missing: sanity. She’s not loud or radical, and she’s not trying to make a statement. But somehow, just by acting normal, she’s become one. All she had to do was dress in head-to-toe denim and lean over a car to make the internet go absolutely bananas. The campaign in question is a new ad for American Eagle, and anyone who spends any time on social media has certainly seen reactions to it over the past few weeks. The ad is washed in soft nostalgia, with a vibe including a gas station stop, American denim, and a once-ubiquitous girl-next-door look. Sweeney’s ad is like a love letter to everything American culture supposedly outgrew. And that’s why people can’t stop talking about it. The ad racked up millions of views in days. It’s the most viral moment of Sweeney’s career, even more than her Emmy-nominated turn on the popular HBO drama “Euphoria.” In one of the ads, Sweeney says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” This messaging has led to absolute meltdowns by mainstream media and leftist social media influencers, who insist the Sweeney ads are nothing but “Nazi propaganda.” Backlash got so bad that American Eagle responded, but instead of apologizing, they surprisingly doubled down. “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story,” the company posted on their Instagram. “We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way,” the statement continued. “Great jeans look good on everyone.” The reaction has been telling. Fans are celebrating the campaign as a breath of fresh air — it’s not just a fashion ad, it’s a vibe shift. In an industry that runs on provocation, Sweeney is quietly proving you don’t have to reject femininity, tradition, or wholesomeness to be relevant. You just have to stop pretending you’re above it. That shouldn’t be controversial. But in Hollywood today, it absolutely is. Sweeney grew up far from the glitz of Los Angeles. She was raised in a small town in Idaho and comes from what the media might call a “conservative” family — though Sweeney has never commented on politics. But she has alluded to them. Leftists were furious in 2022 when she posted photos from her mother’s 60th birthday party. The pictures, which included a relative wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt and a MAGA-style hat, sparked immediate outrage. Sweeney didn’t take the same path as many before her by issuing a groveling apology. Instead, she posted a follow-up post on X saying, “You guys, this is wild. An innocent celebration for my mom’s milestone 60th birthday has turned into an absurd political statement… Please stop making assumptions.” That act of defiance, refusing to apologize, was rare enough. But it’s what she hasn’t done since that’s even more interesting. She hasn’t become a political mouthpiece. She hasn’t branded herself as “anti-woke.” She’s just stayed normal. And for some reason, that drives people crazy. It’s rare to see a Hollywood star so universally embraced without selling a political message, trauma story, or carefully calculated ideology. But maybe that’s the point. Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly summed up what many have been saying on a recent episode of her podcast. “She’s all woman,” Kelly said of Sweeney. “She has a great pair on her that would be the envy of virtually every woman, and they’re obviously natural… and so she’s in some ways, the opposite of a Kardashian,” she added. “She’s petite … she’s buxom, but they’re natural, and her face is not overly prodded or manipulated. She looks normal. She looks like just a pretty American girl.” Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with someone like Sweeney because she’s not trying to be anyone else. She’s not reinventing herself for every season. She’s not jumping on trends to stay relevant. It all speaks to a growing hunger for authenticity. It’s not the kind of curated authenticity influencers serve up with a wink and a sponsorship deal. People want real. They’re over the Botox looks that have dominated for years. That’s the sweet spot Sydney Sweeney has managed to occupy. Her critics don’t know how to handle it. She’s a reminder that the pendulum is swinging in the hearts of viewers who are tired of being lectured. Sweeney isn’t fighting that culture war directly, but she’s proving that jeans, normalcy, and charm still resonate with most of America.

The Committee holds jurisdiction over the D.C.

The explosion has been declared a 'mass casualty incident'

'Undermine the democratic process'

This investigative research report examines the FDA’s ongoing effort to schedule 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), a naturally occurring alkaloid found in kratom and produced endogenously in the human body. Drawing on pharmacological literature, expert commentary, regulatory inconsistencies, and media dynamics, we argue that the FDA’s approach reflects a deeper failure of evidence-based policy. Rather than promoting public […]

