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Weekend Plans With Rachel Bovard On Wine, Washington, And Drinking Like Churchill

Upstream

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Bright Side: This One’s For The Queen Of Country Music

bright side

Dolly Parton

Not every woman is destined to become a biological mother. That doesn&#8217;t mean she can&#8217;t embody the essence of one through sacrifice, nurturing, humor, wisdom, and grace. Every woman carries a God-given piece of that inside her, whether or not she ever has a child of her own to raise. Dolly Parton, who never gave birth, spent her life proving it.
Born January 19, 1946, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/dolly-parton-dead-at-80">in a one-room cabin</a> on Locust Ridge in East Tennessee, Dolly Rebecca Parton was the fourth of 12 children. Her father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. She recorded her first single, &#8220;Puppy Love,&#8221; at 13, and the morning after her high school graduation in 1964, she packed her belongings in paper grocery bags and left for Nashville. She never left her family behind, though. Loyalty to her kin and her hometown was evident in everything she did afterward.
Early in her 58-year marriage to Carl Thomas Dean, Parton tried to get pregnant. By 1978, at 32, she&#8217;d changed her mind. &#8220;We don&#8217;t want children of our own,&#8221; she <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/809748900103018/">told</a> the BBC. &#8220;We don&#8217;t want the total responsibility.&#8221; At the time, she had five younger siblings who had lived with her already.
In 1982, Parton had to cancel a tour due to abdominal pain and bleeding. She was later diagnosed with endometriosis. This medical condition involves tissue that is similar to the lining of your uterus growing where it isn’t supposed to. It can cause infertility and extreme pain.
Shortly afterward, Parton underwent a partial hysterectomy and learned that having children would be impossible. She&#8217;d go on to say, in various interviews over the following decades, that she never felt a &#8220;burning&#8221; pull toward motherhood the way some women do.
But despite her words, she still maintained a wistfulness on the subject. &#8220;I would have been a great mother, I think,&#8221; she <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/06/dolly-parton-more-to-me-than-big-hair-phoney-stuff">told</a> the Guardian in 2014. &#8220;I would probably have given up everything else. Because I would&#8217;ve felt guilty about that, if I&#8217;d have left them [to work or tour]. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn&#8217;t have been a star.&#8221; 
She and her beloved husband Carl even picked out a name — Carla, if they had a girl — before deciding not to become parents.
What she chose instead was to mother everyone else&#8217;s children. &#8220;I didn&#8217;t have children because I believed that God didn&#8217;t mean for me to have kids so everybody&#8217;s kids could be mine, so I could do things like Imagination Library,&#8221; Parton said during an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/dollysimaginationlibrary/videos/2696343797293710/">interview</a> with Oprah Winfrey in 2020. 
In 1988, she launched the Dollywood Foundation to support educational achievement in her home county, and in 1995 the foundation introduced the Imagination Library, a program that mails free books to children no matter their income level. What started as a local effort in East Tennessee grew into a global literacy initiative. The organization would eventually ship more than 200 million books to children across five countries.
There&#8217;s a version of the childless life that&#8217;s become massively popular online. These are women who talk about not having kids because they want to travel, buy nice clothes, make more money, and never be tied down. Parton&#8217;s version did include fame and success by any measure, but it never came at the expense of thinking of others. 
&#8220;We take care of a lot of other people&#8217;s kids,&#8221; the “Jolene” singer told Rolling Stone in 2003. &#8220;We buy new cars for all the nieces and nephews that graduate, we send any to college that want to go.&#8221;
That maternal instinct reached well past her own family, too. When rapper Eminem was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside her in 2022, Parton wrote him a letter afterward since the two never got the chance to meet in person. 
&#8220;Even though I don&#8217;t know a lot about rap music, I&#8217;ve come to know that you are the very best at it,&#8221; she wrote, adding that she&#8217;d always felt an unexplained connection to him. Eminem <a href="https://x.com/Eminem/status/2092367272891310482">posted</a> the letter on X after her death. &#8220;She definitely didn&#8217;t have to take the time to do it,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;Even for a kid who mostly listened to rap music, she was an icon. A superstar in every sense.&#8221;
To the family she did have, she was something closer to an actual mother, just one generation removed. Her nieces and nephews called her Aunt Granny and GeeGee while Carl was referred to as Uncle PeePaw. 
&#8220;I grew up in a big old family with eight kids younger than me, and several of my brothers and sisters came to live with me early on in my life,&#8221; she <a href="https://people.com/country/dolly-parton-on-kids-family-members/">told</a> People Country in 2014. &#8220;I&#8217;ve loved their kids just like they&#8217;re my grandkids, and now I&#8217;ve got great-grandkids.&#8221; 
She made similar statements more than once over the years because it was simply true of how she lived. Not having kids of her own never stopped her from mothering the ones around her.
Parton had her own theory for why kids gravitated toward her. &#8220;I think kids relate to me because they think of me like a Mother Goose or a Fairy Godmother,&#8221; she said. &#8220;I&#8217;m like a cartoon character — my voice is little, and I&#8217;m an excitable little person like them! I&#8217;m very childlike in that way, in my nature.&#8221;
Parton leaves behind no biological children. But for childless women, she remains a wonderful example of how to exude a mothering spirit without ever giving birth. For Parton, it was about sacrifice, giving, and a pureness of heart that everyone could plainly see. 
She leaves behind a hundred million-plus free books mailed to kids who needed them, a foundation still funding education in her home county, nieces and nephews who called her Granny, and a rapper who never met her but still felt uplifted by a letter. What a legacy.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Dolly Parton Never Had Kids. She Still Exemplified Motherhood.

