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For subscribers	August 11, 2025

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Her talent is eclipsed in a culture that values attention over artistry

	By Frank Bruni

Those of us with insomnia have shamefully low bars for our late-night television viewing, which is how I justify my acquaintance with "Echo Valley," a bonkers new Apple TV+ movie about a mother's sacrifices for her drug-crazed daughter. It requires not so much the suspension of disbelief as the incineration of it. But it gives its actors a lurid excess of opportunities to suffer nobly or scheme nefariously, so it lured A-listers such as Julianne Moore, whom I'll follow into almost any valley, gulch or gorge of her choosing, and Domhnall Gleeson, who'd be riveting reciting a recipe for porridge.

Also Sydney Sweeney, who steals the movie from them both.

She plays the cursed daughter to Moore's mom, though "plays" doesn't do the performance justice. She reels. Rages. Combusts. During one sequence, as she asks and then terrorizes Moore for money, her desperation metastasizes into a hysteria so raw and so real that I gasped.

Forget Sweeney's "great jeans." She has great talent.

Not that anyone would know that from the overwrought, omnipresent, cynically engineered chatter about Sweeney's cheeky ad campaign for American Eagle. Over the past few weeks, Sweeney the actor has been swallowed whole by Sweeney the pitchwoman, Sweeney the provocateur, Sweeney the partisan chew toy, Sweeney the political riddle. I say that not out of sympathy for her — she's obviously a willing, witting participant in at least some of this. I say it out of sadness for the rest of us and for a society in which attention is a greater currency than artistry, professional distinction is too often a mere steppingstone to ambient celebrity and objects of admiration turn into endlessly deconstructed objects of curiosity, both against their wishes and by their own design.

Can't actors just be actors, musicians just musicians and athletes just athletes without conscription into our culture wars? Must they exploit their prominence for maximum profit or be exploited as social media fodder? I barely remember the performances that won Gwyneth Paltrow and Matthew McConaughey their Oscars; those golden moments receded behind the dross of all the merchandising they've done, all the cultural baggage they took on, as they traveled a drearily familiar arc from being celebrated for their artistic achievements to being famous for being famous.

George Clooney — whose suavity has been used to hawk watches, coffee, tequila — won praise for his lead role in the Broadway production of "Good Night and Good Luck" this year, but I bet more Americans are familiar with the role he played in last year's presidential race, entering the fray by publicly questioning President Joe Biden's cognitive state and beseeching him not to run for re-election. Starring alongside Clooney in the 2024 election was Beyoncé, who blessed the use of her song "Freedom" as a campaign anthem for Vice President Kamala Harris and took the stage with her at a Houston rally — an appearance that President Trump recently railed against, calling for a criminal investigation into it. Amid such ridiculousness, a person could briefly lose track of Beyoncé's musical genius. And of her own denim evangelizing — for Levi's.

Not all celebrity endeavors and endorsements are created equal. Occasionally they reflect genuine conviction, real caring, altruistic goals. But there's something crass and confusing about so many successful entertainers' readiness to stray into just about any arena of American life. And there's something about the digital age and social media that has mixed their various ventures together more thoroughly than ever before, into a sort of all-purpose dough, a.k.a. brand, that can be stretched, shaped and cooked this way and that, in accordance with a star's appetite for influence and income.

Sweeney's hunger is immense, as Doreen St. Félix observed in an excellent essay in The New Yorker. "She spoke plainly, in an interview from three years ago, about how acting can't pay her bills," St. Félix wrote. "She takes advertising deals that seem beneath her." In The Times, Yola Mzizi tallied the sources of Sweeney's supplemental income: "She's smiling while holding up a face cream in an ad on the subway and pops up when customers are placing orders at Baskin Robbins. She's taking awkward selfies with the latest Samsung flip phone or trying to convince you that pink fuzzy loafers are cool. She sells her bath water." That's not to mention her swimsuit collection. And she reportedly has a lingerie line in the works.

That frenzy of commercialism distinguishes Sweeney, who's all of 27. So does her instinct for impact. While she and the creators of the American Eagle ads couldn't have foreseen the exact chain of events by which those ads would become a cultural flashpoint — the supposedly widespread outrage among progressives was exaggerated and promoted by right-wing agitators, as Ken Bensinger and Stuart A. Thompson wrote in The Times — they must have sensed that the exaltation of her "blue eyes" and the genes/jeans wordplay would draw a certain kind of notice. Generate a certain manner of discourse. And that Sweeney, Sweeney, Sweeney would be discussed ad nauseum.

