The Free Press

We’ve spent the last few years discovering something delightful: Free Press subscribers genuinely like each other.

Not in a vague internet-comment-section kind of way, but in a stay-talking-for-hours-after-a-debate kind of way.

So we decided to make it easier for Free Pressers to meet in real life.

Today, we’re launching the Free Press Supper Club.

Here’s how it works:

You fill out a short questionnaire.

Then our matching system places you at a restaurant with five to seven fellow Free Press subscribers we think you’ll genuinely hit it off with. You’re encouraged to bring someone, and dining preferences will be accommodated—no pasta places if you’re gluten-free, and no Michelin stars if you prefer a diner.

On June 18, we’ll host dinners in 12 cities across three countries.

Join a Supper Club

Don’t see your city? Suggest yours here.

The cost to participate is just $18. Dinner itself is pay your own way, because the point isn’t a prix-fixe networking event. It’s to create a great table with great people at a great restaurant.

But the night doesn’t have to end there!

During dinner, you’ll receive a text message revealing the location of the nearby after-party. That’s where your table meets the other Free Press tables in your city for drinks and conversation.

Think of it as a way to dramatically expand your Free Press contact list in a single night. Alternatively, just think of the Supper Club as a place where you’ll meet people like you who are looking to meet people like you.

Your future co-founder, best friend, collaborator, investor, poker buddy, or spouse may already be sitting at one of these tables.

This program is exclusively for paid subscribers.

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“Tell me three true things about yourself.”

If I had to define the parenting style of my father, Ben Sasse, in one sentence, it would be those seven words. I can’t pinpoint the first time I remember him using them, but over the years, I’ve been directed by the prompt many times. After any success or failure, whether jumping with excitement or drenched in tears, my dad asked us to recite three things: one that reaffirmed our relationship with God; one that reaffirmed our family’s unconditional love for us; and one that reaffirmed qualities we most valued, like perseverance and grit.

The specific statements changed, but the goal behind the formula was consistent: Get out of your messy head and take an aerial view of your life.

In December, two hours before I walked the stage at my college graduation, we learned that my dad had been diagnosed with metastasized, stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The following weeks were a blur of extraordinary grief and random crying—in parking lots, on morning runs, in Trader Joe’s checkout lines, and while studying for the MCAT. I’m not sure what the world record is for use of the word terminal in a 30-minute appointment, but I’m pretty confident that between Memorial Sloan Kettering and MD Anderson Cancer Center, at least one renowned oncologist we saw came close.

In the months since (which is more time than early conversations and scans predicted), I’ve watched my dad navigate this new world with grit, humor, resilience . . . and frequent puking in the front yard. But most importantly, I’ve watched him pull out the best weapon for any battle: a rooted worldview grounded in theology.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where regulation requires American companies to help save our culture, homeless people have rights too (lots of them!), and numbers can look good and bad at the same time. Let’s jump in!

Netflix helped turn Vancouver into Hollywood North. Amazon, Disney, and Apple poured money into Canadian productions, employed armies of Canadian crews and creative types, and helped Canadian artists reach audiences far beyond Canada’s tiny domestic market.

The Canadian government seems to have looked at all this and thought: How do we tax and regulate it?

Online streaming services, ranging from the four American companies I just mentioned to Swedish audio streaming giant Spotify, will have to hand over 15 percent of their Canadian revenue under a decision announced last week by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The money will help subsidize parts of the media system considered culturally important by the government, especially French-language programming, indigenous content, and local news.

A 5 percent “base contribution,” to use the CRTC’s term, has been around since 2024. (Most normal people would call it a tax.) It was imposed as a result of 2023’s Online Streaming Act, which then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government sold as a patriotic effort to make streaming giants “pay their fair share.”

Of course, no one can really define what “Canadian culture” even means—least of all Trudeau himself, who infamously described Canada in 2015 as a “postnational state” with “no core identity.” And as I reported in 2023, the Online Streaming Act was never simply about bringing online broadcasters under similar rules as Canada’s traditional broadcasters. It was about dragging Canada’s old, protected broadcasting model into the internet age—and expanding the CRTC’s authority.

It’s Tuesday, May 26. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: A Democratic congressional candidate who wants to imprison “billionaire American Zionists.” Vindication for Harvard’s anti–grade inflation crusader. And much more.

But first: Michael Doran on Trump’s two-part peace plan.

Memorial Day weekend began with every indication that a deal with Iran might be imminent. It ended with U.S. strikes against Iranian forces.

