Substacks
Can You Find God in a Bikini? Olivia Reingold
LOS ANGELES — A woman dressed in a kimono tiptoes between the tattooed limbs of about fifty influencers, musicians, and yogis lying on the floor of a spa in West Hollywood. They’re in the homestretch of a breathing exercise that’s lasted twenty minutes. By now they’ve become one organism, breathing to the rhythm of a jungle beat on the stereo, their stomachs rising and falling like a hive mind.
“At the end of this,” the instructor prepares the crowd, “we’re going to have the opportunity to create sound—to move what needs to be moved.”
The participants, which includes one of Demi Moore’s daughters, a DJ with face tattoos named Diablo, the singer Kesha, and “Krotchy,” a model known for her two differently colored eyes, breathe more deeply into their white robes, creating a song on top of the song with their huffing: Oh-ah, oh-ah-oh.
Then the instructor, wearing silver hoops the size of cantaloupes, gives a quick countdown: “Three, two, one.”
Suddenly everyone is screaming.
Girls arch their backs and howl up at the ceiling. When a few run out of air, they almost moan. That’s when some start to clap; others cheer. And one man breaks through with the staccato call of a dolphin.
That last sound is emanating from Diplo, the Grammy award-winning DJ, supine on the floor with one hand draped across the chest of his musician pal Rhye, who has 2.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
“I started doing some animal noises at the end,” Diplo later explains when we’re in the sauna together. “The energy was strong.”
Welcome to Secular Sabbath, the members-only club that hosts bimonthly events, usually in Los Angeles but also in Iceland and Mexico City—and, at the end of the year, Antarctica. Colorful images of its young, beautiful (and sometimes famous) adherents have quickly spread the word of its mission on Instagram. For Genevieve Medow-Jenkins, the community’s 32-year-old founder, Secular Sabbath is a continuation of her youth spent at The Esalen Institute, a wellness retreat in Big Sur, California, which was famously portrayed in the final scenes of Mad Men.
Her parents were “bodyworkers” at Esalen, where her mother developed a new kind of massage “based on the atmosphere” and her father meditated, sometimes for days at a time. And even though she says most people raised in Big Sur never leave, she knew she had a higher calling.
“I knew that I had to share my upbringing with the world,” Medow-Jenkins tells me. “And Secular Sabbath is this chrysalis of what Esalen was in the ’90s, when I was growing up.”
She says Esalen has since become “commercialized,” selling workshops that last a few days but can cost upward of $10,000, unless you snag a “sleeping bag space” for a few hundred bucks. In 2016, she started distilling its spirit for a new audience, offering pop-up experiences at spas, Joshua Tree, and private homes. A $180 annual membership fee allows anyone to purchase a ticket to her events, which generally cost $75 to $400, and feature breathwork, cacao ceremonies, and soundbaths, often played by Rhye (real name: Michael Milosh).
The purpose of her Secular Sabbath sessions is to connect her “couple hundred” members to a higher power, at a time when attendance at religious services across the country is dwindling.
“I hope that they connect with a sense of purpose, through God or something greater than just themselves in this world,” she told me.
In other words, even though Americans are increasingly giving up on church, they’re still looking for God—even in a sauna with Diplo. Medow-Jenkins, who was raised Jewish, says she rarely goes to temple now, but still finds God all around her.
“The other day, I was upset about something. And in that moment, I asked God for help,” she says. “In moments of vulnerability, it always does in some way come back to God.”
Since the 1990s, the number of Americans who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” has more than doubled from 9 percent of the population to 21 percent, where it stands today. If the trend continues, Pew predicts that religious “nones” could represent a majority of the country by 2070. Part of what’s pushing people away from religion, Medow-Jenkins says, is its dogma—something that briefly soured her on Judaism when she was young.
Once, while visiting her Orthodox relatives in the Midwest, Medow-Jenkins remembers them asking her not to eat with them, because her Subway sandwich wasn’t kosher.
“It was so negative for me because it was so rule-bound,” she says. “And I knew when I created Secular Sabbath, I didn’t want it to have many rules. I wanted it to feel like you could be any version of something and still be included.”
There are no rules listed on the Secular Sabbath website. Though drugs or alcohol aren’t provided or encouraged at her sabbaths, Medow-Jenkins also says she won’t “take it away from them.” (And judging from the pure ecstasy of today’s crowd, it wouldn’t surprise me if the vibe is pharmaceutically enhanced). Her events don’t even have to occur on the Sabbath—this event, for example, is happening on a Tuesday night.
But she does try to steer clear from any connections to Western religions like Christianity, and instead borrows from Eastern traditions, because people are “more open to it.”
More than anything, she wants to dispel the idea that God is uncool.
