The Free Press

Everyone who moves to the bougie Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope does so with big ideas about how their new life there will go. How they’re going to jog in Prospect Park; how their brownstone apartments will be an oasis in the concrete jungle, a place to read on-trend books and host delightful dinner parties for erudite neighbors.

And how they will make beautiful meals with ingredients sourced, of course, from the Park Slope Food Co-op.

The Co-op is one of the oldest cooperatively run grocery stores in the country. It is both an institution and an idea, that in exchange for volunteering shifts reracking carts or weighing out wedges of cheese, you too can have access to cheap, choice produce and single-source artisanal chocolate bars. The building is big and charming. About 17,000 people are members, and there’s always a chance you could run into a Brooklyn celeb—Ezra Klein!—or even a real one, like Maggie Gyllenhaal, among the dry goods.

Who wouldn’t want to be a part of it? Well, me.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Bernard-Henri Lévy reflects on Jean-Claude Grumberg’s 1974 “Dreyfus in Rehearsal,” a play about the Dreyfus Affair, whose themes are hauntingly relevant amid today’s resurgence of global antisemitism.

The play is now the subject of a new production, “Dreyfus in Rehearsal Again,” in New York City—and for two nights only, on June 2 and 3, it will feature BHL himself. You can purchase tickets here.

To receive Things Worth Remembering directly in your inbox, sign up here.

Do you know Jean-Claude Grumberg?

He is one of the rare French playwrights to have entered the classical repertoire while still alive.

The son of a Jewish tailor deported and murdered at Auschwitz, Grumberg spent his life speaking not about the heroes of history but about its survivors, its ghosts, and that post-catastrophe humanity that continues to joke, love, breathe, and work.

He produced a masterpiece, L’Atelier (The Workshop), which brings together, in the Sentier district of Paris, seamstresses in the years after the Second World War talking about clothes, boys, and vacations, while also knowing that, behind the sewing machines, hovers the shadow of the Holocaust.

He created another masterpiece, Dreyfus in Rehearsal, which I remember seeing in 1974 at the Odéon Théâtre in Paris for its premiere. It portrayed a theater troupe in 1931, in a Lithuanian shtetl during the rise of Nazism, attempting to stage a play about the Dreyfus Affair.

He is one of those creators thanks to whom France still understands that antisemitism, in all its forms and colors—from barracks nationalism to a form of progressivism that has become delirious, is never merely an opinion but a monstrous crime.

Now, do you know Yonatan Esterkin?

It’s Friday, May 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Alex Berenson on why the latest health-tech fad device is actually making us less healthy. Matti Friedman joins School of War. Our editors’ picks. All that and more.

But before we get to today’s stories, it has been an exciting week over at 60 Minutes, with Bari announcing a new executive producer for the most storied show in TV news: the award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker Nick Bilton. Read more about it here, and check out Nick’s note to the show’s team. We’re excited to tune in.

Now, our lead story: The Baltimore miracle.

What’s broken? That’s a question we ask a lot here. It’s one you can’t ignore if you want to understand the world, and perhaps even make it better. But if you want to fix what is broken, you need to ask another question—one the media is prone to ignore: What works?

Today’s lead investigation, by Charles Fain Lehman, is an answer to that question, focused on one vital issue in one city. For decades, Baltimore has been synonymous with homicides. In 2020, homicide rates in the city were eight times higher than the national average. Then, starting in late 2022, the rate started falling precipitously. Today’s numbers would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. In April, Baltimore had four homicides, a lower total than for any single month in 50 years.

“What has happened in Baltimore was supposed to be impossible,” writes Charles. The cycle of homicides was, we were told, never going to fall unless America ended its war on drugs, or until systemic racism was fully disassembled. But those fatalistic predictions turned out to be wrong.

So how did Baltimore do it? Charles went to find out. Take the white pill this Friday morning, and read his fantastic dispatch.

