How Monica Lewinsky Shaped the 2020's World, NY Times: "Christianity Resurges Thanks to Gen Z," A"24 Hour Retail Blackout" Won't Work, Why There So Few Fiction Books for Men (The Five for 02/28/25)
Plus, Tom Hardy has a new TV show AND a new movie. Harry Potter reboot lands legendary actor. Nu-Metal memoir is a must-read.
Hey, welcome to The Five, a publication about the stories that matter, but don’t always make the front page.
It’s Friday, so let’s jump into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
Up first…Christianity is resurging in the U.S.
After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults, according to a major new survey from the Pew Research Center. And the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which had grown steadily for years, has also leveled off.
“We’re entering a new era of the American religious landscape,” said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who was not involved in the Pew survey. The “nones” — those in the American population who tell researchers they have no religious affiliation — have been growing for decades. “Now that growth has either slowed or stopped completely,” Dr. Burge said, “and that’s big deal.”
The findings come from the Religious Landscape Survey, a survey of more than 35,000 randomly selected adults from across the country conducted in 2023 and 2024. The last survey was published in 2014, making the new edition’s release a major update in the understanding of American spiritual beliefs and practice.
The survey finds that 62 percent of adults in the United States describe themselves as Christians, including 40 percent who identify as Protestant and 19 percent who are Catholic.
Overall, that represents a decline in the share of Christians since the survey was first published in 2007. As recently as the early 1990s, nine in 10 adults in the country identified as Christian. Almost 30 percent of adults participating in the new survey are religiously unaffiliated, and 7 percent identify with a religion other than Christianity.
“If you look to the long term, it’s a story of decline in American religion,” said Gregory Smith, a senior associate director of research at Pew. “But it’s a completely different story if you look at the short term, which is a story of stability over the last four or five years.”
This is one of those trends that’s been obvious for a few years online…but now there’s official data to back it up.
[two]
Apparently there’s a boycott today…it’s worth unpacking why this will NOT bring down the price of eggs.
A grassroots organization is calling on Americans to participate in what it’s calling the "Feb. 28 economic blackout" by refraining from buying goods from major retailers for 24 hours.
The nationwide protest comes amid rising prices on everything from gas to groceries — including, notably, eggs — and is similar to social media-fueled economic efforts that have cropped up online in recent months, including the "No Buy 2025" challenge against overconsumption.
The Feb. 28 boycott is an initiative by the People's Union USA, a self-described “grassroots movement dedicated to economic resistance, government accountability and corporate reform.”
The group, founded by John Schwarz, says it is not affiliated with any political party. According to the organization’s website, its goal is “to unite Americans against the corruption and greed that has kept us struggling for decades.”
The daylong boycott has been promoted online by several celebrities, including John Leguizamo, Stephen King and Bette Midler.
"For our entire lives, they have told us we have no choice, that this is just how things are, that we have to accept these insane prices, the corporate greed, the billionaire tax breaks, all while we struggle just to get by," Schwarz said in a recent Instagram video. “For one day, we are going to finally turn the tables."'
Yeah, that’s not gonna work. From the Civil Rights boycotts to the more recent boycotts over social issues (Bud Light, Target, etc.) consumers changed outcomes stopped buying for months/years, not 24 hours.
This is the same thing to a major corporation as a bad rain/snowstorm that depresses sales for a day or two. The only true winners are a handful of C-list celebs who get their names in some media coverage.
In particular, the price of eggs is a result of how many chickens died of Avian Flu…nothing can change that in the short term, including driving straight past the McDonald’s drive thru today, or skipping a Wal-Mart delivery order.
[three]
This week, Monica Lewinsky re-emerged on the Call Her Daddy Podcast, and directly called out Bill Clinton for his treatment of her. This happened in 1998, but the second order effects have rolled on for decades, which we’ll get to in a moment.
The Hill reports:
Monica Lewinsky says the “right way” for former President Clinton to have handled the fallout from their affair when she was a 22-year-old White House intern would have been either “to resign” or to have found a way to not throw a young person “under the bus.”
“I think that the right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was nobody’s business and to resign,” Lewinsky said during her interview on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast released Tuesday.
“Or to find a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who was just starting out in the world under the bus,” she added.
“And at the same time, I’m hearing myself say that, and it’s like, OK we’re also talking about the most powerful office in the world. I don’t want to be naive either,” Lewinsky, 51, said.
Her remarks came in response to “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper asking her to reflect on the 1990s scandal and how both the press and the White House should have navigated the situation once it came to light.
“It’s really complicated, because you are talking about issues and situations where so many people are impacted,” Lewinsky said.
