The Free Press

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Caitlin Flanagan regrets Tom Cruise’s America-hating new film. Aaron MacLean explains why you need to read a biography of Xi Jinping’s father. Kat Rosenfield is still reeling from the bizarre Elizabeth Holmes documentary. And more!

But first: Why would you leave America to live in England?

Look, I’m not going to pretend your country’s not great. I spend a lot of time in the Free Press office in New York, and whenever I look out the window at the skyline, the majestic Succession theme starts playing in my head. Speeding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a yellow cab is the ultimate manifestation of the phrase “I’ve made it.” Your houses are so big, your appliances so very modern, and even your domestic flights have live TV!

England, where I live, is not like that. The economy is stagnant. Our prime ministers are always resigning. In London, my perfectly nice apartment—or, as we say, flat—does not have a dishwasher. Or a tumble dryer. I’ve had my phone stolen not once, not twice, but three times.

But, I’m sorry, no matter how much Americans try to persuade me—and believe me, Bari will not let me hear the end of it—I’m not going to move to America.

Our contributing writer Freya India, a fellow Brit, made a different decision. Last summer, she moved to Washington, D.C., for work, then spent a year “trying to talk myself out of my homesickness; trying not to think about what I was giving up, all that time with my parents and grandparents; trying to think of the GDP!”

But a few weeks ago, she packed up and came home to London. “Many people think this is a mistake,” she writes in her essay today. Brits remind her of the money to be made in the U.S. Americans worry she’ll get arrested for her posts on X.

More powerful than her belief that England has problems, Freya writes, was “this sense of betrayal, like I had left somewhere I was obligated to.” She was investigating what makes 20somethings unhappy, and gradually concluding that it’s because they’re afraid “to put down foundations, to bind ourselves to places and people.”

It’s not that England is better. It’s not that America is worse. This week, when I saw the BBC headline “Tiny Rare Frogs Bred for First Time at London Zoo,” I said to a colleague who was also born here, “We live in a silly little country.” We don’t deny it. But it’s home.

—Freya Sanders

This week, Daniel Cox wrote about the young men without college degrees who are losing the dating game; River Page reported on a male teacher’s worst nightmare; and Suzy Weiss weighed in on the curiosity shop that is furious with Kelly Clarkson. Catch up today:

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a mountain man in Steamboat Springs, Colorado; a kosher Scrabble lover in D.C.; and a poetic romantic in Cuba. 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 [email protected].

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our columnist Aaron MacLean for his recommendations. . . 

📚Read. . . Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Interests Come First, which recently came out in paperback. Technically a biography of Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping’s father, this elegant and insightful book doubles as a fantastic introduction to the history of the Chinese Communist Party in the 20th century—and the claustrophobic madness of working at its pinnacle. An intimate of Mao Zedong, Xi Zhongxun had a leading role in government during some of the CCP’s most consequential and deadly years, only to be purged himself in the 1960s. His daughter, Xi Jinping’s half-sister, committed suicide, and Xi Jinping himself was sent to live in the countryside, where he slept in a cave. Ultimately, he responded to the party’s betrayal of his family by becoming even more committed to its totalitarian goals. Torigian explores this irony, among other themes, as he narrates many of the last century’s deadliest tragedies from the point of view of a father and son at the center of it all. (You can also listen to Torigian discuss the book on my podcast School of War.)

🍺Drink. . . An ice-cold Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. California’s contributions to the American project have been mixed, but we can put this beverage firmly in the “pro” category, along with movies and surfing—both of which it accompanies nicely. I developed a taste for it when I spent a summer in California during the Marine Corps, and now it’s my go-to. It’s got more character than a Budweiser but isn’t so froufrou that you sound intolerably pretentious for saying you like it. What more do you want from a beer?

