The Free Press

Dear Abigail,

A while ago, I met a girl in class who caught my eye. I didn’t speak to her for the first few months of the semester, until she was hired by my student newspaper. When she walked into our newsroom one day, we had a pleasant interaction. I thought she was cute, and sometime in the days after, I found a pretext to give her my number. We started talking, and I found that I really enjoyed my time with her. I rarely meet anyone I get excited about at my university. She’s 18. I’m 22. This is not something I would think twice about if it weren’t for an anonymous social media app that dominates public life at my university.

This app is the real center of gravity on my campus, and reputations can be destroyed there. I’ve watched it happen to peers of mine over things way less serious than an age gap. The girl I’m talking to is very well-known in her class. If we got together, it would reach the app pretty quickly, and they wouldn’t like it. They’d label it predatory, and I’d be staring down the barrel of a true cancellation.

I know that the threat of cancellation is seldom a good reason not to do something. But it feels like this conviction is much easier to hold when the stakes are more abstract. This isn’t occurring in the public domain; it’s in the collective imagination of a very small university where I still have to live and work. The people who would judge me are not strangers on the internet. They’re my classmates and my colleagues. How does one move forward in confidence in such a scenario?

—Tom, 22

Tom,

Risk-taking is a young man’s prerogative. The suppression of risk-taking is the suppression of men.

And yet, from the moment you were little, we padded your playground and surveilled every “playdate.” We shortened recess, forbade tackle football, and berated you for showing the slightest interest in guns. Across cultures, throughout history, boys have been fascinated by tools of violence, but if you dared sketch a crossbow, we sent you home. We pummeled you with anti-bullying lectures, then—in an act of supreme cynicism—furnished your classmates with sophisticated technological tools for bullying at scale. We encouraged your generation to inform on one another and pledged to “believe women” if you ever had conflict with one. Schools lectured you about the necessity of explicit “affirmative consent,” and warned you of the dire consequences of failing to obtain it, before you ever held a girl’s hand. No prior generation of young men was regarded with comparable hostility—tarred by the sins of Harvey Weinstein when you were 12.

And now that you’re a man, you’re expected to tear off your helmet and toss it to the wind like so much caution. As if a lifetime of conditioning could be so easily undone.

It’s Thursday, May 28. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Kat Rosenfield asks, is Belle Burden telling the truth? Patrick McGee on how Intel saved itself, and may soon save America. Joe Nocera on Old School. And much more.

But first: The Pentagon official defending the kind of war he once opposed.

In Washington, they say personnel is policy. That’s why Donald Trump’s appointment of influential foreign policy guru Elbridge Colby to a top Pentagon job last year was seen as a big deal. Colby is in the vanguard of MAGA thinkers who reject the bipartisan interventions that have defined U.S. foreign policy for the last quarter century. Anti-war populists saw in Colby’s rise a sign that Donald Trump would govern as a “restrainer” in his second term.

With Trump having toppled Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, prosecuting a war with Iran, and eyeing Cuba, that prediction aged like milk.

Now Colby finds himself having to defend the kind of conflict with Iran that he has spent most of his career warning against. Colby’s story is a way into a bigger tale, about the worldview governing Donald Trump’s unconventional and potentially era-defining foreign policy in his second term.

Which is why we asked Eli Lake to profile him. Eli speaks to Colby, and dives into the backstory of this unlikely populist with impeccable Washington credentials and a controversial grandfather. Read Eli on the MAGA guru whose influence and resolve is being tested by the Iran war.

—The Editors

And, ICYMI: Check out Joe’s introduction to The Lindbergh Conspiracies, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

At 12 p.m. EST, Suzy Weiss will hop on our new Free Press Forum for her first AMA. She’ll be around for an hour to talk about all things culture—so click here to drop your questions about the latest books, movies, summer trends, or anything else, and don’t forget to tune in this afternoon for her answers.

• Israel launched another round of attacks against Hezbollah on Tuesday, striking several targets across Lebanon. The renewed offensive comes at a particularly volatile moment, as the U.S. continues to push for a peace deal with Iran.

• Oil prices fell on Wednesday morning, as the temporary ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran remains largely intact. The S&P 500 ended Wednesday slightly higher, but will be closely watched as diplomacy continues in the Middle East.

