Lifestyle

‘The Trojan Teddy Bear’: The promise and peril of childhood in the age of AI

Published

4 weeks ago

July 15, 2026

‘The Trojan Teddy Bear’: The promise and peril of childhood in the age of AI

In A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Monica introduces Teddy to David. The seemingly ordinary teddy bear quickly reveals himself to be an intelligent companion capable of conversation and emotional support.

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Warner Bros. Pictures

Back in 2001, Steven Spielberg released an underrated scifi movie named A.I. Artificial Intelligence (yes, the title is a bit redundant). The movie, which loosely borrows from Pinocchio, tells the story of a family who adopts a robotic boy programmed for love, and that robot’s heartbreaking quest to become a real boy.

Much of the technology in A.I. remains elusive. We’re probably not anywhere close to building androids that can convincingly pass as Haley Joel Osment — or Jude Law, for that matter. But some of the AI products imagined in the movie are starting to look surprisingly plausible. Take Teddy, an animatronic teddy bear. Teddy can walk, talk, make decisions, and respond to the needs and emotions of people around him. He’s more than just a toy. He’s an intelligent companion and protector for children.

Today, a slew of technology companies are developing AI companions that sort of resemble Teddy. The most intelligent AI chatbots still live on digital screens, but a wave of startups is giving them bodies — creating dolls, action figures, and robots that can serve as companions for kids.

What happens when kids grow up with AI?

AI is already a part of childhood. Recommendation algorithms curate what many kids watch and listen to. Chatbots stand ready to answer questions like, “Are monsters real?” or “Why is the sky blue?” They can help with homework, tell bedtime stories, or even feel like a friend. And companies are racing to embed AI into toys, nurseries, classrooms, and eventually robots that live alongside families.

In a new book, Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity & Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI, author Dana Suskind grapples with what the rising tide of artificial intelligence means for raising kids. On the one hand, she acknowledges that the technology offers promise as, for example, a productivity enhancer and time saver for parents, a monitoring and research tool that can give parents and scientists valuable data on child development, and an interactive tutor that might help some kids learn.

But Suskind worries about what happens if AI begins replacing the kinds of human interactions that young brains evolved to learn from.

In fact, Suskind says, her original, working title for the book was, “The Trojan Teddy Bear,” a warning that AI companions may seem cute and cuddly — but they carry hidden risks for child development. She ultimately went with Human Raised because she wanted to emphasize the positive — and irreplaceable — role that parents, teachers, and caregivers play in molding young ones.

“If we want children to be able to continue to connect with each other and with other human beings, to be able to think critically, to be able to navigate the human world, we’re gonna need to make sure that kids have a distinctly human-raised early childhood,” Suskind says.

Suskind is a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she directs a program aimed at giving kids hearing with cochlear implants. After she began doing this incredible work — literally helping children hear — she noticed that some kids who had the procedure went on to understand spoken language and talk with relative ease, while others had a much harder time. Hearing alone wasn’t enough. And that led her to dive into neuroscience and social science to understand why.

The brain development of young kids, Suskind learned, is heavily influenced by the back-and-forth interactions they have with their parents and caregivers during the first several years of their life. And she grew concerned that there is a big population of kids who aren’t getting the enriching communication their brains need. And so she founded the TMW Initiative, a research center that helps parents create the kinds of brain-enriching environments that children need to reach their full potential. (You can read more about Suskind’s biography and previous work in a Planet Money newsletter from 2022).

Why Dana Suskind is sounding the alarm

With the explosion of AI, Suskind has grown alarmed by a rush to introduce an unprecedented technology into kids’ lives without careful reflection and rigorous scientific study about its effects on young minds. She is especially concerned about AI companions and other systems that interact socially with children, which she fears many people will use to substitute for the human interactions that children need most.

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have used technology to make raising children a little easier. In Human Raised, Suskind traces that history back to prehistoric times, when mothers used woven slings to carry infants while they worked. Over the centuries, new technologies — like television and tablets — have eased the burdens of caregiving or helped keep children occupied. Many of these technologies have also been greeted with fears that they would rot kids’ brains.

