But first: Frannie Block meets the 25-year-old who’s saving local news.

My first job out of college was working the night shift as a cops and crime reporter at The Des Moines Register. I’d sit at my desk listening intently to the police scanner, and hop in my car as soon as I heard a whiff of action and drive straight to the scene. I loved this paper and still do—the people I worked with are among the most dedicated, smart, and kind colleagues someone could ask for.

But while I was there, I knew I was watching a business model failing in real time. In six months, I had survived two rounds of layoffs, watched the boss who hired me take a voluntary buyout to save our jobs, and found out I was getting furloughed for a week over Christmas. My new editor managed more than a dozen writers on his own after the shrinkage.

With fewer and fewer reporters, our owners, Gannett—the largest newspaper chain in the country—told us to shift our focus from long, in-depth investigations to shorter stories with catchier headlines to try to boost our online presence. At weekly staff meetings, we’d brace ourselves for the latest signs of a business in free fall.

By the time I left, I’d seen a Pulitzer Prize–winning paper once lauded for its biting political coverage depleted into a shell of its former self.

The state of local media in America today brings me great sadness, but when I heard about Evan Newton in Monticello, Georgia, I felt a twinge of hope.

Newton is 25 years old, and two weeks ago, he emptied his savings to purchase his local newspaper from its longtime owner to save it from being bought by a conglomerate or shutting down altogether. Young and ambitious, Newton told me he couldn’t just “sit on the sidelines” and watch the paper he grew up reading wither away. So I hopped in the car again and drove to the office he’s now running—to meet someone brave enough to identify a problem in his community and take a risk to fix it.

“I’ve never owned a business,” said Newton cheerfully, who admitted he barely graduated from college. And yet, he’s got a plan. . . —Frannie Block

Second Thought

The journalist Amy Chozick specializes in women who spike the blood pressure of the body politic. Hillary Clinton. Lauren Sánchez Bezos. The Kardashian sisters. She’s profiled them all—and in this week’s episode of Second Thought, she talks about their messy realities with Suzy Weiss. They also chat about Amy’s brand-new book, With Friends Like You—which is about what happens when a girlboss becomes a mom.

“Our generation of women was raised on, ‘You can do whatever a guy does,’ ” Amy says, “I don’t think men were raised to be like, ‘You can do whatever a woman does. You can load the dishwasher and cook every night and do the grocery shopping.’  ”

Watch their conversation below, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And to read Suzy’s reflections on their chat, don’t miss her newsletter!

​​Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet a student of Brazilian Zouk dancing; a Philly sports fanatic; or a shih tzu mom “partial to a dirty martini with a rare steak.” Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to Cupid@TheFP.com.

This week, Kat Rosenfield wrote about Sophie Cunningham—the professional basketball player who said “young girls in sport shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” and didn’t get canceled. Arthur Brooks reflected on the tragedy of looksmaxxing. And River Page complained that the internet forces us to live in a secular sharia state. . .

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our reporter River Page for his recommendations…

📺 Watch… The New World. Although hated by many audiences and critics upon its release, Terrence Malick’s 2005 take on the Pocahontas story is perhaps the greatest movie about America ever made. Malick doesn’t whitewash conflict between the settlers and natives, but he doesn’t spend a great deal of time moralizing about it either. His main interest is the pure strangeness and curiosity of two completely different societies with no previous knowledge of each other meeting for the first time—a phenomenon nobody in the globalized world will ever truly experience again.

📚Read… A Feast of Snakes, by Harry Crews. It’s one of the few novels that documents the transition from the old South to the new. Set in the small town of Mystic, Georgia, it follows Joe Lon Mackey—a former football star turned alcoholic wifebeater—as he prepares for the town’s annual Rattlesnake Roundup, a festival wherein locals hunt, kill, and eat the town’s snake population. This book has everything: castration, crazy agoraphobic women, adultery, dogfighting, and, of course, murder. And it’s a quick read.

