Last month, politically conservative OnlyFans creator Anya Lacey started advertising a “husband application,” which she’s ostensibly using to find a follower who will make her a “tradwife.” But really, her new website—dateanya.com—is a cross between a dating app and a self-improvement boot camp for interested men.
Lacey shares nude photos on her OnlyFans—but “I’m not sleeping around with 10 different men, like what Bonnie Blue’s doing,” she tells Vanity Fair. Her largely male followers “want a relationship. Obviously I can’t be an in-person girlfriend to 500,000 people.” So she launched Date Anya because “there needs to be a way that people can really hone in on what they want. There’s been a lot of pushback, because people want a pill. They don’t want to make fundamental changes in their lives.”
She says she’s looking for a man who dresses well, communicates, and wants to live a “godly” lifestyle. She also wants one who takes charge. “Let’s say me and my future husband have differing opinions,” she says. “If he hears me out, I’m happy. But whatever he thinks is best for the household, at the end of the day, I will follow him in that.”
In theory, putting something in the dictionary is supposed to settle its meaning once and for all. But already, Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of tradwife—which the reference manual added just a couple months ago—feels out of date. According to that dictionary, a tradwife is “a married woman, especially one who posts on social media, who stays at home doing cooking, cleaning.” Now, though, it seems that the word has become an umbrella term for a still-shifting set of values, one a woman needn’t be married to espouse.
The social media phenomenon of the tradwife is usually traced back to the pandemic era, when social distance and doomscrolling led increasing numbers of women to the feeds of influencers who were dolled up like 1950s housewives or doing Laura Ingalls Wilder cosplay. But as the conservative manosphere reached peak saturation after last year’s election, a market opportunity emerged for the women who see themselves as those men’s potential partners. In this space, tradwife is less of a literal descriptor and more of a marketing term for a woman who is willing to put herself second in her real—or theoretical—marriage.
Reminds me of the guy in Najaf, Iraq, who said the fall of Saddam meant, "Democracy! Whiskey! And Sexy!" No matter how traditional your culture, hormones happen.
Walking between gates 12 and 14 in the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, you might see a sign for gate infinity — and that’s when you’ll know you’ve reached the Interimaginary Departures. While the rest of this terminal services domestic flights, this lounge sends its passengers to Narnia, Hogwarts, Panem, Middle Earth, the Emerald City, the Hundred Acre Woods, and hundreds of other destinations from the universes of literature, film, and video games.
Your first clue that Interimaginary Departures isn’t a normal gate is the fantastical FIDS (Flight Information Display System) board. But look a little closer and you’ll see even more magic. There’s a bright white wall whose elegant molding is not only visibly incongruent from the rest of the concourse but physically too, slicing through the lounge’s chairs and furniture at a seven degree tilt. There are rabbits, a la Alice in Wonderland, woven into the carpet and carved into the machinery. And regardless of time or weather, the gate’s doors are cracked ajar with a stunning white light. (A brass sign warns you that this is a portal between dimensions and most certainly not an exit.)
Visitors to the lounge can use the interactive ticket machine to print their boarding passes for Interimaginary flights, though not without answering a few existential questions first. If you stick around long enough, you might even catch a couple announcements to prepare passengers for their upcoming trips.
The gate was designed by Janet Zweig in 2021, though a full list of credits can be found in the exhibit’s floating bookshelf that faces the rest of the terminal.
I was lucky enough to make a few friends my first semester of college. We ended up hanging out quite a bit during those early months.
We’d all get excited for the weekends because Friday nights meant going out to party. Everyone except for Anna, that is.
Anna was quiet, shy, and a definitely a goody-two-shoes. She was from Alabama and spoke with a pronounced southern drawl I’d rarely heard in Maryland. She was reserved but friendly once you got to know her. Anna cared about school a lot. She was almost always studying whenever I saw her.
Every Friday night we’d make plans to go out together and party. But Anna would always refuse to come. She’d say something along the lines of “I have to study” or “I just don’t feel like it tonight.”
Eventually, we stopped inviting Anna out. Everyone except Alexei.