Lewinsky lived under the threat of prison time for YEARS during the investigation. She’s never married or been able to have any sort of career to speak of, after starting out with one of the most prestigious interviews in the world at age 22. Lewinsky shared on the podcast that she was unemployable, for any job, after the scandal broke.
Her personal story is…pretty dang tragic. But there’s a strong case to be made between Clinton’s response to the scandal and the major events happening this week, from Dan Crenshaw threatening to murder Tucker Carlson on a hot mic to the failed “Epstein Island file release,” which featured the single most cringeworthy moment of the Trump 47 Presidency so far, with right-wing influencers dancing with binders about child sex abuse. In fact, almost nobody in politics or public life acts like an adult these days (my friend Craig Dunham did an excellent job of covering this…it’s too long to quote, but you should go read it).
And Clinton paved the way for Trump himself to be elected, at least the first time, as Democrats had argued long enough that personal ethics didn’t matter in politics…that the electorate believed them. Lest you think 90’s Republicans were any better, Newt Gingrich, who was prosecuting Clinton in the Senate, was having an affair with a staffer 20 years his junior, which probably makes him worse than Clinton, from an ethical standpoint.
But hey, maybe she was attracted to him for his ripped physique and incredible personal style.
There’s certainly an argument to be made that culture was already going in a direction of ignoring all personal ethical/moral codes, as Postmodernism, which began in the late 1800’s with Fredrick Nietzsche, hit it’s peak from the 1990’s-2010’s.
Now, in the 2020’s, there seems to be an awakening, at least in a segment of the population, that living without an overarching moral code in which every hyper-individual chooses what is right for them…hasn’t worked out so great. (See story #1 in this issue).
Nietzsche famously claimed that God had died, and the world would descend into chaos as we had to figure out how to live without a deity. The craziest thing is…faith is on the upswing again, and the person who tipped the first domino led to the destruction of Nietzsche’s ideas…may have been a White House intern.
Monica Lewinsky failed to bring down a U.S. President…but she may have driven the first nail into the coffin of the Postmodern worldview.
[four]
Author, editor and YouTuber Kristen McTierien went viral across more than one social network this month for pointing out something really obvious, but rarely discussed.
There aren’t many fiction books for adult male readers.
“Men still read and they read prolifically. It’s just that they’re kind of ghettoized. If you’re a man and you want to read, there’s a few options open to you. Nonfiction, of course. Hey bro, are you reading your nonfiction to get on that grind? If not, pfft, WYD? I hate the internet. If you want to read fiction, military sci-fi is a reliable place to go. High fantasy, sword and sorcery. Do you like Game of Thrones? We got you covered, bro. Pulp novels are niche but still exist. And, of course, there’s always homicide—murder mystery books, very popular with both sexes.
But what if you don’t like any of that stuff? What if you want contemporary fiction? You’re a man, you want to read about the here and now. No, it’s not about the apocalypse. No, it’s not about a dragon. And whatever it’s about, you absolutely don’t want to sit through 27 and a half pages of worldbuilding. You don’t like that. And yeah, we can make fun of you for your attention span, or we can acknowledge that men have varying tastes in literature, just like women do.”
It’s not just a taste thing, either, according to McTierien…but a whole perspective on modern life is just missing from the pages between the hardcover.
“Very few contemporary novels deal with the modern male experience at all, or if they do, it’s from the female perspective. Do these female authors or the POV female characters get that right? I’ll leave that for you to tell me. Probably not. Because contemporary fiction focuses on the slice of life, there’s a lot of the male experience that we’re missing out on. We’re missing out on male sexuality, which of course we know society as a whole hates and spits on. We’re missing out on male friendships, which again, if you believe the press, y’all just don’t have friends. You have no friendships, and you don’t want them.
Indie authors are filling in the gaps here, but major publisher don’t seem to be worried about hole in the market..so don’t expect any changes on this front soon.
Shameless plug, I’ll be releasing my first novel, The Deere Pipeline: A Midwestern Prairie Tale of Opioids, Murder…and Farm Equipment, for free in both digital audiobook formats. If you feel like checking out a bit of the in-process draft, here’s the Google Doc I’m working from.
[five]
As always, let’s head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup:
[movies]: After a decade of a rather poor record leading the Star Wars IP, Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy is out at Disney by the end of the year. Since 2015, five Star Wars films have been released, but nearly a dozen were announced, then postponed or cancelled, which may mean Kennedy’s legacy may be defined by…what didn’t happen. || Jason Statham is returning for The Beekeeper 2, which will be like every other Jason Statham movie…and people like me will be happy about it. || Speaking of Statham, a new trailer just dropped for A Working Man, which is also the same as all his other movies, except this time he’s a construction worker who kills bad guys, and this one is written by Sylvester Stallone. || Shrek 5 is a thing, starring Zendeya, if you have little ones and/or a lot of nostalgia. I had no idea there were four of those movies, and I haven’t seen any of them.