💰Buy… Things on eBay. Almost nothing is made well anymore—from particleboard furniture, to cheap clothes, to AI-slop wall art—but thankfully, whatever it is you’re looking for, no matter how niche, there is a boomer in Wisconsin with a hoarding problem who has a version of it that’s stood the test of time in their garage, and who now wants to sell. Half the decor in my house and a decent portion of my clothes have come from these heroes—and none of it has immediately broken or fallen apart in the way that Amazon trash will. So the next time you want to redecorate, or want to find a vintage wool sweater for $15 (like I did last winter), log on and enjoy the journey. (Author’s note: Ebay isn’t paying me to say any of this, but it should!)

Last but not least: When we asked our creative director Clara Grusq for the most beautiful thing she’d seen this week, she told us that she just rewatched the late ’90s classic, The Talented Mr. Ripley—and she couldn’t get enough of this sun-soaked Mediterranean shot.

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

But in February, a staff member apparently complained about the assignment, and the story was forwarded to South Florida State College (SFSC) president Fred Hawkins, a Republican former Florida House member who is an ally of Governor Ron DeSantis. “I don’t ever want to see this story again,” Prabhakar said she was told by Hawkins, adding that he wouldn’t want his college-age daughter reading it. The college president also said the story was “political.” The next day, she was suspended and told that her contract wouldn’t be renewed.

On Wednesday, Prabhakar sued SFSC and Hawkins in federal court. She alleges that what happened violates Florida’s Campus Free Expression Act, signed into law by DeSantis in 2021. The law says that state colleges in Florida “may not shield students, faculty, or staff from expressive activities” and protects “faculty lectures, writings, and commentary.” Prabhakar is seeking to get her old job back, as well as compensatory and punitive damages, and is being represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Hawkins and SFSC could not be reached for comment.

The short story “Bettering Myself” by Ottessa Moshfegh is certainly racy but not expressly political, and Prabhakar says that she taught it for three years at SFSC before the spring semester class that led to her removal from the classroom. But the lawsuit is yet another collision between free speech and DeSantis’ campaign to excise concepts of sexism and racism from the curricula of public schools, including higher-education institutions. In early July, a federal appeals court struck down the higher-ed provisions of one of DeSantis’ weapons in that fight—the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, signed into law by the governor in 2022.

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There are half-filled reporter notebooks, an old film canister, a walkie-talkie, and a half-burned candle used to offset the smell of the office cats—including a black tabby named Typo who got her name from sitting on people’s keyboards. The landline rings while Newton is in the middle of editing a story about the town’s softball team. It’s a subscriber calling: Her paper didn’t show up on the doorstep last Thursday. Newton realizes her subscription has lapsed, and helps her renew it.

“I’ve never owned a business,” said Newton, who admitted he barely graduated from college. Now he’s managing a three-person staff, plus a handful of freelancers and contract delivery people. “This is all learning in real time.”

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Amy Chozick, my guest on Second Thought this week, specializes in women who spike the blood pressure of the body politic. Amy is an author and a former political reporter who’s covered some of the most controversial figures of our age, including Harvey Weinstein and erstwhile WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. But perhaps no one has been more divisive, or earned more of Amy’s spilled ink, than Hillary Clinton, who Chozick covered during her 2008 and 2016 campaigns; her first book, about those years, is called Chasing Hillary.

Since then, Amy has taken a step back from political writing and moved to LA. But her interest in complicated, infuriating women persists. Her recent profile of Mrs. Bezos with the headline “Someone Has to Be Happy. Why Not Lauren Sánchez Bezos?” went viral. “She triggers people,” Amy told me. “I think her perspective is, ‘Why should I pretend to be miserable?’ ”

We’re in an elite-hating moment, and that includes elite women. “There’s so much vitriol toward billionaires that’s driven by inequality. I think a lot of these women I cover, the perception of them has so little to do with who they actually are. They become a prism for all of our feelings about powerful, sexualized women and wealth.”

And now she has a new book out, her first novel, With Friends Like You, about those very themes: powerful women, wealth, and motherhood. It’s a thriller about two women who used to be friends, and about the wildly different paths their lives take before crashing back into each other. I don’t want to give away the plot, or too much from our conversation, but something I’ve been thinking about, ever since we spoke about it, is how jarring motherhood can be for women who were told to focus on their careers before having a family.

“Our generation of women was raised on, ‘You can do whatever a guy does,’ ” Amy said. “I don’t think men were raised to be like, ‘You can do whatever a woman does. You can load the dishwasher and cook every night and do the grocery shopping, and actually you can stay home with the kids.’ They weren’t raised like that.” It’s a fair point—one we get into in this week’s Second Thought.

