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Graduation season is upon us. At commencements across America, graduates are sitting patiently in their caps and gowns, their parents perched uncomfortably in the bleachers of a basketball arena. There, they often endure an address from a soon-to-be-forgotten political figure exhorting the graduates to undo some of the damage that the other side has done to the nation. Or the grads get advice to go have fun in their careers—from, say, a cardboard-box magnate so severely workaholic that he had three heart attacks and two divorces by the age of 40.

True, a few commencement speeches have been memorable, such as David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” at Kenyon College in 2005; Steve Jobs’s “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” that same year at Stanford University; and Admiral William H. McRaven’s “Make Your Bed” at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014.

It’s Monday, May 25. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. This Memorial Day, Aaron MacLean revisits one of the great novels about the sacrifices soldiers made during the Second World War. Plus: Tyler Cowen’s guide to how to save your job from AI. The betrayals of the LGBT movement. And more.

But first: Are we on the brink of a peace deal?

Deal or no deal? That is the trillion-dollar question looming over much of the world—and the White House—this Memorial Day. The president skipped his son’s wedding and spent the weekend at the White House, reportedly hammering out the details of an enduring peace plan to put an end to the war in Iran.

On Saturday, Trump said the “final details” of a deal were “being discussed” and would “be announced shortly.” By Sunday, a breakthrough seemed a little less imminent. “I have informed my representatives not to rush into a deal,” the president said in a post on Truth Social. “Both sides must take their time and get it right,” he added.

So, what is the latest state of play? And why are we in this deadlock in the first place?

Eli Lake offers answers to those questions in his reported column this morning. Read his analysis to understand what is really pushing the president to make a deal.

—The Editors

In a Memorial Day edition of Things Worth Remembering, Aaron MacLean revisits Herman Wouk’s 1978 novel War and Remembrance, which describes a soldier’s sacrifice and the American cause during World War II. It’s a captivating work, bringing the reader face-to-face with the horrors of the Holocaust and the heroic Allied victory in the Pacific, and braiding together a “tale of American sacrifice and Jewish tragedy, and the complex but profound links between the two.”

Such a work is desperately needed, writes MacLean, at a time when influencers on the left and right have begun to question the righteousness of America’s war against the Nazis, and the stories of the liberating generation who fought in Europe and the Pacific begin to fade from living memory.

For more Memorial Day reading, revisit H.R. McMaster on the soldiers he remembers, Joe Nocera on why America still has heroes, and assorted Free Press contributors on the heroes who never made it home

• The Russian military pummeled the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv with missiles and drones late Saturday night, killing at least two and wounding 83. Russia launched 600 drones and 90 missiles, including a hypersonic ballistic missile. The attack targeted government offices as well as schools, supermarkets, and apartment complexes. “It is crucial that Russia does not get away with this,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said after the attack.

• A gunman was killed after opening fire just outside the White House on Saturday afternoon, prompting the Secret Service to return fire, killing the gunman and injuring a bystander. Approximately 15 to 30 shots were fired during the exchange, according to officials. President Trump was at the White House at the time, but was “not impacted.”

• Douglas McCain, the eldest son of late, longtime Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, died Sunday. He was 66 years old. “He was a truly wonderful, joyful man who supported me throughout my life. He brought humor, fun, and great conversation to every room,” Meghan McCain, his sister, said in an Instagram post after the announcement of his passing.

• A second Ebola screening center was made operational in Atlanta, Georgia, for Americans returning from countries that have experienced a severe Ebola outbreak in recent weeks. Located in the same city as the Centers for Disease Control, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport will be an additional point of entry, along with Washington’s Dulles Airport, for passengers returning from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, or South Sudan.

• China began its first space mission set to last more than a year on Sunday afternoon, launching three astronauts into orbit. The Shenzhou-23 mission will carry the crew to the Tiangong space station to study space’s effects on the human body in preparation for China’s goal of sending humans to the moon by 2030. China has been effectively banned from using the International Space Station since 2011.

• Felix Rosenqvist won the 110th Running of the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday afternoon, overtaking David Malukas in a stunning last-second pass and winning by half a car length, the closest finish in race history. The race honored Kyle Busch—the champion NASCAR driver who died suddenly on Friday at the age of 41—during the 18th lap, commemorating Busch’s longtime number.