[shows]: The Harry Potter TV reboot for HBO/Max landed John Lithgow (3rd Rock from the Sun, Cliffhanger) as Dumbledore. Lithgow pointed out that he’ll be 87 when the show ends, and is almost certainly his last role. || Tom Hardy is quite busy (see below), as in addition to a new movie, he’s also co-starring with Hellen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan in MobLand, a new TV show from directed by Guy Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes, Snatch). Hitting Paramount+ in March. || Now that Stranger Things is over, a couple of cast members are jumping over to The Rings of Power on Prime Video…a show that had a terrible season 1, but redeemed itself in season 2, if you’re on the fence about catching up.
[music]: For some reason, Bob Dylan posted a clip of Machine Gun Kelly rapping to his Instagram. Dylan is…forever weird, and nobody, including MGK, knows why or what it means. || Jason Isbell played his latest single on Jimmy Fallon, and it's great || Brooklyn Vegan published a list of the most anticipated albums this year, including upcoming projects from indie rockers Franz Ferdinand, Lana Del Rey, a reunion from hip hop legends Clipse, pop songstress Lorde will attempt a comeback after a sophomore flop, and nu-metal heroes Deftones will release a new project amidst a resurgence thanks to Gen-Z falling in love with them. Full list here. || West Virginia Americana vocalist Charles Wesley Godwin released his new EP Lonely Mountain Town today, with a guest spot from Avett Brothers front man Seth Avett. It’s…excellent. Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music.
Sign me up for ANYTHING Tom Hardy is in, as he’s the star of two of my favorite movies of this century (Lawless, Warrior). This looks like a classic cops vs. criminals tale, albeit with top-shelf action and [insert record scratch] the bad guys throwing a washing machine at a cop car?!
Streaming 04/25.
If you’re gonna watch one Star Wars thing (I’m a pretty tepid fan at best), Andor is the best rated project from the IP in 10 years. It’s been a three year gap since season 1 released, but that seems to be the norm in this era.
The only weird thing here (and it’s very weird) is why they used a song from outlaw country artist Steve Earle for the trailer, which feels like a scoop of ice cream on a greasy slice of pizza…just cause two things are good individually, doesn't mean they should be paired up.
Streaming 04/22.
Everybody hates Blake Lively these days, so it will be interesting to see if the audience will hate-watch Lively play…a diabolical character where it looks like art is imitating life. Released in 2018, A Simple Favor is a heck of an underrated murder/mystery, and Anna Kendrick is brilliant in it, so it’s great to see them reunited.
This is screening this one at the famed SXSW Festival, which means Amazon thinks this will be on one of the bigger streaming movies of the year, despite Lively’s PR mess and the multiple lawsuits flying around.
[new music]
You probably didn’t have surf-rockers Switchfoot teaming up with Chicago blues legend Buddy Guy on your 2025 BINGO card, but here we are.
Don’t miss this one…it works in the most unexpected of ways. Blues may not be the most “popular” genre these days, but this song slaps.
[read & learn]
I was a pretty huge fan of (then) niche nu-metal outfit P.O.D. when they went from relative obscurity to one of the biggest bands in the world thanks to their uplifting anthem “Alive” releasing on the same day as the 9/11 tragedy.
On the 30th anniversary of the San Diego band, front man Sonny Sandoval sat down to pen a proper memoir that dives into a pretty crazy upbringing just two miles from the Tijuana border in a blue collar, highly diverse neighborhood. Originally a fan of 80’s hip hop and reggae, Sandoval discovered punk and hardcore acts like Suicidal Tendencies on boom boxes of blue collar work crews, and went on to form a completely new sound that was nothing like the fuzzed out guitars of Nirvana and Pearl Jam that were dominating the FM airwaves in 1994….
There are plenty of 90’s-10’s pop culture twists here, including a then-unknown vocalist Katy Perry jumping on a single with the band, and how Sonny helped the original lineup of KORN reunite.
The best podcast/TouTube vid of the week comes from former SCOTUS journalist Jeff Rosen, who makes the case for young people (and everybody else) to regularly read Greek Philosophy.
If you don’t know where to start, grab a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and go from there. The book is a collection of personal writings from one of history’s most virtuous emperors.
Until the next one,
-sth