Honestly with Bari Weiss

Last week I had the privilege of sitting down with one of the foremost historians of our time, Simon Sebag Montefiore. As I write this, his work has never felt more urgent.

“We’re in a new world of counterhistory,” he said recently. “A new world of counterhistory where neither historical facts nor present-time facts matter if they don’t fit the ideological orthodoxy.” 

It is “our responsibility as historians,” he said, “to stand up and be unafraid to contradict conventional wisdom, surging conspiracies, witch hunts, purity tests, pile-ons that are used to crush debate ... and to say persuasively, ‘This is what happened.’ ”

And that is what he does in his brilliant new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.

But don’t worry. This is Sebag. I promise you this is not some serious, dry textbook. There is a chapter in his book called “Fat F****r” (which was the CIA’s code name for King Farouk of Egypt). You will learn in these pages that a Palestine Liberation Organization terrorist was married to a Miss Universe. That Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and President John F. Kennedy were both johns at Madame Claude’s Parisian brothel. And that Saddam Hussein was raised by an uncle who wrote a pamphlet titled “Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies.” Okay, maybe that last one was predictable.

Sebag has said that this book is the hardest he has ever written, and is a subject that only someone “bonkers” would tackle. Bonkers or brilliant or both: You’ll decide. 

Sebag is, of course, the author of over a dozen other books such as Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great & Potemkin, which are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature.

I asked him how he makes sense of the fight within Islam itself, why we’re so fixated on this region, whether the Middle East’s plight is the product of Western intervention or the choices of its own leaders, how the Gulf States came to ally with Israel and Iran with China and Russia, who is winning the current war, and much more.

I am so thrilled to share the conversation I had with him—live—in NYC.

Honestly is taking a pause. We’ll be back soon.

Last week, Bari sat down with Erika Kirk for an hour-long town hall in front of a live audience on CBS.

It was an extremely powerful conversation. Erika and Bari spoke about a lot—rising political violence in this very divided country; the way some people justified or excused Charlie’s murder; what Erika thinks about some of the controversial things Charlie said in his lifetime; her response to Candace Owens and the conspiracy theories Owens and others are peddling; the growing antisemitism on the right; and her decision to forgive Charlie’s killer.

They also talked about the posthumous release of Charlie’s last book, Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life.

This town hall was the first of many conversations and debates Bari will be bringing to CBS News about the things that matter most. Which, of course, are often the hardest to talk about. We really hope you will tune in. 

In case you missed this first one with Erika Kirk, we’re thrilled to share the conversation here on Honestly. And we can’t wait for you to catch the next one on CBS News.

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

One of the most complex medical, ethical, moral, and religious questions of our era is that of physician-assisted suicide—also known as Medical Aid in Dying, or MAID.

Eleven U.S. states and Washington, D.C. have legalized some form of MAID for terminally ill patients. And New York might join them.

Over the summer, a Medical Aid in Dying Act passed New York’s state legislature. It is now sitting on Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk as she decides whether to sign it into law.

Under the proposed New York bill, terminally ill adults with a prognosis of six months or less to live would be able to access a prescribed, self-administered life-ending medication.

Supporters argue that this is a compassionate option—one that can relieve people of immense pain and suffering, allowing patients to choose when and where they die, and to do so surrounded by loved ones.

Opponents see this as a violation of physicians’ fundamental oath to do no harm. They also worry that while access may begin narrowly, it could expand over time to include people seeking death for reasons other than terminal illness—such as mental suffering or simply a desire to stop living. Cases like this have already occurred in Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, and Switzerland.

Rafaela Siewert sat down with two experts who see this topic very differently for a heated debate.

David Hoffman is a healthcare attorney, clinical ethicist, and professor of bioethics at Columbia University. He argues that hypothetical future abuses of MAID shouldn’t outweigh the needs of terminal patients who need this option now.

Dr. Lydia Dugdale is a physician, medical ethicist, and professor of medicine at Columbia University. In her view, legalizing this practice of physician-assisted suicide risks undermining the responsibilities of governments, medical systems, and families to care for the mentally ill, the poor, and the physically disabled. And she fears that the potential for excessively expanded access over time is too great.

We are among the many Americans who do not know what the right answer is. We see both sides—which is why grappling with the nuances of this subject is so important.

This is a debate you won’t want to miss.

On how MAID works in theory vs. how it works in practice:

Lydia Dugdale: So you have to be 18 years of age. You have to be able to consent. You have to have a terminal diagnosis understood as six months or less to live. You have to be able to self-ingest.

David Hoffman: Some of the criteria vary from state to state with subtle nuance. For example, Oregon initially had a residency requirement that you had to be a resident of Oregon. Why? Because they feared—at the time I can understand why they would—that people would travel from around the world to Oregon, get their prescription for a lethal medication, go to the beach, watch the sunset, take the medication, and bodies would litter the shoreline. Well, that never happened. So Oregon eliminated its residency requirement. . .