The Socialite vs. Influencer Cold War

Speaking of women going on the record, Julie Macklowe, a New York City socialite and entrepreneur, is more than happy to. The wife of real-estate heir Billy Macklowe, she’ll dish about her least favorite restaurants, her fake Birkins, and, above all, her fellow millionaires, whom she calls “cheaters” for avoiding New York taxes.

I caught up with Macklowe recently. We talked local government, jewels, prescription drugs, and why she came out in favor of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s controversial pied-à-terre tax—a move which earned her plenty of “dirty looks” at Hamptons parties.

Macklowe, who voted for Trump three times, pointed out, “I’m not pro-taxes. I think New York could be better run, I think our government’s terrible. There’s 1,000 things we could do—to better balance our budget; clean up our subways . . .”

Read my Two Drinks with Julie Macklowe here:

Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About

The monied Massachusetts enclave of Nantucket has a new cause banning influencers from its stores. “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video,” said John Sylvia, an antiques store owner with a “No Influencers” sign stuck on his door. The influencers, with their legions of followers, aren’t going down without a fight.

Justin Lester, a 37-year-old pastor at a California church, has built an AI twin, fully equipped to spread the good word to his congregants even when he’s unreachable. As he sees it, “It’s a digital version of my mind” that’s always available to serve; but some fear it could be a bit more complicated than that. Read Freya India’s piece about what happens when faith becomes just another app on our screens.

Ebay and three former executives have agreed to pay $55.7 million to resolve claims that the company had stalked and terrorized journalists who critiqued it. When I say stalked, I don’t just mean eBay pestered them; according to the plaintiffs, the company sent them live insects, a bloody pig mask, and a funeral wreath. Beware the e-commerce mafia!

Last week, a married partner at a Manhattan law firm went viral after he was caught making out with a junior colleague on a Central Park bench. As my colleague River Page wrote this week, the real scandal is far bigger: What happens when our society turns into a nonstop surveillance state where anyone with an iPhone can turn your life into a reality show? As River put it, we’re knee deep in “secular sharia.” My tip: Don’t ever raise up your phone to film anything but your children or a sunset.

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“Today, the Board of ‌Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza,” President Donald Trump triumphantly declared on Truth Social on Thursday. The Board of Peace, presided over by Trump and including Turkey and Qatar among its members, was charged with funding and implementing the administration’s September 2025 20-point peace plan for Gaza. This provided for a permanent ceasefire and the return of all of Hamas’s Israeli hostages, living and dead. But the fulfillment of the subsequent points—Gaza reconstruction, deradicalization, and long-term efforts for peace—was contingent on Hamas disarmament.

Once it commenced, the disarmament process, including the mapping of Hamas tunnels, would set in motion a gradual Israeli military withdrawal to the so-called Yellow Line and eventually from all of Gaza. Verifiably demilitarized, Gaza would then be secured by an International Stabilization Force, composed of troops from multiple countries, and administered by Palestinian technocrats of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG). “This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY,” Trump exulted this week, referring to Hamas’s pivotal willingness to disarm.

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Julie Macklowe, in her Gucci tank top, Louis Vuitton sneakers and load-bearing Hemmerle diamond earrings, has some bones to pick. We’re at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Four Twenty Five restaurant in Manhattan, and we’re drinking—what else?—cocktails made from Macklowe’s own line of single malt whiskey, the “first luxury, and only luxury, American single malt,” she tells me. The blond mom of two and New York society fixture is having a lemonade and a few fingers of Macklowe Gold, which retails for nearly $300 a bottle; I’m sipping a Manhattan, made with her rye.

Not long ago, Macklowe—a loyal Donald J. Trump voter—made headlines by coming out in favor of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax, an annual levy on second homes worth over $5 million that took effect July 1. “You have people popping in from Palm Beach and throwing galas,” she says. “They don’t even pay New York taxes, and they’re chairing it.”

Macklowe tells me she’s gotten “dirty looks at parties in the Hamptons” and a few people being “asshole-y,” but says her approach is: “Deal with it. And if you can’t, I don’t care.”

