Every time Sydney Sweeney pops up—which has been a lot recently—Lainey and I have some variation of the same conversation, debating her merits as an actor. Lainey maintains Sydney doesn’t make much of an impact, she’s in good stuff, like Euphoria and White Lotus (and The Voyeurs, which got less coverage than those shows but is good), but she’s never the most memorable person on screen. I maintain that’s because right now, everything is about her boobs.
Sydney Sweeney could be the best actress of her generation and we wouldn’t know it because her boobs get top billing everywhere she goes. I get it! They’re great boobs.
Sweeney is in the position Scarlett Johansson was in twenty years ago. No one can focus on anything except her body, no matter how good her work is. It took a long time and concentrated effort on ScarJo’s part to alter that narrative even a little bit—it’s never really gone away, but over time, her body took a backseat to her body of work.
This is probably why Sweeney has kept her head down since wrapping her rom-com in Australia with Glen Powell, maybe even why she hasn’t rushed straight into a breakup of her own. Glen Powell can be a f-ckboy all he wants, and it won’t really stick, professionally, but the deck is stacked against Sweeney—young, blonde, stacked—if she’s absorbed into public consciousness as some kind of femme fatale. As it stands, the heat on her whatever-ship with Powell is fading, and she seems to be escaping that moment without carrying...
For the past several months, a coordinated digital campaign has targeted community archivists in Bangladesh who document and preserve audiovisual material related to the July 2024 Student-People’s...