LD: As did Vermont.

There are more civilian-owned firearms in the United States than in any other nation on earth. To many, gun ownership is the ultimate expression of our freedom and of the promise that power ultimately resides with the people, not the state. But they are also part of the reason that we have more gun deaths than anywhere else in the developed world.

The debate on guns in America stems from a single sentence from our Bill of Rights, written in 1791: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

That sentence—the Second Amendment of our Constitution, and the question of whether America would be safer without it—was the focus of our final live debate of 2025, held before a packed house at Chicago’s Studebaker Theater. On stage were two formidable debaters: attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz, and Dana Loesch, radio host, author, and former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association.

“If I were grading the framers for how they drafted the Second Amendment,” Dershowitz quipped, “they get a C+ with grade inflation.”

You probably know Jonathan Haidt as the guy trying to save your kids from smartphones and social media apps. Likely you’ve read The Anxious Generation, which has been translated into 44 languages and sold nearly 2 million copies. One might say that Jon is Elvis for 21st-century moms who don’t understand Discord.

But when Haidt gets written about decades from now, it will be for much more than this book and the powerful movement that came from it. I think he will be regarded as one of the most important writers of this epoch.

Because he has the remarkable ability to understand—and explain—our social condition. He holds up a mirror to us.

He did it with his book The Righteous Mind, which explained why people are so passionately divided over politics and religion. He did it again with The Coddling of the American Mind, co-written with Greg Lukianoff, which explored why young people—especially on college campuses—can become totally intolerant of opposing views. And in his latest book, The Anxious Generation, he asked the obvious question: Why are teens suddenly so unhappy? Why are they losing attention, self-confidence, and the ability to socialize? Perhaps it has something to do with the mesmerizing device in their hands.

In a world gone mad, Haidt has turned common sense into a radical mission. I sat down with him in front of a live audience in New York City to talk about how we got to this point—and where we go from here.

On the fatal dangers of social media:

Bari Weiss: There are two major calls to action in your book and in the movement around it: One is banning phones in schools; the second is making sure kids aren’t on social media before the age of 16. I want to allow you to talk about two stories that I think bring the necessity of those two policies to life. I’ve heard you speak to a mom named Kirsten, whose daughter developed a pretty serious eating disorder after she was bombarded with content on her TikTok’s “For You” page. Can you tell me a little bit about her and her daughter, and why that story is so emblematic to you?

Who owns the future of the Democratic Party?

That’s the question on everyone’s mind since last Tuesday night—when the richest city in America elected 34-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as its mayor.

You can see Mamdani’s win as a one-off—a charismatic contender facing a rival mired in controversy. But the other way to see it is as emblematic …

Do you feel uneasy? Do you feel a level of ambient anxiety? Do you feel despair, despite the fact that we live in the most luxurious time and place in human history? And did my producer offer to give me a Klonopin today? That one I won’t answer.

The point is, you are not crazy. If you feel these things, you are simply attuned to reality—and it’s not a problem that’s solvable with less screen time or with meditation, red light, or sea moss.

My brilliant guest, Paul Kingsnorth, argues that the reason you feel this way is not this or that social media app or algorithm or culture war issue. That these are all superficial expressions of a thousand-year battle with what he calls “the Machine.” What exactly that means, he’ll explain tonight.

To personally fight the Machine, Paul has moved his family out of urban England to live off the land in rural Ireland, where his family grows their own food, draws water from a well, and homeschools their children. To learn more about his life, you’ll have to go back and listen to the Honestly episode I did with him in 2024.

In his new book, Against the Machine, Paul makes the argument that what this moment requires is something of a rebellion. He says the West is not dying, but already dead. And this book is an attempt to understand how we got to this profound feeling of disquiet—and how we might return to true peace. It’s being billed as a “spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age.”

Click below to listen to our conversation, or scroll down for our favorite moments.

On finding meaning in the technological age:

Bari Weiss: How can we live a life of meaning? How can we maintain our humanity in the age that we happen to be living in right now—short of becoming monastic?

Paul Kingsnorth: We’re living in this time, and this is the time we’re made to live in. So you better get through it, and you better just deal with it, girlfriend, as I believe they say in these parts. There’s no five-point plan to save the world, because it doesn’t work like that, but there are a number of ways you can think about how to live your life. We all live completely different lives. There’s no manifesto for everybody. But the first thing to do is to start asking yourself what this story is.

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.” I 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, I ask 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.

Click below to listen to our conversation, or scroll down for our favorite moments.

