Principles? For spring? Groundbreaking.

“A million girls would kill for this job,” says Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) to Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) in the original “Devil Wears Prada.” The job in question is, of course, second assistant to the Anna Wintour-esque Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor-in-chief of Vogue stand-in Runway. Blunt and Hathaway were both 23 in 2006, when the movie came out. I, too, was in my twenties, and like the movie’s main character, I was working in publishing in New York, in my case at a book imprint, acquiring books and assisting the editorial director.

Emily was right—there were a million girls. But there were also, in hindsight, roughly a million jobs. It was just before the recession hit; I would leave for grad school just in time to avoid layoffs, not unlike Andy heading for the traditional newsroom she opts for at the end of the movie. It was also the year before the introduction of the iPhone, which would cement publishing’s transition from print-first to a digital-first product we could all access from our pockets. On the newspaper side, the number of jobs from 1990 to 2025 would fall by around 82 percent. Condé Nast, the parent company of Vogue, went from its glory days to what the New York Times’s Michael Grynbaum recently called “a husk of its former self…its authority has been all but demolished by the web.”

But in 2006, we were still early in this decline, and times were flush. My friends and I went to book parties and read Gawker accounts of what it was really like to work for Wintour. We could afford a good $12 dinner and an unlimited MetroCard and to live in prime Brooklyn on editorial assistant salaries, at least with a roommate or two. We were also young and unencumbered enough to be able to work really hard—nights and weekends, reading manuscripts on the train, developing competence at our low-paid but undeniably fun jobs.

The first “Devil Wears Prada” is a twentysomething movie that feels incredibly 2006. It is an aspirational movie about idealism and whether, if you are an A-student striver, you should choose a workplace that is bitchy and commercial and frivolous, though more worldly and profitable, or one that is virtuous and poor and naively unfashionable but more substantive. Andy, you probably recall (or can guess), ultimately opts for the latter—emerging a little wiser and better dressed, but with her journalistic morals intact.

Tonight, twenty years later, “The Devil Wears Prada” is back with a sequel, as well as a marketing strategy encompassing tens of millions of dollars and an inescapable barrage of brand partnerships. (Even Googling it just now caused a pair of scarlet pitchfork-heeled stilettos to traipse across my computer screen. Nowhere is safe.) Trailers have been circulating for months. Their main gist has been to convince fans of the first movie, which remains a candy-colored standard for slumber parties and plane rides, that the second will be a beat-for-beat echo of the original: the same bright-eyed ambitions, serene putdowns, luxe locations, fantasy of raiding the Runway closet.

But what’s inside this glossy box is something a little different. Thanks to a small cameo appearance by my wife (full disclosure!), I had the chance to attend the premiere last week. (Which was apparently “Coachella for queer people”? Sure, I’ll take it.) Amid all the hype, what I kept thinking about in watching the movie was not just the outfits, the music, the product placements…but how we all have aged. The up-and-coming 23-year-old starlets are now 43-year-old box-office stars. And if “The Devil Wears Prada” was for aspiring twentysomethings, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is a fortysomething burnout movie made for precisely these times.

Without spoiling too much: this new movie is all too aware of what has happened in journalism, particularly the experience of dancing anxiously around the room while one chair after another gets pulled out of the game. And the plot now revolves less around who is running the magazines than around who owns them. If Andy Sachs 1.0 had to decide between a glamorous magazine gig and a salt-of-the-earth newspaper one, that distinction itself is now revealed to have been a luxury. The animating question in the second movie is where in journalism you can find a job at all—and what owner will keep these remaining life rafts afloat.

There is something poignant about watching the exquisitely dressed Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt have to act out the slow chastening we in media all underwent from 2006 to 2026. By 2014, it was not infrequent that I would greet a colleague at another paper by graciously asking how their billionaire was behaving (mine: John Henry; yours, Jeff Bezos). Later, there was a period where we all seemed to work for the phone company (mine, AT&T; yours, Verizon). “The Devil Wears Prada 2” plays out this ownership drama with gossipy delight – by the end, we get both a Bezos figure and, perhaps, a MacKenzie Scott. But in some ways it’s grim that, if Andy once turned up her nose at Runway’s commercialism, that now looks like the noblest remaining option. She is still not entirely in charge—a features editor, not editor-in-chief. The sequel’s image of peace is to tuck her back under the wing of Runway’s stand-in mom and dad, Miranda and Stanley Tucci’s loyal Nigel, like a young adult returning after a breakup to her childhood bedroom.

This week, I was struck by an essay by a tech designer, Ky Decker, who recently quit their job after seeing not just their workplace overrun with AI, but also the standards or goals of the organization shifting to a point where they seem unrecognizable. “I keep asking myself: What happened to the principles that were professed a decade ago? To address climate change? To reduce racial, gender, and economic inequality? To ‘don’t be evil’? Were these principles abandoned, or were they merely born of convenience? Has tech always been like this? Was I just blind to it before?” Decker writes. 

Although the job I most recently quit was in journalism, not technology, everything in here rings a bell. And I find that I am daily having the same kind of conversation with people in (or formerly in) other fields: lawyers for the DOJ, small business owners, artists, educators. The sense is the same: can we continue to do good work, using our own minds and hands, with the basic assumptions we had before, that our work is purposeful and helps people and is worth a living wage? In a world where, say, Kash Patel is anyone’s idea of who should be running the Federal Bureau of Investigation, what are we even doing here? “Being skilled, doing the right thing, all of those things don’t seem like they matter anymore,” said a doctor friend to me recently. We had thought those things were important. Andy Sachs definitely thought those things were important.

By the end of “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” Andy’s ideals have telescoped in: can she get paid to do decent work in a community of old friends? That may be enough. A shot near the end of the movie captures Andy and other key characters in their offices, panning out to show them like happy little dolls in a dollhouse, their world intact. Maybe they are the lucky ones. Or maybe not. Outside the dollhouses, former institutionalists find themselves roaming around, consulting and newslettering, building their own brands, maybe eating some ramen while skateboarding, trying to figure out what to do next. It’s not always easy to pivot as cinematically quickly as Andy does, especially when the berths offered by institutions become rarer. For better and worse, more of us need to start inventing our own opportunities. 

In case it’s not clear, I liked this movie, maybe more even than the first one (whose nastiness about fitting into a sample size, and Andy’s resulting weight loss, make me cringe a little to show it to a kid today). What I appreciated particularly was the way the movie’s universe seemed to have grown up along with its audience. If the first installment made its protagonist an underdressed young adult gazing up at a skyscraper filled with fancier workers in high heels – the clackers, one friend used to call them – and wondering whether she would trade her integrity for access to the fashion closet, we are now handling our layoffs, practicing being persuasive to billionaires, and yes, sometimes getting to do the work we actually want to do, on our terms. The institutions are unreliable, shrinking, sometimes vanishing entirely. But, at least in the movies, there is still some room for skill and for doing the right thing.

I just loved this beautiful and erudite long essay by Gabrielle Bruney about the disappearance of the public bench. “When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm,” she writes.

I’ve always liked a bench, but nothing makes you appreciate them more than having kids – in the last seven years, my gratitude for the entire concept of a place to sit outdoors has soared. And while you generally need permission to be on someone’s porch, the glory of a bench is you don’t. It’s the spirit of the porch, made manifest through the world.