Motherhood

Dolly Parton was the greatest southern stateswoman of the 20th and 21st centuries. Forgive me a bit of hyperbole; the country star’s death at 80 has triggered an outpouring of grief and will no doubt be the source of thousands of well-earned and deserved eulogies and epitaphs.
Some might suggest it&#8217;s wrong to invoke the idea of a stateswoman for a figure so assiduously apolitical. Dolly was refreshing because she was not political even in moments where it was popular, or at least commonplace, to be so. Dolly managed to be friends with leftist icons such as Jane Fonda and a maternal figure to the deep red denizens of her home region. That she might have been a truly political figure, in that most classical and truest sense of the word, would have probably never occurred to her. Dolly’s legacy was more than music. It was also more than culture. Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean changed the fabric of society in her home region for the better, in ways that hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans benefit from.
The world Dolly Parton entered in 1946 was not only poor; it was, by our standard, barely modern. She was born at her parents’ home, not in a hospital. That home was a one-room cabin that would have seemed rustic to people born one hundred years before she was. Dolly eventually had 11 siblings. Her mother had 12 children before the age of 35. Her father was an illiterate sharecropper. The Partons did not even have money to pay the missionary doctor who delivered Dolly. Her father offered a sack of cornmeal. 
Sevier Country, Tennessee, was in the 1940s still remarkably poor at a time when the rest of Tennessee began to experience the government-sponsored prosperity of the Tennessee Valley Authority. FDR’s programs did not lift the Partons out of poverty. That work would be done by the small, wasp-waisted, blond daughter of Avie and Robert Parton.
Dolly Parton’s world was traditional without the benefit of the correct respect given to tradition-coded life from Zoomers. Music was celebrated because it was one of the few ways the often-barely literate or illiterate mountain folks passed on their traditions. Holiness Pentecostal religion offered a passionate faith in a place where day-to-day life was often marked by grinding poverty. Dolly Parton was everything that modern America should have hated: a poor, southern, uneducated hillbilly. 
And yet America not only did not hate Dolly; it fell hopelessly, madly, uproariously in love with her. Her good looks and sweet voice certainly turned heads and melted the hearts of those who might have looked down on her. But Dolly’s true talent was being far smarter than anyone ever gave her credit for. It was that intelligence — so unsuspected from anyone born in to the poorest parts of the Smokies in the 1940s — that made Dolly more than just a singer and more than a cultural icon.
Dolly at times looked and sounded ridiculous. The rhinestones, and the syrupy but still somehow tasteful flirtation she used to charm her many admirers, might have led undiscerning observers to conclude she was nothing more than a musically talented bimbo from the sticks. But behind the façade lay the heart of a woman committed to the betterment of her people and willing to move mountains to accomplish her aims.
Plutarch wrote of the Roman general Fabius that some aspects of the latter’s personality “led those who knew him superficially to suspect him of something like foolishness and stupidity. Only a few discerned the inexorable firmness in the depth of his soul, and the magnanimous and leonine qualities of his nature.” And so it might have been for Dolly Parton, who nonetheless lived long enough for most of America to admit the depth of her soul and the undeniably magnanimous and leonine qualities of her nature.
Like a true lioness, Parton was fiercely protective of her mountain people. And like Fabius, Dolly avoided the large open-field political and social battles her time. She chose the ground she waged her war on in her battle to make the lives of Tennesseans better. And that ground proved to be entertainment and literacy.
Dolly Parton’s battle to make the lives of Appalachians better was an unmistakable success. And she fought to bring large-scale literacy to poor Americans. Dollywood employs over 20,000 people from across East Tennessee and creates almost two billion dollars in annual revenue for the region. Parton’s person is substantively responsible for the rise in tourism in Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, and Sevierville. Her foundations funded cutting-edge medical research and helped with natural disaster relief. She did all of this while also being one of the most important singer-songwriters in the last century. 
It is perhaps trite to end with a nod to Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” made so famous by Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover. Dolly undeniably made people love her; she was pretty and sassy and talented. But if the outpouring of grief around her death is any indication, many Americans by 2026 revered and adored her for reasons that evoke the passions solicited by the death of classical heroes, heroines, and statesmen, rather than those of a country or pop star.
In Dolly, we saw the America we wanted to exist. Pericles admonished Athenians during the Peloponnesian War “to fix their eyes every day on the greatness of Athens” so that they would fall in love with her. Dolly Parton was, for Americans, the embodiment of an America we could fall in love with. And at least in Dolly, we could see an America that really was great. What more could we ask for politically from someone who was not political?
***
Miles Smith IV is an associate professor of history at Hillsdale College.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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How Dolly Parton United A Divided Nation

Entertainment

Music

Obituary

Tennessee

Jason Statham movies are among my guilty pleasures. They are a lot like AC/DC records in that you know exactly what you’re getting, with reliable assurance that it will be an entertaining event.
From director Jean-François Richet, the latest entry in the Statham canon, “Mutiny,” finds him in the steadfast and familiar role of Cole Reed, an ex-British policeman and soldier working as bodyguard and chauffeur for Tibu, a Bangkok shipping billionaire. “Mutiny” isn’t exactly “Back in Black,” but like much of AC/DC’s latter catalogue, it is formulaic and reliably fun.
Sure enough, if Jason Statham is your bodyguard, something will go wrong (this is actually written into his contract). Shortly after announcing the sale of his firm, Tibu is ambushed and murdered — an unusually eventful furrow in a mergers and acquisitions transaction. Framed for his boss’s murder, Reed follows the trail of one of the hired gunmen aboard a large cargo vessel owned by Tibu’s company.
Much of the film unfolds aboard the ship, its hull, bridge, ventilation shafts, and stacks of shipping containers serving as playgrounds in which Statham theatrically dispatches bad men. Reed also encounters Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis), the ship’s newly assigned third mate, who is unaware that its captain and crew are facilitating a human-trafficking operation. After stumbling upon the victims hidden in the cargo hold, Angie tries to help them and promptly lands herself in the crew’s crosshairs.
The plot partners Reed and Angie together and throws in an underdeveloped thread about Angie’s young daughter waiting for her back home. The film appreciably avoids the temptation to shoehorn a superfluous romance between the pair, though Angie herself remains largely inconsequential. At times, she feels like an addition demanded after some studio executive read the first screenplay draft and wondered how to broaden the demographics. Who do they think is watching these films?
Once the captain and crew realize Angie has discovered their operation, the action gets underway. The maritime setting and tone inevitably recall such &#8217;90s pop-cinema throwbacks as Steven Seagal’s “Under Siege” — another lean, bruising action flick confined to a ship and populated by simpleminded henchmen awaiting painful deaths. Statham, however, composes himself like the real deal, and Richet stages the fights with gratifying brutality. I have always thought Statham is the action star Seagal wanted to be. Seagal wound up recording strange blues-reggae albums and hanging out with Vladimir Putin; Statham keeps producing a new action film every year. They may be variations on the same theme, but they are almost always guaranteed to charm.
My main gripe with “Mutiny” is that it betrays the simplicity of its conceit by piling on parallel storylines. There is Tibu’s assassination and the business intrigue behind it, the trafficking operation aboard the ship, Angie’s effort to get home to her daughter, and the obligatory dossier on Reed’s decorated past. None is especially complicated, but together they clutter a movie whose pleasures are refreshingly elemental: put Jason Statham on a boat full of criminals and let nature take its course.
The morality of Statham’s film universe is similarly straightforward. Reed is an unwavering stoic with an almost supernatural capacity to inflict damage. Had he been written into Greek mythology, he would surely be a demigod: stronger, faster, and quicker-witted than ordinary men. What defines him is how he directs those gifts. Personally, if my employer were assassinated on the job, my instinct would be to contact HR regarding new openings — after posting on LinkedIn what my boss’s untimely murder taught me about B2B sales. Reed instead pursues his boss’s killers and, upon discovering a human-trafficking operation along the way, makes dismantling it a side quest in his mission of revenge. That says something about his morality. And we are all the more entertained for it.
***
Harry Khachatrian (<a href="https://x.com/harry1t6">@Harry1T6</a>) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at <a href="https://www.betweenbottles.com/">BetweenBottles.com</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Jason Statham as Cole Reed in Mutiny. Photo Credit: Dan Smith/Lionsgate

Hollywood Needs More Formulaic Movies Like Jason Statham’s ‘Mutiny’

