If you’re listening to this, you probably know someone who has struggled with alcohol addiction, or maybe you’re an alcoholic yourself. It’s one of the most universal human experiences. In 2023, 10 percent of the U.S. population met the criteria for alcoholism. That’s 30 million people.

And throughout the past hundred or so years, there’s basically been one solution: total sobriety, talk therapy, and Alcoholics Anonymous. And yes, there are countless people ready and eager to say, “AA saved my life.” We know and love many of those people.

But as Katie Herzog writes: “The dominance of AA obscures the fact that other options exist too.” Okay, so what are these other options? One of them is a drug called naltrexone that can let alcoholics keep drinking—yes, you heard me right. Katie describes it as a chemical safety net that makes you want to drink less.

And in order for the drug to work, you actually have to drink—at least at the beginning. The goal with this method is not necessarily abstinence. It’s reformed, moderate, responsible drinking.

Is this all starting to sound like snake oil—or worse, even dangerous? We understand. Over 175,000 Americans die each year from excessive drinking. It causes heart disease, cancer, domestic violence, and suicide. It costs the U.S. economy nearly $250 billion in healthcare expenses. There’s loss of productivity, criminal justice fees, vehicle wrecks—I could go on. And living with alcoholism, or being close to someone who struggles with addiction, can be devastating.

So when someone comes along and says, “Your alcoholic loved one can actually drink with naltrexone,” the knee-jerk reaction is to say: “Hell no.”

But Katie Herzog, in her new book Drink Your Way Sober, argues that AA—and our traditional thinking—has not worked, and will not work, for everyone. And she makes the case that we should be more open to alternative forms of treatment like naltrexone.

You’ll know Katie from her hit podcast Blocked and Reported, which she co-hosts with Free Press contributor Jesse Singal—though she likes to say she is “the only host of the only podcast.”

And today, Bari asks her how she got sober using naltrexone—and a program called the Sinclair Method—how the drug actually works, why it’s been shunned by the medical community, and whether she thinks society will buy into it.

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At 3:22 a.m. ET on October 7, 2023, Bari texted her producer: “Candace, there’s war in Israel.” At that moment, Hamas men still roamed southern Israel, and the details were far from clear. What we knew was that Israel had been attacked and that videos were beginning to make their way from Telegram to X: scenes of dozens of Palestinian terrorists breaking through the security fence and rushing into Israeli territory; clips of Hamas militants, with AK-47s slung over their chests, driving white pickup trucks through the streets of southern Israel; blurry videos of Israelis running for their lives in roundabouts and fields.

We had no idea what was about to unfold. We did not know yet that 251 Israelis would be kidnapped that day, including more than 30 children. We did not know yet that what was unfolding was the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust—only this time streaming live on social media.

We immediately started bringing you firsthand accounts here on Honestly. You might remember a pregnant woman named Shaked told us about 11 family members who were taken hostage, including her niece, 3, and nephew, 8. Or how two survivors of the Nova Music Festival, Amit and Chen, watched the murder of their friends. We talked to a mother whose daughter was killed at the music festival. And a grandmother who hid in her safe room for hours with her 10-day-old grandson as terrorists shot at the door.

And we spoke to a father named Jon Polin, whose son, Hersh, was kidnapped. Little did we know that the entire world would soon know his name.

Anyone who bore witness to the evil of that day, and to the horrific tragedy of the war that has followed, prayed that the hostages—the living and the dead—would finally be brought home. For Israelis, that rallying cry—Bring them home—was at the center of their psyche, their longing, their hope for the last two years.

And then yesterday, 738 days later, the remaining 20 living hostages came home as part of President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan.

Yesterday, we spent moments throughout the day glued to our phones, tears streaming down our cheeks, watching the videos of these freed men running into the embrace of their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers—and in some cases even to their little children—after more than two unimaginable years in Hamas captivity. 

As Matti Friedman wrote in The FP: “An unfamiliar mood spread like a shift in the weather: relief and optimism. . . . The Israelis who rallied over the past two years under the banner ‘Bring Them Home,’ and whose energies kept the hostages and their families in headlines in Israel and abroad through two dark and often hopeless years, allowed themselves to smile and cheer.”

We are under no illusions about what comes next. Yesterday began only phase 1 of Trump’s peace plan (Hamas still holds many of the deceased hostages, which is a breach of the agreement). And serious—perhaps intractable—challenges lay ahead. There are many, many outstanding questions. As Free Press Middle East analyst Haviv Rettig Gur said, “Everything that matters for Gaza’s future is in phase 2 and beyond.”

To try to begin answering many of those questions—and to reflect on this historic moment and what it means for Israel and the world—Free Press producer Rafaela Siewert hosted a livestream yesterday that we want to play here for you today.

She was joined by former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren; The Free Press’s Matti Friedman and Haviv Rettig Gur; and Nimrod Palmach, who ran into battle on October 7, 2023 of his own accord. And Siewert also speaks to Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin—the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was kidnapped on October 7 and murdered in Gaza after over 300 days in Hamas captivity. Still, Rachel and Jon woke up every single day for the last two years and fought—in public and around the world—for the return of every last one of the remaining souls to come home.