President Donald Trump is on the precipice of surrender in his second Iran war, according to some of his most devoted supporters. At issue is a proposed 60-day ceasefire that in theory would open the Strait of Hormuz and end the U.S. blockade as the two sides work on a broader nuclear deal. The president himself is giving mixed signals. On Saturday, he said he was very close to an agreement. On Sunday, he said he had told his team “not to rush into a deal” and posted an AI-generated image of a precision-guided munition emblazoned with “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Leaks in the press suggest that the U.S.-Iran agreement would compel Trump to give Iran an economic lifeline in exchange for opening the strait. Republicans have panned the early reported details of the deal. Senator Ted Cruz posted on X that the war would be a “disastrous mistake” if it ended with “an Iranian regime—still run by Islamists who chant ‘death to America’—now receiving billions of dollars, being able to enrich uranium & develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz.”

Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said early reports of the agreement “seem straight out of the Wendy Sherman-Robert Malley-Ben Rhodes playbook,” referencing three senior Obama administration officials who helped craft the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. This prompted White House director of communications Stephen Cheung to implore Pompeo to “shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals.”

But Trump is hearing it from all parts of his coalition. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, on Sunday warned the president via X that the Iranian regime is lying, and that the $25 billion that the U.S. is reportedly offering in sanctions relief and unfrozen assets would be paying “tribute” to a terrorist regime. Senator Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, posted Saturday on X: “The rumored 60-day ceasefire—with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith—would be a disaster.” Meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham has warned throughout the weekend that ending the war now would give Iran a victory they did not earn on the battlefield.

Are you afraid of losing your job to AI? It is hotly debated whether AI is making jobs scarcer right now. But whatever may be the case today, it is not crazy to have this fear for the future. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co. already has told us he expects to hire more AIs and fewer bankers.

With this risk in mind, I thought I would write a simple guide on how to protect and support your career prospects. There are no absolute guarantees, but you can improve your odds in the labor market. The same steps will also benefit society by allocating your labor more efficiently and minimizing the time you might spend on the dole.

Principle one: Look for messy jobs.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, as we commemorate Memorial Day, Free Press columnist and Marine Corps veteran Aaron MacLean reflects on Herman Wouk’s World War II masterpiece “War and Remembrance,” and its unbearably human depiction of a war now increasingly confined to the history books.

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

Strange young man that I was, I first encountered Herman Wouk by way of Gore Vidal, whose collected essays I purchased from the Crown Books at Springfield Mall in Northern Virginia when I was about 15. The son of a retired Army officer and a public school administrator, I had no idea who Vidal was, but it had an arresting cover with Jasper Johns’ American flags, and the essay I happened to flip to (a review of Robert Graves’ translation of Suetonius) had lots of sex. Sold.

Back at home, I turned to a stunt-essay that had run in 1973 in The New York Review of Books, in which Vidal reviewed all top 10 New York Times fiction bestsellers. The utterly cynical and nasty (and frequently funny) polemicism, implicitly in defense of Art and Language, was thrilling. His attitude toward his authors was that of a Kriegsmarine captain conducting unrestricted U-boat warfare in the waters off Nova Scotia: no prisoners.

The journalist Sean Trende spends most of his time dissecting the details of American politics. As senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, he’s normally diving into vote counts, redistricting maps, and polling crosstabs. On Friday, however, he published a very different kind of story. It’s about his oldest son, Judson, who is 18 and has profound autism. It’s a beautiful account of fatherhood, family, and why a less than perfect life is still very much worth living. We’re grateful to Sean for letting us share it with you. —The Editors

Friday was a day I’ve dreaded for over a decade. At around 6:20 a.m., we got my oldest son, Judson, up, gave him a bath, put his safety harness on (don’t worry, we dressed him first), and then watched him amble down our driveway to the school bus, as we had almost every school day since fourth grade. He went through whatever class activities he had, came to the end of the day, and got ready to ride the bus home, as he had almost every school day since fourth grade. His teachers and aides wiped their eyes, put him on the bus, and off he went, just the same as he’d done almost every school day since fourth grade.