—Oliver Wiseman

This was a big week at Free Press towers, with the launch of The Free Press Community. That means a whole slate of new offerings for Free Pressers. There’s the Free Press Forum, an online meeting place to discuss, debate, and debrief the news. You’ll also find a place to chat with Free Press staff—including our own Queen of TGIF, Nellie Bowles, today at 2:30 p.m. ET.

Want to get offline? Sign up now for The Free Press Supper Club and mark your interest for Free Press Excursions and Retreats. Check it out—you might meet your next spouse or business partner at one of these events. For more on all this, read Bari’s note laying out the next chapter of The Free Press:

While you can pick your friends—and we hope yours read The Free Press—who you get as your parents is a sort of cosmic roll of the dice. This week, one of our favorite pieces was by a young woman who won the dad lottery—her father is former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, the moderate Republican who is now dying of pancreatic cancer.

Most parents ask their kids “what did you learn today?” after school. Sasse asked his kids, including his daughter Alex Sasse, “Who did you serve?”

Alex’s essay this week is about her parents’ values—and how they have shaped her. It’s one of the most moving things we’ve published:

Knowing your father is going to die and celebrating his life is one thing. Knowing your daughter doesn’t want to live and trying to talk her out of it is another.

This week, Rupa Subramanya spoke with Omar and Cizzy Dekker, whose 19-year-old daughter, Iris, chose to end her life after years of severe depression.

“I tried to understand how loving parents could be persuaded that the best decision for their daughter was an early death,” writes Rupa. “What I found was a system that turns young people’s ambiguous wishes into a diagnosis of incurable depression.”

The headline news this week was Iran—and the always-imminent-but-never-actually-materializing deal to resolve the conflict. We ran two essential pieces of analysis on the state of play this week. One, from Michael Doran, lifted the lid on what the president plans to do next and looked at whether it will work.

In the other piece on the conflict, Niall Ferguson compares the Iran war to a roller-coaster ride on magic mushrooms. What happens when the ride ends and the drugs wear off? Read his piece to find out:

The Free Press has a new culture podcast—Second Thought with Suzy Weiss—and this week’s guest is a big one. Last week in LA, Suzy sat down with arguably the biggest villain in the music industry: Scooter Braun.

You may know him as the man who discovered Justin Bieber and made him a teen sensation. Or, more likely, you know him because, in 2019, Taylor Swift accused him of denying her a fair opportunity to own her original studio recordings.

The real story, like any with suspiciously obvious heroes and villains, is more complicated. That’s why Suzy spoke to the mega-manager, onetime Kanye West collaborator, and archnemesis in Swift’s fairy tale. He says: “I legitimately don’t know her.”

We move from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., where Tanner Nau spoke to some hopeful former January 6 defendants about their hopes for getting a piece of the action from President Donald Trump’s new $1.776 billion fund for those targeted by the Biden Department of Justice.

One man, who sprayed an aerosol irritant at three Capitol Police officers, entered through a broken window frame, and threw a punch at another officer, is hoping for up to $10 million. But he told Tanner he’d settle for $3 million.

Read Tanner’s report on the rioters hoping to strike it rich—and what the law says about whether or not they’ll ever see a dime.

The biggest tech news of the week came out of . . . the Vatican? Pope Leo XIV published his encyclical on artificial intelligence, warning that AI risks creating a new Tower of Babel. The introduction to the English translation was written by our very own Arthur Brooks. We adapted it for our pages and you can read it here:

For more on AI: Tyler Cowen offers his tips for how to keep your job in the age of employment disruption. Don’t miss his dos and don’ts:

This week, a young, healthy man named Steven Bartlett received 25 million views on X as he described the suffering he faced when he pushed his body to its limits.

Bartlett, whose biceps suggest he spends a lot of time at the gym and whose X profile describes him as an “entrepreneur” (such a beautifully elastic word; are we not all entrepreneurs?) climbed K2 ran an ultramarathon swam the English Channel had “a couple of glasses of wine.”