But not in terms of the accomplishments that initially brought her renown and made her current ubiquity possible. The fuss over Sweeney's body obscures an extraordinary body of work. "The White Lotus," "Euphoria," "The Handmaid's Tale," "Sharp Objects" — she's prestige TV royalty. For a reason: She nails almost every role and almost every scene.

Her performance in the 2023 HBO movie "Reality" — about Reality Winner, the N.S.A. contractor convicted of leaking a classified intelligence report to The Intercept — is an exquisitely subtle wonder in which the slightest shifts in her posture and the fleeting darting of her eyes convey the secrets she's keeping and the control she's on the verge of losing as two F.B.I. agents press her to come clean about what she has done.

Her performance in the 2024 horror flick "Immaculate" — about a mysteriously pregnant nun-to-be — is the operatic opposite of that. It culminates in howls of fury that maintain their bone-rattling, bloodcurdling intensity longer than seems humanly possible. They transform the movie, a dollar-store descendant of "Rosemary's Baby," into a grotesque, gory analogue of "Sophie's Choice."

I like to think that if I had a gift like Sweeney's, I'd be purely devoted to it. Wholly sated by it. And too grateful for my genes to care much about my or anybody else's jeans.

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For the Love of Sentences

Bialobrzeski/laif, via Redux

At NPR, Linda Holmes was moved by a new Billy Joel documentary to listen afresh to old records of his: "The words are mostly still in there somewhere, stuck in the back corners of the bottom drawers of my memory, in that way where you couldn't write them down on a blank sheet of paper, but if the music starts playing, they seem to materialize in your mouth, line by line, right before it's time to sing them out loud in the car." (Thanks to Robyn Rime of Rochester, N.Y., for nominating this.)

In Mother Jones, Bill McKibben identified an infuriatingly missed opportunity: "One possibility is that America will simply sit out the global solar boom in the same way Cubans, thanks to endless embargoes, still drive '57 Chevys. Perhaps, having self-embargoed from the clean energy future, America will someday be a living museum of coal-fired power plants and basement furnaces." He added: "As costs have plummeted, solar has gone from being the Whole Foods of energy to the Costco of power — available in bulk, on the shelf, and cheap in most of the world." (Tom Kucera, San Rafael, Calif.)

In The Washington Post, David Von Drehle paid tribute to the musical satirist Tom Lehrer, who died last month: "A mathematical prodigy from a wealthy family with a fondness for the light comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, Lehrer was to social criticism what Cole Porter was to sex — proof there is no better way to say the unsayable than with witty rhymes and toe-tapping rhythms." (Uschi Wallisser, Stuttgart, Germany)

Also in The Washington Post, Carolyn Hax advised a retiree mulling the best use of so much free time. "If you functioned well at work with lists and an organized plan, then it's also OK to make lists and organize yourself now," she wrote. "It's still not like work, because the stuff on the list is 'go swimming' instead of 'inch toward death in a meeting about things I have to be paid to care about.'"(Jeffrey Solow, Elkins Park, Pa.)

And George F. Will bemoaned the ubiquity and vagueness of a four-letter word: "Having no fixed meaning, 'vibe' cannot be used incorrectly. So, it resembles the phrase 'social justice,' which includes a noun and a modifier that does not intelligibly modify the noun." Will added: "Shakespeare used 28,827 different words without resorting to 'vibe.' He could have written that Lear gave off a bad vibe while raging on the heath, and that Falstaff's vibe was fun. But the Bard did as well as he could with the limited resources of the Elizabethan English he had." (Cheryl Hanschen, Jackson, Mo., and Grace Sheldon-Williams, Los Angeles, among others)

In The Athletic, Brendan Kuty charted a storied squad's sustained slump: "The New York Yankees landed in Texas, fired up the grill and started BBQ-ing their own playoff hopes." (Marsha Berkowitz, Manhattan)

In The New Yorker, Burkhard Bilger shared dental details: "My bottom teeth lean this way and that in a wandering line, like first graders on a field trip." (Max Sinclair, DeKalb, Ill., and Ken Logsdon, Columbia, Mo., among others)

