SAVE $20: The Edifier Vintage Wood Bluetooth speaker is on sale at Amazon for $79.99, down from the normal price of $99.99. That’s a 20% discount.

Putting on a great playlist while cleaning the house can change the entire vibe. The same goes for listening to an audiobook while cooking dinner. If you’ve been getting by with listening to your favorites at home with one earbud in so you can still be part of the household conversation, consider upgrading to a home Bluetooth speaker. There’s an especially pretty model on sale today.

As of July 14, the Edifier Vintage Wood Bluetooth speaker is on sale at Amazon for $79.99, down from the normal price of $99.99. That’s a 20% discount. Both the brown and ivory colorways are incuded in this deal.

With a fun retro style, the Edifier is well deserving of a place on your living room’s bookshelf or your bedside table. Edifier put thicker foot pads and spherical contact surfaces on the Bluetooth speaker to help provide better insulation from vibrations. You’ll be able to crank up the summer tunes without the speaker bouncing around.

Support with Bluetooth 5.0 means you’ll have seamlessly speedy transmission, and it helps with lower battery consumption. If you’d rather not connect with Bluetooth, you can connect via AUX, a USB-C port, or TF card. Edifier mentions the Vintage Wood speaker has battery power for up to 10 hours of playtime with the 2,500mAh lithium-ion battery.

Adding to the style of the Edifier speaker, the buttons have a piano-key button design. The compact design of the speaker measures about six inches in width, three inches high, and a bit over four inches deep.

While the stylish Edifier Vintage Wood Bluetooth speaker is on sale for under $80, upgrade your tunes. Since it only weighs a pound, you can easily take it around the house to have your audio in any room.

When I was growing up, people thought my parents were separated. It wasn’t because they got in public fights in parking lots. It’s because my parents took separate vacations with me. Over January break, my dad would take me to Colorado to ski. And then at spring break, it would be my mom’s turn to take me to Boca to lie on the beach all day and go to the movies at night. This arrangement was ideal for two parents who love each other very much but have wildly different interests. My mom isn’t a huge fan of the cold, and my dad doesn’t love to, as he says, “sit around in the dirt.” So, they took separate vacations, and the beauty of being an only child is that I got to go on both. (I can’t believe only children are stereotyped as spoiled.)

I never felt like I had a “normal” family. And I don’t mean that the way someone says, “We’re not a normal family” and then it’s a straight couple with three kids who are like, “Sometimes we have breakfast… FOR DINNER!” Obviously, there is no such thing as a normal family. But growing up, I couldn’t help feeling like my family was different because I didn’t have any siblings.

Like most kids my age, I lived for TGIF on ABC, the block of family sitcoms that played every Friday night. There were many different families portrayed on these shows, but the thing they had always in common was multiple children. Some shows had big families, some had blended families, but there weren’t many shows depicting my home life: the sole child living with two adults. Maybe because that’s not a fun show for kids to watch — it would mostly be about the adults opening mail while the kid reads alone in her room. It’s not compelling television, but it was certainly a nice life.

In the heyday of BuzzFeed quizzes and millennial meme culture, I was bombarded with content about what birth order says about you. Personality traits, preferences, and conflict styles were all neatly ascribed to whether you were an oldest, middle, or youngest child. When these memes occasionally included an only child, it was like, “Oh yeah, and these freaks have no idea how to fight.”

When people ask me if it was weird to be an only child, I tell them no, because I didn’t know any other way. Having siblings was as foreign-seeming to me as having a pet iguana whose tail was always falling off and being found behind doors or between couch cushions, like my friend Sean had. Of course I had my own room, who else would I share it with? Of course all these toys and clothes are mine, who else’s would they be? Of course I am terrible at handling conflict, who would I have fought with? My stuffed animals? They’re all pacifists, even Walt the warthog.