Hollywood

Movie Review

Movies

There’s a reason every Dolly Parton song feels like it finds a home in the deepest part of your soul. Writing from her heart, she set out to make a career in music. Instead, she changed the world, and she did it by always being herself.
“I never do anything that I don’t pray about,” <a href="https://www.facebook.com/reel/1296816105625461">Dolly</a> said. “I always ask God to … guide me to do things that would glorify him and to uplift mankind. That’s my mission.” 
Whether she was playing the sassy Doralee Rhodes in “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbxUSsFXYo4&amp;list=RDUbxUSsFXYo4&amp;start_radio=1">9 to 5</a>” and threatening to turn a coworker “<a href="https://youtu.be/TxmtoGBeO7c?t=40">from a rooster to a hen with one shot</a>,” dishing the recipe on her cuppa cuppa cake in “<a href="https://youtu.be/2m66fBLU_fk?t=9">Steel Magnolias</a>,” belting out “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKsQR72HY0s">I Will Always Love You</a>,” or crooning over that woman “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixrje2rXLMA">Jolene</a>,” Dolly felt like one of us. Because she was. 
The fact that she could look like she did — and still relate to anyone — is the key to her magic. “My boobs are fake, my hair’s fake but what is real is my voice and my heart,” <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/glastonbury/10937329/Dolly-Parton-my-boobs-are-fake-but-my-voice-is-real-I-did-not-mime-at-Glastonbury.html">she famously said</a>. She was so wholesomely over-the-top, we couldn’t resist falling in love.
Dolly wrote more than 3,000 songs during her lifetime — if anyone was counting. “I started playing guitar when I was seven years old, and I’ve been writing serious songs ever since,” <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=451630247761543">she said</a>. “I’ve got songs stuck everywhere. I pull out a drawer to get some panties … I’ll find a song in there.” 
There’s no way to know whether she recorded them all. But from the sound of it, maybe Dolly’s run isn’t entirely over. Even her upcoming Broadway show “<a href="https://www.broadway.com/buzz/207095/dolly-partons-story-comes-to-broadway-in-dolly-a-true-original-musicaltickets-are-now-on-sale/?gad_source=1&amp;gad_campaignid=22855272851&amp;gbraid=0AAAAAD-mnJvvCyaC85cYMwQvxFiqDTotT&amp;gclid=CjwKCAjw-rTUBhAiEiwADv8gBOAMeDbME-tns0_UsSpsNTtvDBNBTip_Tgd1kKi3Iu7H5nLI7IwVGBoCE4sQAvD_BwE">DOLLY: A True Original Musical</a>” will feature new songs. Now, it looks like opening night will have to honor what would have been her 81st birthday on January 19, 2027.
You can be sure Dolly fans are gonna get through this; we have Dolly to sing all the sad songs with us. 
Along with the legendary music catalog that earned her 11 Grammys, 10 Country Music Awards, four American Music Awards, and induction into the Country Music, Rock and Roll, and Songwriters halls of fame, Dolly graced the silver screen in over 12 theatrical releases, starring alongside Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda — in addition to her countless made-for-TV heart-warmers. 
Dolly also left her footprint behind the scenes, elevating scores of other artists’ careers. Whitney Houston leveraged Dolly’s timeless songwriting for her version of “I Will Always Love You” for the film “The Bodyguard.” And as godmother to Miley Cyrus, Dolly championed the up-and-comer by appearing in “Hannah Montana” and supporting her entry into music. 
There will never be another queen of country music. After rising from poverty to stardom living a real-life American dream, Dolly cemented her legacy over her 70-year career by paying it back to everyone she met.
Once Dolly bought <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thetasteofcountry/posts/on-this-day-in-1986-dollywood-opened-its-doors-for-the-very-first-timeparton-bou/953403557451413/">Silver Dollar City</a> in the late 1980s, the grounds were officially reopened as Dollywood. Dotted with Dolly’s signature butterflies — and regularly beating out other parks such as <a href="https://media.mypigeonforge.com/tripadvisor-users-recognize-dollywood-as-top-u-s-theme-park-2/">Disney</a>, Universal, and Legoland as a crowd favorite — the theme park continues to delight families by celebrating the bluegrass and Southern food of the Appalachians.
This was the stuff Dolly knew best. Her earliest years were spent in a one-bedroom rural Tennessee cabin in the 1940s, as the fourth-eldest of 12 children. At age six she was singing in church, and by the time she turned 13, she had co-written her first song and was introduced by Johnny Cash to perform on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. She got three encores.
&#8220;As I heard the band play my introduction, I lifted my head and looked up toward the lights,” <a href="https://dollyparton.com/life-and-career/awards_milestones/grand-ole-opry-performance-1959">Dolly</a> remembered. “I smiled at the people in the balcony and then let ‘er rip.&#8221;
After building an extraordinarily successful career, Dolly funneled a large part of her wealth back into the community, aiming to empower education through her <a href="https://www.nea.org/about-nea/media-center/press-releases/nea-honors-dolly-parton-friend-education-award">Dollywood Foundation</a>. Her Buddy Program initiative slashed school dropout rates in her hometown of Sevier County, Tennessee, by giving “$500 to every seventh and eighth-grader who finished high school.” The buddy part involved two students pledging to get each other across the line. 
Dolly understood the power of bringing people together, whether they liked it or not. She largely flew above political discourse, preferring to stay out of the fray. All three times she was offered the greatest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (twice from President Donald Trump, once from President Joe Biden), she declined in case it was perceived as a political choice. 
“I don&#8217;t work for those awards. It&#8217;d be nice, but I&#8217;m not sure that I even deserve it. But that&#8217;s a nice compliment for people to think that I might deserve it,&#8221; <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/dolly-parton-donald-trump-comments-president-praises-her-12366516">she said</a>.
As the nation lowered its flags to <a href="https://x.com/yashar/status/2092320365318230336?s=46">half-staff</a> in honor of the legendary star, loved ones shared Dolly’s <a href="https://youtu.be/9govup-IG3c?t=109">final wish</a> to “rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable.” It was one last playful quip from the woman famous for joking, “It takes a lot of time and money to look this cheap, honey.” 
She was light, she was love, she was country music. We’ll miss you, Dolly. “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nttKdCfEpkk">Always, Always</a>.”
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