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It’s arguably the most vivid illustration we’ve ever seen of the migrant crisis that has transformed the face of Europe in one decade and that continues to consume the continent’s politics. And no one saw it all coming more clearly than our own Douglas Murray. His 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe, chronicles the errors of judgment that led Western leaders so carelessly to open their doors to unlimited migration.

Will the brief storming of Ceuta prompt a reckoning among European elites, or will the crisis linger on, with the same denials and failed solutions from the leadership class? Read Douglas’s take on what comes next. —The Editors

Eleven years ago, almost to the day, Europe was experiencing a migration wave that threatened to make the continent buckle. In the space of a matter of weeks, more than a million people from Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East made their way into Europe, principally by crossing to the islands of Greece and Italy: “the soft underbelly of Europe.”

As various European countries started to panic, it was German chancellor Angela Merkel who decided to control the day. “Wir schaffen das,” she said in August 2015. “We can do this.” Merkel and some of her counterparts in the EU effectively suspended normal immigration procedures and opened the borders of Europe to anyone who wanted to come.

In those days, the route into Europe via Spain was relatively quiet. That was because the option of getting into Europe via Central and Southeastern Europe had been opened up, so there was less need for migrants to use the Spanish option. There were also effective agreements with the Moroccan authorities—unlike those in lawless Libya, for instance—which saved Spain from the most challenging of the 2015 waves.

Still, Spain remained uniquely vulnerable. Not least because, like Greece and Italy, the country had an accident of geography. This was the fact that, as well as being a remarkably short sail from North Africa, Spain has two territories actually in Northern Africa: the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

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Glen Hansard was, first and foremost, a live performer.

The Irish folk rock legend’s life was tragically cut short this week at the age of 56 in a motorcycle crash. But the accomplishments of his career will long outlive him. At 13, Hansard quit school and started busking, playing covers of Van Morrison and Bob Dylan on the streets of Dublin. Seven years later, in 1990, he founded The Frames, a band named for his habit of keeping friends’ broken bicycle frames strewn about his backyard until he got around to piecing them back together.

Then, in 2007, he became an international celebrity—somewhat ironically, for a film.

Once, a sad and shabby little masterpiece shot for €112,000 (just under $250,000 in today’s dollars), features Hansard as a part-time busker referred to in the script simply as the “Guy,” pining for his ex-girlfriend while working for his dad fixing vacuum cleaners. His counterpart is Czech singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová, who plays the “Girl,” a classically trained pianist with a young daughter and an estranged husband back in the Czech Republic. “Guy” and “Girl” quickly bond over their love for music, falling in love as they write and record together. As well as starring in it, Hansard co-wrote the music and lyrics for the film’s songs.

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But first: The chaos in Ceuta.

Sixty thousand. That’s how many people local authorities estimate have crossed from Morocco into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta over the past 24 hours. It is, by any measure, an extraordinary figure, coming close to the territory’s total permanent population of nearly 84,000. Also extraordinary: the footage of the crossings. Droves of mostly young men jumping out of trucks at the border, swimming around breakwaters, clambering over fences, sprinting down streets. At least 18 people have died during the chaos, and the Spanish government has deployed the army to Ceuta.

The scenes recall the peak of Europe’s migrant crisis a decade ago—and underscore how little Europe’s elites have done to address the problem in the intervening years. Rod Dreher recently returned to the U.S. from living in Europe, where he watched as political leaders repeatedly refused to tackle the issue, and Europeans only grew angrier. In our pages today, he reacts to the dystopian scenes from Ceuta, and asks: What will it take to break the immigration taboo? —The Editors

EDITORS’ PICKS

All across the country, Americans are angry about data centers. They’re too big, they say, too noisy, and too costly for the communities that have seen their electric and water bills rise. But data centers are also inevitable, and absolutely essential in the coming age of AI. Joe Nocera lays out a “peace plan” that will allow for the continued build-out of data centers while mollifying the concerns of local communities. It includes transparency, improved construction technology—and plenty of money.

In early July, when Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham said that women shouldn’t have to play sports against biological males, America more or less shrugged. When, a week later, reporters gave her the opportunity to walk back her remarks, she doubled down: “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.” This, says columnist Kat Rosenfield, is a sign of progress. Not so long ago, there would have been howls of outrage and attempts to cancel Cunningham. What has brought on this sea change? Kat’s thesis: “Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole entire ass.” Who can doubt it?