The results were horrific. As Bartlett explained to a fellow entrepreneur:

I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day. . . . I podcasted worse. I didn’t go to the gym that day or the day after because I felt really bad. . . . I could track all of this on my Whoop.

Hold on a second there, buddy.

Your what?

A question we often grapple with when writing about the global rise in antisemitism is “Where, if anywhere is still safe for Jews?” The UK, my home country, certainly doesn’t feel like it; neither does Europe or Australia. So what’s left?

At any other point in the last 200 years, the obvious answer to this question would have been America. The United States has long embodied the promise of the New World, allowing Jews to thrive and, in turn, enrich the country.

Ironically, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this safety and security has enabled a generation of American Jews the luxury of reconsidering the Bund.

The Bund, a secular socialist movement largely based in the Pale of Settlement, was the original ideological rival to Zionism. It emerged in 1897, at the same time as the first Zionist Congress, and its members argued that the way to make the places they lived in better for Jews was assimilation. It didn’t work. The Bundists were largely destroyed in the Holocaust, and the few who survived became reluctant Zionists anyway.

I can’t remember the first time I heard the expression “what a year last week was,” but it seems truer by the hour—and this was a holiday-shortened workweek! In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes boldly predicted that by now, we’d all be working just 15 hours a week. But given the intensity of the insanity of the news lately, I’d settle for 15 hours a day in a dark room.

I’m Nick Gillespie, editor at large at Reason and occasional contributor to The Free Press, subbing in for Nellie Bowles, who may or may not be taking the day off to interview for a better-paying job aboard the Long Island Rail Road, which would allow her to work remotely with unlimited personal days while earning six figures in overtime alone. As some of you may know, I’m libertarian and, as I cautioned at The Free Press debate on immigration in 2024 with Ann Coulter, Sohrab Ahmari, and Cenk Uygur (more on him in a moment!), that usually means people think I’m mostly going to talk about drugs and economics. Which I am!—I just want to give fair warning. If that’s not your thing, don’t worry, Nellie will be back next week. And if you can’t wait that long, head over to the Free Press Forum at 2:30 p.m. ET today, where Nellie will answer all your questions in a subscriber AMA.

→ Remember, kids: Real winners don’t use drugs!: It’s officially summer, and all kinds of sports events—the Indy 500! Baseball! The NHL playoffs!—are breaking out all over the place like prickly heat rashes. The upcoming NBA Finals will pit either the San Antonio Spurs or the Oklahoma City Thunder against the New York Knicks, who haven’t won a championship since 1973, when the team included future senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), nicknamed “Dollar Bill” partly because he was a “famously frugal” cheapskate despite having signed one of the fattest NBA contracts of the era. Regardless of who the Knicks face, they are a lock, since Chicago-born Pope Leo blessed their victory.

The week’s greatest (read: saddest) sports story comes from the Enhanced Games, a new Vegas-based competition showcasing athletes openly using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), and vowing to crush records in marquee events like the 100-meter dash and the 100-meter freestyle swim. Interestingly, a competitor who vowed he’d “juice to the gills” performed worse than he did when he couldn’t use drugs. Even more embarrassing: The 50-meter backstroke winner was a non-enhanced athlete, thus, writes James Dator for SB Nation, “tearing apart the entire premise for the games.” All told, one world record was beaten while three unenhanced athletes won their events. It’s a victory for man over pharma.

Here’s the upshot: PEDs are not magic potions that will automatically create a race of super-athletes. They are one technology among many—including space-age fabrics for uniforms, weight-training and other practice regimens, diet and nutrition, surgeries on tendons and ligaments, and over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs—that can help world-class athletes improve their performances (often by speeding up recovery times). We should have more honest and open conversations about them in sports and regular life, but all the PEDs in the world aren’t going to make just anyone the Lance Armstrong of accounting, let alone cycling.

