Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss on the rise of “leg hair harassment.” Kat Rosenfield on a helicopter parent’s worst nightmare. Amanda Knox on a chatbot’s false confession. Rafaela Siewert sits down with a Brooklyn DJ who’s on Vladimir Putin’s most-wanted list. And more!

But first: The truth about the plastic surgery backlash.

On social media, there’s a new trend: Women are talking about removing their breast implants, dissolving their filler, undoing their plastic surgery. They’re talking about what the pursuit of beauty cost them: One describes blood and pus “actually pouring out of a hole in my ass” after getting butt filler; another recalls her “nightmare” appointment getting chin filler. Meanwhile, capitalism is catching up: Clinics are advertising “buccal fat restoration” to reverse the procedure of sucking fat out of the cheeks—which, until recently, was all the rage.

When I texted our columnist Freya India about this trend, asking her to write about it, I thought she’d be over the moon. After all, earlier this year she published a book in which she argued that social media had made a generation of girls believe they had to inject their faces with toxins in order to look okay—and called on women to rebel against this idea.

Had the resistance begun?

But a couple of days into her reporting, Freya texted to say this wasn’t a story about women seeing the light and realizing they’re fine the way they are. It was something much darker. A lot of the women she spoke to, or watched online, said they’d had awful experiences with implants or injectables or unnecessary surgery—but they were still considering going back for more.

“There’s a part of me that is still interested in the idea of looking young and beautiful longer,” one 29-year-old told Freya, even though her face had swelled up so much after getting Botox that she could barely see, and was left “angry,” “scared,” and “extremely insecure.”

It disturbed Freya that all these women were anxious to sound nonjudgmental, saying things like “I’m not here to judge,” or, as one TikToker put it: “I think everybody is obviously entitled to do what they want with their bodies.” This is a woman who experienced digestive issues and breathing problems after getting breast implants. (Last week, an NYPD officer died in the Dominican Republic after suffering complications from her removal.)

“I met many young women brave enough to risk it all for beauty,” writes Freya, “but not one brave enough to say this to others: Don’t do it.” —Freya Sanders

Freya India • Culture and Ideas Just Say It: Plastic Surgery Is Bad for Us

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Rafaela Siewert • Two Drinks

Two Drinks with . . . One of Russia’s Most Wanted

Egor Cherniuk doesn’t always feel like a liberal—even though he’s so passionate about liberalism that he’s been to prison on its behalf. “By Russian standards, I’m as lib as one can get,” according to the 28-year-old, who once worked for Vladimir Putin’s archnemesis, Alexei Navalny, and says he’s now on the Russian president’s most-wanted list. But in Brooklyn, where he works as a DJ in exile, he feels politically homeless. “To bicker about pronouns when you don’t have a free press or when you don’t even have independent courts sounds so fucking ridiculous,” he tells Rafaela Siewert over two coffees. Read story ›

Kat Rosenfield • Things Worth Remembering

A Time Capsule of Free-Range Childhood

According to one poll, a majority of 14-year-olds in America aren’t allowed to go further than their own street without adult supervision. Kids are smothered by extracurriculars, and their parents track their every move on an app. Some struggle to believe that, as recently as the ’80s, adolescents could roam freely with their friends. They need to watch Rob Reiner’s “Stand by Me,” argues Kat Rosenfield in this week’s Things Worth Remembering. In this classic coming-of-age film, which turns 40 this month, but is set in the ’50s, kids smoke cigarettes, tote a gun, and look for a dead body in the woods—and “growing up,” writes Kat, “is a thing kids could only truly do in moments when they were on their own, out of adult view.” Read story ›

Amanda Knox • Culture and Ideas

Amanda Knox: A Chatbot’s False Confession

Amanda Knox’s one-woman show, which she’s currently performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, has a question at the heart of it: How am I going to explain to my kids that, as a young woman, I went to prison for a gruesome murder I didn’t commit? It’s been met with a storm of backlash, and a Change.org petition demanding the sold-out show be canceled out of respect for the murder victim, Meredith Kercher. (Those who’ve seen the show say it’s deeply respectful.) To understand the story Amanda is telling onstage, read her recent piece for us, about an experiment in which a criminologist coerced a chatbot into a false confession—just as, Amanda writes, she was manipulated nearly 20 years ago in an Italian police station. Read story ›