But Suskind argues AI may mark a fundamental shift. Interacting with a chatbot or intelligent teddy bear is more than just a kid glued to a television or an iPad watching Sesame Street or Paw Patrol. AI systems carry on conversations that can feel strikingly human. They respond to kids’ questions, emotions, and fears. They create a kind of synthetic social relationship — one that, Suskind argues, may shape developing minds in ways that, until recently, only humans could.

Suskind cites the research of renowned University of Washington developmental psychologist Patricia K. Kuhl. Kuhl proposed what’s known as the “social gate” hypothesis — the idea that children’s brains are biologically primed to learn through social interaction. Studies have shown, for example, that babies learn language much better from a live person than from a screen. Neuroscientists and psychologists suggest that’s because social interactions engage the brain in ways passive media does not. The sing-song way adults naturally speak to babies, smiles and other facial expressions, gentle touch, eye contact, and back-and-forth exchanges all appear to help open that social gate and facilitate learning and healthy brain development.

While artificial intelligence is no match for human educators and caregivers, Suskind argues, it is capable of opening the social gate in young children in ways that previous technologies could not. That makes AI a potentially extraordinary educational tool — but also a potentially dangerous one.

Companies design AI systems with their own goals, which could include maximizing your kids’ engagement, keeping their attention, collecting data, and making money. They don’t have the same priorities as parents. And while those systems may imitate human interaction, Suskind argues they cannot recreate everything that makes human relationships developmentally valuable.

“Eye contact, shared laughter, patient answers to ‘why’ questions activate ancient neural circuits designed for connection,” Suskind writes. “These exchanges provide a form of nourishment no algorithm, however sophisticated, can match.”

Human relationships are also messy and filled with emotions. Parents misunderstand their children. Kids get frustrated. Families argue, reconnect, and then smooth things over. Suskind argues that those imperfect interactions — and “the productive struggle” they create — are how children learn resilience, emotional regulation, flexibility, and how to navigate real relationships.

Unlike most humans, AI systems can be endlessly engaging, infinitely patient, and relentlessly affirming. Interactions with them often feel frictionless. Suskind worries giving young kids considerable exposure to them may make them less prepared for the messy, unpredictable nature of real human relationships.

AI as junk food for the young mind

Suskind compares AI relationships to ultra-processed food. “ If all you eat is fruit snacks, which is a synthetic version of fruit, when you actually eat the real fruit, you’re gonna be like, “Hmm, it’s not quite as sweet,” she says.

AI could eventually be programmed to try and mimic real parents and caregivers even more closely. But Suskind argues that the problem isn’t simply that today’s AI falls short of human relationships. It’s that AI represents a fundamentally new kind of social experience for children — one that already raises concerns based on what we know about child development and whose long-term effects remain deeply uncertain.

Suskind uses an analogy from the 19th century, when a German chemist named Justus von Liebig created one of the first infant formulas, hoping to replicate the nourishment of human milk. But when a French physician tested the formula on four newborns, all of them died within days, and the episode sparked a fierce controversy.

The lesson, Suskind suggests, is that we should be cautious about engineering substitutes for something as biologically, emotionally, and socially complex as human caregiving before we understand how those substitutes shape children’s development.

Given so much uncertainty about this rapidly evolving technology and its potential effects on kids, Suskind spends a lot of the book offering parents a practical guide for safely navigating child-rearing in the age of AI. She emphasizes that it’s especially important to shield kids from AI during their first years of life.

“Older children and adults encounter AI with already-built neural scaffolding, but young children are still wiring the very circuits that shape future learning and relationships,” she writes. “Introducing AI during this sensitive period presents a fundamentally different challenge with greater potential for harm.”

Suskind is open to the idea of using AI to enhance education for some kids — but only as a tool that enhances, rather than replaces, humans. She argues that human caregivers are the best way to cultivate what she calls “the Human Edge,” a set of social, emotional, and cognitive skills like “critical thinking, interpersonal connection, genuine creativity, empathy, and resilience.”

But, like time-crunched parents who rely on screens to buy themselves some time today, there may be growing temptations to outsource parts of child-rearing to AI, especially considering the fact that childcare is incredibly expensive. Suskind worries that, over time, a fully human-raised childhood could become a kind of luxury good — much the way fresh, healthy food often is today. Families with the time and resources would provide rich human interaction to their kids. Everyone else might increasingly rely on cheaper, more convenient AI substitutes.

