Lifestyle
When did food become such a luxury?
The industrial food supply will be the last bastion of the luxury economy, and we might mirror the cannibals in doomsday movies before we cede our idiosyncratic eating habits to austerity.
Capitalism is amazing because it inspires unrelenting competition between brands and the branding of items that should be generic — organized and categorized by which boasts the best flavor, the most sustainably sourced ingredients, or fastest-ripening produce whose side effects might include the leaching of toxic chemicals into municipal food and water supplies. Then, these same brands dutifully patent an expensive snake oil antidote for poisoning you. The side effects of the contaminants might reveal themselves in the body as mineral depletion, heavy metal overload or lethargy (chronic fatigue, leaky gut, hyperactivity, dissociation, anhedonia). Luckily, the same system that instigated mass disease and physical and psychic atrophy can invent a market for “clean eating,” the branded backlash against factory farming’s poisoning and genetic modification of your food and soil and water and air.
What makes late capitalism even more special is that it can short-circuit just well enough that the so-called clean or whole foods deter most of society from examining where their food comes from and how it reaches them. What is a farm? What is a supply chain? Who are the farmers harvesting your food and the truckers driving it on interstates to you? Do they earn a living wage? Do you? What is topsoil? What is a supermarket? A muse for Allen Ginsberg, whose ecstatic litany of a poem “A Supermarket in California” captures the orgy of too many and just enough options, the numbness of excess. We forget that litany of questions under the fluorescent beams. Such are our funeral parlors for food, where mechanical reproduction haunts nourishment and we eat from the giant slot machines of industry. What is a supermarket?
In Memphis, Tenn., circa 1916, Piggly Wiggly opened its doors, offering the first self-service grocery vendor. Customers used carts and handheld baskets and ambled the aisles with their lists and often those lists expanded because there were so many products. Branding became essential to the differentiation that would earn the easy recognition and loyalty of customers, though labels about the purity of contents or lack thereof didn’t matter in this former landscape. What is called “Big Food” was born in the same region of the consumer temperament that brought us Elvis. By the 1950s and ’60s, middle-class and bourgeoisie America had a casual sense of access to meals and snacks and radio hits as if all were ready-mades built into their cities and suburbs like parts of a set. Personal fridges were stocked as well as the early markets but now there were more “processed foods” — frozen meals for lunch or dinner, an infinite variety of chips and dips for grazing. And the American teenager had enough disposable income to spend on frivolous quick food to accompany lighthearted music and lifestyles. The result is that we now have as many supermarket chains as we have categories of food product in those hallowed minor warehouses.
Before the self-service grocery, outlets required patrons to show up with detailed lists of items they needed and hand those lists to a clerk who would gather the items, which were either loose in bins or in flimsy generic packaging with no ingredients or labels. Today, this feels a step above state-sanctioned rations. At the same time, there’s a new niche market for containerless, “zero-waste,” grocery stores such as Re_Grocery in Los Angeles. And what these elite, boutique shops don’t necessarily realize is that they’re turning wellness into a luxury for the elite and those who replicate elitism for clout. It’s a sinister mode of decadence — decadent minimalism, where overt virtue signaling meets seemingly neurotic purity fantasies, where customers dance in the glow of the glare on bulk bins.
I remember supermarket parking lots from my childhood most vividly. There were times when my mom, my dad and I would make a trip for a jug of milk and my mom would go inside while we waited in the car. One such night my dad asked if we should leave her and drive away, as if to suggest before she owned us forever like the market. I returned a monotone no. The supermarket gave him a premonition of something sinister to come. In suburban San Diego, an area called Carlsbad, we’d call him from supermarket payphones as he sat in jail. His paranoia had been confirmed. And after he died and we moved to L.A., my mother went on her inevitable health kick-slash-healing journey. She hired a meditation coach who introduced her to Enya and a ’90s health-food chain called Mrs. Gooch’s. This store boasted muted neutral bins and amber-toned aisles, a drastic contrast from the buzzing neons of the popular chains. Instead of brand names like Fruit Roll-Ups, Mrs. Gooch’s carried fruit leather, made with real fruit, and it was tofu or other soy stuffed into the inner filet of the hot dogs instead of insinuations of pork. You could buy freshly pressed juices in glass bottles. On the way home, we’d stop for shots of wheatgrass. During her bouts of depression, she’d leave money on her nightstand and we’d walk ourselves to Vons or Ralphs and buy anything we wanted. At home, we had books on raw veganism by Dick Gregory and grape cures and detox methods and healing music. We had stakes in every market. We’d turned grocery shopping into a therapeutic symbol of semi-functional American family life, and of agency over our own lives. We were part of the group unknowingly beta testing the conflation of health, vitality and luxury shopping.