I liked Alexei the most in our friend group. He was valedictorian of his high school, played tennis at a competitive level, and was remarkably smart. If anyone deserved to have an ego, it was Alexei. Yet somehow he managed to be the kindest person I’d ever known. But my absolute favorite thing about Alexei was that he always invited Anna to come party with us.
One Friday night as we were all about to leave the dorms for a house party, Alexei stopped us. “Hold on, let’s invite Anna.” We headed over to her dorm and invited her to come with us. She said “Sorry, I have to study for my Arabic exam next week, but you guys have fun.”
Alexei continued to invite Anna every time we went out for the rest of the semester. And Anna said no every single time.
Curious about his persistence, I asked him “Why do you keep inviting Anna out when she’ll just say no?”
I’ll never forget what he told me: “I know she’s always going to say no, but that’s not the point. I invite her out so she’ll always feel included in the group.”
After that first semester, the friend group disbanded and we all went our separate ways. Many years later I ran into Anna and we ended up catching up. She told me how difficult her first semester of college had been. She was very close with her mom and sister and missed them terribly.
But then she said something that stayed with me: She was grateful. She was grateful to be part of that brief friend group because she felt like she had a family away from home. And that even though she never partied with us, she always felt included because we would stop by her room and invite her anyway.
Ponder for a moment the widespread extent of abysmal ignorance that went into this public presentation. Someone assembled those data, then calculated multiple discounts over 100%. Then someone with graphic design skills created the poster. Someone sets the poster on the easel. Camera crews gather around. And then this "very stable genius" says (and believes) he is offering a 654% discount FFS. Isn't there anybody in the chain of command with the brains (or the balls) to say "this isn't possible."* It's embarassing. Makes me ashamed to be an American.
The TrumpRx website is of course a Potemkin village, giving no details and promising results in 2026.
*addendum - what I should asked was whether there was anyone willing to tell the emperor the truth about his new (or absent) clothes. I'll blog that fairy tale separately, after this weekend's football games.
"We're not talking about" regime change in Venezuela, President Donald Trump told reporters back in August. "I can only say that billions of dollars of drugs are pouring into our country from Venezuela," and that "a very strange election" put Nicolas Maduro in office, "to put it mildly."
"What I can tell you is Maduro is a narco-terrorist," said Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has placed a $50 million bounty on Maduro's head, wanting him to face charges in the U.S.
Earlier this week, another six suspected narco-traffickers were killed in a strike ordered by Trump on a boat in the Caribbean suspected of carrying drugs. This brings the total number killed up to 27.
"Trump is truly aghast at how Maduro savaged the economy of a once-vibrant Venezuela," reports Nahal Toosi in Politico, mentioning how Trump appears to "genuinely dislike" Venezuela's president.
But Trump isn't just satisfied with strikes on boats. Yesterday, news broke that he secretly authorized the CIA to take some sort of action in Venezuela, the details of which aren't clear and haven't been confirmed. There's also been some repositioning of ships starting this past August. Never one to keep his mouth shut, Trump told reporters a bit about his plans: "We are certainly looking at land now, because we've got the sea very well under control," he told reporters.
At this point, "the scale of the military buildup in the region is substantial: There are currently 10,000 U.S. troops there, most of them at bases in Puerto Rico, but also a contingent of Marines on amphibious assault ships," reportsThe New York Times. "In all, the Navy has eight surface warships and a submarine in the Caribbean."
"Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela?" a reporter asked Trump yesterday. "They have emptied their prisons into the United States of America," responded the president, in what sure looks like him soft-launching the idea that an invasion would be warranted.
Maduro, for his part, announced that he would mobilize 4.5 million members of the Bolivarian Militia, which is a civilian force that's undergone military training, to support the official military, which has been placed on high alert.
If Maduro wants to be treated like a legit head of state, not the leader of a cartel, he isn't helping his own case:
Absolute HORROR- young Venezuelan activists @LuisPecheVE and @yendrive were shot at more than 10 times in what looks like a hit job in Bogota, where they are exiled. This would be the latest case of Maduro targeting dissidents abroad.
One possible theory: This deportation flight was denied landing and turned around, possibly as retribution for Trump's choosing to strike the boats in the Caribbean. Maduro is making clear he's not interested in talking, and that he wants leverage.