• After 88 days of large-scale shutdown, the Iranian government is reportedly restoring internet access across the country. If it holds, the change would mean the end of one of the longest nationwide internet blackouts in history, and the ability for Iranians to finally return to reading news and communicating with friends and family online.

• Former president Joe Biden filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department on Tuesday. The action came as part of Biden’s attempt to block the release of audio files and transcripts from interviews he gave to a biographer in 2016 and 2017, which eventually became part of the investigation into the then-president’s handling of classified documents.

• The Trump administration is reportedly planning to send U.S. citizens who are exposed to Ebola to Kenya for treatment. The program would be a stark contrast to previous public-health policies, which returned Americans to specialized domestic facilities.

• The financial app Robinhood launched a new feature that will allow AI agents to trade stocks and make credit-card purchases. The addition will let users directly connect programs like Anthropic’s Claude or coding software like Cursor to their profile, and even provide the agent with its own dedicated trading account.

• A chemical tank at a paper mill in Washington State imploded on Wednesday. The accident killed at least two people, and nine more workers remain unaccounted for.

• Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has purchased a stake in the Cleveland Guardians baseball team. Kelce has long dreamed of a career in Major League Baseball, and his investment in the Guardians will officially make him part of his hometown team.

In this episode, Shilo sits down with veteran journalist Joe Nocera for a deep dive into the world’s best-selling novelist, Agatha Christie.

Nocera’s new investigative podcast is all about the Charles Lindbergh Jr. kidnapping, one of history’s most infamous crimes, and a key inspiration behind Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.

They dig into why mys…

A partisan fight over fraud has become a showcase in asymmetric warfare. Republicans are working aggressively to expose misspent federal aid and benefits. By contrast, many Democrats aren’t sure whether to admit that there’s a problem at all.

Republicans’ crusade against fraud has ramped up since YouTuber Nick Shirley’s videos alleging widespread abuse of federal funds in Minnesota’s Somali-run childcare centers went viral in December. Democrats are still figuring out how to coherently respond. Many appear to be torn between scrambling to solve the problem and condemning anyone who dares to point it out.

California has become the fiercest battleground in the war over fraud. On Tuesday, Democrats in the state assembly passed AB-2624, entitled “Privacy for immigration support services providers.” Republicans have a different name for the bill: the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.” It was introduced by Democrats after the YouTuber followed up his Minnesota video with another one alleging over $170 million in fraud in the state’s publicly funded hospice and daycare centers. AB-2624 targets those who seek to emulate Shirley’s visits to purportedly fraudulent businesses by criminalizing certain disclosures of identifiable information for businesses and nonprofits that serve immigrants.

The bill resembles much of Democrats’ public response to Republicans’ accusations of tolerating fraud—deny, deflect, and act only under pressure. Yet for all the bluster, Democratic administrations in Minnesota, California, and Maine are quietly executing the very purges and investigations they once denounced as “racially charged” or “contrived.”

A year ago Intel was left for dead, its stock at a 16-year low. Today, it’s the hottest stock on Wall Street, gaining almost 500 percent over the last year, leading to an all-time peak valuation in its 58-year history—surpassing $600 billion as it secures partnerships with a Who’s Who of tech titans led by Nvidia, Tesla, and Apple.

But nice as it is for shareholders, the stock’s rise isn’t the real story. Intel’s comeback, if it sticks, could be hugely important for geopolitics and for securing America’s economy in the 21st century. Intel is the only American company remotely capable of competing with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), its much larger rival in Taiwan. And among the reasons the stock is climbing is that the AI boom has reached a new stage, one where central processing units (CPUs)—the semiconductors that comprise the computer’s “brain”—are suddenly critically important again. Intel has long been a dominant CPU manufacturer.

The AI boom had primarily been built on a different kind of semiconductor known as graphics processing units (GPUs), the graphics chips pioneered by Nvidia. GPUs split AI workloads into thousands of small tasks and work on them all at once. CPUs, built to do tasks consecutively, were considered increasingly irrelevant. “Somewhere along the way, people thought CPUs were dead,” Rene Haas, CEO of UK chip designer Arm, said back in March.

On March 3, Elbridge Colby found himself in the unusual position of having to defend a war he has spent most of his career warning against. The top Pentagon strategist appeared before a Senate committee only three days after President Donald Trump announced the launch of Operation Epic Fury over the skies of Iran.