📺Watch. . . The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I’m not sure why, but I find this movie strangely arresting, and I am pleased to report that, if you’ve seen it before, it really holds up. The film, based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, stars Brad Pitt as Benjamin, who is born in the body of a shriveled old man, and then lives his life physically backward. Travels, wars, and a lifelong romance with Cate Blanchett ensue—and that romance is complicated by the fact that she ages normally. Moving, strange (in the best way), and a marvelous survey of the American century from a fantastical and moving perspective. Watch with a Sierra Nevada in hand.

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

Unlike most of us, Chrystia Freeland saw Donald Trump coming from about 450 miles away, from her perch in Ottawa as a top government minister under former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. Back in 2016, she told me when we met a few weeks ago, “we were sufficiently alive to the possibility that Trump would win that we actually had the Department of Trade produce a paper on what we should do if the United States were to threaten to withdraw from NAFTA.” They suspected Trump might tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had knit their countries and Mexico together for more than two decades.

That, of course, is exactly what happened—the first shot in a stochastic trade war that has escalated since then, and is still roiling politics in both countries. Trump came into office with the view that Canada, rather than being America’s closest ally, was actually “ripping us off.” Freeland would spend the better part of seven years in the middle of that fight as her country’s lead negotiator, helping strike a replacement deal in 2018 before things collapsed again in Trump’s second term.

She recalled all of this to me at a fancy hotel in Manhattan, where we met for lunch. She was visiting the city to promote her new book—Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People. That provocative title refers to none other than Trump, whose years of broken promises and gaslighting rhetoric have left Canadians, who were long smitten with America, feeling totally jilted. “No one was allowed to go around saying mean things about him,” Freeland said of the Trudeau cabinet during Trump’s campaign and the early days of his first term. Even the smallest slight risked torching the two countries’ relationship.

I went to see the new Tom Cruise film, Digger, at a midweek matinee in Pasadena, expecting it to be a somewhat monastic experience. Still, I hadn’t imagined that I would comprise one-sixth of the audience, and one-half of it by the movie’s end. There are bad movies; there are always bad movies. But then there are the ones that make you want to carve a little circle around your chair and tunnel your way out.

Digger is a two-hour movie about climate change, apparently intended for an audience that has never heard of that particular plague. More specifically, it is an indictment of America’s involvement in that horror, and really of America itself. To borrow a formulation made famous by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright: It’s not a “God bless America” movie. It’s a “God damn America” movie.

Friends, we’ve lost Tom Cruise.

You can see everything is a remarkable sentence. Four words; infinite possible interpretations, depending on who is speaking and in what context. You would understand this to mean very different things if shouted from the precipice of the Grand Canyon versus, for instance, whispered seductively by the stripper who is beckoning you toward a velvet settee—or pointing you in the direction of the ATM, for that matter. It all hinges on the unspoken second half of the sentence:

You can see everything from up here.

You can see everything for a price.

Or, in the case of the new documentary about Theranos founder-turned-convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes: You can see everything—and still have absolutely no idea what you’re looking at.

After a year living in America, I’m moving home to England. Many people think this is a mistake. Brits act as if I’m committing some form of self-harm. “You could make so much more money! You could have a much bigger flat!” Americans have read so many horror stories about Britain on X that they act as if I’m going back to North Korea. “Won’t you get arrested at the airport?”

This is the opposite reaction to the one I received a year ago, when I decided to leave. Last August I moved to Washington, D.C., and nearly everyone I knew was thrilled for me. I had finally made it out of the country! I wasn’t unusual for a young Brit. Record numbers are leaving. In the year to June 2025, around 195,000 under age 35 left the UK, making up about 76 percent of all British emigration. Some go to Dubai, some to Spain, and some to Australia—mostly for financial reasons, including higher wages, tax advantages, a lower cost of living. Some go to America, the land of opportunity.

Of course England has its problems: Over the past few decades, immigration has spiraled out of control, despite the public consistently voting against it; people have been arrested by armed police for offensive social media posts; civil servants are “triggered” by the sight of our own flag. We are losing pride in our country. Our economy is stagnant too: Measured by GDP per person, Britain is now only just richer than Mississippi, the poorest state in America. Wage growth is slowing, taxes are rising, and public services are collapsing. We are, according to The Atlantic, a “case study in self-sabotage.”