And children raised largely by AI might not only lag socially, emotionally, and cognitively, but, ironically, they could also be less prepared for an AI-driven economy.

Suskind points to a recent essay by the University of Chicago economist Alex Imas. Imas argues that as AI automates more cognitive work, human jobs may be increasingly concentrated in what he calls “the relational sector” — occupations where humans are valued for qualities that make them distinctly human, from education to health care to hospitality, the arts, and therapy.

If that’s true, then the traits children develop through a human-raised childhood won’t just matter for their social lives. They may also become an economic advantage. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the most valuable skills may be the ones that are the most deeply human.

Lifestyle

This rising painter reimagines Renaissance art in a cocoa plantation in Cameroon

Published

7 hours ago

August 9, 2026

Press Room

This rising painter reimagines Renaissance art in a cocoa plantation in Cameroon

Marc Padeu, a painter from Cameroon, draws inspiration from Renaissance art brought into an African landscape. The above painting is title “Sous le poids de la coupe” — under the weight of the cup.

Copyright The Artist/Courtesy Larkin Durey

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Cameroonian painter Marc Padeu says that being an African artist means “being the heir to an extraordinarily rich history.” But he also says it can mean “living and working on a continent where artistic infrastructure is virtually nonexistent.”

Padeu’s work often takes inspiration from religious paintings from the European Renaissance — but reimagines them, depicting people in Cameroon’s cocoa plantations. London gallery Larkin Durey is currently holding an exhibition of Padeu’s latest work.

Marc Padeu, a painter from Cameroon, has a new show at the London gallery
London gallery Larkin Durey.

Courtesy of Larkin Durey

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Oliver Durey, the gallery’s director, said: “Mark’s work is timeless. His visual style is simultaneously very contemporary but also deeply rooted in that old tradition — so there is something extremely fresh about it.”

Padeu is from Bafang in the West Region of Cameroon and is part of the Bamileké ethnic group. The 36-year-old now lives in Yaoundé, the country’s political capital. In an interview with NPR, Padeu explained his art — and what inspires him.

Can you talk about why you meld classic Western paintings with African scenes?

I wouldn’t say that I’m trying to fuse Western painting with African scenes. For me, it’s more a question of placing images that everyone recognizes within a setting that is familiar to me. I grew up in Cameroon, surrounded by plantations, villages and people who make their living from the land. That’s the world I know best, so it’s only natural that this is the setting in which I want to tell these stories.

At one point, I asked myself why certain images seemed to belong exclusively to Europe. Why should the Nativity, the Last Supper or Christ in Gethsemane always be depicted with the same faces and the same landscapes? Yet what they convey goes far beyond any particular place or era. They speak of love, sacrifice, fear, hope, family. These are profoundly human, universal experiences.

How did you become an artist?

It’s certainly down to genetics, first and foremost. My mother is a fashion designer. She doesn’t work much any more, but when I was younger, I used to see her fashion sketchbooks. So I inherited this talent from my mother. I was already drawing a lot at primary school and then at secondary school. I was the one who often helped teachers draw their demonstration sketches on the blackboard in front of my classmates. This often earned me a certain reputation at the various schools I attended.

Later on, I went on to study at the school of fine arts. I must say the timing was perfect in that respect. The very year I passed my A-levels, the Cameroonian government opened the country’s very first art schools. So I’m part of the very first ever intake of graduates from that school. It was a very traditional course, based mainly on the study of art history.

“La bague de Roxane” — Roxane’s ring — by Marc Padeu

Private Collection, USA/Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Larkin Durey

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Private Collection, USA/Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Larkin Durey

Is there one artist who inspired you most?

The African American painter Kerry James Marshall. Marshall was a significant discovery for me, not because I wanted to paint like him, but because he showed me that it was possible to reestablish Black bodies at the heart of the great tradition of painting. He never merely added Black figures to an art history that had already been written; he demonstrated that they were an integral part of it.

I do think, however, that our approaches subsequently take different directions. He is very interested in the social and political history of African American communities. My work is more permeated by philosophical and spiritual questions. I explore the major themes of existence: birth, sacrifice, death, hope, promise by embodying them in scenes from everyday life in Cameroon.