When Senator Elizabeth Warren asked him how the Iran war was “America First,” Colby didn’t miss a beat. “I would say America First and peace-through-strength are served by rolling back, as the military campaign is designed to do, the threats posed by Iran’s very large and growing missile and one-way attack drone program, its navy, and of course, ensuring that it doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.”

For most senior Trump administration officials, testifying to the merits of the president’s war would be unremarkable. But Colby, known as Bridge to his friends, is a different story. The sandy-haired 46-year-old policy intellectual made his name in and out of government by warning about the perils of overstretched U.S. military commitments.

His job in the second Trump presidency as the under secretary of defense for policy seemed like a perfect match. Colby was serving a commander in chief who campaigned against the Middle Eastern wars of his predecessors. Yet the Iran war is a reminder that Trump’s worldview cannot be reduced to campaign slogans. For years, Colby has tried to persuade Washington to focus on the growing threat from China and shift away from Europe and the Middle East. And yet here he is, serving in an administration that has launched another war far away from America’s chief adversary.

From the beginning, Belle Burden’s memoir, Strangers, was the stuff that middle-aged female nightmares are made of. A high-flying woman who had it all—beauty, money, three gorgeous children, and a 20-year marriage to the love of her life—cruelly abandoned with neither warning nor fanfare by the husband she thought she would be with forever. He was cheating; she had no idea. She didn’t even know he was unhappy.

Burden first told her story in a viral New York Times Modern Love essay in 2023; the book-length version, released this year, has been a massive bestseller. No surprise there: Burden, a willowy blonde with a socialite’s pedigree, makes for a compelling cautionary tale about how even the most accomplished and desirable woman can fall victim to a financially abusive adulterer, trapped in a life built on lies. I listened to the audiobook a few months ago and found it riveting, even as I wondered what might be missing from the narrative—if only because when it comes to a memoir of marriage as experienced by one of the spouses, something always is.

Now the answer to that question has arrived, but not, as one might have expected, in the form of a competing tell-all by Burden’s now ex-husband Henry P. Davis. Instead, we got a New Yorker investigation into Burden’s divorce documents that shed light on the financial aspect of her story, revealing that its shocking account of a woman driven to the edge of ruin by her conniving, greedy spouse was, in reality, a great deal more complicated.

The controversy centers largely on two properties purchased by Burden for her family during her marriage: a multimillion-dollar apartment in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood, and a house on a lake on Martha’s Vineyard. (Slumming it, they were not.) In her book, Burden claims that the money for these homes came from two trusts left to her by her parents and grandparents, which she liquidated in their entirety. She also described listing her husband on the deeds out of a naive desire to demonstrate her love and commitment—which he then cruelly leveraged in the divorce, laying claim to his stake in the properties in full knowledge that his wife could not afford to buy him out. It’s only an hour before their trial, having dragged Burden right up to the precipice of humiliating ruin and dangled her over the edge, that her husband suddenly and inexplicably concedes his share in the properties.

The New Yorker’s reporting uncovered multiple discrepancies between this account and reality, including that what Burden described as a “trial” was actually a much lower-stakes proceeding called a “status conference”; no actual trial date had been set. The bigger revelation however was that despite depicting her financial state as dangerously precarious, Burden reported an $800,000 income the year before her divorce—as well as assets in excess of $10 million over which her husband had no claim.

For the last five years, if you walked onto almost any American college campus, you would have found an office and staff dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). DEI in higher education grew out of civil rights–era efforts in the 1960s and ’70s as a well-meaning attempt to recruit more diverse faculty and students—but the movement exploded after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

DEI officers at higher education institutions tripled after July 2020. At the University of Michigan alone, DEI staff grew to 241 people at an annual cost of over $30 million.

And it wasn’t just universities. There was a moral panic about structural racism in nearly all of our most important institutions. What followed was a cultural shift that permeated into job interviews, mission statements, and email signatures across the Western world.

At face value, those missions—diversity, equity, inclusion—seemed pretty noble.

But what did it look like for those words to be implemented?

Critics would say: A new rubric emerged, where people’s value was determined by the historic suffering of their identity groups and not individual merit.

Eventually, the tide turned on DEI. In 2023, the Supreme Court ended race-based affirmative action. And when the second Donald Trump administration took office in January 2025, it moved aggressively against DEI. Today, over 300 colleges and universities have eliminated DEI requirements, closed DEI offices, or altered their DEI policies.