For years, Laura Loomer, the MAGA influencer, sided with Russia in its war against Ukraine, even contributing articles to Russia’s state-run network, RT. But after visiting Ukraine, and meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials, she concluded she had been on the wrong side. On Tuesday, from her hotel room in Ukraine, she spoke to Eli Lake about her change of heart, and tells him she now considers Zelensky “an essential ally.” Notes Eli: “By the looks of things, so does the president.”

When Alex Berenson’s 81-year-old mother got a tax bill for $55,048 she was baffled. She had lived in her New York City townhouse for 30 years—and she knew she didn’t owe that kind of money to the city. The answer, it turns out, was Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new “pied-à-terre” tax, which is designed to dun out-of-towners who own fancy New York apartments but whose primary residence is elsewhere. The incident leads Alex to muse on everything from inept city bureaucracy to Mamdani’s socialism, to the heartlessness of social media. “Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax isn’t just about pied-à-terres,” he writes. “It’s about stoking resentment toward an ever-expanding list of class enemies.”

Every six months, Tanya Lukyanova spends a few weeks in Moscow, where she was raised and where she still has friends and family. Since 2022, when the war against Ukraine began, she never saw the effects of the war in Russia’s capital, as the government sought to keep it insulated. But this visit was different. Tanya reports that she saw long lines of people waiting for their ration of gas, heard people talking about seeing drones and hearing explosions, and discovered a bitterness about the war that she hadn’t experienced in earlier trips. “Nobody can explain what we’re fighting for,” said one man after a few drinks. “Why do people die every day? To what end?”

One early clash surrounded the “Salute to America 250” in Washington, D.C. The White House spent the months leading up to this year’s July 4 celebration promoting the administration’s National Mall festival as one of the grandest events in American history. “We are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA,’ ” Trump wrote in a June 15 social media post.

Then came a directive from his own secretary of Homeland Security that the festivities, including Trump’s planned remarks and the massive fireworks show that followed, should be called off because of weather conditions.

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The Spanish government has done so, but it should never have come to this. It was bound to, though, because Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, a Socialist, oversees one of Europe’s most permissive migration regimes. In January, Sánchez announced a blanket amnesty program to regularize the immigration status of half a million migrants living illegally in Spain. In a New York Times op-ed published in February, Sánchez characterized the move as both humane and economically necessary, and contrasted his policy to the restrictive ones of “MAGA-style leaders” (read: Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán).

By summer, applications had soared to over one million—this, in a country whose migrant population is estimated to be at around 15 percent of the national total. Granted, the beneficiaries of this program are mostly Latin Americans, who, owing to a shared language and cultural similarities, are relatively easy to integrate.

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→ HRH Fauci!: Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, kept a journal. A diary filled with love notes to himself. Which I’ve literally never heard of a man doing, but that’s beside the point. I guess he also did it on his work computer, because Senator Rand Paul obtained and released it. I’m not sure where to begin. First, let’s get a sense of the tone. He carefully documents all the glitzy celebrations of himself, lists all the “movie stars and athletes” he has a Zoom call with, and carefully logs all the celebratory news stories about himself. It’s like an Excel spreadsheet of compliments. For a sense, here’s Anthony Fauci on Anthony Fauci:

Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson in the world. (Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written abuyt me since I am so busy . . . seriously. POTUS seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We are developing a very unique and interesting relationship. The entire secret service corps is coming over to me and chatting. They let me into the first gate without even checking ID. Everyone is worried about my health and welfare, probably because it is all over the place that I am almost 80 years old.