Is it right that you used to be a fresco painter in a church?

That’s right. I created a few murals in the churches of Nkongsamba, where I was studying at the school of fine arts. At first, it was just a part-time job to earn a bit of money. But the murals were so successful that I was very quickly inundated with commissions, mainly of religious murals. The churches commissioned me to paint scenes inspired by the Bible: episodes from the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the various apostles, angels and certain saints.

One evening, whilst I was still painting on the scaffolding inside the town’s grand cathedral, a few women from a prayer group entered the church and prostrated themselves before the still-unfinished mural. It gave me a very strange feeling. But above all, it was at that moment that I realized the power that images and representations can have.

“The Blue Man of Njombé,” by Marc Padeu

Private Collection, USA/Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Larkin Durey

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Private Collection, USA/Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Larkin Durey

I have read that you take inspiration from religious paintings from Europe, especially from the Renaissance era.

Through constantly depicting these religious images, I began to take a deeper interest in them. I remember one in particular: The Coronation of the Virgin by Diego Velázquez. This painting, which I consider a masterpiece of composition, fascinated me to such an extent that I created my own reinterpretation, which I would call The Blue Virgin. The same is true of Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, which I reinterpreted as The Blue Man of Njombé.

Can you tell us a bit more about The Blue Virgin — with its depiction of a woman whose skin and clothing is blue?

The Blue Virgin is one of the first works in which I sought to create a dialogue between Christian iconography and my own visual world. I depict a young African woman striking the serene, frontal pose of Renaissance Madonnas. Inspired by Diego Velázquez’s The Coronation of the Virgin, this is not a Virgin in the religious or devotional sense. Rather, she is a symbolic figure. She embodies motherhood, promise and a form of silent presence. By giving her the features of a young Cameroonian woman, I wanted to show that these foundational figures of art history can be reinvented through other faces, other stories and other places.

The luminous skull resting on the figure’s lap is undoubtedly the most important element in the painting. It refers to the memento mori [Latin for “remember you must die”] tradition, which features prominently in Western painting. In Christian iconography, the Virgin is often associated with the promise of life; here, that promise is set against the awareness of death. The color blue was not chosen here solely because it is traditionally the color of the Virgin Mary. It creates a sense of distance from reality. It distances the figure from the portrait, bringing it closer to the symbolic.

Can you explain how religion influences your work? Are you religious yourself?

My relationship with religion did not begin with the frescoes in churches. For as long as I can remember, my family has always been very religious. My mother is without a doubt the most devout person I know on this earth. This was already the case with my grandparents before her. My grandfather was a catechist [a teacher in the church]. However, I grew up caught between two spiritual traditions. My mother’s family are very devout Catholics. My father’s family, on the other hand, are not at all. They are animists [people who believe that animals, plants and various objects possess a spiritual essence] deeply rooted in the Bamiléké spiritual tradition. My father was, in fact, a member of a council that assists the village chief in making decisions for the community. So I have always navigated between these two spiritual traditions, as have most other Africans, for that matter.

How did you get the idea of putting classical figures in a clearly African setting — and not a glamorous setting but a setting of people who farm for a living, which is hard work?

My aim here is not to rewrite the history of painting. Over the years I have spent studying classical painting, I very quickly realized that the major themes it explores — namely birth, death, sacrifice, promise, hope and so on — are by no means exclusively European. They are quite simply human and can therefore be embodied by Africans, and of course by Cameroonians.

Having grown up in an environment where working the land plays a central role, it therefore seemed entirely natural to me to place at the heart of my work these men, women and children whom I know well, and with whom I once shared the grueling daily life of the plantation. The idea is to portray them with the same nobility and dignity as the figures of the great masters. So, indirectly, it is my own story that I am telling. It is myself that I am painting.

Marc Padeu, “La Balançoire,”

Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Larkin Durey

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Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Larkin Durey

Your paintings feel very alive, like the people in them might move at any moment. Do you work from photographs or real life models?

My way of working is rather unusual — it’s very personal. In fact, a painting can take several months, or even much longer, to take shape in my mind before I even begin to paint. I live with that image for a while. I think about it constantly, I transform it in my mind, I imagine different compositions until everything starts to fall into place.