Judson was a senior in high school. He also has profound autism. He’s 18 years old, and while he blessedly has some capacity for speech, I’ve never had what you would call a conversation with him. And I assume (though I can’t really know) that he had no clue that Friday wasn’t just any old school day like he’s had since fourth grade. Two days ago, Judson Hancock Trende had his last day of class. He got off that bus, and he’ll never get back on. When his schedule-obsessed brain prompts him to seek reassurance by asking “School tomorrow?” today, the same way he has every Sunday for well over a decade, we will have to figure out a way to let him know that, no, there’s no school tomorrow, and not the next day or the next one. Not ever.

Thirty years ago, in February 1996, Cuban MiGs over international waters off Cuba ambushed and shot down two unarmed Cessnas operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an exile-led humanitarian group that flew small civilian planes over the Florida Straits to spot rafters fleeing Cuba during and after the post-Soviet economic collapse. Four men were killed. And they were killed doing life-saving work. For Cubans crossing on inner tubes and makeshift rafts, an airborne volunteer with binoculars could mean the difference between rescue and drowning. By Brothers to the Rescue’s own account, the group flew 32 missions a week at its height and helped locate more than 17,000 people at sea.

There has been no accountability for, and little public memory of, this heinous crime. In fact, in popular culture, the main representation of the incident has it factually and morally backward. In 2020, Netflix released Wasp Network, a dishonest film about a Cuban spy ring that helped enable the killing of the four men. The fictionalization turned Cuban intelligence agents into patriotic underdogs and treated the men they killed as an inconvenient subplot, which helped cement a misleading public memory of a murder, especially among viewers too young to remember the case.

This week, 30 years after the shoot-down, the U.S. government took an important step toward setting the record straight. The Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment charging Raúl Castro and five co-defendants with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder. This indictment has been interpreted by the press as a sort of presage to future military or diplomatic action by the Trump administration in Cuba, a pretext for whatever the next dramatic turn in Trumpian foreign policy may be. But the actual substance of the indictment should not be ignored.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Joe Nocera reviews the new Steve Jobs biography, 40 years after profiling him. Jill Kargman, who skewers the Upper East Side for a living, says: “I don’t need Bellinis to be uncensored.” Kat Rosenfield was wrong about The Sheep Detectives. Kara Kennedy defends the self-professed “slut,” and now mom-to-be, Alex Cooper. And much more!

But first: The builders of the Bay Area are finding God.

If you go to a party in the Bay Area, there’s a good chance you hear AI researchers making their favorite joke: that they’re “building God.”

Very few mean it literally. They just mean that this technology could become more powerful than anything we’ve ever known. But Avital Balwit, Chief of Staff at the AI firm Anthropic, sees the joke as a reminder that, even as it works to transcend humanity, Silicon Valley has a God-shaped hole in its heart.

A lot of the people making this joke are about to become very rich—both Anthropic and OpenAI are set to go public at eye-watering valuations in the very near future—and have seen machines do things that seem miraculous. Materially, these tech workers could not be more satisfied. But spiritually, there’s an emptiness. And that’s a problem not just for them, but for all of us.

“You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied,” writes Avital. Having lived in San Francisco for four years, she found herself yearning for a religious practice. In her essay today, she explains why. Don’t miss it.

Whatever vulnerability a woman has, “there is a rabbit hole she can go down,” says Freya India, one of our new contributing writers and the author of the brand-new book Girls®, which is all about how her generation was robbed of their childhoods. Freya joined Suzy for the latest episode of Second Thought to talk about how Instagram makes girls hate themselves, how “femosphere” podcasts make women hate men, and how slowly but surely we’re all looking and sounding the same. . . .

Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the YouTube vid below. And if you want to keep up to date with everything Suzy does, don’t miss her newsletter!

Knock knock, it’s Cupid! A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet a former violinist in New York City who’s built an international career from Geneva to Hong Kong; a Shaolin kung fu blue-belt in Connecticut; or a pun-loving Angeleno who works in HR (but is more fun than Toby from The Office, he promises). 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, your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

Don’t miss Suzy Weiss’s latest investigation—into the weird, wonderful, and surprisingly controversial world of “cottage food”—and Noah Bernstein’s piece on the Enhanced Games, an Olympics-like competition taking place this weekend that allows athletes to dope. Plus: Novi Zhukovsky on whether AI just won a literary prize, and Liel Leibovitz on why the world of American podcasting is like North Korea:

Obviously, you should spend your weekend listening to The Lindbergh Conspiracies, a brand new true-crime podcast from The Free Press, about the mysterious kidnapping that has perplexed America for more than 90 years. But we also asked the host, our senior editor Joe Nocera, for some recommendations—for when you’ve finished binging his show:

📺 Watch . . . Do you miss the HBO satire Silicon Valley, which ended in 2019 after six hilarious seasons? I do—or at least I did until The Audacity popped up last month on AMC+. It is also very funny, but where Silicon Valley had a kind of sweetness at its core, The Audacity’s humor is rooted in a deep cynicism about the people who get rich peddling technology that both addicts us and strips us of our privacy. “Where’s our parade?” asks one of the show’s self-pitying billionaires. “All I see are pitchforks and ingratitude.” It’s the perfect show for us pitchfork carriers.

🎵Listen . . . The Portuguese word for mandolin is bandolim—and the greatest bandolim player in the world is a 50-year-old Brazilian musician and composer named Hamilton de Holanda. His trio’s latest album, Nova, came out earlier this week and it is a wonder: infectious, joyous, combining Brazilian rhythms with jazz-tinged improvisations. On one track, he plays with Anoushka Shankar, Ravi Shankar’s sitar-playing daughter. Also: If you live in New York, Holanda will be playing June 12 and 13 with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Not to be missed.

🎾 Sports . . . For the next two weeks, you can roll out of bed, make a cup of coffee, turn on the TV, and watch . . . tennis! The French Open starts Sunday, and I can hardly wait. Because it is played on red clay—the slowest tennis surface—it is easy to follow the ball on TV (unlike Wimbledon). And the rallies are often long and taxing, requiring a well-rounded game (again, unlike Wimbledon). Jannik Sinner, the world’s No. 1, who hasn’t lost a match since mid-February, is the favorite of course. But keep an eye out for Michael Zheng, who just graduated from Columbia University. He won his first-round match at the Australian Open, and he’s looking to better that in Paris.

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

Once upon a time, Steve Jobs told me that he didn’t like to think of himself as a businessman. Rather, he said, he thought of himself as a creative person—“a person who builds neat things.”

It was the fall of 1986, and he was reflecting on his self-identity as we were driving in his Mercedes coupe from Palo Alto to San Francisco. He was 31 years old at the time. The year before, he had lost a power struggle inside Apple and left the company. When I was assigned to profile him for Esquire magazine, he was in the process of building a new computer company, called NeXT.

I was never one of the small handful of tech reporters Jobs confided in, but for some unknown reason, he let me spend a week with him while NeXT was in start-up mode. I spoke to him late at night in his car, and in NeXT’s offices, with its $10,000 sofas and $2,200 chairs, not to mention an entrance staircase designed by I.M. Pei. I watched him brutally berate one of his executives in a meeting—and then lavish praise on that same person half an hour later. I saw him obsess over the color of the walls in the factory NeXT was building. I saw him refuse to listen to his team when they told him something he didn’t want to hear. This was the Steve Jobs I had read about when he’d been at Apple: a marketing genius who obsessed over the tiniest details, but also a brat and a bully who pushed people to the brink.

A running joke at Bay Area parties is that AI researchers are “building God.” This, of course, sounds wildly grandiose. No one I have met means it literally—nobody thinks they are making something supernatural or divine. To try to decode: The speaker is gesturing at how powerful this technology could become—even, eventually, functionally omniscient or omnipotent. They are trying to distinguish this invention from, say, social media, or even the internet. They do not mean the current model, but whatever comes after these systems start improving themselves and become far smarter than we are. They are reaching for a shorthand equal to what they expect, and I think that honesty is good for the world, whether or not the prediction holds.

From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.

AI workers tend to be less religious than the rest of the U.S. population. They are mostly lapsed in their faith, or were never religious to begin with. Perhaps they were circumcised or baptized; now they may occasionally meditate. This is, for the most part, a materialist lot—by which I mean people for whom the world is atoms and physical laws with nothing supernatural left over, and for whom morality is something worked out from intuition or from philosophy, rather than received from outside the world.

Their work is fascinating and all-consuming. Some are exhausted, and some do fear what they are making—loss of control, misuse, the economic disruption it may bring—but largely, their days are good and full. By any ordinary measure, there is little here to search for.