Whole Foods replaced Mrs. Gooch’s, but after being deracinated by Amazon, it became passé, less and less a signifier of status. Around the same time, terms like food desert went mainstream, defining the regions within cities where the only available food was the kind that is addictive and might kill you a little quicker. The newfound concern wasn’t accompanied by any remedy. The ability to articulate the struggle for decent food became another vain virtue signal.
And then came the rise of Erewhon, an upscale health food market that derives its name from the anagramic spelling of the word nowhere. It takes its name from a novel by Samuel Butler, in which ill health is a crime and citizens have to stay vital or risk incarceration — dark, with a little radiant grain of truth in depicting the persistent crisis of faith in the food supply. The market first opened in Boston in 1966, then reemerged in 2011 after a couple bought it from its original owner. Today a private equity firm — the Stripes Group — owns a minority stake, and the chain is expanding to every upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles. Thanks to the internet, its reputation transcends L.A. and has come to signify luxury eating nationwide. Tourists make pilgrimages to try its Hailey Bieber smoothie, replete with obscure superfoods and priced around $22. This is a typical price of an Erewhon smoothie. Everything in the store is organic, and local produce is prioritized. The aisles are sepia-toned and filled with everything from bone broth to raw fermented crackers to dried fruits (unadulterated by sulfur dioxide) to organic hygiene products to every brand of specialty water that exists in the world.
The prominence of Erewhon is the temporary response to the deterioration of Whole Foods, but its increasing popularity is also a reaction to the food scarcity trauma that 2020 instigated and the way we self-soothed with bougier tastes in food and wellness. It is no longer enough to wear designer- or even label-free “quiet luxury” clothing; the new way to indicate class is to shop Erewhon with no regard for cost and bypass the genetically modified, aggressively low-quality gut-busting food the U.S. is now renowned for. Celebrities shop at Erewhon and call paparazzi to photograph them there. Kim Kardashian collaborated with Balenciaga and carried a brown paper Erewhon shopping bag designed by the questionable brand to an outdoor L.A. fashion show. It was tacky. Influencers make TikToks and YouTubes taste-testing Erewhon smoothies and prepared foods mukbang-style. The satiety can be felt through the camera, its satisfaction with luxuriating in something so pure, so clean. And many of us have had slow evenings where we head there with a friend just to feel something. Erewhon is expanding to so many locations that the chain is bound to suffer the fate of Whole Foods and be replaced by a new, more conscientious iteration of the clean-eating superfood movement.
In the meantime, this aggressively revisionist supermarket, as indicated in Butler’s novel, has become part pharmacy, part a site of repentance for past consumption. We can’t see the farm from Nowhere. We are running on the energy of farmers’ labor and transmuting it into fetish object, and it feels almost beautiful on set in Los Angeles.
We’re in a game of survival of the fittest, where surviving itself feels akin to luxuriating in what should be hostile territory, mastering an environment we have come together to ravage. The next phase, of course, is making everything we consume from scratch like the tradwives and supermodels-turned-influencers. But you can’t buy their affect from Nowhere. It’s part Nara Smith, the German and South African supermodel who is now TikTok-famous for her gorgeous, tedious recipes for everything from gum to chips to real meals, and part Gwyneth Paltrow, who preaches her style of eating and sells it in batches that can be shipped direct to your doorstep, as if by a deity of celebrity fitness.