How Dolly Parton Conquered America

Northerners are paying upwards of $12,000 for &#8220;rush coaches&#8221; to get their daughters into a Southern sorority. It may sound crazy, but that&#8217;s just the price of admission to college&#8217;s most prestigious social clubs.
Now before you call me &#8220;dumb&#8221; or &#8220;out of touch,&#8221; I did not pay for any type of sorority coach, but I didn’t need to. I was from the South, went to school in the South, and had connections out the wazoo with girls already in sororities at Auburn University. But to be clear, I still got dropped by some sororities I liked (I’m looking at you Chi O).
It’s already hard enough to get into a sorority at the University of Alabama, Auburn University, or Ole Miss if you are from the South. You need spotless social media, recommendations from friends, an over-filled resume, and frankly some luck to get in. Coming from the North? Who are you? That’s what these sorority girls will be asking. So yes, these “rush coaches” give the skills needed to have a chance at joining one as an out-of-state girl eager to live that SEC sorority girl life.
Here is some inside ball. Sororities know exactly who is coming through those doors during recruitment week — if you are from Birmingham, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; or Mobile, Alabama. Before rush even starts, the girls on the other side of the sorority house have been locked up for a week, without sunlight, learning everything about the top girls who will walk through that door once rush week starts.
But not every PNM (that stands for potential new members — sorority slang) gets spotlighted. Only the girls who are known to members already in the sorority or come highly recommended by an alumna are in this slideshow where the current members can get to know your face and some fun facts about you.
It always cracked me up that if you were from a small town you were grouped with other small town girls and affectionately called &#8220;small town trash.&#8221; Was that just my school? Probably not. Look, not everyone can hold it down in Birmingham or Atlanta; someone has to hold it down in Alex City.
Now if you are coming from far out-of-state, especially out-of-the-South, you are starting this sorority journey already down by a touchdown. (We love a good football metaphor down here.) And only if you make a splash during rush are you then known as a &#8220;discovery,&#8221; and boom you have someone on the other side fighting for you, which is huge. But that is not the rule; it’s the exception.
Girls up North have known this for a while thanks to the absolute TikTok mania that surrounds rush every year, and now the parents are catching on. Lindsay Lookingbill is a teacher from Maryland who at first thought her daughter was silly for asking for a professional rush coach, but the mother later told Bloomberg it was necessary.
&#8220;You’re not going into another world. You’re not going to Mars,&#8221; she told <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-10/what-is-sorority-rush-and-why-are-parents-paying-6-500-for-coaches">Bloomberg</a>. &#8220;But you are going into a different culture.&#8221;
Growing up in Alabama, girls know how big of a deal it is to get into sorority. In Birmingham even high schools have them!
We had mock &#8220;ice water tea&#8221; parties (what the first rounds of sorority recruitment used to be called) after church on Sundays, résumé classes, a handbook telling you everything you need to know about the sororities and how to get alumni to write you recommendations — it was intense.
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Trisha Addicks, the author of &#8220;The Rush Bible,&#8221; understands the amount of prep that goes into sorority recruitment. It’s why she started her business, It’s All Greek To Me, back in 2017 long before &#8220;RushTok&#8221; (sorority videos on TikTok) was even a thought. This company charges $6,500 for a one-year coaching program. Starting this fall, she’s launching the two-year Legacy Mentorship package for $12,000, and people are buying.
&#8220;The response has been overwhelmingly positive,&#8221; Addicks told The Daily Wire. &#8220;Clients tell us again and again how relieved they are to have found &#8216;The Rush Bible&#8217; and/or our team at It&#8217;s All Greek to Me, especially our clients from the North.&#8221;
There has always been a need to prep for sorority recruitment for us ladies below the Mason-Dixon line, but with the influx of Northerners sending their kids down South after the pandemic (hello 30% increase in five years <a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/sorry-harvard-everyone-wants-to-go-to-college-in-the-south-now-235d7934">per</a> the Wall Street Journal), businesses like Addicks&#8217; have exploded.
&#8220;RushTok and social media completely changed the landscape of sorority recruitment,&#8221; Addicks said. &#8220;Girls are seeing the hype online and they want in, and our business has grown exponentially because Northern families know what they don&#8217;t know.&#8221;
&#8220;Rush is hard everywhere, especially in the South. Most Northern families haven&#8217;t navigated it before, and even families who think they know rush from their own experience find the Southern process is a different world.&#8221;
A rush coach like Addicks is going to clean up your social media, wardrobe, accent, manners, and résumé. Yes, Southern sororities do care about what you wear, how you talk, and what is on that résumé. No one knows who you are, so you have to nail the first impression.
&#8220;Rush is a high-stakes goal like any other, and you cannot show up and wing it,&#8221; Addicks said. &#8220;You prepare for it the way you would for any major interview or competition.&#8221;
Now before you say this is stupid, let me make one thing clear: Sororities provide structure, accountability, community, and connections during formative years. You have to have good grades and cannot be caught making out with everyone at the bar or posting alcohol on social media when you’re under 21. Put that drink in a red cup!
&#8220;At the end of the day, I didn’t pay Mindy to help my daughter through rush,&#8221; Lookingbill said. &#8220;I paid Mindy for life skills development that will help [my daughter] throughout life.&#8221;
Once you know how cutthroat the process is, it’s no surprise that parents are paying so their daughter isn’t the one during recruitment talking to a member that gives the “come rescue me signal.” Yep, that’s how calculated rush is. Members have a distress signal that basically means, &#8220;I can’t talk to this person anymore, come relieve me.&#8221;
My friend put it simply: &#8220;I would pay $5,000 just so my daughter doesn&#8217;t have to be the girl no one wants to talk to.&#8221;
Here is my rush advice: When a girl asks about your summer during the first rounds, you better sound busy. Volunteer work, summer job, playing sports, competing in pageants — sound like you were filled to the brim with commitments. No one wants a couch potato anti-social weirdo.
Use manners. Look the girls in the eye, ask questions back to them about what they like to do, say thank you, and just be polite. Nothing says “cut” like talking to a PNM with an attitude.
Dress respectfully. This is not a nightclub; it’s a sisterhood with standards. Cover up and look nice and modest.
And here is some advice from Addicks herself.
&#8220;For rush, highlight that you are a girls&#8217; girl, a genuine friend, and someone who wants to be involved and active in your sorority,&#8221; Addicks said.
&#8220;Do this through intentional, thoughtful social media posts. Show yourself with friends and family and participating in activities you love. Avoid too many photos alone or with a significant other, and archive the solo bathing suit photos.&#8221;
Boom. And all that was for free.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Sorority Rush At Auburn

I Survived Southern Sorority Rush. Here’s Why Parents Are Paying $12,000 For Help.