“In American culture, we are so disconnected from feeling passionately about things—because it’s terrifying to care,” she says. “People are afraid to feel into spirituality.”
Inside the West Hollywood spa, women swaddled in robes are drawing a giant rainbow slug on a piece of paper laid out like a rug. Nearby, Juliana King, a blonde 37-year-old acupuncturist, says there was a time when the word God made her bristle.
“I had to reclaim the word God,” she tells me, sitting by the pool, listening to Rhye, who’s ten feet in front of her humming into a microphone. “Because God felt like this man in the sky that tells you how to be, and so I was uncomfortable with the word for a long time.”
King, who has a hint of mascara smudged beneath her eyes after a cold plunge, tells me she grew up in Texas, by the Mexico border, in a small city of about 150,000 called McAllen. There, she attended a Presbyterian church.
“I technically went to church,” she says. “But it was just a place I showed up.”
Now, she says she’s a “cafeteria spiritualist” who picks and chooses which practices work for her.
“I want to find God and know God in my own way,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to tell me the quality of God or how to worship or anything, I want all that to be my own experience.”
Around the corner, a woman is tending to a “plant symphony”—a group of potted ferns and succulents attached to sensors, which track the movement of water through their systems, turning it into sound. The result is like the single note of an organ ringing out, punctuated by the twinkle of a chime.
“It feels like a natural high,” says the woman, who is wrapped in a spa robe, her light hair draped across her shoulders.
She tells me her name is Macy Baker, and she says ten years ago, when she was 18, she probably would’ve been at a bar by now, but the beauty of Secular Sabbath is it gives attendees an alternative to booze.
“I feel like we’ve put a lot of emphasis into unconsciousness, with alcohol and drugs and things, to ensure that we stay lost,” she says. “Like people could be out at bars, and instead they’re here at a spa, listening to plants generate music and doing breathwork and sipping cacao. How awesome is that?”
Then Baker meets my eyes in the dim light: “But now, we’re in this new great awakening.”
Three hours into the evening, there’s been no mention of God in the official programming. It feels more like Coachella than church. A brunette chases a man into the hot tub, asking, “Are you my soulmate?” Over in the pool, Scout LaRue Willis is floating atop six foam noodles, meditating with her eyes closed. A crowd in the steam room, led by Rhye, is singing variations of one line for thirty minutes: “Somebody to love.” They’re all drinking canned water, which one man describes as “magic.”
Tamara Rodriguez, a 33-year-old actress who was born in Mexico, watches the scene as she dangles her feet in the water. She says she knows how this all looks.
“Oh, these are just some Hollywood kids living their yoga life,” she imagines a stranger might say.
Hell, she even thought that when she came to her first Secular Sabbath, held at Joshua Tree. But then she dispensed with her judgment when she realized how good it all felt.
“The first time I saw pictures of this, I was like, mostly everyone is white, so you’re like, ‘What is this yogi community that’s trying to create—some sort of cool kids club?’ But then you go into it with an open mind and see through it.”
Now, she says, she considers Secular Sabbath a “church,” but the kind where no one has to say anything specific or meet a certain dress code to belong. In some ways, it’s similar to Hillsong, the evangelical megachurch in Hollywood that once attracted Justin Bieber, Kevin Durant, and Kylie Jenner with its emphasis on rock music and a party atmosphere. Although that movement died down after its pastor became the subject of multiple scandals, including cheating on his wife, its lesson prevails: people will come to church, if it’s a place to be seen.
“This is, like, take off the clothes of your day and be more you,” Rodriguez added. “Be more human, authentic, so you can return to the world and something more truthful to you.”
Back in the sauna, I’m sitting in the dark on a wooden bench with Diplo, who is still in his khakis, Crocs, and t-shirt. He tells me that he grew up attending an Episcopal church back home in Daytona Beach, Florida, when he was still known as Thomas Wesley Pentz, and even now, at 44, he looks to Jesus Christ as an inspiration.
“He was a perfect person. He was kind. His ambition was to be the best person you could be.”
Since his mom and sister passed away recently, he says he’s been back in church. But he doesn’t believe God can be found only there.
“Everyday is church for me,” he tells me. “I’m always like, at the club”—then he cocks his head to think. “That is the church because people go there to deal with their problems.”
He adds: “Anything that makes you feel like you’re celebrating life is a church.”
Olivia Reingold is a writer for The Free Press. Read her dispatch from the Asbury Revival, “Why Students in Kentucky Have Been Praying for 250 Hours.”
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At the end of August, we ran a special series on What School Didn’t Teach Us, in which Joe Nocera described his path into journalism and Julia the Intern explained why she wanted to try farming before taking up her place at Stanford. (You can catch up with it.)