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Congratulations are not usually in order for someone who has been forced into hiding, someone whose children are scattered across continents for their safety, someone whose supporters are sitting in prison cells for the crime of believing in democracy. 

But our guest today, María Corina Machado, just won the Nobel Peace Prize—joining the ranks of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Dalai Lama, to name a few. 

On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded their 2025 Peace Price to the Venezuelan opposition leader for her tireless work “promoting democratic rights,” describing her as “a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness.” She is Venezuela’s first-ever Nobel Peace Prize winner. 

Machado’s story, as Jonathan Jakubowicz wrote in The Free Press, “is a political thriller come to life. A 58-year old industrial engineer and former member of parliament, she spent two decades as the most relentless opponent of Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro.” That thriller came to a head on July 28, 2024, when Edmundo González, Machado’s stand-in candidate, swept Venezuela’s elections with over 90 percent of the vote. But Maduro, Venezuela’s longtime dictator, claimed victory anyway and seized power. Since then, Machado has been living in hiding, her location undisclosed even to most of her allies, as the regime has arrested hundreds of political prisoners and issued a warrant for her arrest. 

Machado has been nicknamed Venezuela’s “Iron Lady,” the same moniker given to Margaret Thatcher, who happens to be her personal hero. She represents what may be the most significant challenge to authoritarian socialism in Latin America, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have her here today.

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This week commemorates the two year anniversary of October 7, 2023. That morning, Hamas invaded Israel. They slaughtered some 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. Forty-eight hostages, some alive and some dead, are still being held in Gaza.

In these last two years, the world has changed. In many ways, the past two years have felt like two decades. The world feels like it has tilted on its axis. 

There is nobody better suited to make sense of this moment—the lessons learned, the harsh realities that have been revealed, and America’s changing role in the world—than Niall Ferguson.

Niall is a columnist at The Free Press. He is also senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the author of 16 books, and one of the most influential historians of our time.

This conversation with Niall was a Free Press livestream. To never miss those conversations, and to be able to join them as they unfold, become a subscriber at thefp.com.

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Two years ago today, five terrorists broke into Eli Sharabi’s safe room on Kibbutz Be’eri. He had been sheltered there for hours with his wife, Lianne, and teenage daughters, Noiya and Yahel, reading horrific texts flooding in from neighbors and hoping somehow his family would be spared.

They were not. The terrorists shot and killed their dog, then dragged Eli away, leaving his family behind. As they pulled him out the door, he looked back and shouted: “I’ll come back!”

After 491 days in Hamas captivity, Eli did come back. He survived—with most of his time buried deep underground, shackled, starved, subjected to constant humiliation, and psychological and physical torture—all because he believed he would one day be reunited with his wife and daughters. That belief kept him alive.

But when he was released on February 8 under a ceasefire agreement, he soon learned the devastating truth: Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel were dead. Hamas murdered them on October 7, 2023. His brother Yossi, also kidnapped, had been killed in captivity as well. 

Eli’s memoir, Hostage, out today, is the first published account by a released Israeli hostage. He writes in unflinching detail about being held in the tunnels, about his Hamas captors, and about his singular focus on survival.

We read the book, through tears, last week on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur is a day of atonement and forgiveness, but it’s really a day of reckoning with life and death. The story Jews around the world read that morning is of Moses’s final speech to the Israelites before his death, delivered as they stand on the edge of the Promised Land—after slavery in Egypt, after 40 years of wandering in the desert and the loss of an entire generation. Moses tells them: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.”

If anyone has earned a right to despair, to give up on life, it’s Eli Sharabi.

But he doesn’t. What’s remarkable about Eli is that he chose—and continues to choose—survival at every turn. He chooses life in the face of death. Again and again and again.

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An announcement from The Free Press.

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Leland Vittert is one of America’s most recognizable television correspondents. You’ll know his face from years of frontline reporting in places like Egypt, Libya, Israel, and Ukraine. 

You may have followed his tumultuous exit from Fox News in 2021, after clashing with the network over its coverage of Donald Trump—and then his redemption arc, becoming the host of On Balance and the chief Washington anchor at NewsNation. 

But what you might not know is that Leland is autistic. He just wrote a book about it, called Born Lucky: A Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism. In it, Leland explains that he didn’t talk until age 3, was born severely cross-eyed, and struggled with basic concepts like eye contact, humor, conversation cues, and social rules. Middle school and high school were nothing short of hell. 

So how did the kid we just described go from, as he says, “socially lost” to one of America’s most recognizable and charismatic voices? Training. Relentless, nonstop work. His father knew the world wouldn’t change for Leland—Leland would have to change for the world.

It is a moving memoir about how Leland—and most notably, his father—worked to “beat” his autism. You’ll have to read it to understand how.

Leland was diagnosed about 40 years ago. Since then, conversation has shifted dramatically—and so have rates of diagnoses. In the 1980s, about one in 1,000 American children were diagnosed with autism. Today, it’s one in 31. The questions of what causes autism and how we treat it have become so politicized that the conversation has left people either resentful, anxious, confused, or scared. And most critically, still without answers. 

