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A few days ago, The Boston Globe published an article about the American Eagle ad controversy with the headline “How American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney ‘good jeans’ ad went wrong.”

The preview on the newspaper’s website also included the line “The company’s stock has soared.”

That’s the exact opposite of something going wrong if you’re in business to make a profit. A more fitting headline would be “How American Eagle’s ad went right.”

What happened here was a triumph of marketing, what most companies with edgy ads want: for paid advertising to catch fire and explode into “earned media,” otherwise known as free advertising.

For those of you who missed the story, American Eagle signed Sweeney — an actress best known for her roles in HBO’s “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus” — for a sultry ad in which she talks about genes being passed down from parents to offspring. At the end, she says, “My jeans are blue.”

From those benign words, a ruckus ensued.

Some critics have said that the words coming from a blue-eyed blonde are suggestive of eugenics and old ideals of beauty that we’re no longer supposed to embrace.

Others have noted the similarities between the American Eagle ads and Brooke Shields’ ads for Calvin Klein in the 1980s, which also played with the words “jeans” and “genes.” Both campaigns showed the young women zipping up their jeans in sexually suggestive poses.

In years past, we would be talking about that. But conservatives on social media have been largely quiet on this point, and instead are crowing that the age of “wokeness” is over since American Eagle didn’t respond to a handful of critics by apologizing and pulling the campaign. President Donald Trump praised Sweeney on social media, and American Eagle stock prices are up.

Related
The internet wants to cancel Sydney Sweeney for this

Meanwhile, the doughnut chain Dunkin’ released a cheeky ad in which the actor Gavin Casalegno, who stars in the Amazon series “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” says, “Look, I didn’t ask to be the king of summer, it just kinda happened. This tan? Genetics.”

Podcaster Shawn French told Fox News Digital that this is a “cultural turning point,” and it’s true that we have gone, with dizzying speed, from Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender influencer whose promotion famously tanked Bud Light sales, to Sydney Sweeney.

But also, the American Eagle story has benefited from the dog days of summer, and a group of people who have been described as “terminally online.” Which is to say that, yes, the ad has generated a shocking amount of news coverage (even the journal First Things found a way into the story), but it’s a social-media-generated conversation.

Conversely, the Brooke Shields controversy was more of a monocultural moment. The movie “The Blue Lagoon” was widely panned (winning Shields a Razzie award for worst actress), but everyone knew who she was — a teenage actress starring in an R-rated film. (Shields later said that the film couldn’t be made today, but that’s probably more due to animals being harmed than the nudity.)

All these factors led us to the bewildering moment where the nation was obsessively talking about an actress that many of us have never seen wearing jeans that most of us will never buy. There are probably more people scandalized by the idea of paying $80 for jeans than those who believe that American Eagle is promoting eugenics in a well-funded, well-planned series of ads. If I ever wear a pair of these jeans, I will have found them at the Goodwill.

A tale of two Posts

In the same week that the media reporter for Columbia Journalism Review wondered if The Washington Post is on life support, the New York Post announced a westward expansion.

Per Sara Fischer at Axios, “New York Post Media Group, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., will launch a new, daily Los Angeles-based newspaper called ‘The California Post’ in early 2026.”

Unlike The Washington Post, which reportedly lost $100 million last year, the New York Post is profitable and has a large number of readers in Los Angeles, the editor-in-chief, Keith Poole, told Axios. The publication will feature " journalism, entertainment and celebrity gossip, sports news, local news and opinion — with an edgy voice," Fischer wrote.

The New York Post is often derided by “legacy” journalists as a tabloid, a label that was useful when explaining why the publication’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was ignored for so long. CNN’s Brian Stelter at the time called the laptop story a “manufactured scandal‚" but The Washington Post and other news organizations eventually conceded that at least some of The New York Post’s revelations were correct.

In a head-spinning bit of irony, The Washington Post reported on the New York Post’s expansion and quoted Poole saying, “I think it’s a good time to cement that we are a national brand in the eyes of America and in the eyes of our peers and in the eyes of the advertising industry as well.”

Meanwhile, over at Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop enumerated the number of Washington Post writers and editors who have recently left (including longtime political writer Dan Balz and all but one obituary writer), while noting that owner Jeff Bezos wants his paper to be a national brand, one that firefighters in the Midwest might want to read.

It’s a worthwhile goal, though one that might be best achieved by offering free subscriptions to first responders.

Recommended reading

Jay Evensen, who recently published a five-part series on Bangladesh, looks at the real-life effects of Trump’s tariffs in the South Asian country.

He writes: “Bangladesh is the embodiment of the old saying that when the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. In this case, Bangladesh is just glad it won’t catch pneumonia.”

What happens when tariffs increase? Look to Bangladesh

Brad Wilcox and Maria Baer examined how the “big, beautiful bill” failed families, particularly parents who want to stay home with their children but can’t afford it.

They write: “Rather than catering to the most privileged parents who choose to work outside the home, allowing all parents to keep more of their own money each time they grow their family would benefit all families. And it would have sent a much better message."

Where are the pro-family senators?

Asma Uddin argues that we should all pay attention when norm-breaking, rather than being costly to our leaders, becomes politically rewarding.

“The framers designed our system knowing they couldn’t draft rules for every crisis. George Washington and his contemporaries relied instead on good faith, restraint and habits of compliance to make the Constitution work. The document’s deliberate ambiguity wasn’t a flaw but a key feature, and it depended on leaders respecting the system even when breaking it might offer short-term advantage.”

When constitutional norms are challenged, that should matter to us all

Endnotes

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Comments

A few years ago, after seeing a sign advertising “drive-thru” weddings, I wondered if we are losing something important when marriages can be officiated by anyone.

The Wall Street Journal raised the stakes this week with a story about a couple who were married in Las Vegas by a cartoon jar of mayonnaise, a promotional event (read: earned media) for Hellmann’s. It is a relief, I suppose, that only 37 couples applied. It’s a bigger relief that after the mayo-themed ceremony, the couple said they found “a quiet place to read their real vows.”

Meanwhile, soon after I wrote about the rise of banks that court conservatives, Donald Trump appears poised to issue an executive order that will fine banks who drop or deny service to customers for political reasons. Melania Trump wrote in her memoir that both she and her son had been debanked.

As always, thank you for reading and being part of the Right to the Point community. You can email me at Jgraham@deseret.com, or send me a DM on X, where I’m @grahamtoday.

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