Scenes from New York: This was amusingly a scene from Philly that some Brooklyn leftist imbecile seized on and assumed was…city hall in Manhattan (since the whole world revolves around NYC, donchaknow). Now, the discourse has swirled around fare evasion in both cities and the degree to which the leftist mindset is just totally tolerant of public disorder and blatant theft.
boy i sure do love exiting subway stations through the emergency exit door! unfortunately i am a very slow walker and easily distracted so sometimes i look up from my phone and find that i've been holding the door open for a minute or more without even realizing it https://t.co/fCQAyN5ANm
It's just totally taken as a given in these lefty circles that all the people and entities actually paying all the taxes are not paying any taxes https://t.co/qebrM563AO
"President Donald Trump said he might go to the Supreme Court to personally watch oral arguments on whether the bulk of his tariffs pass legal muster, in what would be a highly unusual spectacle," reportsBloomberg. "'I think I'm going to go to the Supreme Court to watch it,' Trump told reporters Wednesday in the Oval Office. 'I've not done that, and I had some pretty big cases. I think it's one of the most important cases ever brought, because we will be defenseless against the world.' The Supreme Court will hear arguments Nov. 5 over whether import taxes affecting trillions of dollars in international commerce imposed by Trump are legal. The president has said the tariffs are authorized under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a law that gives the president a panoply of tools to address national security, foreign policy and economic emergencies."
"The Trump administration is considering a radical overhaul of the U.S. refugee system that would slash the program to its bare bones while giving preference to English speakers, white South Africans and Europeans who oppose migration," per a New York Times report. "The proposed changes would put new emphasis on whether applicants would be able to assimilate into the United States, directing them to take classes on 'American history and values' and 'respect for cultural norms.' The proposals also advise Mr. Trump to prioritize Europeans who have been 'targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for "populist" political parties.'"
Bill Ackman—aka my new favorite person—just donated $1 million to a super PAC opposing Zohran Mamdani's mayoral bid.
Truly:
OpenAI is an amazing company and these are impressive numbers … and also a company losing $20 billion a year with $13b in revenue, making business deals that project hundreds of billions in future spending, with a private valuation of $0.5 trillion, is mental.
The ONE THING we supposedly learned after the Dubya debacle was: just because a government is evil and easy to topple doesn't mean that we should just go to war. And that's before we ask where all the war refugees will go...
Update, October 15: Bill Pulte filed his missing Form 3 on October 14, after we published this story.
For the past month, Donald Trump has been trying to fire Lisa Cook—a renowned economist serving as a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors—over claims that she committed mortgage fraud. Trump’s attempt ended up before the Supreme Court, where lastmonth lawyers for the administration told the justices that Cook’s firing is merited because she committed “financial misfeasance.”
In fact, Cook has not been charged with any crime—and additional loan documents show that the alleged fraud was instead probably a clerical error. Yet the administration has doubled down, framing it as “potentially criminal” and termination-worthy, ever since it was first raised by a Trump official who runs a small federal agency: Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) head Bill Pulte.
Pulte, a construction heir and longtime Trump donor, published screenshots of Cook’s mortgage applications on X in August and has issued similar attacks against several other Democrats, suggesting that imperfections in their mortgage loan documents were evidence of fraud or willful misconduct. Now, Mother Jones has learned that Pulte himself committed an error in his own financial filings—the same kind of mistake that he has used to attack Trump’s political rivals.
Pulte filed a Form 3 for Freddie Mac but has yet to do so for Fannie Mae—putting him in violation of securities law, according to two experts who spoke to Mother Jones.
The error stems from Pulte’s unprecedented move in March to make himself chairman of the boards of government-controlled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Together, these two entities service nearly half of American mortgages, and they’re overseen by the FHFA, Pulte’s agency.
Pulte’s new roles on the Fannie and Freddie boards meant that he was required to file something called a “Form 3” with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that oversees publicly traded companies. The SEC requires that all new officers at public companies file this form within 10 days of starting their position, even if they own no shares of the firm. Pulte did file a Form 3 within 10 days of joining the board for Freddie Mac (and declared that he has no ownership of any Freddie shares) but has yet to do so for Fannie Mae—putting him in violation of securities law, according to two experts who spoke to Mother Jones.