It’s Friday, October 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Unpacking the charges against the radical trust fund baby Fergie Chambers. Is dealing with the government about to get even worse? Why is a 2000s pop star feuding with a Brooklyn toy shop over a very expensive bird robot? And much more.

But first: Is any man safe from “Jane Doe”?

Jeremy Taylor worked at Oakland School for the Arts for nearly two decades when the call came. It was the principal, telling him he was being suspended.

Taylor was called for an interview with an investigations company hired by the school. He’d been accused of having sex with a woman when she was a student of his nearly two decades prior.

Investigators didn’t tell him they’d already talked to “Jane Doe,” the woman who accused him. And they didn’t appear to have very much evidence to back up her claim.

“I fully thought I was going to be back in the classroom once they finalized their report,” he told me.

Instead, the investigation concluded that he’d not only slept with Doe but also that he’d exhibited “grooming” behaviors with two other minors. This despite the fact that those former students, in interviews, had said nothing untoward had happened.

Taylor was fired, arrested, and charged with committing a lewd act upon a child before he was eventually cleared. This was in 2022, and he hasn’t worked since.

Most examples of “he said, she said” encounters—including the “Cornell 7” case currently being litigated in the court of public opinion—involve men who, all evidence suggests, behaved in a way that was morally reprehensible on some level. In the case of Jeremy Taylor, however, there was never any proof that he had sex with Doe at all—or did anything that should have cost him his job. On the contrary, there was a lot of evidence that Doe made the allegations in the midst of a severe mental health crisis.

The more I dug into his case, the stranger things looked. What made Doe change her mind about what seemed like an innocent student-teacher relationship between herself and a man she previously believed was gay? And why didn’t anyone even seem to consider the possibility that his accuser might be lying? Read my investigation to find out.

—River Page

If you’ve spent any time on social media this week, you’ve probably seen—out of the corner of your eye, at least—that the 2000s icon Kelly Clarkson has been feuding with, of all things, a curiosity shop in Brooklyn called Art of Play. The accusation? That the store refused to sell her a $15,000 mechanical bird, and looked at her like she couldn’t afford it.

What fresh hell is this? And why have so many freethinking Americans devoted hours this week to debating it? Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot break it all down in the latest episode of Second Thought, with the help of special guest Michael Moynihan. “She says she was treated like a hooker,” says Suzy, but “being a sex worker is like the greatest thing you could be in Brooklyn.”

This week, best-selling Irish author Sally Rooney stated that her publisher was pulling her books from shelves in the UK—because of her promise to give a portion of her royalties to Palestine Action, which the British government designated a terrorist group last year. “To publish my work in the UK could now constitute a serious criminal offense,” she wrote. Is Rooney a victim of censorship?

No, writes Eli Lake—and most people are missing the point. The real question, he argues, is “whether it was prudent to include Palestine Action in the same category as groups like Hamas and al-Qaeda.” That is a thornier quandary, and in his latest piece, Eli digs into the arguments on both sides.

In one of the most closely watched midterm Senate races, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed spent the entire primary campaign railing against Israel and the Iran war. But when Audrey Fahlberg asked him about leaked audio from a strategy call—where he said he didn’t want to comment on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today”—he dodged the question and admonished her: “Ask smart questions.”

El-Sayed is favored to win his Michigan race, which may determine control of the Senate. But will his short fuse and sensitivity to questions about Iran turn off enough voters to spoil his chances? Audrey has the story.

In less than two weeks, the people of Israel will decide once again whether to retain Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, or elect a change of course. To mark the occasion, we asked contributors who have followed Netanyahu’s career to evaluate his legacy, and describe where he might take his country next. Among them is Haviv Rettig Gur, who explains why Netanyahu is still competitive and what happens if nobody wins a majority. Don’t miss his interview with Maya Sulkin.