He loved being a celebrity. The thing about it is, he really was being worshipped! There was a cult of Fauci. People were getting Fauci tattoos and dancing with images of Fauci. He really was on the cover of every magazine, which, if you think about it, was weird! If millions of Americans suddenly made me their cult leader, and I had previously just been an unknown short man in the back of an HIV press conference, I would go insane with power too. So would you. And when you see lockdowns in the context of a power-drunk elf getting turned on by the idea of canceling Easter—he’s typing so fast he can barely keep up—you can understand better what we all lived through. For him, the pleasure was canceling things, especially things he felt gave power to the right (sports, family gatherings, religious events). We can never forget the freaks who gain power in a centrally controlled system. Also: no diaries, ever, certainly none in Google Docs. I write my grocery lists on Signal, and you should too. Love letters via email have been forbidden until further notice. I will be dragged up in front of Congress one of these days, but so help me God, they aren’t going to know about one brunch I attended. Next up, the lab leak:

→ No one ever thought it was the wet market: In his diaries, Anthony Fauci clearly thought a lab leak was possible or even probable. Even as the whole elite intelligentsia made belief in wet-market origin a litmus test for being a good person for God knows what reason. Here’s Anthony Fauci in his journal in 2020:

It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread. Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human-to-human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.

And Fauci himself thought it could definitely be tied to the gain-of-function research he knew was happening with Covid viruses in Wuhan. GOF is gain of function, which is basically when scientists give a virus a new trait (or “function”) so they can see how it behaves. Again, here’s Anthony Fauci:

There was not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion. Ron Fouchier said he was sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this. This is expected of him since he was the original GOF person with Yoshihiro Kawaoka. Also, Christian Drosten was with Ron; the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible, and given the fact that Dr. Shi Zhengli at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.

To remind everyone: Suggesting that the U.S. funded gain-of-function research on Covid in Wuhan was considered slightly insane at the time. But in 2016 there was literally a Wuhan-linked coronavirus researcher writing: “This is terrific! We are very happy to hear that our gain-of-function research funding pause has been lifted.” The only reason I knew about any of this earlier was by reading a lunatic blog called ZeroHedge, that was like, Hey, there’s a Covid-making lab in Wuhan. In 2021, The New York Times’ global health reporter posted: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” Racism is the cudgel that will hit you if you question why we have to wear a hazmat suit to walk to the mailbox. (She apologized amid backlash.) Never mind how it’s maybe more racist to say the Chinese gave us this disease from weird animals they eat and not from a sophisticated laboratory? Anyway, here’s NPR, again after Fauci’s own writing that gain-of-function research in Wuhan was a possible source of the virus:

Oh, also? Fauci knew in February 2020 that Covid’s case fatality rate was pretty low. He wrote, “This is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility,” and that the fatality rate is “more like 0.2-0.3 percent rather than 2.0 percent.” Schools were closed. Careers were lost. Suicides spiked. I had to give birth—literally go through labor!—in a face mask (try it sometime). And in the end, it was exactly what the baddies always said it was: a bad flu. The case fatality rate for the normal flu was about 0.1 percent.

All of these revelations will only very lightly be reported on. There’s currently a TV news blackout on the story, except on Fox News of course, per this one analysis.

That 0.5 percent is why everyone’s so upset about CBS News getting any tiny bit of intellectual complexity. How dare CBS News air that 0.5 percent on Fauci. This is the fascist takeover we warned you about.

And why do you care so much about relitigating Covid anyway? It’s in the past! Let it go. You didn’t like all those TikTok dances and making banana bread and the fact that your toddler regressed, your grandpa died alone, and you considered walking out on your spouse?

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They explore what these wildly different women have in common, why they’re judged so harshly, and what the public gets wrong about them. Then they turn to Chozick’s new novel, With Friends Like You, and the growing wave of books exposing the darker side of motherhood and why it feels like part of you dies when you have children.

Plus: a stirring defense of Lorena Bobbitt.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

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For months, it was conventional wisdom among large swaths of the American right that Ukraine would inevitably have to cede its Donbas region to Russia to end the war. Now, with Russian morale flagging, “that assumption is just no longer true,” says Aidan Stretch, a CBS News international reporter based in Kyiv. Today, Stretch joins School of War to disc…

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Matar was already serving a 25-year sentence after he was convicted of attempted murder last year in a New York court. But the federal case against him is important because it demonstrates the threat Iran poses not only to our republic, and our republic of letters, but to the liberties of a free society.

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I recently met a 55-year-old patient, an athlete his whole life, thoughtful about food and sleep. He wants to feel excellent and live well for a long time. For years, his cholesterol panel had been looking increasingly abnormal, but his doctor had shrugged it off as not yet urgent enough to act on. Eventually, he had to get more advanced cardiac testing, which found significant coronary artery disease. Since learning he had plaque in his arteries, he has struggled to tolerate different lipid-lowering medications and felt frustrated by how little control he seems to have.