Once this vision becomes clearer, I look for people who can bring it to life. Sometimes these are close friends or family members, sometimes acquaintances and sometimes people I meet over time. I don’t work with professional models. I organize photo shoots, but I don’t necessarily ask them to strike a specific pose. Although nothing is left to chance, I prefer to suggest a situation or an emotion and let them express themselves naturally in front of the camera.

These photographs form my raw material. I sometimes take dozens, or even more, for a single painting. The figures are often photographed separately, at different times, sometimes several months apart. Then, in my studio, I reconstruct the scene entirely from scratch. I reposition the bodies, alter the gazes, the lighting, the colors and the proportions. A final composition may thus bring together references taken at moments far apart in time.

I like to let an image mature for a long time before bringing it to life on the canvas. It is often in this waiting that the work finds its true purpose.

What does it mean to be a Cameroonian artist — an African artist — in 2026?

That’s an excellent question. Being a Cameroonian or African artist in 2026 means, first and foremost, living and working on a continent where artistic infrastructure is virtually non-existent. We’re talking here about sub-Saharan Africa. This means that recognition very often comes from outside the continent. We find ourselves in a kind of paradox: We’re more visible in London, Berlin, Paris or New York than in Douala, Abidjan or Lagos. As African and Cameroonian artists, our careers therefore depend on an international ecosystem whose rules and contours we don’t always fully understand.

However, being an African artist, a Cameroonian artist, also means being the heir to an extraordinarily rich history. We come from great kingdoms, often with recognized artistic traditions. Kingdoms that have weathered major historical and painful events, namely: the various slave trades, colonization, the struggles for independence, the diversity of languages and the coexistence of ancestral practices with monotheistic religions imported from the West. All this heritage that already exists within us is very often reflected in the works we create.

However, we do not remain prisoners of this history. We do not paint to represent Africa or Cameroon to the world but to reveal the world from the perspective of Cameroon, of Africa.

“Memento vivere” — remember to live — by Marc Padeu.

Copyright The Artist/Courtesy Larkin Durey

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What advice do you have for other aspiring African artists?

First and foremost, I would tell them not to try to be “African artists” but simply to become artists. Much like a politician, one’s ethnic or geographical background cannot be a political platform. One’s background is therefore merely a starting point for a broader openness to the world.

I would encourage them to broaden their horizons further. To study their personal history and their origins in depth. To learn about the history of art and to take a serious interest in philosophy.

I’d also tell them not to be afraid of time. These days, everything pushes us to produce quickly, to be visible straight away. Personally, I don’t produce more than ten paintings a year, sometimes even fewer than seven. That suits me just fine. I’m constantly quite aware that I’ll be doing this all my life, so that drives me to find a creative rhythm that I can easily sustain, given the high standards it demands over the very long term.

Finally, I’d remind them that art isn’t just a profession, but a way of being, of existing in the world.

Are you ever asked if you are just imitating the great masters? Or trivializing these images by putting them in a cocoa plantation?

To be honest, I have never asked myself the question in those terms. All artists draw inspiration from those who came before them. Manet drew inspiration from Titian, Picasso from Velázquez and so did Francis Bacon. For my part, I enter into a dialogue with these images because they form part of our shared heritage. I do not seek to copy them but to extend them through my own perspective.

As for the idea that I might trivialize these works by transposing them into a cocoa plantation, I actually believe quite the opposite. Biblical stories feature ordinary people: fishermen, shepherds, craftsmen. They do not take place in extraordinary settings but at the heart of everyday life. Ultimately, what could be more natural than to bring them back to life today amongst the men and women who work the land? For me, there is something profoundly noble in these ordinary gestures.

“La promesse et l’agneau” — the promise of the sheep — by Marc Padeu.

Copyright The Artist/Courtesy Larkin Durey

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In a world where prejudice sadly still flourishes, have you run into discrimination?

In all honesty, I don’t recall ever having personally been the victim of any form of discrimination. Perhaps I haven’t been paying close enough attention to have noticed it? Or perhaps philosophy really does help me a great deal in this regard. However, I think it would be very naïve to say that prejudice does not exist in the art world. It can be present there just as it is in other areas of life. However, it is essential not to build one’s career around it. If one makes prejudice the main subject of one’s work or narrative, one gives it a prominence it does not deserve.