Alabama

Ole MIss

sorority

The new movie “Tony” tells the story of a pivotal summer in the life of the late chef Anthony Bourdain. While an arrogant and opinionated undergraduate at Vassar College, Bourdain dreams of a prestigious writing fellowship that comes to nothing, and rather than face the shame of failure, he flees to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in pursuit of a fellow student, Nancy. Shortly after arriving, he gets drunk, beaten up, and mugged. Scooped off the sidewalk, literally, by the staff of a local seafood restaurant, he is deposited on the porch hammock of the restaurant’s proprietor and head chef to sleep it off.
Realizing the next morning that he has no money with which to pay for even the most basic accommodation, young Tony agrees to wash dishes at the restaurant in exchange for food and the porch hammock. It is during this summer that Bourdain discovers his passion for cooking, decides to drop out of university, and applies to the Culinary Institute of America.
The movie is loosely based on the opening chapters of Bourdain’s blockbuster autobiography, “Kitchen Confidential.” While accurately recreating the scenes of drug-taking and debauchery Bourdain describes in his book, the film’s dramatic focus is on something else, young Tony’s relationship with the owner of this Provincetown restaurant, enigmatically referred to throughout as “Chef.”
This role is masterfully played by Antonio Banderas — surely securing a place on the Oscars shortlist for Best Supporting Actor — who portrays him as a stern but benign disciplinarian, giving Bourdain a shot when most would and probably should not have. The Chef’s rules are few but fixed, the most important being: “If you turn up late for work, you are fired.” Recognizing that the chaotic and angry Tony probably cannot master a wristwatch, he becomes the boy’s alarm clock, waking him up each morning by means of a large pan of seawater in the face. While under the Chef’s tutelage, Tony slowly turns his gaze off his own entitled ego and onto what is happening around him, specifically the food being prepared in the high-pressure world of a kitchen. Captivated by this messy but creative workplace, Tony becomes desperate to join it. 
I won’t give away more of the plot as I want you to go see the movie, but will comment on one other aspect, which is quietly striking in a movie produced by the indie darling film studio <a href="https://a24films.com/">A24</a>. The Chef is a devout Christian. His second rule is that employees in his restaurant should not blaspheme the Lord’s name, and a third is that while Tony is under his roof, he must accompany him to church each Sunday. A recent interview with Banderas in <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/antonio-banderas-s-acts-of-faith">the New Yorker</a> referred to the Chef as “the story’s one unambiguously good man.” It is refreshing to see a Christian character portrayed so positively, unlike the usual suspects of hidden sexual deviant, hypocritical killjoy, or annoying do-gooder, which seem to be the standard treatment for “Christian character” nowadays. 
The movie is realistic about how strong Bourdain’s personal demons remained, however, and never suggests the Chef’s intervention turned the boy’s life around. Such a simplistic plot would have struck a dud note given what we know about Bourdain’s drug problems and suicide in 2018. But it does make the observation that the Chef gave Bourdain something that enabled him to make a positive change of direction in his life. This change was achieved through patient, clear, and sometimes humiliating moral instruction, not just happy talk, lessons on self-acceptance, or behavioral tweaks. 
You might not have noticed, but another movie this summer featured a mentor, this time someone actually called Mentor. In Homer’s epic poem &#8220;The Odyssey,&#8221; Odysseus entrusts the care and raising of his young son Telemachus to his friend, Mentor, while he himself is away fighting the Trojans. This is where we get the actual word “mentor” from, though the term was not popularized by Homer’s poem but much later in a 17th-century French story, “The Adventures of Telemachus.” This later tale was written by Archbishop François Fénelon, tutor to Louis, duke of Burgundy, the grandson and heir of King Louis XIV. In an early example of fan fiction, Archbishop Fénelon took the minor role Homer gave to Mentor and turned it into the central part of his own spin-off story. 
“The Adventures of Telemachus” proved a publishing phenomenon back in 1699, becoming the single most widely read literary educational work in France in the subsequent century, and spawning multiple English translations during the next two centuries. So what did Archbishop Fénelon intend Mentor to teach the young Telemachus, which in turn the heir to the French crown and Fénelon’s own pupil might absorb?
Mentor teaches that the first rule of good government is self-government, that working from the inside out, a person needs first to be able to master himself before he can achieve greatness. Fénelon’s Mentor states that the ideal ruler must possess “a judgment that restrains and regulates [him], so that his whole work, however bold and animated, is perfectly consonant with propriety and truth.” This general cultivation of virtues should also “correspond with the designs of heaven.”
Mentor’s instruction is at times painful, such as when he pushes Telemachus — while dangerously infatuated with the beguiling nymph Eucharis — off a cliff. Safely in the sea below, both men can now swim to a raft Mentor has secretly built and escape the nymph’s island. Yet even if his intervention sometimes takes these physical, dramatic forms, it is the inner man Mentor is trying to mold in his mentoring of Telemachus, not just his outward behavior. His instruction reaches into Telemachus’s psychological depths — the very place the late philosopher and Christian writer Dallas Willard argued we live from.
As Willard wrote in &#8220;Renovation of the Heart,&#8221; “How we live in the world now and in the future is, almost totally, a result of what we have become in the depths of our being … that is where we understand our world and interpret reality.” By targeting this hidden interior, Mentor ensures that Telemachus’s eventual capacity to rule is not a mere posture, but the expression of a mature character.
This constructive, soul-shaping mentorship finds a literary counterpart in L.M. Montgomery’s &#8220;Anne of Green Gables&#8221; through the steadying guidance of teacher Miss Stacy. Recognizing Anne’s sharp but unruly intellect, Miss Stacy does not indulge the young girl’s impulses; she actively redirects them. She steers Anne away from the lurid and sentimental “potboiler” novels that feed her melodramatic tendencies, directing her toward serious literature that expands her mind. Through this disciplined academic rigor, Miss Stacy equips Anne to earn a place at Queen’s Academy, opening the door to college and a profession. 
Mentors have huge power over their typically young and impressionable charges, which can be abused in the wrong hands. The opening scene of the 2014 movie &#8220;<a href="https://youtu.be/Df1xkYYbYrY?si=BxMArxzK623ZuKol">Whiplash</a>&#8221; features an encounter between young jazz drummer, Andrew, and the charismatic but terrifying Fletcher, tutor at the fictional Schaffer Conservatory of Music. “Do you know who I am?” Fletcher asks, thus demonstrating that his version of mentorship is all about him, the Great Man, and not about his student. When Andrew is subsequently summoned to attend a rehearsal at 6 a.m., his smile of gratitude foretells that he is going to be desperately damaged by this weapons-grade narcissist before the end of the movie. 
It is precisely such toxic, manipulative dynamics, exemplified by Fletcher’s abusive grandiosity in &#8220;Whiplash,&#8221; that have driven many away from traditional mentorship and into the arms of seemingly safer life coaching. Wary of the potential for authority figures to inflict psychological damage under the guise of high standards, contemporary culture seems increasingly to prefer the non-judgmental, client-centered approach of the life coach. Where a traditional mentor like Anne’s Miss Stacy demands self-discipline, moral growth, and the pursuit of objective excellence, the modern coach often focuses on unconditional validation, personal alignment, and embracing the “real you.” Yet, while this shift protects against the predatory narcissism of a Fletcher, it also risks abandoning the profound, challenging moral development that genuine mentoring provides.
Modern life coaching and micro-adjustment culture focus largely on functional optimization, offering superficial tweaks designed to engineer external career advancement, relational success, or professional efficiency. Take celebrity life coach Mel Robbins, whose viral “The High 5 Habit” instructs followers to look in the mirror every morning and literally give their own reflection a high five. It is the ultimate manifestation of the non-judgmental, self-validating ethos, replacing the demanding work of moral improvement with a low-friction, self-congratulatory gesture. 
Life coaching culture promises small adjustments to help us feel better, but feeling better is not the same as becoming better. Who doesn’t want a constant stream of uncritical validation? But the humbling and uplifting truth that “Tony” reminds us of is that sometimes, instead of a cheerleader, what we really need is the wake-up call of a saucepan of seawater in the face.
***
Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

https___cdn.sanity.io_images_xq1bjtf4_production_e0ee453925d270fc24a9c9d57e24098293c9a142-6000×4000

The Powerful Life Lesson Hidden In ‘Tony’