I encourage all my patients to keep their own spreadsheets of lab results, since trends tend to tell stories that snapshots miss. Once my patient pulled together his records, a decade of results emerged. Buried in them was a letter after his 2014 annual physical: Your cholesterol panel is abnormal. The recommendation would be to eat healthy, exercise, and sleep, which are all things you are already great at. See you in a year! What followed was a decade in which closer monitoring, a more individualized assessment of risk, targeted lifestyle changes, and medication could have been considered.

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One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive toward, without—a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things.

Communism, according to Rubio, would not be laudable if only we could make it work, because making it work would mean an end of great individual accomplishment and of the striving that brings romance and meaning to our lives.

The trouble is, as I was reading this, it did sound like a depiction of a very live ideology that is one of the most powerful forces in the United States today. I refer not to communism, but to the ideology of technological succession, or transhumanism, that is guiding our AI entrepreneurs. Every word of Rubio’s castigation of communism could apply even more fully to the views of an industry to which his administration is extremely close.

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So it goes when the unstoppable force of political ideology crashes into the immovable object of the god’s honest truth. It doesn’t matter if you know the former thing to be false; you have to believe it. And not only that, you want to, if only because you’ve seen what happens to people who don’t, and so you know what a profoundly cold comfort it would be to maintain your grip on reality when tribal belonging demands you let go. The people who guard the door to the clubhouse have declared that two plus two is five, that we have always been at war with Eastasia, and—to borrow from another cautionary tale about the dangers of conformism—that the emperor is not, I repeat, not parading around with his wiener out, but rather wearing a pair of pants so innovative they are beyond the ability of ordinary people to comprehend or even perceive.

This is what all right-thinking people believe—and now all the right-thinking people are looking at you, because you are one of us, aren’t you?

Aren’t you?

Aren’t you?!!

For a certain amount of time, in certain political climates, this will be enough to produce the appearance of a consensus. But even the most successful campaign of forced conformity to falsehoods cannot last forever—which brings me to the curious case of Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham.

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Dear Abigail,

Almost 20 years ago, when we were relatively newly married, my wife and I moved overseas, so I could go to graduate school. She was miserable there, and I was one cause of that misery; I worked too much, and I didn’t spend enough time with her. Ultimately, she decided she needed to go back to the States for her own happiness, to which I agreed. In her absence, I had an affair with a co-worker, which continued until I came back to the U.S. a year later. I didn’t tell my wife.

Since then, my wife and I have had three wonderful daughters. (They’re now 13, 11, and 6.) Until recently, we were both happy in our marriage. I felt guilt and shame about my misdeeds, but I tried to channel it into being a better husband. Then, 18 months ago, my wife asked me point-blank what had happened when I was in graduate school. I confessed everything to her and begged for her forgiveness. I also confessed to my priest and did penance. We have each been seeing a separate therapist ever since the disclosure, and have also been attending couples therapy.

I’m writing because all these months later—despite my earnest and often desperate commitment to both the advice we have been receiving and what my wife says she needs from me—she hasn’t been able to forgive me. She is frequently miserable around me, seems constantly plagued by obsessive thoughts about the affair, and suffers from insecurity because of what I did. She frequently rejects my sincere expressions of remorse, love, and commitment, leaving me in despair. Not infrequently, she lashes out loudly, often within earshot of our children. They don’t seem to have caught on, and they continue to be happy and well-adjusted, but I’m constantly worried they’ll hear my awful sins recounted in one of her outbursts.

I still love her deeply, and at times, I can still see glimpses of the happy couple we used to be. She has always said she believes she will eventually be able to forgive me. But we’ve been struggling for so long, and I honestly don’t know if we’re making any progress. She becomes angry whenever I beg her for forgiveness, because she feels judged for not having granted it yet. She says she is working through things with her therapist and that forgiveness is a “journey.” But I look at where we are now compared to a year ago, and it’s not clear that this journey is going anywhere good.

I am determined to be the husband she deserves, which I wasn’t before. But it seems clear that I make her miserable—and how can I love her if I make her miserable? I’m really in a bind here, and I don’t know what to do.