This is why we love golf

Books Jo Walton’s Reading List: July 2025 Fairy tales, history, a very sexy romance, and excellent fantasy. By Jo Walton | Published on August 11, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share July began in the Åland Islands between Finland and Sweden, at the end of Archipelacon 2. We took a boat from there to Stockholm, and from Stockholm to Gdańsk in Poland. After a few days in Gdańsk, we took a train to Warsaw where I had a great time at Basyliszek/Polcon, a really fun convention with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Then we took a train to Prague for two days, and from Prague to Venice on a wonderful train through the Alps. After a day in Venice we got back to Florence, where I still am. I’ve had friends staying here the whole time, which has been tons of fun.  I did a (hopefully final) revision of Everybody’s Perfect and started working on what (fingers crossed) may be a new novel. I read just eight books, some of them on boats and trains, and lots of them were great. Black Thorn, White Rose — edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (1994) I continue to read my way through these fairytale retellings that pretty much began the modern genre of retelling fairytales. There were some absolutely terrific ones in this volume especially from Nancy Kress, Patricia Wrede, and Howard Waldrop, a disappointing story (“Godson”) from Roger Zelazny, who, surprisingly, didn’t bring much new to the original, and a bunch of very good stories from other people. This is an interesting series with very high quality overall, and the standouts are really as good as it gets. See You in the Piazza — Frances Mayes (2019) Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, was recently given honorary Italian citizenship. This book is about a large number of places in Italy that she visited on trips, starting in the north and working south—mostly places a little off the beaten track. She describes what she saw and what she ate, and it’s not a guide book so much as an account of holidays. It’s very readable but not compelling. I’ll definitely be checking where she ate if I go to any of these places, and there’s something endearing about her talking about buying a jug or a plate to remember a place when far away. There are recipes in it too. I read a lot of books at once, and this was a very good book for that, for reading in little pieces in between other things, always happy to read a bit, never sorry to move on. Passenger to Frankfurt — Agatha Christie (1970) A strange and bad book. It started off disappointing me in that the “passenger” was on a plane not a train, and then went on with way too many meetings of civil servants. There is one good character, a great-aunt. The romance, and indeed the thriller plot, get short shrift. This is, however, a very good example of a mainstream writer utterly failing to understand how science fiction worldbuilding works. This is supposedly a near-future (of the late Sixties) where a mysterious enemy is manipulating “the youth” and stirring them up to drugs, discontent, and trouble, where entire countries are being taken over by “the youth,” manipulated by this mysterious enemy. Now Christie does not at all think through that if France and the US have been taken over by these mysteriously manipulated people, nice great-aunts might have trouble vacationing in the Alps. But the weirdest thing is the ease with which everyone agrees to use an untested, permanent, mind-altering drug or wonder what the consequences might be in the long term. It’s sad to see this view of the Sixties, and the idea that the youth movements of the time were led by fascists is ludicrous, but that’s not even what’s bad about the book. I barely cared about the characters, the mystery (who is the enemy?) is barely concealed from the reader, and oddest of all, the book feels as if it’s missing a climactic chapter. Christie wrote this in a rush, and with a deadline, her eightieth book, coming out on her eightieth birthday, and maybe she just didn’t have time to write the climax, and maybe she just thought it was sufficiently predictable that she could skip straight to the “rewards and weddings” chapter. Very odd book. Not recommended, unless recommended as bad example. The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France — Robert Darnton (2025) Darnton calls this his last book, but I hope it isn’t. It is, however, tying together all his work on the history of books and writers and the French Revolution. It isn’t quite as good as The Revolutionary Temper, but it’s very good. He gives us examples of the lives of hack writers in the years before the French Revolution and shows us how they lived and made a living, and how they made it through the climactic events—or in some cases, didn’t. This is a kind of history we don’t often see, specific and close up and on the ground, but always related and connected to the bigger picture of what’s going on. Darnton’s work has been on writers, booksellers, censors, printers, poets, and one of the reasons I love him is the way his microhistories allow zooming out to better understand the big events of history. Terrific, readable, recommended. The Pairing —  Casey McQuiston (2024) Romance novel partly set in Italy, recommended to me by all my friends who read romance. They were right, this is actually great. It’s about an American couple who booked a food tour of Europe and then broke up, and got a voucher, and eventually had to take the tour and rediscover each other while going through Europe eating and drinking and sightseeing. It’s much better than that makes it sound, and both the Europe and the romance are well done. It also does a thing I haven’t seen before where, rather than alternating POVs of the romance protagonists, it splits at halfway through the book, so the first half is all Theo and the second half all Kit. It really works. I even forgive it people having sex somewhere in Florence that is always either locked or has a guard in it. The book starts in the UK and ends in Sicily, and I started reading it in Prague, not thinking that this would mean I’d be reading the Pisa and Florence bits actually in Pisa and Florence, which was weird but fine. Warning: this book has way more sex than most of the genre romance I read. Tons of sex. So be aware. It also has great descriptions of food, and lots of excellent minor characters—the tour guide, the other people on the tour, old friends, strangers—all very well done. The Thirteenth House — Sharon Shinn (2006) Second in the series that begins with Mystic and Rider, definitely read the first one first. The actual plot develops through both books, and there are spoilers for the first book. This is a good continuation, which deepens the world and the complexity of what’s going on, and has a strong story with volume completion. Shinn is very good at characters and worldbuilding, and really, what was I thinking not to read these as they came out? Oh well, I can catch up now. If you like low-stakes, non-epic, kingdom-level fantasy, this is terrific. She’s also doing character romance. Which reminds me, mild spoilers: so, the first book introduced the world and a small party of people travelling through it, and gave us a romance between two of the party. This gives us the POV of one of the others, and is a romance for another two of the party. There are two people left in that small party, and they’re both men and while their sexuality hasn’t been discussed they’d make an odd couple. But maybe… Shinn often has minor character same-sex couples, but her main romances have been male-female as far as I can remember. But also, there’s more than one more book, so… well, there are a lot of mysteries on the table here and this is one of them. Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen — Laurie Colwin (1988) This was recommended to me and I enjoyed it in a quiet way—a series of slight, mildly amusing pieces on cooking and eating and having a relaxed attitude to life and life’s ups and downs. I liked Colwin as a person, and she’s absolutely right about cream, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to read anything else of hers. The Year’s at the Spring: An Anthology of Recent Poetry — edited by Lettice D’Oyly Walters (1920) Don’t ever put words like “recent” or “contemporary” or “modern” in your title, it will look silly when people read the book in a hundred years. This anthology of early Twentieth-century poetry, free on Gutenburg, is actually great—there are some duds, of course, but there are also some really good poems, both ones I’d seen before and ones I hadn’t. There are also charming 1920 illustrations. The overall impression is a little twee and pastoral—“recent” doesn’t really cover the Great War poets I’d have expected; there are some war poems but no Owen and no Sassoon. But it’s good to be reminded of Walter de la Mare, and to see a snapshot of a moment of poetry, this is what people were reading in 1920, what they thought worth collecting in their time, and very different from what we’d see looking back. [end-mark] The post Jo Walton’s Reading List: July 2025 appeared first on Reactor.