Smith began making her food from scratch after being diagnosed with lupus and eczema. As a model and mother of three married to model Lucky Blue Smith, she has become the embodiment of luxury fashion meeting its lifestyle counterpart, with only a glint of moralizing. This family is almost perfect in its All American-meets-New American mode, like they were dreamed up in the Erewhon origin novel, with beauty as their alias, so you’d never know there are underlying health issues inspiring their commitment to clean living. Nara Smith is idolized and also ridiculed, but the unbothered serenity she channels in every video is eerily effective. She manages to be vulnerable, venerable, semi-transparent and entirely opaque, like any of the great gurus. “Do as I do, but you can’t because you’re you and I am the embodiment of pure luxury” could be her slogan. You just wanna try the lifestyle out, slow down, buy a mortar and pestle, marry a devout model, and see if living that way is akin to falling in love, becoming a teenager again, sharing a sugarless homemade soda over whitewashed doo-wop while the wars cold and hot proliferate abroad.
There is rampant spiritual sickness pervading the West, and what is called luxury, in every area of life, seems to soothe its symptoms. When it comes to food — shopping for food like our lives depend on it, but casually, in refined and enchanting micro-climates — the spirit seems to swell with optimism at the thrill we feel when we pay more for the false security of organic, non-GMO, seed oil-free, Nara Smith-approved groceries. My mother, widowed but loyal to the lifestyle market as if it would protect her from the alienation of child rearing, was onto something. This is where the elite go to abandon and redeem themselves, where the almost elite go to feel like what they may never be and claim a lifestyle just beyond their reach, for now. Who could blame them?
The un-retirement of Alpine skier Lindsey Vonn, Olympic debut of NHL players including like Connor Hellebuyck and return of halfpipe snowboarder Chloe Kim are among some of the biggest storylines at these Winter Games.
Hans Bezard/Agence Zoom, Jonathan Kozub/NHLI , Maddie Meyer via Getty Images
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Hans Bezard/Agence Zoom, Jonathan Kozub/NHLI , Maddie Meyer via Getty Images
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There’s no shortage of Winter Olympics storylines to watch — and we’re not just talking about sports.
Hundreds of athletes will vie for medals in 16 different sports over the course of a jam-packed 2 1/2 weeks in the Milan Cortina Games. They will compete at venues spanning a nearly 9,000-square-mile swath of northern Italy, in front of in-person spectators (a welcome return after the COVID-19 restrictions in Beijing in 2022) and on an even bigger world stage.
Rising stars — and one new sport — are making their Olympic debuts, while familiar fan favorites are returning, some in pursuit of a comeback after many years away. Lifelong dreams are on the line, but there are also geopolitical tensions, environmental questions and so much more.
Here are some of the threads we’re following:
1. Iconic American women are chasing comebacks
Lindsey Vonn grimaces after crashing in a women’s downhill race in Switzerland on Friday.
Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
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Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
Legendary American athletes — many of them women — across multiple sports are returning to the Olympic stage after years away. They may include Lindsey Vonn, who retired as the winningest female skier in history in 2019 but returned to competition after a partial knee replacement in 2024. She qualified for the Games at age 41 amid a triumphant World Cup season, but hurt her knee in a crash just a week before the opening ceremony. Figure skater Alysa Liu reversed her teenage retirement and now brings a 2025 world title and renewed love of the sport to her second Olympics. Another former teenage phenom, halfpipe snowboarder Maddy Schaffrick, clinched a spot in her first Olympics at age 31, over a decade after retiring from burnout in 2015. And Alpine skier Breezy Johnson is aiming for redemption on the same Cortina slopes that destroyed her knee and her last Olympic dreams just weeks before she was set to compete in Beijing in 2022.