On Monday, the U.S. sank two Iranian boats that officials said were attempting to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. also struck missile launchers in southern Iran after missiles targeted American planes. “U.S. Central Command continues to defend our forces while using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire,” said Captain Tim Hawkins, a military spokesman.

In other words: A precarious ceasefire remains in place for now. Meanwhile, the diplomatic mood music still points toward a deal—even if the talks have slowed and President Trump threatens to walk away. “The deal with Iran will either be a great and meaningful one, or there will be no deal,” he said Monday on Truth Social.

So what will Trump do next? Michael Doran has answers to that question in his latest piece for The Free Press. Michael is one of the most astute observers of this conflict, and in a must-read account of the state of play, he lays out where he thinks things are heading—and reveals what senior Trump administration officials say are the president’s long-term plans on Iran.

As national security adviser to President Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan played a critical role in an administration with a very different Iran policy to Trump. He joins Aaron MacLean on the latest episode of School of War to discuss the state of his world and the state of the Democratic Party. Tune in for Sullivan’s views on China, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, foreign policy debates on the left, and more.

—Oliver Wiseman

• Pope Leo—who took his name as a nod to the pope who defended workers during the Industrial Revolution—released on Monday his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas. He called for governments to regulate AI companies, protect workers who are displaced by AI, and ensure humans retain oversight of autonomous weapons. “The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology,” the pope wrote, “but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.”

• Mexico agreed to host Iran’s national soccer team during the World Cup after the U.S. declined to allow the team to stay on American soil. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said there was “no reason to deny them the possibility of staying in Mexico.” The team will stay in Tijuana and fly Iran Air to its World Cup matches in Los Angeles and Seattle.

• A damaged chemical tank in Southern California that had been at risk of exploding is no longer considered a threat. A crack in the tank naturally vented pressure and brought temperatures down on the methyl methacrylate, a plastic-manufacturing chemical. More than half of the residents who had been evacuated were told that they could go home.

• The United States has spent years trying to keep China from building world-class computer chips, but Chinese tech firm Huawei said it may have found a way around that. The company announced a breakthrough Monday that it claims will match the world’s most advanced semiconductors by 2031, achieved by stacking chips on top of each other, rather than depending on manufacturing cut off by U.S. sanctions.

• A heatwave is scorching Europe, with the UK breaking its all-time May temperature record on Monday, reaching 94.6 degrees Fahrenheit. In France, two people died during sporting events. Health authorities have issued warnings about the rising risk of heat-related deaths.

• Uber and Lyft drivers in Massachusetts became the first rideshare workers in the country to unionize, with the newly formed App Drivers Union receiving state certification to represent about 70,000 drivers. The union can now begin bargaining over wages and job security—a potential model for similar efforts underway in California and Illinois.

Jake Sullivan, former U.S. national security adviser under President Joe Biden, Kissinger professor of the practice of statecraft and world order at the Harvard Kennedy School, and co-host of The Long Game podcast, joins School of War to discuss geopolitics through the lens of today’s Democratic Party. Where do Democrats stand on China, Israel, Iran, an…

Canada legalized assisted dying in 2016, with a promise that it would be “narrow, cautious,” and reserved for those within months of death. It hasn’t stayed that way. The law has since expanded to cover people with chronic but nonterminal conditions, people with disabilities, and people whose suffering is entirely psychological. Now a parliamentary comm…

Maureen Galindo wants to make one thing clear: She never said she wants to put Jews in internment camps.

“No,” the Democratic congressional candidate in Texas said in a defiant TikTok video last week. “I said I want to imprison the American billionaire Zionists.”

That clarification has done little to calm the firestorm around Galindo, a San Antonio sex therapist and one of the two candidates in Tuesday’s Democratic runoff for a newly drawn House seat. In an earlier post, Galindo said she wanted to turn an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility into a “castration processing center for pedophiles,” which she suggested would include “most of the Zionists.” The comments drew bipartisan condemnation and sent national Democrats scrambling to stop her in the race’s final days.

But the scandal was not entirely a surprise to those who know Galindo. Candidates who have run against her, a businessman whose project was nearly derailed by Galindo, and a former San Antonio City Hall staffer who used to spar with her at public meetings describe her as “out there,” “conspiratorial,” and “very angry.” And for some, that’s not a bad thing.

“There’s an appetite for all these types of things, just like with Marjorie Taylor Greene,” said Ricardo Villarreal, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for a different House seat in Texas and one of Galindo’s only four donors, according to her Federal Election Commission filings. (Two of the other donors are her relatives.) “She’s definitely got her supporters,” Villarreal said.