In response to the series, we got a letter from K.L. Evans, who homeschooled her daughter Ruby LaRocca—otherwise known as the winner of our first-ever High School Essay Contest. Last year, Ruby wrote us a gorgeous Constitution for Teenage Happiness. Reading her mother’s letter—about what you can learn in school, if you have the right teacher—we now get how Ruby ended up so wise beyond her years.
The best students are the bad ones. That was my great discovery in school. I was not belligerent or idle, just a little deviant. Dreamy. I would dodge what I was supposed to be doing and work industriously on projects that were not asked for and would never have been assigned. (Bold, unwieldy affairs that required enormous effort and patience and drew tiny audiences.) I tortured and enjoyed myself. Pondered long and earnestly on how I should make use of my life. I met with many successes but of a kind so marginal they scanned as failures. People found me charming and ridiculous.
My favorite teachers were the same: unpredictable, untidy, gifted in a way that only a handful of people appreciated. They tended to be honest, and so uncertain about their own effectiveness. Both exacting and affable. Bound absurdly to the twin demands of scholarship and art. Never friendless, but often lonely. (I know because eventually I became one of them.) I found my teachers in old books, in novels and plays and films, and occasionally in real life. Some who I knew in person were just assigned to me, and I had the good sense to cling to them like a barnacle. Some wrote books that taught me how to think, and once in a while I would be brave enough to send a letter to one of these hardworking scholars, and the most generous of them would write back. Corresponding with lively intellectuals far beyond my limited circle of acquaintance was almost as exciting as coming to understand with profit those playful, dynamic, radical works of education sometimes called “classics.”
A classic is one of those rare, synoptic books around which a whole life can evolve, or which becomes deeper as one becomes deeper. That’s why classics have what Ezra Pound calls “a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.” They do not reinforce but challenge our habitual, settled ways of thinking—which is perhaps why so many people assiduously avoid reading them. As the playwright Alan Bennett jokes, “A classic is a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have read themselves.” Of course, school is not the only place one could find readers of such books, but in my experience, school was where you found them. (Even if on the perimeter, without a formal position.)
My point is that the experience of formal education missing from the Editors’ recent investigation into “What School Didn’t Teach You” is the one clung to by the most serious teachers and students: Those eccentrics and oddballs who associate school with the charged, productive space one person opens up for another. The philosopher Stanley Cavell said a teacher is any person who “shows one a way to do relevantly and fruitfully the thing one had almost given up hope of doing.” According to this view, “school” is where students find (only by looking) teachers (not all, not most, but a small, animated faction) game to ward off the stultifying atmosphere in which educators take up a mode of explanation premised on students’ inability—in which teaching assumes the form, “I must explain this to you, since you cannot understand it yourself.” Most people feel fondly about school in proportion to how much they practiced thinking, unraveling difficulties, for themselves.
Schooling as I experienced it and tried to re-create for my students felt less conventional, more bohemian than the kind of pre-professional training the contributors to your series rightly fled—for the farm, the newsroom, or the workshop. A very clever friend of mine (one of those brilliant, legendary, unemployed intellectuals happily occupying what John Ashbery calls the “category of oblivion which increasingly threatens any artist who dares to take his own way”) says that human genius is like grass breaking through concrete; it persists even in situations of institutional hostility. School is and ought to be the straining, daring green and the crushing pavement—minus which the grass ain’t so beautiful.
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When I joined The Free Press—then called Common Sense—as an intern in 2021, it was run out of a family group chat. Literally.
Texts about what story from the news should we commission mingled with what we should order for dinner, and who was picking up the baby. There was no office, no HR department, and inevitably we went with Thai.
I scored the job the way most Free Pressers do: a cold email. In mine, I wrote about losing friends, grades, and party invites because I was too stubborn—or perhaps too foolish—to censor myself on campus. I told Bari I’d be willing to sweep the floors.
Instead, in my first week on the job, I sat in on an interview with Kim Kardashian from my dorm room. It was the most fun I had in my four years at college in the Covid era. And not just because my personal hero was on the other side of the camera—Kim, not Bari—but because it was the first time in a long time I hadn’t felt alone.
Overnight, I was working with people who left their jobs at places like The New York Times and NPR and Vanity Fair because, like me, they no longer belonged in the places that they worked so hard to get to. They became the most valuable mentors any young person could imagine.
That summer I flew to California and became the first Free Press intern. It was. . . informal. My official interview was with Suzy on FaceTime. Early on I had to Uber a microphone from Andrew Sullivan’s house to Larry Summers’ for a podcast recording. I’ve taken out the trash and furnished an entire newsroom from Facebook Marketplace. I’ve traveled to Israel to cover the war in Gaza and to Palo Alto for an interview with Javier Milei.