-Rachel Treisman
2. International tensions may be uniquely high for U.S. athletes
There’s always a political dimension to the Olympic Games, but this year, U.S. athletes could face a uniquely tense atmosphere. The Trump administration has sparred with European athletes over a wide range of issues, including repeated threats against Denmark’s sovereign territory in Greenland. (The U.S. and Denmark men’s hockey teams are scheduled to face off on the ice on Feb. 14.) Some Italian politicians have also voiced concern about the role of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who plan to help with security at the Winter Games. Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala told local media that after the violence in Minneapolis, ICE agents are “not welcome” in his city. Vice President Vance, a frequent critic of European leaders, is expected to attend the opening ceremony at the Games on Feb. 6.
-Brian Mann
3. NHL players return to the Olympics
Brothers Brady and Matthew Tkachuk are among the NHL players set to make their Olympic debut for Team USA.
Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
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Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
Olympic hockey hasn’t included players from the world’s top professional league for more than a decade. Finally, that era is over, and we get to see some incredible teams play in a best-on-best format (although the tournament won’t include a Russian team, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022). Some of the league’s biggest stars, like Edmonton’s Connor McDavid, Toronto’s Auston Matthews and Colorado’s Nathan MacKinnon, are well into their careers without having had the chance to play for Olympic gold, and that changes next month. The star power on Team Canada alone runs from MacKinnon and McDavid to the legend Sidney Crosby and the San Jose Sharks’ 19-year-old phenom Macklin Celebrini. The Americans are no slouches either, with Matthews, the Tkachuk brothers and a trio of talented goaltenders led by Connor Hellebuyck, last year’s NHL MVP — and they’ll have their eyes set on the first Team USA gold since the “Miracle on Ice” in 1980.
-Becky Sullivan
4. Ski mountaineering makes its Olympic debut
A 2025 Ski Mountaineering World Cup women’s mixed relay event in Bormio, Italy, where the sport will make its Olympic debut.
Antonio Calanni/AP
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Antonio Calanni/AP
These Games feature several new medal events and one entirely new sport: ski mountaineering. In “skimo,” as it’s called, athletes race both up and downhill, alternately wearing and carrying their skis in backpacks. Alpine countries like Italy, France and Switzerland tend to dominate in skimo (after all, that’s where the sport has its roots), but there will be a pair of rising American stars to root for: Anna Gibson and Cameron Smith, who earned the U.S. its inaugural Olympic skimo spot with a historic World Cup mixed-relay win in December in Utah.
– Rachel Treisman
5. A new generation of U.S. curlers takes the rink
For the first time in 20 years, the U.S. will not be represented by curling legend John Shuster at the Olympics. Shuster competed in every winter Olympics from 2006 to 2022, and led the U.S. men’s team to a surprise gold medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games. At the 2025 U.S. Olympic Trials, Shuster’s team was defeated by a crew of Gen-Z curlers led by 24-year-old Danny Casper, whose team is currently ranked sixth in the world. On the women’s side, Team Peterson — led by sisters Tabitha and Tara Peterson — heads to the Olympics a second time. And Olympics newbies Korey Dropkin and Cory Thiesse, world champions in 2023, will represent the U.S. in mixed doubles.
-Pien Huang
6. Mikaela Shiffrin wants to put her 2022 Olympic disappointment behind her
Mikaela Shiffrin smiles after placing first in the Audi FIS Alpine Ski World Cup Women’s Slalom in late January, just days before the start of the Olympics.
Millo Moravski/Agence Zoom/Getty Images
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Millo Moravski/Agence Zoom/Getty Images
Mikaela Shiffrin is the most decorated skier ever, full stop. Nobody, man or woman, has won more races than Shiffrin, who has 108 World Cup wins, 12 season titles (in three different disciplines) and five overall titles to her name. But Olympic success has proved more elusive for Shiffrin. She has won just three medals in her three Olympic appearances — including a stunning shutout in 2022 when she missed the podium in all five of her events. Then, in 2024, Shiffrin sustained a freak injury that could have derailed her career. In a race that fall, she crashed and sustained a mysterious but severe puncture wound that sidelined her for months. Now, though, Shiffrin has returned to top form in her signature event, the slalom. She has competed in eight World Cup slalom races so far this winter and won all but one (in which she finished second). You’ll have to be patient, though: The women’s slalom is one of the very last alpine skiing events of the entire Olympics.