Joan Heminway, a law professor at the University of Tennessee’s Winston College of Law who specializes in securities regulation, confirms that directors like Pulte must file a form even if they have zero ownership of any shares of the firm.
“To me this is a no brainer,” she said. “It is required.”
The FHFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment to this story.
New directors are required to file Form 3s even if they own no shares because they serve as a check to regulate insider trading. Board directors often get key information about a company’s steps before the public does. That’s why the Form 3 tells the public what, if anything, the new director owns before they first start their job: It establishes a baseline for the future, because if they make new trades while still serving as a company director, they must report those too.
Assuming Pulte has not traded shares of Fannie Mae while he’s been a director, Heminway says the missing filing is not likely to lead to enforcement action by the SEC, and that Pulte could take corrective action and file the form late.
Pulte’s hard stance has proven useful to Trump, who immediately used it to issue a letter firing Cook “for cause.”
Meanwhile, Pulte has treated the filing errors of Trump’s political rivals with a lot more severity. In August, he told his 3 million X followers that Cook had designated two homes as her primary residence at the same time to get lower interest rates—posting a side-by-side screenshot of her mortgage applications, under an all-caps banner: “FRAUD AT THE FEDERAL RESERVE.” He added that he was using this information to recommend that Cook be criminally prosecuted by the Department of Justice. “No one is above the law,” he wrote.
Pulte’s hard stance has proven useful to Trump, who immediately used it to issue a letter firing Cook “for cause.” This is the only legal way a president can fire top officials at the Fed, whose independence from politics is a staple of US economic stability. Firing Cook would present an opportunity for Trump to appoint a loyalist in her place and to gain more influence of the central bank.
In the spring, Pulte also sent criminal referrals for mortgage fraud against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully prosecuted Donald Trump and his businesses for millions of dollars worth of financial fraud. This week, a Trump-appointed prosecutor charged James with mortgage fraud. The transactions that Pulte highlighted in his referral were not the ones in this week’s indictment, but the charges mark an escalation of what he began: Prosecutors had previously investigated the claims he made against James and concluded there was no case. What’s more, the Associated Press recently reported that Pulte has a long history of issuing blistering attacks against those who have slighted him: He tried to depose his aunt in a lawsuit, called a relative a “fat slob,” and when he lost his board seat on his grandfather’s company, he accused his grandfather’s widow of insider trading.
As my colleague Dan Friedman and I reported last month, Pulte has had previous paperwork errors. He got his job in the administration after his wife donated $500,000 to a super-PAC backing Trump, just as Trump’s reelection campaign was struggling to get off the ground following the January 6 insurrection. The donation came through a Delaware shell company and was eventually investigated by the Federal Election Commission. The agency said that Bill Pulte had not broken the law, but it did find that his wife had incorrectly filled out a form to indicate the money came from an LLC rather than a member of the Pulte family.
In at least two other records, Cook designated one of the homes as a second home, suggesting that her lender may have mistakenly designated the vacation home as a primary residence when filing her paperwork. Pulte’s missing filing is likely a similar mistake.
ProPublica also found that at least three Trump Cabinet members have done what Cook is accused of—claiming primary residences on different mortgages. They noted that this is often something that lenders select on loan forms, and that borrowers then sign without noticing while going through piles of paperwork. In other words: These are common human errors, far from willful lies or criminal acts.
In Cook’s case, that appears to be what happened: In at least two other records, Cook had designated one of the homes as a second home, not a primary, suggesting that her lender may have mistakenly designated the vacation home as a primary residence when filing her paperwork.
Pulte’s missing filing is likely a similar mistake. “This is probably a glitch, and Pulte probably thought he had done both,” Heminway says of his missing Fannie Mae Form 3. “It somewhat puts the filing lapses on equal footing in that, in both cases, it probably will turn out to be a technical error that created the noncompliance.”
Often, the determining factor for prosecuting such oversights is whether they’ve benefited the person who made the error, or if the lack of disclosure has somehow hurt the public. One could argue, Heminway says, that Pulte’s error might be more significant than Cook’s. In her case, the primary residences were reported, even if in error. But in Pulte’s case, there was simply no information reported at all.