Sincerely,

Hopeless in the Midwest, 44

Hopeless,

What is the ideal romantic relationship? What sort of marriage do you want? I’ve now interviewed over a hundred young people on the subject, and they invariably recite some version of this: two people, each completely happy and fulfilled in their own pursuits, coming together to face hard times without ever sacrificing their independence.

They strive to avoid “codependency,” as uncountable TikTok influencers and Instagram therapists advise. They see dependence as pathological, signaling an unhealthy or even “toxic” relationship. They don’t realize they are importing a term from addiction recovery and misapplying it to all close, interdependent romantic relationships. They don’t know that organizing your life around each other is often a telltale sign that you are in love.

You and your wife did well when your lives were knit tightly in interdependence—when you rejoined her after grad school and built a family. You fell apart each time you behaved as our culture insists you should: like two totally independent people, each with private goals and needs, pursuing them sometimes together and sometimes apart. That’s the deepest problem here, Hopeless. Deeper even than the affair, because it created the conditions for it. At critical moments, the two of you behave like you aren’t married at all.

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But first: Is a home for the canceled incentivizing hate?

Gabe Einhorn, a tech entrepreneur, took to X last month to share his dismay after an Ivy League student refused to interview with him, citing a single reason: The student was “not interested in working for a Jew.”

At the time, Einhorn blurred out the applicant’s name; but internet sleuths quickly discovered that he was a 19-year-old Cornell University student named Austin Franco, and circulated his bio across the platform.

In the old days, that might’ve spurred a cancellation campaign; instead, it’s made Franco a minor celebrity. This week he was interviewed on Piers Morgan’s talk show, where he doubled down on his bigotry in front of countless live viewers. Now, online fans have raised over $25,000 to fight his “unlawful doxxing”—and they did it through a platform called GiveSendGo, which has emerged as a more permissive crowdfunding alternative to GoFundMe.

GiveSendGo has helped the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny raise funds to clear their names after they were banned from other platforms. But it has also become a place for the likes of Franco to raise money off of their offensive views. In our lead feature today, Novi Zhukovsky talks to the founders of GiveSendGo and investigates whether this home for the cancelled is also incentivizing hate.

Last year, River Page reported on another GiveSendGo case: that of Shiloh Hendrix, the white woman who, after screaming racial slurs at an autistic 8-year-old on a playground, received over half a million dollars in donations. At the time, he marked it as a dark sign of a rising “woke right.” Last week, Hendrix was found guilty of disorderly conduct for the incident. But all that conviction has done, River writes in his latest piece, is turn Hendrix into a First Amendment martyr.

—The Editors

MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS

THE NEWS

• The U.S. said it intercepted an Iranian missile barrage on Wednesday, as it collaborated with Saudi armed forces to strike local militias in Iraq. The renewed attacks came the same day as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House for the first time since the war began in February.

• Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie more than a dozen times, was convicted of aiding a foreign terrorist group and carrying out the orders of the Iranian government on Wednesday. The ruling leaves Matar facing life in prison.

• More than 1,000 employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta signed a statement asking the U.S. government to support international efforts to “deliberately pace” AI development. The call, including from some of the companies’ senior leadership, comes after an unreleased OpenAI model went rogue during testing last week.

• President Donald Trump and the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to toss an $83 million defamation verdict won by writer E. Jean Carroll, arguing Trump can’t be sued for comments he made while president. The move comes shortly after the Justices refused to hear the appeal of a separate $5 million verdict against the president last month.

• Russia charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism, accusing him of failing to remove channels allegedly used to coordinate Ukrainian attacks in Russia. The popular messaging app responded on X with a photo of Durov flipping off the camera, adding a dose of drama to the controversy.

• James Comey’s defense counsel alleged that federal officials misled judges, submitted false statements, and withheld key facts during their investigation into his “86 47” seashell post. The motions filed late Tuesday seek the dismissal of the case, which charges the former FBI director with threatening President Trump on social media.

• President Trump unveiled a $22 billion renovation of the Washington Dulles airport Wednesday afternoon, alongside United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The plan includes four new concourses at the capital’s international gateway, which handled a record 29 million passengers in 2025. (For more on the president’s renovations of D.C., read Suzy Weiss’s report.)