-Becky Sullivan
7. The logistical feat of a widespread winter Games
Organizers are calling these the most geographically widespread winter Games in history, spanning an area of roughly 8,495 square miles. They are co-hosted by metropolitan Milan and the Alpine resort town of Cortina d’Ampezzo, dispersed across four main competition clusters and six Olympic villages. Even the opening ceremony is spread out, hosted primarily at Milan’s historic San Siro Stadium with simultaneous athlete processions at venues in Predazzo, Livigno and Cortina. And, in a historic first, two Olympic cauldrons will ignite the action: one in Milan and one in Cortina. The Feb. 22 closing ceremony will take place between the host cities, at a Roman amphitheater in Verona.
-Rachel Treisman
8. Could the U.S. win its first-ever biathlon medal?
Deedra Irwin, pictured warming up before an event in 2023, could be Team USA’s best hope for its first ever medal in biathlon, which combines cross-country skiing with precision rifle shooting.
Anders Wiklund/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images
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Anders Wiklund/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images
Biathlon is the only winter Olympic sport in which the U.S. has never won a medal. Brutal! The sport is way bigger in Europe, and athletes from countries like Norway and France have traditionally dominated. Then, at the 2022 Games in Beijing, Deedra Irwin came closer than any American before her when she finished in seventh place in the women’s individual event. Now, she’s back for a second try. Like many American biathletes, Irwin took a winding path to the sport. She didn’t even grow up around guns — her first memory of firing a gun was at a ladies’ night at her college’s shooting range — and she didn’t attempt the sport until she was in her mid-20s, after pursuing a career as a Nordic skier (and living out of her car). Meanwhile, the 23-year-old Campbell Wright just scored his first ever podium finish in a World Cup race. (“Not gonna lie, I’ve been wanting a podium pretty bad. Maybe too much … but today it worked out!” he wrote on his Instagram after.) It’s the second Olympic appearance for Wright, who’s ranked No. 10 in the world, but his first for the U.S. after the dual national switched his national allegiance from New Zealand.
-Becky Sullivan
9. In-person spectators are back
The COVID-19 pandemic restricted in-person spectators and required masks (with some exceptions) at the last Winter Olympics, in Beijing in 2022. Many athletes have shared that they’re looking forward to competing in front of crowds, feeding off the energy of a packed arena and getting to take in the moment with their loved ones by their side. Figure skater Alysa Liu, who competed in Beijing, told reporters: “I had a lot of fun at that one. Everyone’s saying, ‘Listen, that one’s nothing compared to what a real Olympics is like.’”
-Rachel Treisman
10. Environmentalists say the Games are damaging a delicate ecosystem
Clouds hang over the ‘Seceda’ Dolomites mountain in the northern Italian province of South Tyrol, which is hosting Olympic biathlon events.
Matthias Schrader/AP
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Matthias Schrader/AP
The Italian Dolomites are a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site, and organizers promised to use the Games to “showcase the importance of protecting sensitive mountain ecosystems.” But environmentalists say water resources are being strained, and construction projects have further contributed to the “urbanization” of a mountain system already stressed by overtourism. As the region faces warmer and shorter winters due to climate change, most sporting events will take place on artificial snow and ice. The organising committee estimates it will require 250 million gallons of water — the equivalent of nearly 380 Olympic swimming pools — taken from local rivers, streams and lakes, which environmental groups say could strain the local ecosystem. Eight key environmental organizations in a joint statement denounced the Games’ sustainability claims as “greenwashing” and pointed out that the organizing committee has failed to conduct in-depth environmental surveys of the impact of these changes on the Dolomite region.