Donald Trump now governs between enemies who want him to fail, and allies who demand impossible victories. He confronts that predicament as he announces that an agreement reopening the Strait of Hormuz is now “largely negotiated.”

Trump faces attacks from both directions at once. Republican allies such as Senator Lindsey Graham fear an ignominious retreat. “If a deal is struck to end the Iranian conflict because it is believed that the Strait of Hormuz cannot be protected from Iranian terrorism,” Graham warned on X over the weekend, “then Iran will be perceived as being a dominate [sic] force requiring a diplomatic solution.” Such an outcome, he added, “will be a nightmare for Israel.” Meanwhile, Democrats who opposed the war from the start depict the move toward diplomacy as an admission of futility. Senator Chris Van Hollen gloated that the emerging framework amounts to “a return to the prewar status quo.”

Adversaries claim that Trump’s diplomacy vindicates their depiction of the war as needless and reckless, while supporters demand an unconditional victory he cannot realistically deliver. Both sides misrepresent the strategic logic of the moment.

The Democratic critics refuse to acknowledge the war’s substantial achievements, foremost among them the severe degradation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security and one of the leading independent experts on nuclear proliferation, assesses that Tehran went from near-certainty of the ability to build a nuclear weapon within months, to facing far longer timelines with substantially lower odds of success.

When I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, students on the premedical track had developed a scheme for protecting their grade point averages from organic chemistry. Instead of completing the course on campus, they would enroll in a more forgiving summer program elsewhere. The popular destination, I was surprised to learn, was Harvard University.

As it turns out, Harvard really is a layup. A report released in October by the university’s Office of Undergraduate Education confirmed what those students had already sussed out: Grades at the university had been creeping upward for decades. In the 2024–25 academic year, three out of every five grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates were A’s.

Last week, Harvard’s faculty finally tackled the problem, approving a grade cap that will limit A’s to 20 percent of the undergraduates per course, plus up to four exceptions for extenuating circumstances. The changes will take effect in the fall of 2027. Nearly 70 percent of Harvard’s faculty voted in favor of the plan, and its dean of undergraduate education said that she hoped the grade cap would “encourage other institutions to confront similar questions with the same level of rigor and courage.”

Every year on Memorial Day, the nation pauses to remember and mourn the millions who have lost their lives in the service of our country. This year, the meaning of the day is especially acute. War continues to rage in Iran, where at least 13 American service members have been killed. Many more U.S. soldiers are stationed in countries across the globe.

It is all too easy to take for granted our freedoms as Americans. And it is even easier to misunderstand or ignore the realities of the wars fought to keep those freedoms alive. Free Press contributor Elliot Ackerman understands those realities all too well. A Marine Corps veteran and former intelligence officer, Elliot served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan—before returning home to become, among many other things, a novelist.

“A career filled with night raids, long-distance patrols, and clandestine asset meetings does, at first glance, seem to have little to do with a career spent sitting at a desk day after day dreaming up a story,” Elliot wrote for us last year. But, in fact, as you’ll find in his essay below, the two have everything to do with each other. Today, Elliot marks Memorial Day by reflecting on his relationship with fellow veteran-turned-novelist Karl Marlantes—and on the extraordinary relationship between storytelling and war.

—The Editors

In 1984, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote an essay about the war in Vietnam—more specifically, about the role literature might play in reconciling the country as it reckoned with the war. She interviewed a series of veterans turned authors, including a young Tim O’Brien, who was still six years away from publishing his seminal work, The Things They Carried.

Kakutani noted that several fine works of fiction had emerged from the war, but no masterwork. Perhaps, as Vietnam veteran and author Philip Caputo told her, it was still too early: “Tolstoy wrote about Napoleon’s invasion some 60 years after it happened,” Caputo said, “and it may be that that kind of perspective on Vietnam can come only with the passage of time.”

In the end, Caputo was right: That Vietnam war masterwork wouldn’t come until 2009, when Karl Marlantes published Matterhorn, a 600-page epic that took him 35 years to write. Matterhorn is the War and Peace of the Vietnam War. The novel follows a company of Marines as they take and try to hold onto a jungle-covered hill that gave the book its title. Marlantes, who graduated from Yale and dropped out of a Rhodes Scholarship to volunteer in Vietnam, followed Matterhorn with the nonfiction work What It Is Like to Go to War, an equally profound meditation on violence, society, and homecoming.