May 26, 2026

Courtesy of the publisher.

On Friday, The New Yorker published an article by Jessica Winter about court documents that “complicate the narrative” of “financial peril” that the extraordinarily wealthy heiress Belle Burden “wove” in her best-selling memoir, Strangers. If you haven’t read Strangers but have read this article, you might come away with the impression that this is a case of a memoir being thoroughly debunked by subsequent reporting. 

If you have read the book, you might notice that Winter’s article hinges on a narrow reading of the text and a cherry-picked selection of quotes from the marketing push around its publication, focusing on its relevance as a cautionary tale for women about the importance of financial independence. But Strangers’s larger story, from which it derives much of its emotional impact, is not about money at all. Rather, it’s about a marriage that Burden’s husband ended suddenly and unilaterally for reasons she says she still doesn’t understand. No one has contested that version of events.

Could Burden have been more specific about the size of the enormous trusts she stands to inherit someday in the section of the book concerning her worries about losing her family’s homes? Probably! 

Should every book come with an appendix that includes the author’s tax returns? Fun as that would be, it’s not generally understood to be something writers owe their readers. A more pertinent question might be: Does knowing that Burden has a great deal of money coming to her, none of which was accessible during the time period she describes in the book, really complicate the narrative all that much? Should she have ceded any claim to her husband’s income during their marriage, when he all but required her to stay home with their three children, simply because she was already rich enough? While I feel as persecuted as the next renter-class Brooklynite (maybe more so), I wouldn’t necessarily push Burden up against the wall first when the revolution comes. 

Scenting blood in the water, online sharks circled around Winter’s story immediately. It’s fun when we perceive someone high status to have been brought low; even more fun when that person is a woman who has made the cardinal mistake of writing in the first person. “Society heiress Belle Burden’s vast inheritance is exposed,” trumpeted a Daily Mail headline, which is nonsensical even by the standards of a Daily Mail headline (what does it think an “heiress” is?). One person, whom I will keep anonymous because I’m nice, tweeted that Burden had “lied more than James Frey.” 

We seem to have a variation of this same conversation almost every time a woman’s memoir climbs the best-seller list. This sort of fact checking is just one way of puncturing credibility, of finding a reason – and really any reason will do – why this particular woman doesn’t deserve to describe her own experience. Once you start noticing that pattern, you realize that “this particular woman” turns out to be … actually pretty much every woman! It’s a wonder anyone still subjects herself to the ritual humiliation that publishing a memoir entails. But I guess that’s what the money is for. 

Photo: AaronAmat/Getty Images

Have you seen dating coach Anwar White’s “catching print” TikTok? If no one sent that to you back in March, this whole conversation doesn’t apply to you. Please accept my heartiest congratulations on being a gold-star lesbian. Everyone else: Okay, so we’re all newly aware of conversations around dick size, it feels like, and today Brock Colyar gets into why and also what men are doing in order to remedy situations they feel unsatisfied with. Filler injections can add girth, but not length. Exercises called “jelqing” and “dick-ups” exist. But aside from practical solutions, what can be done about the deeper (harder, meatier, etc.) issues such as … what does the heightened concern about symbolic masculinity signal about Our Society As A Whole?? Also, does size matter? 

All of this is very sad for men, genuinely, but you might forgive the women hearing of these struggles for feeling that some chickens are perhaps coming home to roost. As one of Brock’s female interviewees put it, “Men kill us, so we get to talk about their dicks at brunch.”

Photo-Illustration: The Strategist; Photo: Liza Corsillo

It’s no surprise that painter Marcel Dzama, who’s perhaps best known for creating some really cool album covers, likes to make art with his 14-year-old son. Perhaps more surprising is his very chill attitude about letting kids play with knives. Of his favorite box cutter, he says, “I would say probably don’t let your kid use it until they’re at least 7 or 8. You do have to be careful with them. And teach them how to use it. There’s a lock on the back, so you can open it for them and just have just a little bit of a tip that’s coming out so you won’t injure yourself, and if it does break, it won’t really cut you too bad.” Even better, they’re only $1 a pop. What could go wrong! 

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Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Cannes Film Festival, MUBI, DR, Adam Newport-Berra

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