Growing up, I was rarely jealous of my friends who had siblings: The younger ones were like weird babies, and the older ones all seemed like assholes who thought we were weird babies. Sure, sometimes it was nice to go to someone’s house and have enough people to play Capture the Flag. But I mostly remember getting home, going up to my room, and lying on the bed in silence like a 44-year-old decompressing at the end of a long day at the office. And I knew the only person who might come bother me was my mom letting me know it was almost time for dinner — a dinner that I liked because you have more freedom to be a picky eater as an only child, when you’re just one finicky palate to cook for.

As a preteen, though, I sometimes wished for a sibling: specifically, an older sister. Older sisters are, from what I can tell, the meanest human beings on the planet, but they are also the gatekeepers to becoming a woman. They know about tampons and foundation and getting asked to dances and that the cool girls in high school don’t carry backpacks, they wear messenger bags. I lived and died by my stacks of teen magazines, but flipping the stark white pages of Seventeen is not the same as your sister coming into your room, pulling out a lip liner, and showing you how to use it. If you have an older sister, you don’t have to use the metallic gunmetal-gray Lancôme eye shadow your mom gave you from a bonus gift at Nordstrom, apply it alone in your poorly lit bathroom, and then wear it to the Friday-night dance looking like you got a black eye from a robot.

Instead, because I was the youngest person around by more than two decades, everything — activities, entertainment, topics of conversations — was geared toward adults. And I liked being able to hang with the big dogs (aka talk to my parents about what they liked). I was the kid who had no problem befriending teachers, talking to them a bit more like a peer, because that’s how I was treated at home. (I’m sure they loved that and weren’t at all annoyed by a nine-year-old talking about what she saw on 60 Minutes.)

There is one element of being an adult only child, however, that really scares me. As my parents get older, I’m more aware every day of the job of being their sole caregiver. I am so, so, so unbelievably scared of what that is going to look like. As they march on into their seventies, do I sometimes wish I had a brother or sister to deal with the uncertainty of the future together? Sure. Would I trade my life as an only child with my parents to have that? No fucking chance.

My parents and I get to do things that so many people don’t, such as spend quality time just the three of us. The best example of this is our annual winter trip. Many years ago, we decided to go “no gifts” among the three of us, and instead put all the money into one very nice vacation. We go every January to Aruba. It’s my favorite week of the year. We arrive separately and spend all day reading books and drinking near one another in the sun. And then we go have dinner at one of the many Italian restaurants in Aruba that exist for some reason. I love it because it’s just us. It’s the tropical version of what every day felt like growing up in our house. We’re not forced to accommodate others. We do the things we want when we want to. And my dad doesn’t even mind reading his book “sitting in the dirt.”

Alison Leiby is a writer and producer, and co-host of the podcast, Ruined. Her television work includes The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Life & Beth, and Ilana Glazer’s Comedy on Earth special. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, McSweeney’s, Cosmopolitan, and many other outlets. This shortened excerpt is from her new collection of essays, I’m a Lot, which came out earlier this month. You can buy it here, if you’d like.

P.S. More posts about only children and what age gaps do your kids have?

(Author photo by Mindy Tucker, family photo courtesy of Alison Leiby. Excerpted from I’m a Lot by Alison Leiby. Copyright © 2026 by Alison Leiby. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.)

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 1 hour ago

In a world gone mad, we could all use a little simple, silly, innocent fun. You take your kids to the theater to relax and create a memory you’ll share together. You put on a streaming show to make them giggle while you make dinner. You buy a ticket with your friends to a big-budget blockbuster to watch guys battle with swords, forget how much you hate your boss, and stop worrying about whether AI is going to take away your job. 

That’s how most people view entertainment’s place in their life. For it to keep filling that need, they have to be able to trust it.

Unfortunately, entertainment can’t be trusted. The entertainment you watch has never been less interested in giving you what you want. It has other plans, and this has never been truer than it is right now, in 2026. 

This is the story of how The Muppets and The Odyssey intersected in 2026 to destroy the last shred of trust audiences had left.

Making Muppets Hate Kids

On the surface, 2026 seems like a perfect time for a revival of The Muppet Show. The original was a family classic that spawned a generation of wholesome, non-controversial entertainment. Exactly the kind of thing that’s been missing from the usual streaming offerings. 