Anthony Bourdain

The Odyssey

Bethany Miller&#8217;s sister calls her every election cycle with the same question: Who do I vote for?
Even though she leans conservative, she still struggles to cut through the noise. &#8220;She was having a hard time understanding what all this political jargon meant,&#8221; said Miller, managing editor at the Conservateur, in a recent interview with The Daily Wire. &#8220;We should be able to bring it down to the everyday experience.&#8221;
Miller has become an expert at identifying the gap between believing something and being able to explain it to another person, especially to someone on the opposite end of the political spectrum. 
Her clients range from churches and advocacy groups to campaigns and the military, and the request is almost always to fix messaging that just won&#8217;t land. For conservative women especially, there is a huge gap between the truth and the Left doing a better job at marketing its positions.
Miller encountered this phenomenon while teaching a class of high school girls at her church. One student reiterated the same tired talking points that conservatives have been hearing for years. When asked about her perception of conservatives, Miller said she immediately spewed the “barefoot and pregnant” line. 
&#8220;And they&#8217;re gonna force us &#8230; we&#8217;re oppressed, and we don&#8217;t have rights,&#8221; she added. Miller didn&#8217;t expect to hear that type of talk still floating around, but she realized it’s still “very, very relevant.&#8221;
Part of the problem, in Miller&#8217;s view, is that conservatives have let that caricature exist without counteracting it for too long. In some cases, they&#8217;ve added to it.
She pointed to the recent rise of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-the-tradwife-movement-lost-its-traction">&#8220;trad wife&#8221; content</a> online as an example of branding that may go too far in the wrong direction. &#8220;Conservative women are diverse,&#8221; she said. &#8220;It doesn&#8217;t mean you have to be a MAHA mom &#8230; you can be a conservative mom and crunchy.&#8221; 
&#8220;I think the struggle has always been conservative women can&#8217;t be put in a box,&#8221; Miller added. &#8220;And I think that&#8217;s where we&#8217;ve kind of shot ourselves in the foot — letting this whole trad wife thing run, because it&#8217;s not a good look to be restrictive.&#8221;
That doesn&#8217;t mean staying home with kids is the problem, she insisted. &#8220;Being a trad wife is a beautiful thing,&#8221; Miller said, adding that the key is to approach it as being one option of many that are all welcome and accepted in the conservative movement.
Miller is part of the exact demographic that feels so far out of reach for conservatives. She&#8217;s in her mid-20s, unmarried, working full-time in a metropolitan area, so it would make sense to assume she’s progressive. She says the conservatives are right about policies and goals, referring to their worldview as “true, good, and beautiful,” but says conservatism is failing to resonate in part because of key issues that candidates aren’t willing to address.
“I think we need to have honest conversations. I mean, we should as conservatives [ask questions like], ‘Why does forming a family feel inaccessible? Why are young people delaying marriage? Why does motherhood feel incompatible with professional success? Why is housing so expensive? Why do people feel economically unprepared to have children?’ Because I personally get a little frustrated with the messaging.” 
And it’s not a matter of having bad ideas. It’s merely lacking the ability to get the message across to the intended audience. “The conservative party is pushing more to have lower inflation and be able to buy a home and have accessibility. And those are all great things,” she said.
&#8220;We don&#8217;t need to abandon our principles and our policies,&#8221; Miller went on. &#8220;We do need to keep up to date with where the culture is going, where the media trends are going.&#8221;For the woman trying to figure out what to say the next time a friend brings up politics at brunch, Miller&#8217;s answer is that it’s about meeting people where they are.
&#8220;We have to be better storytellers at the end of the day,&#8221; she said.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Young voters

Conservatives Aren’t Connecting With Young Women. It’s Time To Try Something New.