The biggest loser at the Enhanced Games wasn’t an athlete, though. It was Donald Trump Jr., who was among the high-profile funders of the games, and whose parent company’s stock tanked after the middling results. That may not even be the worst recent loss for Don Jr., whose father played the ultimate trump card to get out of going to an undesired destination wedding. I, too, might be tempted to start a war to avoid going to a rehearsal dinner where Don Jr.’s college buddies toast him. While the president swore he really, really wanted to go to the Bahamas to celebrate his son’s merger with “socialite” Bettina Anderson—with a name like that, I should hope you’re a socialite—he just had too much work to catch up on. “I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Matti Friedman is an award-winning journalist and columnist at The Free Press. He joins the show to discuss his latest book, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe. On whose behalf were the Zionist Jews fighting the British during World War II? What happened to the legendary Zionist figure Hannah Senesh? And how did a war story without battl…

Just last Monday, a woman sat across from me in my office and asked a question I have come to dread. Why had no one told her? She is 33, a therapist, married three years, and she has been to her gynecologist every year since high school. She was also on the brink of perimenopause.

She had assumed that when she was ready, her body would be too. No one in two decades of annual visits had ever explained that the most consequential decisions about her capacity to bear children were being made by her ovaries on a calendar she could not see, while her doctor took her blood pressure and refilled her birth control.

She is the patient I see several times a month. She is the most preventable tragedy in American medicine.

I am board certified in both obstetrics and gynecology, and reproductive endocrinology. There’s a fertility crisis happening right now in America—and a furious debate about who is to blame. The alleged culprits include housing, smartphones, and capitalism. One group is getting off lightly: ob-gyns.

In July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the U.S. fertility rate had fallen to fewer than 1.6 children per woman—the lowest figure in our history—despite a 2025 survey of American Gen-Z women that found that nearly three-quarters intended to become mothers. American women are not opting out of building a family. They are running out of time.

Say “Baltimore,” and people think of crime. Shows like The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street depicted the city as gritty, gun-ridden, and plagued by gang violence. These fictional representations weren’t far off what statistics show about the city’s reality. Since the turn of the millennium, young black men have been three to four times more likely to die by homicide in Baltimore than in the nation as a whole.

And as violent as it already was, things got worse a decade ago. The 2015 riots, in response to the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody, inaugurated a retreat in Baltimore policing and a multiyear surge in street violence. In 2020, amid a national increase in killings, the Charm City saw homicide rates about eight times higher than the national average.

Then, in late 2022, Baltimore’s fortunes turned. Starting sometime late in the calendar year, murder rates started plummeting. The city reported 333 murders that year. Last year, after three years of steady decline, there were just 133 murders in the whole city—a more than 60 percent drop. That’s the fewest murders Baltimore has seen since 1965.

“It was shootings every day, every night,” said Kin Brown-Lane, a lifelong resident of Cherry Hill, one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, about the situation prior to 2022. “People didn’t have their kids outside to play, because you just never knew what was going to jump off out here.”

In case you missed the news, The Free Press has a new culture podcast. It’s called “Second Thought,” and it’s hosted by Suzy Weiss. This week’s guest is a big one: Scooter Braun. You might know him as the guy who discovered Justin Bieber, or as the superagent cast as a villain by Taylor Swift, or as Sydney Sweeney’s new squeeze. Braun became one of music’s most powerful kingmakers, and helped define pop culture in the internet age. If you haven’t listened to Suzy’s podcast yet, (a) where have you been?, and (b) this episode is a great place to start. Follow the show here, or wherever you get your podcasts, and scroll down to watch her conversation with Braun and read Suzy’s accompanying column. —The Editors

In 2007, when Scooter Braun stumbled upon a video of a 12-year-old Justin Bieber singing a cover of Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” on the streets of Ontario, he knew immediately what to do: make the teenager a global superstar. “Sometimes you get a download,” Braun told me. “A blueprint just gets sent into your head, and it’s so clear what you should be doing, and it doesn’t matter what anyone in the world tells you.”