Born Lucky is landing at an especially interesting moment given that the Trump administration has put the topic of autism at center stage. Just last week, Trump held a press conference where he alleged that there was a link between the active ingredient in Tylenol and autism, and told mothers not to take the pain reliever and fever reducer and instead “tough it out.” 

That’s among the many things Leland and I talk about in this fascinating conversation. 

Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

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If you’re anything like us, you’re a sucker for a good spy show: Homeland, Tehran, Fauda, The Bureau. We’re fascinated by the life of spies—the secret meetings in Beirut cafés, the wigs and false identities, the double and triple lives, always one step away from exposure, risking everything for their country.

Most of the time, those TV characters are pure fiction and the stories are the stuff of Hollywood. But our guest’s new book, The Sword of Freedom, reads just like one of those fantastical thrillers—except every word of it is true.

Yossi Cohen—the former director of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency—spent most of his 38-year spy career in the shadows. He was known only by a letter: Y, or sometimes “The Model,” apparently for his looks. He was, as he writes, “a ghost, never to be seen and unable to be heard. I was invisible, a breath of wind in human form.”

Cohen operated under dozens of different identities in some of the most dangerous places for an Israeli, and he personally orchestrated some of the most daring operations in Israel’s history: stealing half a ton of Iran’s most secret nuclear documents from a warehouse in Tehran; assassinating Iran’s top nuclear scientist using an AI-powered machine gun operated remotely via satellite; setting the stage for the pager attack that crippled Hezbollah last year; creating secret relationships with Arab leaders—relationships that changed the direction of the Middle East.

If you look online, you’ll hear that Mossad has been behind everything from tsunamis to floods to political assassinations of famous Americans.

So we could think of no one better to answer the question of what Mossad actually does—and to address the endless conspiracies that swirl around Israel’s version of the CIA—than Cohen. 

Today, we talk about all of that. It’s a rare glimpse inside Mossad, inside the world of real espionage—and a conversation with a man who helped shape history from the shadows, and who clearly is considering a run for prime minister.

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You know the name Woody Allen. Everyone does. He’s made some of the most acclaimed films ever made: Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors—he list goes on and on and on. He’s made an astonishing 50 movies.

You see his influence everywhere, from sitcoms to stand-up to just about every rom-com made since Annie Hall premiered in 1977. And in the process, he turned himself into America’s most unlikely leading man: short, thinning hair, bespectacled, and exceptionally neurotic.

Now, at age 89, Allen is out with his first novel, What’s With Baum? Its protagonist is an anxious, smart Jewish writer with a messy personal life who gets himself in a great deal of trouble. Yes, it’s like a Woody Allen movie in book form. It’s also funny and delightful, and touches on a major theme of our age: the idea that an accusation, once made, is as good as a conviction.

Allen knows something about that. In 1992, his longtime romantic partner Mia Farrow discovered that Allen had begun a relationship with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. Allen was in his 50s at the time, Previn was just 21. All hell broke loose, with Farrow accusing Allen of grooming and preying on her daughter.

The scandal became fodder for tabloids and late-night talk shows but soon took a much darker turn, with Farrow accusing Allen of molesting their 7-year-old daughter Dylan in August 1992. The charges were never proven in court—indeed they were twice dismissed—but the court of public opinion was another matter.

Today on Honestly, we get into everything about Allen—from the accusations to his subsequent cancellation in the MeToo era to his childhood in Brooklyn and his climb from Flatbush to the commanding heights of American comedy, film, and culture. We delve into how he’s changed and the many ways in which he hasn’t. We talk about his marriage to Previn, which is still going strong after 28 years. His thoughts on President Donald Trump, NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, The New York Times, and American politics more broadly. We’ll hear what he thinks about life, death, and aging as he approaches 90, and much, much more.

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Yesterday, in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of 3,000 people at Utah Valley University, Charlie Kirk was shot dead. Kirk was not just a husband, not just a father, and not just one of the most prominent young conservative voices in the country. He made his name doing something fundamental to the American project: disagreeing out loud. 

He famously said, “When people stop talking, bad stuff happens.”

And so his thing was going to campuses, setting up a tent, and asking people to change his mind. People on campuses lined up to challenge him, often fiercely debating—and that was the point. He was a living embodiment of our First Amendment.

As Matthew Continetti wrote in our pages: “The attack didn’t just deprive a family of its center. It struck at the ties that hold a free society together: open assembly, civil debate, viewpoint diversity. Like every terrorist act, the shooting was meant to instill fear—in this case, fear of speaking out, of exposure, of making a difference.”

And as shocking and tragic as his murder is the response to it: the people online celebrating—yes, celebrating—his death simply because they disagreed with his politics.

Today Bari sits down with Ben Shapiro, Senator Mark Kelly, Matt Continetti, Katherine Boyle, Konstantin Kisin, and The Free Press’s own Eli Lake and Maya Sulkin to reflect on Kirk’s life and this awful moment in American history—and to consider how we can begin to look forward.

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