Conservatives

Women

It seems that modeling a dating app after a beehive wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Instead of feeling empowered to call the shots by making the first move, women really just wanted to be chosen. 
Popular for dating and social networking, the Bumble app dropped its game-changing rule that only the ladies could make the first contact with a potential match. Now, guys can also make the first move — like nature intended. Or, at least the way <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/bumble-ditches-its-rule-that-kept-men-from-making-the-first-move/">66% of women</a> surveyed by Bumble said they like it best. 
“Example #2,746,355 of women preferring traditional gender based roles,” someone posted to <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bumble/comments/1vljedo/comment/p32g5vt/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">Reddit</a>.
As former Tinder co-founder and Bumble founder and CEO <a href="https://youtu.be/Y5JdvWmPH3s">Whitney Wolfe Herd</a> said, “You cannot ask people what they want for the next great innovation. You have to see it before they do. You have to feel it before they do.” Bumble&#8217;s unique concept worked well enough to grow the company to <a href="https://femfounded.org/case-studies/bumble/">$13 billion</a> at its peak. But as singles <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/08/23/nx-s1-5938103/have-dating-apps-lost-their-luster-data-shows-a-decline-in-users">burn out</a> on internet dating as a whole, apps are pivoting to keep users swiping.
Along with lengthening the window for replies from 24 to 72 hours before messages disappear forever, Bumble alerted users that it was shaking up the policy that made it stand out in the first place. Well, that, and all the yellow. It was all intended to help women control their Bumble-sphere and filter out the weirdos. But with over half of users saying they’d rather choose who initiates a convo, the buzzy strategy went bust. 
&#8220;While women making the first move was a radical idea, being women-first was never about prescribing just one way to connect. It was about designing an experience with women&#8217;s needs in mind to create better outcomes for everyone,&#8221; <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2026/08/13/bumble-dating-app-drastic-change/91285450007/">Wolfe Herd</a> said in a statement on August 11. &#8220;Today, our community is asking for more flexibility, less pressure, and more opportunities to create real, meaningful connections and that is what this new experience provides.&#8221;
The brand immediately lost that “it” factor now that it’s so similar to every other dating app, and people are calling it “<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bumble/comments/1vljedo/comment/p31q66s/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">Yellow Tinder</a>.” But it seems like an inevitable sign of the times. Even if they originally wanted to take the wheel in relationships (because of fewer unsolicited eggplant pics), women got tired of doing all the driving. 
“Dating apps demand significant effort from users seeking connections … creating appealing profiles, writing compelling messages, and balancing these tasks with daily responsibilities — all while algorithmic systems capture these interactions for corporate profit,” a study by University of Tacoma associate professor <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211695825000467?via%3Dihub">Dr. Riki Thompson</a> showed. “On Bumble, these challenges intensify for women through time constraints that fundamentally shape modern dating behavior.”
The ladies were no longer feeling it. And neither were the guys who stuck around long enough to be invited to interact.
Things initially started to change a decade after Bumble’s launch when, in 2024, the platform pulled a switcheroo with its <a href="https://fortune.com/2024/05/01/bumble-changes-dating-app-women-make-first-opening-move/">Opening Moves</a> initiative, allowing guys to respond to a prompt on a woman’s profile before she knew he existed. Still, the new policy doesn’t make too much of a difference if you’re familiar with how dating apps work. 
Twenty-eight-year-old <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/bumble-women-first-rule-change/">Emily Spence</a>, who’s been on Bumble for over a decade, says, “The requirement for women to message first didn’t really prevent creeps from messaging you. Just because you say ‘hey’ first doesn’t mean a man isn’t gonna send you something crazy after. It was kind of like a false sense of protection.”
There’s been plenty of backlash toward the app that made its name for “<a href="https://atxwoman.com/2016/04/01/whitney-wolfe/">bringing feminism to your phone</a>.” But even women who felt safer using the ladies-first platform still waited for guys to make a move. 
“I have another friend that claims to have given up on online dating yet also doesn&#8217;t bother to message guys on Bumble. To me that&#8217;s akin to using a pen with the cap on,” a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bumble/comments/1vljedo/comment/p31vwu1/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">Redditor</a> noted. 
In tandem with the Bumble business model, the relationship brain rot hoisted upon young single women over the last decade was real. “I pity Venus de Milo,” a writer for <a href="https://coveteur.com/women-pursue-love-guide-art-of-chase">Coveteur</a> lamented in 2017. “She’s standing still like a hostage at the Louvre waiting for someone else to decide her fate. Like a woman waiting for a man to save her from a tragic ending.” 
The message was: Get off your booty, Aphrodite, and take the reins, you empowered boss! Manifest your man! The world is your oyster! Except that was also the same world in which the viral <a href="https://www.globalfundforwomen.org/movements/me-too/">#MeToo movement</a> essentially shut down the possibility of random eye contact in public without notarized consent. (And let&#8217;s be real, it also did nothing to stop all that Hollywood junk from continuing on without a hitch.) 
So, who exactly were these women supposed to go out there and get? The decent men being told they were the toxic patriarchy and nobody needed them? Those guys? Weird that it’s been so hard to meet good people. 
“I swear dating is such a Catch-22,” <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bumble/comments/1vljedo/comment/p3215dt/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">another Redditor</a> posted. “Women say they don’t like being approached, but what they really mean is that they don’t want to be approached by somebody that they don’t find attractive. But for a guy the only way you’ll ever know if she finds you attractive or not is to ACTUALLY approach her. Yet she knows who she finds attractive, but doesn’t approach him and make the first move.”
So are apps like Bumble doomed to fail? Or is it an undeniable primal instinct for most women to want to be chosen — and for men to do the deciding, at least at first? 
We’re at a point where most people are cool with <a href="https://verilymag.com/relationships/what-guys-think-of-girls-making-the-first-move/">anyone making the first move</a>, as long as there’s a glimmer of a green light. But a man who offers to buy a woman a drink, for example, expresses everything with a single gesture: confidence, safety, readiness, initiative, and assertiveness. Done with finesse at the risk of getting denied? Hot. 
“In evolutionary terms and in everyday markets of attention, that matters because people prefer partners who seem able to face life, not just talk about it,” <a href="https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-psychology-behind-why-men-usually-make-the-first-move-when-dating-women/">the Good Men Project</a> notes. “Men initiating can read as competence: ‘I will go get things started,’ the behavior says. That’s attractive to people who value decisiveness and clarity.”
With <a href="https://www.forbes.com/health/dating/dating-statistics/">80 million</a> people navigating online dating, stats show <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-asked-whom-does-it-matter-who-makes-the-first-move-in-a-relationship?utm=">men are happier than women</a> in relationships where each respectively asked for the first date. The heart wants what the heart wants. And it wants him to man up and invite her out to dinner. Coffee. Whatever.
Whether it happens online or in real life, we’re meant to be in strong relationships with each other, not swimming around solo in a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-most-dangerous-thing-ai-may-replace-isnt-your-job">pool of AI bots</a>. As Bumble partner and happiness professor <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelburchfield/2026/01/29/bumble-announces-research-backed-partnership-to-help-users-fall-and-stay-in-love/">Arthur Brooks</a> explains, “Decades of research show that close, committed relationships are among the strongest predictors of long term happiness and health. Humans are wired for connection, but when modern dating stays confined to the digital realm — when matches don’t translate into meaningful, in person relationships — it can erode emotional well-being over time.”
Maybe we’re all just over the wash, rinse, repeat of hoping for “the one” in a system designed for failure; one more match is two fewer paying subscribers. But for anyone still on Team Bumble, there may be a chance. Of course, it’s best to be realistic about that knight in shining armor — or the objectively hot Forbes 30 Under 30 guy in the quarter-zip. 
Business manager and Bumble user <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/bumble-women-first-rule-change/">Stefanie Feldman</a> says, “I like that it takes off the pressure. Sometimes I just want the men to do the work. I’ve never considered myself a feminist. I want to be pursued. And just because someone reaches out to you doesn’t mean you have to say anything. So that is a feminine power in itself, learning to say no.”
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This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Dixie Dillon Lane’s &#8220;Skipping School: How Homeschooling in America Went Mainstream&#8221; suggests that the first homeschoolers weren&#8217;t just iconoclasts; they were brave. The earliest homeschooling families were not protected by the law. In fact, they often broke it to educate their children at home, and they experienced overwhelming societal disdain. Yet these families doggedly pursued what they believed to be the best form of education for their kids. 
As someone who was homeschooled K-12, I saw the culture I grew up in reflected in Lane’s careful historical sketch. I learned much about the roots and history that gave rise to the current state of American homeschooling and felt a sense of pride in my people. 
Lane states her thesis clearly: “American homeschooling in the present day has deep roots in a long-held American belief that parents should hold primary influence over their children&#8217;s schooling, an influence that has been slowly lost over the past seventy-five years.” Beginning her survey in the 1950s, Lane documents how Cold War fears of communism led to increased federal control over education even as Americans began to grow wary of the government. The first homeschoolers, Lane says, “foreshadowed a new American paradox: a nation plagued with distrust yet booming with consolidation.”
Early homeschooling was deeply unpopular with the public. Even in the 1980s, Lane points out, a poll found that 75% of Americans thought homeschooling was bad for the country. Homeschooling was either illegal or unclearly legal. So, most families stayed under the radar, forming small communities with like-minded families. 
Beginning in the late 1980s, organizations such as HSLDA fought for the rights of homeschoolers. As the law began to turn, homeschoolers gradually came above ground. With legal protection, organizations such as the California Homeschool Network formed to consolidate homeschooling into a movement. 
The turn of the century brought increased freedom and options for homeschoolers. Partnerships with local public schools, online classes, co-ops, and university-model schools allowed for even more flexibility. The COVID-19 pandemic thrust many into homeschooling and brought to light for lots of parents the pitfalls of public schools.