So Disney hired legit Muppet fan Seth Rogen to revive the iconic show and released it to the world. 

Rogen’s new version of the classic variety series was immediately praised for the way it looks, sounds, and feels exactly like the iconic Jim Henson series from the 1970s and 1980s. On that front, it was a triumph. A perfect production. Except there’s one big difference: Jim Henson’s version was the ultimate in wholesome, family-friendly entertainment. Seth Rogen’s version only pretends to be. 

It’s normal for family-targeted shows to work in a couple of edgy jokes that’ll go over the heads of little kids who might be watching with them. That’s part of the fun for parents. 

However, what would you think if instead of one or two sly adult references in your Pixar movie, there were twenty? Or thirty? What if all those sly adult references were only about one specific inappropriate thing? At what point would you start thinking, “Hey, is this Pixar movie trying to tell my kids something?”

That’s exactly what Seth Rogen’s The Muppet Show starts doing in its very first episode. 

That episode number one is only thirty minutes long, but if you watch and keep track, you’ll discover at least ten sex references in those thirty minutes. Actually, not just references; most of them seemed to specifically revolve around celebrating full-on, willful hedonism and adulterous cheating.

There’s a joke where Sabrina Carpenter tells Kermit she likes kink. There’s an entire sketch that revolves around Piggy cheating on her lover. After that, it’s back to Sabrina Carpenter so she can brag to Kermit about banging a married man. Then there’s a segment with guest actress Maya Rudolph, who seems to be engaged in heavy petting with a grumpy Muppet in the audience. 

Two of the musical numbers, one of which is sung entirely by rats, are popular songs about sex. The third song has Piggy replace Kermit as the object of Sabrina Carpenter’s sexual desire, just to make sure the sex references weren’t all heterosexual. 

Defenders might argue these gags are structured so that little kids won’t realize what’s going on. But it’s a significant portion of the first episode, which is a very weird thing to do for your debut episode of The Muppet Show. It’s not the jokes themselves so much as the volume of them, crammed into a short thirty minutes of otherwise perfect Muppet silliness.

Seth Rogen doesn’t have any children, and he’s been loud about how happy he is to be childless. He doesn’t like them, doesn’t care about them, so even though he was supposed to make a show for kids of all ages, it’s clear that he decided to make one for adults and lie about it.

Sexualizing children has become common in family-friendly entertainment, and the people making that entertainment never warn parents about any of it before they see it. They do that because no one would buy a ticket if they knew Zootopia 2 featured a weird predator-prey orgy scene for no apparent reason.

Trojan Horse Messaging

None of this is an accident; it’s Trojan Horse Messaging.

Trojan Horse Messaging is a persuasion technique in which a message is packaged inside a trusted, harmless, or ideologically acceptable frame so that a different, contradictory, or more objectionable idea can be introduced without triggering the audience’s normal resistance. 

It doesn’t only apply to family films slipping in sexual content to groom children into adult behavior. Sometimes it’s ideological dishonesty.

Angel Films recently released a new animated version of the famous George Orwell novel Animal Farm. The original Orwell book is infamous for being entirely anti-communist, and Angel Films, which is theoretically a conservative movie studio, was happy to tout its movie as being equally anti-communist to its conservative, Karl Marx-hating audience. 

Except their movie isn’t really anti-communist. This new version of Animal Farm twists Orwell’s story into a parable about the dangers of capitalism, effectively Trojan-horsing parents into taking their children to learn one thing, while intentionally teaching them exactly the opposite. 

Trojan Horse Messaging isn’t limited to children; it’s being used on you, too. 

It’s why, ironically, director Christopher Nolan’s 2026 version of The Odyssey race-swapped Helen of Troy, despite the story being a Greek myth about Greek people and the iconic, foundational story explicitly describing Helen as being pale-skinned and Greek. 