It’s a progressive feeder to the Ivy League. But tremors of antisemitism at San Francisco University High School since the October 7 attacks have caused Jewish enrollment to fall to a trickle. Read Ashley Rindsberg’s latest investigation of how a new strain of radicalism infiltrated one of the toniest Bay Area schools: One teacher denounced Israelis as “colonizers” and later claimed he was being “silenced by the Zionist parent conspiracy.”

Europe burned this week, as a bevy of protests broke out in France, Spain, and Belgium, led by disaffected young people. So, we asked Niall Ferguson: What’s going on? “They are dimly aware that they are being screwed,” he wrote, “but they don’t appear to understand who’s doing the screwing.” Read Niall’s essay on the psychology of the placard-holders, why they’re setting things on fire, and why they should consider blaming their grandparents for the rigged system they inherited.

In late 2023, Fergie Chambers, the radical American political activist with a $250 million inheritance and a vow to invest in revolutionary and anti-imperialist causes, fled the United States. He knew he was under FBI surveillance, he has said. And four young comrades in Palestine Action US, an anti-Israel group co-founded by Chambers shortly after Hamas’s terrorist attack on southern Israel, had just been arrested for allegedly attacking two U.S. offices of Israel’s largest defense company.

Chambers soon wound up in Tunisia, where he made no secret about his ambition to keep using his money to further his causes. He converted to Islam, bailed out a Tunisian soccer team, and has said that he continued funding radical groups, particularly ones focused on Palestine. Those financial connections led to his arrest in July in Spain on charges of providing financial support to international terrorist groups. He has been fighting extradition to the U.S. ever since.

Exactly what evidence has the Justice Department amassed against Chambers? And why is the Trump administration so determined to get him back? The answers to those questions have remained a mystery, largely because the federal indictment of Chambers is sealed and because government officials have not commented on him since the arrest.

But Spanish court documents obtained by The Free Press reveal crucial details about those accusations, including that Chambers was actively conspiring with Iran while in Tunisia to support Hamas and possibly other terrorist activities backed by Tehran, according to information provided by American law-enforcement officials.

Artificial intelligence in government is here, and here to stay—the only question is whether it will be a relief or a disaster for we the people. Part one of the rollout was using and misusing AI in a scattershot effort to cut programs through the Department of Government Efficiency in early 2025, and part two was integrating AI into Pentagon systems soon afterward. Both efforts became messy, politicized affairs. But an even bigger test may come in part three: weaving AI into the regulation processes that shape the life of every business, as well as individuals like you.

The Donald Trump administration took a small step in that direction recently with the launch of America.gov, which aggregates data from about 29,000 federal websites to help users navigate procedures like changing their address across benefit programs. Will laying a large language model atop the expanse of government rules make it easier to deal with, or generate useful information for employees running the thing?

We’ve been taught that America’s regulatory system is organized in legal codes, like traffic signals and road signs. In reality, the codes are more like an overgrown jungle, incoherent to any real person and often contradictory—three billion words in total, according to law professor Daniel Ho.

Setting artificial intelligence loose into the red-tape thicket, experts think, will untangle the knots and make government work better. This is simplistic and largely misguided. While AI can certainly identify duplication and contradictions, it cannot replace the rigidities of red-tape operating structures that preempt common sense as a matter of law.

The day Jeremy Taylor’s world turned upside down began unremarkably. He spent it at work, at Oakland School for the Arts (OSA), where he had been teaching for almost two decades. It wasn’t until he had just gotten home that the principal called, with news that ended Taylor’s life as he knew it.

“He told me there had been a complaint from a former student and that he couldn’t go into any more details,” Taylor told me. All he knew, he said, was that he had been put on administrative leave and banished from the school. Was it because he had told his government class earlier that day about a former student who once broke in and tore down the American flag? Or because he had helped unionize the teaching staff? Taylor had no idea.

“I’m not sure I can fully explain what it does to your psyche to sit in the dark with a vague, horrific accusation, but no specifics to latch on,” said Taylor, now 51, from his art-filled home in Oakland, California. He has a graying red beard and horn-rimmed glasses, and speaks carefully with a soft voice.