Braun, who I recently interviewed in Los Angeles for my podcast Second Thought, told me he saw explosive talent in the young Bieber—“He was charismatic, he was brave”—and envisioned him as the 21st century’s answer to a young Michael Jackson; a kid, soulfully singing love songs for the masses. He was right. In 2008, after flying the tween Bieber and his mother to Atlanta—it was their first-ever plane ride—he signed Bieber as a client. Over the next 15 years, Bieber, with Braun behind him, would sell millions of tickets to world tours, and become the youngest-ever solo artist to have eight No. 1 Billboard 200 albums, breaking Elvis Presley’s record.

It wasn’t only Justin Bieber. Braun went on to engineer the meteoric rises of Ariana Grande, J Balvin, David Guetta, Demi Lovato, and even, for a spell, Kanye West. “If I like something, why shouldn’t millions of other people like it?” Braun told me about his populist and very “ordinary” sensibilities. On his way up “Mount Pop Music,” Braun made early bets on tech companies too—Spotify, Uber, and Dropbox among them. In other words, Braun was getting rich, his clients were selling out stadiums, and he seemed to have a Midas touch when it came to cultural resonance.

Then it all came crashing down.

One of the things that Braun understood earlier than most was the power of social media. These networks were not just for discovering acts but for cultivating and mobilizing fan bases that would stream their music, buy their merch, and sell out their concerts. “We involved them so intimately in the building that they are just as responsible for the success of these artists as I was,” said Braun, who, in part, architected the transition from old-fashioned fan clubs to hyper-online fandoms, as his acts became hugely popular on- and offline.

But in 2019, one fandom, the Swifties, who idolize the country-singer-turned-pop-phenomenon Taylor Swift, came to consider Braun their archnemesis. Turned out, hyper-intimate fan relationships cut both ways.

One of the things that Braun understood earlier than most was the power of social media.

Here’s what happened: Swift signed with Big Machine Records, based in Nashville, when she was 15. For years, she asked to buy the rights to her masters—the original studio recordings of her, which are typically owned by record labels, and from which they get a profit when songs are streamed—but she and the label couldn’t come to an agreement. “For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work,” she wrote in a Tumblr post in 2019.

Then, after a deal saw her catalog come under Braun’s ownership, she went nuclear.

“I was denied the chance to purchase my music outright, my entire catalog was sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings,” Swift thundered while accepting Billboard’s Woman of the Decade Award in 2019. “This just happened to me without my approval, consultation, or consent.” She went on: “The definition of the toxic male privilege in our industry is people saying, ‘But he’s always been nice to me,’ when I’m raising valid concerns about artists and their rights to own their music.” Swift vowed to rerecord her own songs as an act of defiance; meanwhile, her fans descended upon Braun on her behalf. He was the subject of death threats and endless online ire. Leave it to Swift, a master in storytelling, to take a complicated legal dispute and thread it into a story about betrayal and exploitation—with Braun at the center.

WATCH MY FULL INTERVIEW WITH SCOOTER BRAUN BELOW, OR LISTEN TO IT HERE:

It’s a story reminiscent of The Little Mermaid: A young woman sells her voice for access to a world she idealizes but doesn’t totally understand—except in this version, she fights back, unwilling to let the private equity–funded powers profit from the music she put her heart into. The saga had an air of truthiness, even if it seemed a little pat.

Except: It seems that all the contracts that Swift signed were standard for the music industry, and that the label offered her the opportunity to buy her masters—and later warned her that a deal was forthcoming. What’s more, Swift’s dad was an investor in Big Machine Records, and netted around $15 million from the sale. Braun also offered Swift the chance to buy back her masters after he acquired the label, which he off-loaded for a profit in 2020, but she refused because it required her to sign an NDA, and because Braun would continue to profit off of them.