We’ve buttoned things up a bit since I started. And we’ve grown. A lot.
I have watched that little family group chat—and an office that was Bari and Nellie’s kitchen table—grow into a full-fledged newsroom. We still think of ourselves as an island of misfit toys, but when I really look, I see a hotbed of journalistic talent, doing agenda-setting reporting. I see an 800,000-person strong community of engaged, freethinking subscribers from all over the world. And we’ve found young journalists who embody our values: honesty, curiosity, respect, hard work, independence, excellence, common sense, and a belief in the American project.
So today, we are thrilled to announce a new initiative: The Free Press Fellowship. It’s a two-year program for reporters and writers eager to pursue the kind of journalism that makes The Free Press live up to its name.
The 2024–2025 Free Press Fellows are:
Julia Steinberg (known far and wide as Julia the Intern) has been with The Free Press since her sophomore year of college. In those two years, she has answered all of your “Where I TGs,” testified before Congress, and reported on the ground at the DNC. As a rising senior at Stanford, she will serve as the editor of The Stanford Review.
Here’s Julia on her time at The Free Press: “This was my second summer at The Free Press. I chose to come back—and work part-time during the craziest school year I could imagine—because I was not treated with kid gloves. Interns are trusted to to pitch, report, and write stories, script podcasts, take on business projects, create videos, and so much more. (And yes, sometimes we make coffee.)”
Evan Gardner, a rising senior at Brown, has also been at The Free Press for two years. In that time, he spearheaded our Olympics coverage, traveled to Nashville to cover country music concerts, and installed Ethernet in our new New York offices. (Thank you, Evan!)
Here’s Evan: “I’ve learned how to follow an exciting idea from the chaos of my Notes app all the way to something worthy of the pages of The Free Press. My writing and my thinking have become more expansive, yet precise. Around the clock, there is never a dull moment with this lean but strong team, and there’s no place I’d rather be as we continue to bring you the history—and the madness—unfolding before us. I’ve never consumed this much Diet Coke in my life. I couldn’t be happier doing it.”
Elias Wachtel came to us this summer after finishing his junior year at Columbia, where he studies ancient Greek and classical political philosophy. He wrote about his time on the Appalachian trail and called for Gen Z to turn to national service. He commissioned freelance pieces, worked with editors, and contributed reporting to stories on West Virginia’s opioid settlement distribution and the psychological strain on elite gymnasts.
Here’s Elias: “The most remarkable thing about interning with The Free Press is that they really care about hearing from us. I was shocked when I first learned I’d be allowed to write and publish this summer—in what other internship is that even possible? Before I started working here, I had been a longtime reader of The Free Press. At first, I was almost scared to see what it was like behind the scenes, lest I uncover some hidden angle, some well-kept secret that would shatter my faith in the project. But the wonderful thing about The Free Press is that it’s just what it promises to be: a small team of fiercely independent, curious thinkers who want to bring you the truth, each and every day.”
Jonas Du became a Free Press intern through a Twitter DM he sent to Bari while reporting the Columbia campus protests back in May.
In his time at The Free Press, Jonas has responded to an Atlantic article that argued conservatives benefit from the hostile environment of liberal college campuses, written about why the “authentic” social media app BeReal faltered, and appeared on NewsNation to talk about what young voters want from Harris and Trump.
“When you’re part of a company that’s truly new and disruptive, you can feel it every day. That’s why working at The Free Press this summer has been the best internship experience I could have wished for. After only a few months at The Free Press, it’s hard to imagine working for the legacy media. Every day, I see the real-world impact that reporters, editors, and producers sitting in the same room as me have on the national conversation. To be a part of that team, especially as a 21-year-old, is an opportunity I am incredibly grateful for.”
Last but not least, we are thrilled to welcome Danielle Shapiro.
Danielle is currently a senior at Princeton University, where she studies political theory and history. She is the president emeritus of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, which is committed to truth-seeking and academic freedom. Shapiro’s summer internships, at both Tablet magazine and The Wall Street Journal opinion page, have cemented her desire to pursue a career in journalism. “As someone who has been following The Free Press since its inception, I am so excited to join a growing team of motivated and thoughtful writers,” she said.
You’ll notice that the Free Press Fellows this year are all college seniors. You need not be a college student—or have ever gone to college—to apply to the next cohort. Indeed, we are especially keen to consider college-aged applicants from nontraditional or unconventional backgrounds.
If that sounds like you, please apply here to be considered for The Free Press Fellowship program for 2025–2026.
If you’d like to support our Fellowship program, and the next generation of free-thinking journalists, become a Free Press subscriber today:
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