It’s Friday, May 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: What the Democrats’ “autopsy” of the 2024 elections accidentally reveals. Peter Savodnik profiles progressive LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman. Plus: Martin Gurri asks, “Is the Cuban regime about to fall?” and Niall Ferguson joins Aaron MacLean to make sense of the new world disorder. All that and much more.

But first: Is the “doping olympics” the future of sports?

This weekend in Las Vegas, athletes will gather for the inaugural Enhanced Games. It’s like the Olympics, except performance-enhancing drugs aren’t banned—they’re encouraged. Competitors are juiced with testosterone, anabolic steroids, peptides, and all sorts of other chemical formulations banned in regular events.

Over 40 world-class athletes will compete in track, swimming, and weight lifting. Many are retired Olympians looking for another shot at glory, albeit with the help of drugs administered by doctors at a clinical trial and training camp in Abu Dhabi. Critics say the event is a gimmick designed to sell supplements. The games, which cost $31 million to put on, will certainly be a splashy event, complete with a closing ceremony headlined by The Killers. But is all that spectacle enough to attract sports fans who despise steroids and look down on the athletes who use them?

The company behind the event—which just went public, received early investments from both Peter Thiel and a firm tied to the Trump family, and is worth about $665 million—is betting the answer to that question is yes. Enhanced Group Inc. also says it will eventually make more money from supplements and over-the-counter drugs as from the events themselves.

In our lead story today, The Free Press’s Noah Bernstein delivers the inside scoop on how it all came together. He speaks to athletes and executives to understand whether the juicing Olympics are the future of sports—or an embarrassing disaster for all involved. Read the whole thing and decide for yourself.

—Will Rahn

On Monday, we ran a rigorous examination by federal judge Roy K. Altman of Nicholas Kristof’s inflammatory piece in The New York Times that alleged Israeli prison guards use sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners as a matter of “standard operating procedure.” Altman found that Kristof’s piece is a travesty on multiple levels, and one that undermines “the fundamental rules of fairness and due process that have, for centuries, served as the bulwark of our democracy.” It is perhaps the most damning critique of Kristof’s much-criticized piece out there—and a must-read if you want to understand how the American media lost its way on Israel and much else.

Have you heard about the cottage-food boom? All across the country, Americans are selling homemade foods like cookies and cake and making good money in the process. These often-delicious treats are a financial lifeline for growing families. So why, Suzy Weiss asks, are local governments trying to throttle the cottage-food industry? And is the bipartisan push to regulate kitchen-made goods really a question of whether we can still trust our neighbors? Read her eye-opening look at how the battle over cottage foods became a microcosm of American life in the 21st century.

The Trinidadian poet and author Jamir Nazir just won the extremely prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The only problem is that the story he submitted, about a rural farmer’s romantic longings, might have been written by artificial intelligence. Or at least that’s the accusation leveled by some AI experts. And while we might never know for sure whether Nazir wrote his story or outsourced it to a large language model, Novi Zhukovsky writes, the notion that we can no longer distinguish between brilliant writing and AI slop raises a number of uncomfortable questions about where literature—and our culture at large—is heading. Read this story if you want to understand just how fraught the questions of trust and authenticity are going to get in the age of AI.

In 2022, Tyler Cowen made the case that “wokeism” had peaked. It was a counterintuitive argument at the time, but it looks prescient in hindsight. In his column this week, Tyler updated his argument. The problem, he wrote, is what replaced it, which he calls “a new culture of anger and resentment.” So what does that look like? Everything from California’s unworkable proposal to levy a new tax on billionaires and the murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and, of course, the startling rise of antisemitism. Read Tyler to understand what’s coming—and why he hopes it’s not too late to change course.