I therefore believe that the best response to discrimination is not to confront it head-on or to deny it but rather to produce works that defy all the categories into which people might seek to pigeonhole them.

What is your dream for your work, and what would you like people to think when they see it?

My professional dream hasn’t changed much since the days when I used to paint murals in churches. I simply hope that my work reaches as many people as possible around the world.

You know, the world is in a really difficult state. With all these conflicts and natural disasters, as an artist, I feel a humble duty to do my bit for a happier world. George Bernard Shaw said: “Without art, the brutality of reality would make the world unbearable.”

Marc Padeu: Memento Vivere is on view at the Larkin Durey gallery in London until August 14. The gallery regularly exhibits Padeu’s work.

Lifestyle

A tale of two very different horny movies

Published

19 hours ago

August 9, 2026

Press Room

A tale of two very different horny movies

Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner in One Night Only.

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A wise man once said, Sex is natural, sex is good / Not everybody does it / but everybody should.

Don’t take this declaration literally — have sex if you want to, or don’t have it if you don’t. It’s the sentiment that’s admirable, the notion that sex doesn’t have to be shameful, rigid or distressing. It can be fun! It can be freeing! It can be weird, but in a good way! That spirit seems to have carried over into this summer’s movie season in some big ways: The buzzy comedies I Want Your Sex and The Invite have been enthusiastic champions of unconventional sex and sexuality.

And this week brings two more films where desire and straight-up horniness are top of mind — Jane Schoenbrun’s excellent Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Will Gluck’s infuriatingly sex-negative One Night Only. The latter stars Monica Barbaro and Mr. Dua Lipa — er, Callum Turner.

Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz star in The Invite.

As the end credits rolled at my One Night Only screening, I thought to myself, Did they really put out a mainstream sex-negative rom-com, in the year 2026, arguing for the so-called “upsides” of living under an authoritarian government? Also known as “the sex Purge movie” — because it echoes the popular action-horror franchise – director Gluck and writer Travis Braun’s high-concept dystopian love story is about two hot New Yorkers who keep having awkward meet-cutes during the one 12-hour-period a year when Americans are legally allowed to have pre-marital sex. (When the movie begins, the country is three years into the congressional mandate, which is enforced via biosensors branded on the wrist indicating one’s status as single or married.)

Olivia Wilde and Cooper tk in I Want Your Sex

It’s an inherently fascinating premise that could, in the right hands, be taken in creatively curious directions, interrogating right-wing policing of women’s and queer people’s bodies or even Gen Z’s supposed collective aversion to sex in most forms. That latter issue is of particular interest to Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, which sees Olivia Wilde’s freewheeling artist character enter an ethically dubious yet consensual sexual relationship with her much younger employee, played by Cooper Hoffman.

But apart from a throw-away line here and there, One Night Only is thoroughly uninterested in engaging with the politics it explicitly conjures beyond a few clever sight gags. Instead, it leaves you with more questions than answers, thanks to unclear and avoidant world-building. (For starters: What, exactly, qualifies as “sex”? How do queer people and visitors from abroad factor into all of this?) The movie merely gestures at resistance against the mandates, and does so only half-heartedly and insidiously; the one character we see defy the law is made out to be an all-around deviant with a long rap sheet.

And then there are multiple characters who outright state that just maybe, government-mandated year-round celibacy forces people to be “intentional” about who they sleep with — as if it’s a lemonade-from-lemons kind of situation. (Completely ignored is what it might mean to force couples into marriage who otherwise wouldn’t tie the knot, doing so just so they can have sex without fear of arrest.) To make all the pro-Gilead vibes even less digestible, the script’s humor is second-rate, and Barbaro and Turner just don’t give off the necessary heat to be the central couple. It fails in its dystopia and as a rom-com.