-Ruth Sherlock
11. After doping scandals in Beijing and Paris, will Milan have clean competition?
The Milan Olympics open at a time of deep division among international agencies that police athletes to prevent the use of performance-enhancing drugs. The World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) has long served as the global leader protecting clean sport. But critics say WADA failed to properly investigate doping scandals ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics, involving a Russian figure skater, and at the Paris Summer Games, involving a group of Chinese swimmers. “It necessarily and unfortunately clouds the confidence heading into these [Milan] Games,” said Travis Tygart, head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, in an interview with NPR. In a statement this month, WADA President Witold Bańka called for unity. “We hope that, like us, you are feeling revitalized and eager to work together to advance clean sport in 2026,” he said. But trust remains at a minimum, with the U.S. government withholding its WADA dues in an effort to press for reform.
-Brian Mann
12. U.S. figure skaters are poised to make the podium — and history
The recently nicknamed “Blade Angels” — Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito — will represent Team USA in women’s figure skating.
Jamie Squire/Getty Images North America
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Jamie Squire/Getty Images North America
This is arguably the strongest figure skating team the U.S. has sent to an Olympics in years. The stacked roster of Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito could win the U.S. its first women’s singles gold since 2002. On the men’s side, Ilia “Quad God” Malinin is favored for gold — and poised to become the first person to land a quadruple axel (a jump that only he can do) at an Olympics. In ice dance, seven-time reigning national champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates are looking for redemption after finishing just off the podium in Beijing in 2022. The U.S. is also seeking to defend its 2022 gold medal in the team event, with Japan now its main rival in light of Russia’s effective exclusion from the Olympics.
-Rachel Treisman
13. Can the U.S. work its way up the medal count?
The U.S. won 25 medals in 2022, placing fifth in the overall medal count behind Norway, the Russian Olympic Committee, Germany and Canada. Norway has long dominated the Winter Olympics medal count, going into this year with a total of 405 and a record 148 gold. The U.S. is hoping some of that special sauce might rub off on its ski jumping team, which has won only one medal ever, at the inaugural 1924 Olympics. After 2022, the ski jumping federations of the U.S. and Norway officially partnered to share coaches, training facilities and sports scientists. That has given the U.S. a boost and at least one Olympic medal contender: 20-year-old Lake Placid, N.Y., native Tate Frantz, who moved to Norway to train and work with Norwegian coaches and jumpers. “I’d say it was extremely important,” Frantz told NPR. “It pushes you astronomically.” The U.S. is also hoping the return of NHL men’s hockey players to Team USA will give the men a shot at a gold medal for the first time since 1980.
-Rachel Treisman
14. Team USA bobsled moms could medal
Bobsledder Kaillie Humphries holds her son, Aulden Armbruster, during the 2025 IBSF World Championships. She went through IVF treatments while competing.
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Al Bello/Getty Images
Several elite athletes are back at the top of their sport after giving birth. Kaillie Humphries is back on competing in her fifth Olympic Games (her second for Team USA; she represented Canada for her first three competitions — or four, if you count the year she served as an alternate). She has a 1-year-old son, born after several IVF attempts. “I got back in the bobsled 4 1/2 months postpartum, so it wasn’t the ideal timeline,” Humphries says, “I’m not a spring chicken anymore.” Still, Humphries is a top contender in monobob, for which she won a gold medal at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, and won again at the IBSF World Cup in January. She’s joined by Elana Meyers-Taylor, the most decorated Black athlete in Winter Olympics history, and a fellow mom who’s also back for her fifth Olympics. Meyers-Taylor returned to competitive bobsledding after the birth of each of her children, now 3 and 6. “It’s been quite a bit on my body,” she says, citing years of breastfeeding, lack of sleep, back pain, and getting older, “I might not win every race and every day might look crazy and chaotic…But I wouldn’t trade it for the world, clearly,” she says.
-Pien Huang
15. U.S. men look to end a 46-year medal drought in cross-country skiing
Gus Schumacher, pictured at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships Trondheim in 2025, could earn U.S. men their first cross-country ski medal in almost half a century.