His last day at work was January 4, 2022. A few weeks later, he told me, his union representative sent the school a “threatening email” demanding that it “stop withholding information.” Finally, Taylor was informed that he had been accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a former student. But the school wouldn’t identify the alleged victim, or even say when he or she had attended OSA, which didn’t respond to requests for comment from The Free Press.

Welcome back to another week in review with me, returned from a very understated eye lift. I initially said I want the White House Lady Lift but we settled on “refreshed” and “a young 40,” since my doctor said it was the most realistic. (Mom, if you’re reading this, it’s a joke. I still look like hell.)

In Free Press news, October supper clubs are coming up fast. The date is October 22. The location: 46 neighborhoods, 5 countries—this time including Australia! The last day to sign up is Monday, October 19, at 6 p.m. ET. Sign up here for a spot at a Free Press dinner in your town.

Now, onto the news.

→ Oh, Kimberly: Kimberly Guilfoyle—ex-wife of Gavin Newsom, ex-fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., and as of this week, ex-ambassador to Greece—was offering to trade political favors for cash, according to The Wall Street Journal. I guess she didn’t deliver on the political favors, since now we have tons of her messages with Republican donor Eric Deters. They’re devastating. She sent messages to Deters saying things such as: “You could just send it here. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express that’s all that will show. Please.” And: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” And: “Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things. It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on [S]ignal.” But it soured because according to Eric: “She never came through on anything.” Eric had little schemes of his own: He wanted the extradition of an Ohio doctor who fled to Pakistan after being charged with defrauding insurers. Complex, interesting. (Kim denies it all and claims the messages were AI-generated.) Now Kim is out as ambassador to Greece. Trump has shown little mercy, saying “she wasn’t a member of my family” and “I guess she dated my son a long time ago.” Which is brutal. She and Don Jr. owned a house together, Trumpo! They were engaged! And Trump is like, I think they made out at a bar once, who knows. The Wall Street Journal sums it up: “With two million Instagram followers and her constant travel companion, the stylist Fancy James, she became a potent symbol of the new school of American diplomacy.” The new school of American diplomacy is just asking for money on Signal and having a man named Fancy steam your blazer. We used to be a proper country.

The problem with ol’ Kimmy is that she tried to scam like the big boys, and she couldn’t. But a woman like Kimberly Guilfoyle requires ill-gotten riches. That’s the whole aesthetic. There’s no other career path for Kimberly Guilfoyle. Would a wealthy reader please marry her, accept Fancy James into your life, stick him in a guest bedroom, and just calm this whole situation down? She’ll do some light insurance fraud and you’ll be so happy together. She’ll tape up her eyelids for New Year’s and everything. America’s almost-Fourteenth Lady of West Palm may not deserve power, per se, but she’s at least earned the right to an afternoon of pinot and chopped salad at the club.

→ OpenAI’s bug: An OpenAI engineer allegedly tried to spy on the company by bugging a conference room television. According to authorities, after the bug was discovered, the suspect was then caught on a secret camera checking behind that conference room television to make sure it was still there.

The engineer, Abdulrahman Alfozan, is a well-connected Saudi national. He is reportedly a venture partner at Raed Ventures, a Saudi firm where a member of the royal family is also a partner. He allegedly had a one-way ticket to Saudi Arabia for himself, his wife, and another family member not long after installing the spy device, but alas, the FBI arrested him before he could get to sunny Riyadh. The best part is that he is suspected of plotting his spying using. . . ChatGPT. From The San Francisco Standard:

A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.

It’s perfect. The image of his little face peering behind the TV. Using ChatGPT to help. No other nation has good ideas right now, so they just send their sons to California to steal ours. Also, the fact that OpenAI caught the suspect on camera? TGIF salutes OpenAI. Put a camera behind all the televisions. Bug the toilets. Wire the coffeemaker. And know that anytime you enter any space in San Francisco, you are being watched, on the record, and seconds from house arrest.