Also in The New Yorker, David Remnick debriefed the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, who's "a conversationalist in the sense that a howitzer is a gun: a long lunch with him is a near-monologue, punctuated only by Keret ending one tale and then asking, 'May I tell you another?' His anecdotes, by turns elliptical and jagged, can resemble Kafka's fragments, though his tone is pop-eyed and modern in a way that suggests two of his other passions, Kurt Vonnegut and the Coen brothers." (Mark Benjamin, Seattle)

In The New Republic, Virginia Heffernan observed that the prevalence of women in Trump's cabinet wasn't a blessing, given the women: "Like middle-aged Manson girls, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Linda McMahon and Kristi Noem take orders from a supremely nasty felon. But they have vile streaks all their own. The vileness blends their private and public actions in a filthy smoothie." (Amy S. Parker, Evanston, Ill., and Maureen J. O'Connor, Sacramento, Calif.)

In The Times, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt calculated the sky-high cost of turning the plane donated by the Qatari government into a new Air Force One: "It is free in the sense that a used car handed over by a neighbor looking to get it out of his driveway is free." (Katherine Savage, Chapel Hill, N.C.)

Also in The Times, Leah Greenblatt gave subterfuge its due: "Considering the amount of flop sweat, vigilance and pure performance art it takes to be just one person in the world, I am always impressed by people who manage to lead double lives." (Maureen Rhodes, Wilmington, Del.)

Manohla Dargis appreciated the comedy "maximalism" of a new update of "The Naked Gun": "Taken individually, a lot of the jokes might not work, but when you're in a blizzard you don't notice each snowflake." (Bill Stewart, St. Mary's, Ga., and Joe Doggett, West Dover, Vt.)

And Roger Rosenblatt evoked the special pleasure that he, as an octogenarian, feels when he takes a dip: "What happens to the body in water — the flabby, bony, wrinkled body, I mean; my body, I mean — is a quiet miracle. You're trudging along on land, reluctantly dragging the 1940s cargo vessel you've become, and then you step oh-so-carefully into the water." And you swim as if in your 20s — but with the "knowledge and experience" of age, he added. "In water, you have achieved the impossible. You're young and old simultaneously. A wet Dorian Gray." (Kate Rosenbaum, Richmond, Va., and Colleen Buckley-Reynolds, St. Helena, Calif.)

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in "For the Love of Sentences," please email me here and include your name and place of residence.

Retire These Words!

A scene from "Manhattan" via Everett Collection

If ever an era and a locution were mismatched, it's ours and "thought leader." Thinking is in conspicuously short supply these days. Leaders are even scarcer.

But "thought leader" warrants erasure independent of the age. It's pretentious. You show me someone who claims to be — or happily accepts designation as — a "thought leader," and I'll show you an insufferably smug sage. Scratch that: I'll show you a self-enamored fool. No genuinely insightful person would deem it attractive or effective to wear such a gaudy garland of omniscience.

Not that "public intellectual," a common "thought leader" synonym, is any better. It too is enveloped in an air of preciousness and cursed by its aura of self-congratulation. Here's a good compass: If you cannot use a title or descriptor to introduce yourself without sounding like a pompous punchline in an old Woody Allen movie — "I'm Jonathan, and I've been a public intellectual for three decades now" — you need new language for your occupation.

Which isn't really or solely about leading thought or intellectualizing publicly anyway. If you're sharing your ideas in a classroom, you're a teacher or instructor or professor or such. If you're doing so on a page, you're a writer, an author, maybe a researcher. On a stage? You're a public speaker. On television? Well, that's in the eye of the beholder and depends largely on the substantiveness and affect of the beheld. You're a journalist or a news anchor or an entertainer — but please, please not a pundit. That's another mushy, needless label rightly replaced by a more specific term or terms.

Besides, it makes no sense to speak of a "public intellectual" when there's no "private intellectual," just as "thought leader" lacks the antonym "thought follower," which would refer to … what? Someone in a cult? All but a few Republican members of Congress since Trump took over their party?

Are those two categories redundant?

That's a leading question. And just a thought.

Thanks to Colleen Murphy and Fred Stone, both of Manhattan, among other readers, for nominating "thought leader" for retirement. "Retire These Words!" is an occasional feature about overused, oddly used, erroneously used or just plain annoying locutions. A previous installment, about the phrase "happy wife, happy life," appeared in this newsletter. Here, here, here and here are several other installments.

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