Today, the normalcy of homeschooling — thanks to decades of hard legal work, cultural shifts, and the pandemic — means its demographics reflect what America is. 
Lane writes that while “a majority of twentieth-century homeschoolers were at least in part religiously motivated,” nowadays “the movement itself is not primarily a religious one.” Religion is still an important factor for most homeschoolers, but it is often not a definitive one. Much more common is the belief that homeschooling will offer a better education than other options. 
Although popular culture still sees homeschooling as predominantly white, it is actually quite diverse. A U.S. census survey taken in April and May of 2020 “found that homeschooling parents were nearly evenly split between Caucasians and people of color.” 
&#8220;Skipping School&#8221; works on many levels. It is self-labeled as an account of American homeschooling from within the community itself, letting homeschoolers see their heritage clearly. Lane doesn’t hide the fact that her family homeschools, and her book occasionally myth-busts the worst critiques of homeschooling. These aren’t knocks against the book. It’s not self-serving propaganda. Everyone can glean much from it.
The book is a work of careful historiography, with thorough yet accessible data, personal stories, and cultural context. &#8220;Skipping School&#8221; reasonably defends the practice, enables the reader to understand the homeschooling mindset, and compellingly recounts a true historical narrative. 
The times the book drifts into direct polemic are rare and restrained. They are nonetheless effective. Take, for instance, when Lane discusses the ubiquitous criticism of homeschooling: “Won’t your kids not be socialized enough?” She does the thing few people do: defines her terms. If by socialize, one means engaging in society, homeschoolers demonstrate above-average interaction with activities such as voting, engaging in community service, going to church, and more. 
There’s no question that public schools in America are far from an ideal option, but as Lane shows us, homeschoolers are realists. Speaking personally, she writes, “Like so many other homeschoolers today, we are not antischool, even though we have serious objections to our local public options. Indeed, we are pragmatists who do what works for our family.” 
As homeschooling moved out into the open, options proliferated. Online academies, a variety of curricula, and charter schools have been popping up everywhere in recent years. Several experienced homeschoolers expressed their reservations to Lane. Such options, they said, risk losing pure homeschooling&#8217;s advantages, such as full parental control over curriculum and more flexibility.
There are as many pragmatic approaches to homeschooling as there are homeschooling families. This means an abundance of options and a potential end to the scrappy, DIY, tight-knit communities of pre-2000s homeschooling. 
Some homeschoolers would do well to consider Lane&#8217;s thesis: Americans have always felt that parents should have a strong say in the education of their children, and homeschooling is the most recent manifestation of this fact. Many homeschooling families I know seem to view homeschooling as the universal norm. I would suggest that conservative Christians should see it more as a prudential necessity. 
Ironically, white Protestants were the first to establish mandatory attendance laws, as in an 1852 Massachusetts law. They were thinly veiled attempts to Protestantize Roman Catholic children. 
Nineteenth-century educational reformer Horace Mann certainly went too far in his statements. (See: “Our common schools &#8230; reach, with more or less directness and intensity, all the children belonging to the State,—children who are soon to be the State.”) The Supreme Court thought these inflexible laws went too far as well. 
But a community requiring the education of children goes back to Plato. Martin Luther argued for it as a way to help the laity learn to read the Bible. Yet, as we have seen, absolutizing the community’s interest leads to indoctrination. However, simply saying society has an interest in the quality of the education its citizens receive — an interest that must be weighed against the right of parents to raise their kids how they see fit — is not totalitarian. Thus, communal accountability must be local to ensure the best balance. 
The best thing about &#8220;Skipping School&#8221; is that it will provide something for every reader. No matter your preconceived notions about homeschooling, you will leave with a transformed perspective. This is the highest kind of history: true to the facts and challenging to our biases. Skeptics of the practice may walk away viewing homeschooling as much more reasonable; hardcore conservative Christian homeschoolers may see the history and current situation as less monolithic. While Lane’s book corrects the excesses of anti-homeschooling myths, it will likely also serve to bust some myths homeschoolers believe about themselves too. 
Although Lane demonstrates that homeschooling in the 21st century cannot be claimed by a single group, I think it can. It can be claimed by Americans. Homeschooling is as foreign in Europe as ice in tap water. Americans’ deep desire for freedom and suspicion of the state mean our soil is ripe for the practice. 
In this way, defending homeschooling unites most of modern America, even if only a small percentage of total children receive this kind of education. In another way, it reinforces our cultural divisions. Public schools used to provide a unifying education for all American children. Now, in a pluralistic society, the trade-off for parents taking exclusive charge of educating their children is that existing fractures continue to grow. 
&#8220;Skipping School&#8221; has the right nuance to tackle such a significant subject. I developed a new appreciation for my forebears, reconsidered some of my critiques of the practice, and came to see this issue with greater clarity.
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Cooper Cobbs (<a href="https://x.com/CobbsCooper" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@CobbsCooper</a>) is a 2026 Chesterton media fellow at New Guard Press. A rising junior at Patrick Henry College, he is the incoming student body president and will be the editor-in-chief of PHC’s student newspaper, the Herald, this fall.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Among the DC and Marvel movies that have hogged much of the attention in theaters this year, “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hollywood-made-another-modern-woman-hero-heres-how-it-went">Supergirl</a>” and “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-spider-man-is-succeeding-where-so-many-superhero-movies-failed">Spider-Man</a>” among them, my favorite superhero movie has flown under the radar. Filmmaker Michael Russell Gunn’s “The Brink of War” contains no galactic skirmishes or city-leveling explosions. Instead, it takes us back to 1986, when the global nuclear stockpile had reached its Cold War peak, and reminds us how the fortitude and resolve of President Ronald Reagan helped bring one of history’s most oppressive empires closer to collapse.
Jeff Daniels portrays Reagan, capturing much of the Gipper’s mannerisms and genial, folksy candor, though I still preferred Dennis Quaid’s more physically intuitive performance in the 2024 biopic (or “origin story,” in superhero parlance) “Reagan.” The film opens with Reagan arriving in Iceland for the famed Reykjavík Summit with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (Jared Harris), where the two intend to negotiate arms control. Reagan himself is reluctant to call it a summit. “Summits have gotten us nowhere,” he says. “Let’s just call it a meeting.”
The stakes hardly need embellishment. By 1986, the world contained nearly 70,000 nuclear warheads, overwhelmingly American and Soviet, with both superpowers restrained by the ghastly game theory of mutually assured destruction. Neither leader, socialist or otherwise, had any desire to preside over the annihilation of his country.
Most of “The Brink of War” unfolds inside Hofdi House, the actual site of the negotiations, where Gunn was even able to film using the chairs in which Reagan and Gorbachev sat. The claustrophobic setting suits a movie in which civilization’s fate turns on two men refusing to budge across a small table.
Harris, complete with Gorbachev’s signature forehead birthmark, wisely stops short of attempting a full Russian accent — one dialect American actors almost never get right — instead folding Slavic affectations and rolled Rs into his English. “Are we not mutually assured partners in destruction?” Gorbachev asks. “Should we not be mutually assured partners in reduction?”
Yet Reagan’s concern extends beyond quibbling over how many warheads should remain stationed across Europe. Gunn treats the summit as a collision between two political systems. Referencing the Second World War, Reagan tells his colleagues that “any system, no matter communist or fascist, that denies people their God-given free will is a threat to all nations.”
“The Brink of War” succeeds as a political thriller because it takes that moral distinction seriously.
Gunn also finds simple visual ways to enliven what is essentially two hours of men negotiating. Reagan and Gorbachev, seated across from one another, are at points framed inside isolated black spaces that create a visual wall between them. Elsewhere, the film cuts to the aides, intelligence officers, journalists, and spouses orbiting the negotiations.
Raisa Gorbacheva (Branka Katić), dressed head-to-toe in sumptuous sable furs, bristles when a New York Times reporter addresses her as the Soviet first lady. “In the Soviet Union, we are all truly equal,” she replies.
Such jabs at communism are abundant. When a Soviet official asks Secretary of State George Shultz (J.K. Simmons) why Americans call the president’s emergency satchel a “nuclear football,” suggesting such euphemisms signal weakness, Shultz shoots back: “Yes, gulag sounds so much nicer than inhumane Siberian torture prison.”
The screenplay occasionally feels inspired by contemporary politics. One Soviet dismisses Thomas Jefferson as a “slaveholder” and “conveniently capitalist,” while Gorbachev calls Jesus “the first socialist,” sounding more like Columbia freshmen than Cold War-era Kremlin hardliners. Still, it produces an amusing question. How can affluent Western college students fantasize about an economic system whose leader, in the film, admits that the Soviet Union cannot even manufacture milking machines and functioning tractors to feed its people?
Watching Reagan refuse to abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative, the missile-defense program nicknamed “Star Wars,” also made me pine for some of his uncompromising spirit in America’s dealings with Iran. One struggles to imagine Reagan tweeting that “A CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT,” only to announce shortly afterward that military action has been postponed for two weeks.
Reagan and Gorbachev ultimately leave Reykjavík without what negotiators call a zone of possible agreement, or ZOPA, largely because Gorbachev insists that Strategic Defense Initiative research be confined to the laboratory. Yet Reykjavík was hardly a failure. The negotiations helped clear the path toward the 1987 INF Treaty and proved that sweeping arms reductions were possible.
That is also where “The Brink of War” finds its point. Reagan understood that negotiation did not require moral equivalence and that peace was worth pursuing without pretending the systems on either side of the table were interchangeable. Driven by strong performances from Daniels and Harris, the film may lack the CGI thrills of this year’s superhero blockbusters, but it portrays a hero who actually had a hand in saving the world from nuclear annihilation and communism.
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Harry Khachatrian (<a href="https://x.com/harry1t6">@Harry1T6</a>) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at <a href="https://www.betweenbottles.com/">BetweenBottles.com</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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