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Lars Baron/Getty Images
Alaskan Gus Schumacher is the strongest medal contender for U.S. men, who have won only a single Olympic cross-country medal, Bill Koch’s silver in the 30K in 1976 in Innsbruck. American women Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall took the first-ever U.S. gold in cross country in the team sprint in Pyeongchang 2018. Diggins won a silver and bronze in Beijing in 2022. On the World Cup tour, Schumacher has shown he can beat the world’s best in middle-distance events in the skate skiing discipline. He’s having his best World Cup season ever, with two sprint podiums on successive days in the last races before the Olympics. Vermonter Ben Ogden is another to watch. He has turned heads with bold tactics in the more traditional classic technique and has had good results in skate skiing races, too. A hard truth, though, is the dominance of the Norwegian team and a strong field of Europeans. But don’t count the U.S. out for a medal in the four-man relay, it’s a notoriously unpredictable event and Schumacher, Ogden and John Hagenbuch were on the team that won the event in the 2019 Junior World Championship.
-Eric Whitney
16. Multiple snowboarders could land a historic three-peat
U.S. snowboarder Chloe Kim became the first woman ever to win two Olympic gold medals in halfpipe in 2022. Since then, she’s added jaw-dropping new tricks to her repertoire, including landing a cab 1260 (3 1/2 revolutions) in competition — another female first — and a 1440 in practice. She’s aiming for gold again, even after a last-minute shoulder injury kept her from training in the weeks leading up to the Games. Two other women are also hoping to become the first snowboarders to three-peat in consecutive Winter Games: The Czech Republic’s Ester Ledecka in parallel giant slalom and Austria’s Anna Gasser in big air.
-Rachel Treisman
17. The U.S. sends its strongest long track speedskating team in decades
U.S. speedskater Erin Jackson, pictured in January, is the defending Olympic gold medalist in the women’s 500-meter event.
Matthias Schrader/AP
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Matthias Schrader/AP
The prolific Jordan Stolz — a favorite in the 500, 1000, 1500 meters and the mass start event — is poised to make speedskating history unseen since U.S. speedskater Eric Heiden won five gold medals in the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. After a strong finish at the World Cup, Erin Jackson now heads to Milano Cortina to get ready to defend her Olympic title at her third Games, skating fast and turning left in the Women’s 500 and 1000. Four-time Olympian Brittany Bowe brings her decades of inline speedskating experience, explosive power and technique to the Women’s Team Pursuit. The Women’s and Men’s Team Pursuit — which involves two teams of three people racing in tandem — is going to be hot at these games. Team USA has dominated this event over the past four years, mastering the precision, technique and grace that consistently yields top results. Skaters are a mirror image of one another during every lap of the race. It’ll be much like watching synchronized swimming. Any slight misstep may be the difference between coming in first or 10th.
-Rolando Arrieta
18. Some Russian athletes can compete, but not under their own flag
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) suspended Russia and its ally Belarus after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But it did allow a small number of heavily vetted athletes from those countries to compete as “Individual Neutral Athletes” (AIN) in Paris in 2024, without any national anthems, flags or colors (instead represented by a turquoise logo). Similar rules apply to these Games, with neutral athletes’ participation at the discretion of each international sports federation. Russian athletes — even top NHL players like Alex Ovechkin and Nikita Kucherov — will be noticeably absent from the hockey rink, while a select handful will compete in sports including figure skating, cross-country skiing and short-track speedskating.
-Rachel Treisman
19. Women cross-country skiers will race on equal footing with men for the first time
Women have long struggled to achieve parity at the Winter Olympics, and the 2026 Games mark another milestone. Female cross-country ski racers were first allowed to compete in a single short-track event at the 1952 Winter Games in Oslo. This year, women will compete in the same number of events — a total of six — as their male counterparts. They’ll also ski the same distances, including the grueling 50k endurance race. “I’m really really excited to have equal distance for men and women at the Olympics,” three-time U.S. Olympic medal-winner Jessie Diggins told NPR. Diggins plans to compete in all six events at Milan-Cortina. “I think it’s really cool and an important way to show, especially young women in sport, hey, you got this,” she said.