So what actually happened inside those offices? My guest today, Michael Yassa, was a professor of neuroscience at University of California, Irvine, when, in 2020, his university asked him to serve as associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at UC Irvine’s School of Biological Sciences.

In this episode of Confessions, Yassa and I discuss how DEI initiatives became performative and failed to realize their promise. We agreed on some things (that land acknowledgments are performative), but not everything, and that’s why I hope you’ll watch.

Yassa still believes in “good DEI,” though he tells me he wouldn’t use those words anymore. We debated the data on class versus race as a proxy in admissions, what DEI offices actually did, and whether there’s a need for DEI offices to be reformed rather than gutted.

California has an embarrassment of riches. It’s got bursting green vistas, and rocky cliffs overlooking the Pacific. It’s got all the beautiful actors toiling away in studios to make us the next season of our favorite show. And it’s got Caitlin Flanagan, a daughter of Berkeley, who today weighs the chances that Spencer Pratt, a son of Los Angeles, will be the next mayor of the second-biggest city in the country. Could the Pratt Daddy, as Caitlin calls him in her essay below, in spite of all his foibles, or maybe even because of them, be just the hell-raiser that the City of Angels needs to turn itself around? Pratt’s official campaign slogan might be “LA is worth saving,” but a more accurate one might be a barb from his reality TV days. —Suzy Weiss

You don’t go to war with the angry reality TV star you want; you go to war with the angry reality TV star you’ve got. And so it is that Spencer Pratt, previously of The Hills (“That’s why you’re not in my life, you crazy bitch”), owner of an online business called Pratt Daddy that trades in “healing” crystals, author of The Guy You Loved to Hate, and holder of a University of Southern California bachelor’s degree in political science, has taken it into his mind to become the next mayor of Los Angeles.

And why not? In post-literate America, the old rattle bag of accomplishments means nothing. Our next president will not be chosen from a field of contenders wreathed with meaningless laurels. What even is a Rhodes Scholar? The ideal candidate for 2028 will probably be a Golden Bachelor with Survivor experience.

Pratt Daddy’s candidacy is motivated by a singular and purifying anger—more of a hatred, really—all of it directed at the incumbent, Karen Bass. He holds her directly responsible for the burning of his and his parents’ houses in the Pacific Palisades. Unseating her is his intention. The primary election is next week, and the top two candidates will advance to the general election in November (if one of them gets more than that 50 percent of the vote in the primary, he or she becomes mayor, a scenario that is impossible to imagine. Bass and Pratt are expected to run against each other in the general. I assume he won’t win, but I never thought Richard Hatch would win the first season of Survivor. The race is volatile, with Pratt Daddy releasing TikToks (today’s equivalent of The Federalist Papers) every day. As for his secondary goal, the political humiliation of Bass, he’s already achieved it.

Call this a requiem for Los Angeles. We have nowhere else to go.

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week, Jonathan writes about General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright and his wife. And if you are looking for a fantastic history book this remembrance season, you can do no better than Jonathan’s The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines, which is now available in paperback. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

Not many visitors to Arlington National Cemetery make it out back behind the mansion house, where the graves run up against the old cavalry post formerly known as Fort Myer. In the grass past a Japanese cedar is a tombstone bearing four stars and two names carved into military lore: Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright and Adele Holley Wainwright. The engraved text identifies him as “General, United States Army,” and her merely as “his beloved wife.”

As is always the case at Arlington, there is more to be said. The ease with which the Wainwrights lie together belies a story of separation and suffering symbolic of the sacrifices that generations of service members and their families have made for our freedom. With Memorial Day this week, we owe it to remember the general who became the highest-ranking American prisoner of World War II and his long-suffering wife, who became a prisoner of an enemy of a different kind.

“Home is where the husband is.” That was the saying in the military family where Wainwright had grown up, and Adele Holley embraced it in 1911 upon marrying the skinny West Point graduate who had followed his father into the cavalry and loved riding horses, singing, and reading military history. There was no other way to be married to a cavalryman but to be ready to pick up at a moment’s notice and set off wherever duty led. In 1940, that meant going to the Philippines, then a U.S. colony, for what the Wainwrights assumed would be the final assignment in a career that had taken him to Europe during World War I and more recently made him a general officer. Adele would have stuck it out in the Philippines till the bitter end had the military not ordered army wives and children to leave in May 1941, amid fears that the islands would be difficult to defend in the event of war with Japan.