Camp Friend CABAL

As one nepo baby recently demonstrated, the connections forged in cabins are intense, mysterious, and totally worth getting grounded over.

- DANIELLE STEIN CHIZZIK

The internet got a wonderful gift this spring when 16-year-old Romy Mars, the daughter of filmmaker Sofia Coppola and rock musician Thomas Mars, broke her parents’ rule against public social media posts and released a TikTok video. In it she announced she would be making a cooking video (pasta with vodka sauce, which never materialized, in part due to Mars’s inability to distinguish among onion, garlic, and shallot). Why the defiance? The teen had nothing left to lose, she explained, since she was already grounded—for attempting to use her parents’ credit card to charter a helicopter to take her to meet a camp friend for dinner.

It’s impossible to imagine any better argument for parental limits on social media than the frenzy that ensued. Despite the fact that the video was almost immediately deleted, it spread like wildfire through the internet, spurring coverage on CNN and in the New York Times and eliciting reactions ranging from amusement to disdain. But for a select group of people who either watched or heard about the clip, there was something else lurking beneath the judgmental chuckles at the folly of a supremely privileged teen. For the campers among us, there was recognition.