On “booze noise” and defining addiction:

Katie Herzog: For me, the defining feature of my addiction was mental obsession, so I had a compulsion to drink. I had an overwhelming mental obsession. And there’s a term that I actually heard your sister Suzy say, when talking about Ozempic—she used the term food noise. That’s what it was like: It was booze noise. And the booze noise never, ever stopped, for 20 years. In the back of my mind was always this question: When can I drink? That was the defining feature of it. It wasn’t how it got in the way of my life, my job, my relationships. The closest thing I can compare it to is new love, when you’ve got this intense crush on another person and that’s the only thing you can think about—it feels crazy and obsessive.

Two years ago today, five terrorists broke into Eli Sharabi’s safe room in 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.

I 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.

Click below to listen to our conversation, or scroll down for our favorite moments.

On being dragged away by his captors on 10/7:

Bari Weiss: This is what you write in your book: I look into my daughters’ eyes. They don’t scream, they don’t cry. They don’t even speak. They’re frozen in terror. I will never forget that look of terror in their eyes. And then they drag you away from your family, and you shout back to them: I’ll come back. That look of terror—is that the last thing you see of your daughters?

Eli Sharabi: Yes. I can’t forget their look. They were terrified. They couldn’t speak; they were frozen. They waited for their mother to join them in the kitchen but, unfortunately, they took me just before it happened.

I’ll come back—I tried to make this promise to them. It was horrible. For 491 days, I’m telling the other hostages that the day I am released I’ll take Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel to live in England.

BW: Did you have any idea what was going to happen to them?

ES: It didn’t cross my mind that they would kidnap women and children. Just 40 days later, the Palestinian family holding me hostage forgot to close the door and I could hear the nine o’clock news, and I heard a video of an Israeli mother and her son, shouting in Hebrew, to Benjamin Netanyahu to stop bombing Gaza and take them out from there. And then I understood that there were women and children as well in Gaza as hostages. That was the first time I started to cry, because I thought maybe Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel were in Gaza as well.

It was something really frightening to think about, because it was hell—24/7 of bombing, being chained by your legs, and humiliated. I didn’t want to think that Lianne and the girls were having that as well.

On being taken to the tunnels:

ES: We refused to climb down. I really negotiated with them. I said to them, No way. I’m not going to do that. Please take us to another place. After something like 30 seconds, maybe more than that, they start to get upset with me. They took their gun and pointed it at my head, and then you understand that you have to do it if you want to stay alive. I remembered my promise to my girls—that I’ll come back—so you choose life again.

BW: You choose life by going into the pit of hell.

ES: I needed to choose that, otherwise they’re going to kill me now. They have no problem killing you. So we climbed down, something like 50 meters underground. All darkness around you.

On visiting his family’s grave:

BW: You go to where [Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel] are buried. I wondered if you’d read from that chapter.

ES: We drive to Kfar HaRif—me and the two psychologists, who have been with me since my release. We are joined by my sister Osnat, our family’s army liaison Officer Sigal, and the nurse. Before we set out, the psychologists prepared me. We think together about what it will look like and what will happen there. They are managing the whole event and I trust them. We all sit in silence in the car. The scenery races past the windows. I need closure, I think to myself. I need to see it in my own eyes. I need to tell them I’m back. I promised them I’d come home and here I am. We reached the cemetery. Everyone gets out of the car. I walk toward the graves by myself, with Osnat by my side. The medical and welfare teams stay behind. We walk closer, Osnat leading me, until eventually she points and says: Here they are, Eli. I look at the three graves—Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel. The peaceful fields around us glisten. A blue sky is overhead; birds chirp. I break down crying. I don’t even try to stop myself. Osnat hugs me; I fall to my knees. I can’t see anything. Everything’s blurry—the sky, the view, the other headstones; the people who came with me. Everything fades away. Only Yahel, Noiya, and Lianne exist.

Forty minutes later, I tell Osnat: Okay, let’s go. She looks at me, puzzled. It’s okay, I tell her. Let’s go. I signal to everyone. It’s over, finished. I pick myself up, and start walking slowly toward the exit of the cemetery. This here is rock bottom. I’ve seen it. I’ve touched it. Now, life.

BW: There are a lot of people who have heard about your story, and think to themselves: If something like this happened to me, I could not go on living. Can you explain to those people how you choose life?

ES: First of all, I love life. And second, I don’t think I have the privilege to cry all day, and stay in bed, and be depressed, because for 491 days, my great family, in Israel, in England, fought for me. My friends stopped their life to support my family. All of Israel went out from their houses, almost every week, and fought for me to come back. So I don’t have the privilege to not go on with my life. For me to be sad, or angry, I can’t find any meaning about that. No strength. For me to be busy and happy is much more meaningful for me. I’m sure that’s what would make Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel, and Yossi, my brother, proud of me.

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