-Brian Mann
Jeffrey Epstein Files
First Look At Epstein’s Trove Of Porn Seized By Feds
Published
Jeffrey Epstein had a voracious appetite for not only sex with minors, but also porn, which the FBI seized from his computers and the DOJ released last week as part of the Epstein Files.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation executed search warrants in 2019 at Epstein’s homes in Manhattan and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Agents confiscated a whopping 170 videos from the convicted pedophile’s hard drives and other electronic devices, containing Internet images and video files that include adult porn.
Some of the X-rated images show naked females in sexually suggestive positions on a beach or inside an apartment. Other images capture nude women at several of Epstein’s homes, with the females either alone or with other women or hanging out topless with Epstein.
What’s more, the FBI says the raunchy videos and images do not show the adults committing crimes, noting that Epstein was seen in multiple videos … but he’s not having sex with anyone or abusing his victims. Plus, the FBI says, it’s hard to tell how old the females are, but some appear to be in their late teens.
TMZ is publishing some of the images … which have been redacted and somewhat blurred out by the Department of Justice to protect the identities of those depicted. Last Friday, the DOJ released over 3 million documents, images and videos in compliance with President Trump signing into law the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 19, 2025.
Ads for the Melania movie at the New York Stock Exchange, where the first lady rang the bell last week.
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
First lady Melania Trump’s documentary outperformed box office expectations during its opening weekend, bringing in about $7 million domestically.
Audience members were largely white (75%), women (70%), and 55 or over (72%). Dallas, Orlando, Tampa, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta and West Palm Beach were among the top markets over the weekend, according to data from Amazon MGM Studios.
Amazon acquired the rights to the movie in early 2025 for $40 million. The company ran a flashy rollout for the film, spending $35 million on marketing, leading to questions about whether such a hefty price tag included earning President Trump’s favor — or trying to. Melania is one of the most expensive documentary films ever made, with the first lady herself taking on the role of an executive producer.
Critics have panned the movie, which premiered at the Kennedy Center last week with protesters dressed as Marie Antoinette outside. TikTokers encouraged viewers to instead watch Becoming, Michelle Obama’s 2020 Netflix documentary, which broke the service’s top 10 most popular movies in the U.S. over the weekend.
Documentaries rarely receive wide theatrical releases, but Melania opened on more than 1,500 screens throughout the U.S. this weekend. Ahead of the film’s global release on Friday, many on social media shared photos of their local theaters in which nearly every seat for Melania showings remained available for purchase. Analysts were predicting ticket sales in the $5 million range — making the $7 million box office good news for Amazon.
For a sense of scale: The top-grossing film this weekend was the survival horror thriller Send Help, which brought in $20 million. Following close behind was Iron Lung, also a horror film, at nearly $18 million.
But, writes David A. Gross in his industry newsletter FranchiseRe, “This is an excellent opening for a political documentary, at more than double the average for the genre … These are small movies, and this is a big start for a documentary.”
Gross told NPR via email that the film’s audience “matches with the Trump fan base. The weekend audience gave the film a glowing A CinemaScore,” which polls moviegoers. “They see Melania as an accomplished role model — someone they look up to.”
“As good as this opening is for a documentary,” says Gross in his newsletter, “for any other film, with $75 million in costs and limited foreign potential, it would be a problem.”
Amazon is undeterred. Kevin Wilson, Amazon MGM Studios’ head of domestic theatrical distribution, said in a statement that the box office numbers exceeded expectations — and that a docuseries would be on the way.
“This momentum is an important first step in what we see as a long-tail lifecycle for both the film and the forthcoming docu-series, extending well beyond the theatrical window and into what we believe will be a significant run for both on our service.”
A notoriously private person, the first lady has gained a reputation as a mysterious figure who closely controls her public image. Melania follows the first lady during the 20 days leading up to President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, including preparation for a candle-lit inaugural dinner at which the camera breezes by Jeff Bezos multiple times. Cameras also follow the design process for her inauguration outfits, and her grieving process after her mother Amalija Knavs’ death.
At the New York Stock Exchange last week, the first lady hailed the documentary as “a window into an important period for America.”
Editor’s note: Amazon is among NPR’s recent financial supporters and pays to distribute some NPR content.
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