Loving Hats In A Fedora Hating World

Replacing the most beautiful Greek woman who ever lived with an African woman isn’t an innocent act of creative casting. This is Iconic Reconditioning.

Iconic Reconditioning is the deliberate alteration of a beloved character’s defining symbol, trait, or image to shift audience attachment from the original meaning to a new, preferred one.

It’s hard to see what’s really happening with The Odyssey through the race angle of the situation, so let’s put a different frame on it. 

Imagine a new Indiana Jones where Indy throws away his Fedora in favor of wearing baseball caps. Then imagine the movie was made only because the filmmakers behind it hate Fedoras and want to make other people hate them, too. 

Maybe the new baseball-cap-wearing version of Indiana Jones is well-acted and has amazing special effects. It wouldn’t matter; nobody would support it because it’s not Indiana Jones anymore. It’s some other guy in a different hat. People would hate it. No one would defend it, and the same people who made excuses for The Odyssey would be the ones leading boycotts against Indiana Jones and his baseball cap.

Christopher Nolan’s motives are no different from those of our hypothetical, fedora-hating Indiana Jones director. Only, instead of targeting your feelings on hats, he’s out to change your standards of beauty by stealing the most beautiful woman who ever lived label and applying it to someone totally different. He’s out to change your view of Western culture by rewriting its foundational stories and then pretending nothing happened. He’s using the story of the Trojan Horse, as an actual Trojan Horse, to screenwash you into sharing his worldview. 

This isn’t a guess; it’s a fact. The movie’s cast went out and promoted the film by talking about how much they hate the source material because it’s too male or too white, or whatever, and Christopher Nolan himself admitted that the movie isn’t even based on Homer’s classic story but instead on a politically motivated, feminist reinterpretation of it, written in the modern era. Nolan says one of his primary goals in making the movie was to persuade his audience into abandoning what he deems as “cultural prejudice.” He wants to “do away with some of those assumptions.”

Imprisoning Your Audience With Betrayal

That might seem like at least they’re being honest about what kind of movie The Odyssey is, but most of these comments are being buried and hidden by its marketing campaign, which tells the potential audience that this movie is exactly the opposite of what it really is. There’s a reason the movie’s definitely not blonde Helen of Troy is only shown in a one-second flash in The Odyssey’s trailers, and it’s the same reason Seth Rogen pretended he was making a family-friendly version of The Muppet Show, while doing the exact opposite. 

Because Seth Rogen’s version looks and feels so much like The Muppet Show, it’s likely many parents didn’t watch close enough to realize their kids are being fed a steady stream of sexualization. In the same way those parents saw Muppets and hit play on streaming, most people who buy tickets for The Odyssey will only see the trailers touting it as the next movie from the guy who made Inception and Oppenheimer, before making their decision. They’ll have no idea they’re wheeling Chris Nolan’s Trojan Horse directly into their brain.

It doesn’t matter if The Odyssey is good. It doesn’t matter if The Muppet Show is good. It doesn’t matter if you think the creatives did a good job making Star Trek’s message-heavy Starfleet Academy or the latest, diverse take on Lord of the Rings. The debate over the morality of this kind of screenwashing is not a question of storytelling. It’s a question of honesty.

At issue is something much, much bigger than opinions on joke quality or petty debates about skin color. What matters is whether filmmakers have the right to use screens to surreptitiously change or manipulate minds in ways their viewers would not consciously approve of.

Audiences have expectations. Bill your film as a comedy, and they expect to laugh. Position it as a horror movie, and they’ll rightfully be looking forward to a few scares. That doesn’t mean anyone expects to know the details of your story before they’ve watched. But it does mean people expect your intent in making your product to match their reasons for consuming it.

It’s like filling Pepsi cans with lemonade and then excusing it by telling consumers to stop complaining because it’s really good lemonade. It’s the dishonesty that’s the problem, not the quality of the liquid in the can. 

When you lie to your audience about what you’re doing, you aren’t just manipulating them. You make them into the worst kind of slave: people who think they’re choosing freely, while you’re quietly stealing their free will.