It’s a wonder One Night Only is being released the same week as Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a great, gory and viscerally sensual meditation on old-school slasher flicks. The two movies couldn’t be more different in their approaches to sex; their simultaneous arrival is like the inverse of the Armageddon and Deep Impact twin-movies phenomenon of 1998. For Schoenbrun, sexual anxiety — presented here in the form of internalized societal judgment, among other things — is a hurdle to be overcome through confrontation with the self, not shrugged-off acceptance. Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young queer indie filmmaker, has been tapped to reboot Camp Miasma, the fictional horror franchise that was key to her sexual awakening as a kid (think Halloween, Friday the 13th). She seeks out its now-reclusive original star Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who lives on the grounds of the remote abandoned sleepaway camp where the first movie was shot decades ago because, she — kind of — jokes, “Somebody’s gotta be here” when the franchise’s iconic monster, Little Death, returns.

Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

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At first, Billy is presented as a Norma Desmond type with a Dolly Parton-esque accent (Anderson lays the lilting southern drawl on thick), but the central dynamic between faded movie star and hungry filmmaker is way less antagonistic than Sunset Boulevard. It’s also far more erotic — Kris has largely suppressed her own sexual desires for human connection despite being in a polyamorous relationship, conferring all that energy onto filmmaking and a heavy obsession with the bloody, twisted fantasy of Camp Miasma. Rewatching that first Camp Miasma movie together, Billy helps Kris lose her inhibitions and access a different side of herself; Einbinder and Anderson’s on-screen chemistry, sexual and otherwise, is blissfully alluring.

Schoenbrun, who is trans and nonbinary, is doing something remarkable with Teenage Sex and Death: They manage to draw upon decades’ worth of film theory and gender studies texts and render much of it cinematically, while largely avoiding too much didacticism or prescriptiveness. The film’s expression is sometimes messy, contradictory, and heady, but that’s a feature, not a bug, because sociological academia is often all those things too. So is the journey of sexual exploration.

In Schoenbrun’s previous film, I Saw the TV Glow, which they described as their way of talking about “not being in one’s body … living as voyeur,” Owen (Justice Smith) rejects the calling to live outside himself in exchange for “comfort” in the “norm,” only to find himself truly miserable and unmoored. Teenage Sex and Death, conceived after Schoenbrun transitioned, shows a filmmaker on the other side of that unmooring, both conceptually and visually. (The production design by Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland is top-tier, and includes gorgeous matte backdrops and Hitchcock movie references.) Desire — even the supposedly weird kind that finds pleasure in “powerlessness,” as Billy puts it — is natural and good.

Teenage Sex and Death ends up being a perfect tale for this moment — metatextual, chaotic, firmly progressive in the face of rapid societal regression and devaluation of intellectual rigor. (And also it must be said: a damn good time at the movies, if you don’t mind your eroticism with a side of gore.)

But then again, One Night Only feels timely, too. It’s only astounding that a movie so retrograde and stealthily propagandistic about sex could exist if you ignore, well, everything going on right now. There will always be art made to meet and challenge repression, and art made to merely reinforce it. The only rare thing this week is that the yin and yang happened to arrive at the same time.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Lifestyle

‘Wait Wait’ for August 8, 2026: With Not My Job guest Sally Field

Published

1 day ago

August 8, 2026

Press Room

Sally Field attends Netflix’s Los Angeles Premiere of “Remarkably Bright Creatures” in Hollywood at Netflix Tudum Theater on April 30, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Netflix)

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This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Alzo Slade, Not My Job guest Sally Field and panelists Tom Bodett, Shantira Jackson, and Paula Poundstone. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.

Who’s Alzo This Time

One Giant Crash for Mankind; Mexico meets Mexican-ish; Who’s Watching the Baby?

Panel Questions

A Murder of Best Friends

Bluff The Listener

Our panelists tell three stories about a show that just couldn’t go on, only one of which is true

Not My Job: Legendary actor Sally Field joins us to answer our questions about the world’s dumbest animals

This week, we’re joined by legendary actor Sally Field, who’s up for an Emmy for her role in Remarkably Bright Creatures. She plays our game called “Remarkably Dumb Creatures,” three questions about the dumbest animals on Earth.

Panel Questions

Righty Tighty, Lefty Also Tighty; No Encores, Please!

Limericks

Alzo Slade reads three news-related limericks: Get Your Back Out at the Outback; The Worst Part of Waking Up; The Waaaaah-dyssey

Lightning Fill In The Blank

All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else

Predictions

Our panelists predict, after the big crash, what’s the next story that’ll get the Moon into the news?