Was "Melania" Made by a Realtor with a Drone?

Last week I was in New York, planning for the release of my book, THEY STOLE A CITY: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy, which comes out July 14th. (You can pre-order here, and please do because it really makes a difference to the success of a book.) The blurbs are coming in, and, after nearly ten years of work, am I proud. It’s particularly meaningful to me that early readers have homed in on my argument that the Wilmington coup was a critical hinge point in American history, and that they share my understanding of its importance in explaining why we are where we are now. This one’s from Jelani Cobb, author, most recently, of “Three Or More is a Riot,” and dean of the Columbia Journalism School:

“They Stole a City is a brilliant rendering of a history buried in a shallow grave. Lauren Collins has not only measured the weight of a specific and tragic chapter of our past, she has charted the Wilmington Massacre’s bearing upon the present. The origins of our current crisis become more legible in these pages – as do the forces that would just as soon steal a nation.”

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Before I left town, I had one last order of business: seeing “Melania,” the new documentary about Melania Trump. If you haven’t heard, Amazon paid forty million dollars for some shots of her feet interspersed with breathtaking BTS footage of Melania fussing over her Inauguration outfit (“No more turtleneck!”) and Melania planning a donor dinner featuring a literal golden egg. “After a while, “Melania” starts to feel like an Only Fans account crossed with that meme of Kim Jong Un visiting factories,” I wrote for The New Yorker. Full review here.

The Trumps’ handpicked director, Brett Ratner, who had not worked in movies for years after multiple allegations of sexual abuse, which he denies, turned up in the latest release of Epstein papers. It’s hard to fathom the iniquity coming out of those files, but I want to draw your attention to Epstein’s jawdropping plan for educating boys with video games, in light of my friend Lila Byock’s campaign to keep predatory EdTech out of schools.

What else we got? I bring you France’s most-watched television events of 2025, which basically alternate between rugby games and episodes of the atrocious series “HPI.” I would watch a show about Jacob Helberg, a young, Franco-American official State Department official who wanted to be ambassador to France but lost out to Charles Kushner and now serves as a liaison between Trump and the French far-right. Ditto the Doumbayas—President Mamadi, who seized power in a 2021 coup and First Lady Lauriane, who was born in a village in the Drôme, served as a French gendarme, and is widely rumored to have been a spy.

The Louvre robbery—whatever happened with that?!—got all the air time, but did you know 1) that the Élysée Palace has an argentier and 2) that said argentier was recently arrested for allegedly having pocketed some hundred valuable plates and cups? (Any story with a “thirty-year old porcelain collector living in Versailles” has me from the jump.) The church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Médaille Miraculeuse is little known to Parisians, but draws some three million visitors a year, about the same as Musée d’Orsay. If you want a miracle, I’ve got one: Ousmane Dembélé’s mind-blowing goal against Lille. The beautiful game!

Three goals in life: to interview Dembélé, to have a sandwich named after me, and to figure in a snow globe, ever since I went to the John Singer Sargent show and acquired one featuring his subject, the society gynecologist Samuel Pozzi. The joy this thing gives me. You would not believe. As for sandwiches, I had a deeply satisfying snow-day turkey club at Waverly Diner, my diner of choice in New York City. I have also recently been to the Bahamas (ALL WILL BE REVEALED IN A FUTURE ISSUE OF THE NEW YORKER), where I loved eating chicken souse. I will try to recreate it at home using this recipe. The allspice seems key. Last night I made Melissa Clark’s Parmesan Cabbage Soup; today, it’s less than soupy, and I’m eating it with a soft-boiled egg. I’d never heard of “fried-rice syndrome,” probably because, as this terrific article in Vittles proves, it doesn’t really exist.

I’ve been reading Edith Wharton’s “The Buccaneers” with great pleasure. (Am I supposed to like Guy Thwarte? I don’t, really. Am I supposed to not like Rishi, in “Industry”? Cause I really do.) I tore through Belle Burden’s “Strangers,” admiring the cold fury of her writing. Ben Markovits’s “The Rest of Our Lives” charmed me for the opposite reason, with its forgiving, almost lackadaisical take on the real and pseudo- crises of midlife. I came home from New York with Lauren Rothery’s “Television” and Omar El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” It was good to get out of Paris for a minute—the other day, I saw a picture of a cave and thought it was a piece by Eva Jospin. After the paywall, what I did in New York and what I’m looking forward to this year in France…