The Free Press

“One tragedy of social media is girls not seeing their unique beauty and all starting to look the same.” So says Freya India, one of our newest Free Press columnists, and the author of the brand-new book Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything. Freya has spent a lot of time thinking about what the internet, and social media, has done to girls. The answer, in short, is: nothing great. But it’s worth listening to the longer answer, which she elaborates upon in the conversation I had with her on my podcast this week.

We spoke a lot about the apps that allow you to modify your body to make it look better on the internet, as well as the endless stream of products we’re sold to make ourselves firmer, smoother, younger, and glowier. But Freya thinks it’s not just about physical upgrades—it’s our personalities too. We’re all “being dragged by that algorithm toward an eventual end product where we all become much more similar,” she said. In other words, the future is ruled by women who all, on some level, want to look like the Kardashians, who talk like the same few influencers, and who are trying to shop or medicate their way out of insecurity.

“Whatever vulnerability she has,” Freya told me about women like this, “there is a rabbit hole she can go down.”

Freya and I spoke about eating disorders, the benefit of stigmas, women’s fear of aging, men’s anxiety around their looks—and how various corners of the internet, from OnlyFans to podcasts about how men suck, have warped sex and intimacy. Somehow, she insisted that doing the research for her book didn’t make her depressed—quite the opposite. Listen below to find out why Freya, despite believing that Big Tech has hurt Gen Z women more so than the patriarchy, is hopeful:

Gabby Golden believes that God gave her the bakery, or at least the idea for it, so that she might bring in some extra income while still being able to stay home with her kids.

If so, she’s not the only one. There’s a quiet revolution sweeping America’s kitchens. Cottage foods—which is food, usually baked goods, prepared in private homes but sold to the public—have taken off. “It’s like everyone is posting ‘Hey, welcome to my home bakery,’ ” Golden told me.

Of course, producing and selling things like bread or jams from someone’s house has been around for thousands of years. But this latest cottage foods craze is animated by distinctly modern trends: side hustling to stave off inflation; skepticism of health guidelines handed down from the government; a worship of unprocessed, small-batch foods; and the on-camera appeal of removing steaming scones from the oven while toddlers and pets pad around nearby.

But lately the idyllic notion of selling chocolate chip cookies from your porch has been crashing into the reality of public health inspectors, commercial bakery owners, and legal liability. “We’re talking about food in people’s mouths,” Rachel Smith, a bakery owner in Wisconsin, told me. She told me she thinks it’s unfair for women like Golden to sell their fare with no oversight, while bakers with storefronts like her are subject to inspections, fees, and permits. Not to mention: In many states, cottage bakers don’t have to do any food-safety training. “If it’s in your kitchen, you should know how to handle it so that the end consumer is safe,” Smith added.

I spoke to cottage food producers, farmers, a public health official, and commercial bakers for my story about this trend. I learned that states have different regulations when it comes to cottage foods; there are differences in how each defines nonhazardous, for example, while various states have special carve outs for pickled foods, or tamales, or fudge. Many states have updated their books, or started doing so, to either loosen or tighten the rules around not just cottage foods but also raw milk and prepared meals. And that’s not to mention the cottage industry that’s sprung up around cottage foods: apps to keep tracks of sales and inventory, microbakery coaches, and conferences to learn about how to handle cheese safely.

On the surface, it might seem like a story about some moms selling bags of snickerdoodles to help bring in some extra cash—and in part, it is—but it gets at some of the most controversial topics in America right now. Like, who benefits from the gig economy, and who loses out? And who gets to decide what you do in your own home? This is a tale about the benefits and drawbacks, and the risk we take on, when we trade safety for more freedom.

Read my piece on cottage foods:

If you know anything about the Amish, perhaps it’s that they live life the old-fashioned way: They avoid electricity, churn their own butter, and drive horse-drawn carriages. But their new obsession is something all too new: They’ve fallen in love with AI. New York magazine went deep into the communities where TV is banned, but ChatGPT is as common as straw hats.

For a brief moment in the 2010s, Tiger Moms ruled the world. After decades of gentle parenting, moms who obsessed over their kids’ chess classes, charity work, and early SAT prep were all the rage. Now, it seems the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction: “Beta moms” are in, and they’re shrugging their way through parenthood. The Wall Street Journal heard from one mom about her 13-year-old that “she usually won’t know precisely where in Los Angeles he is.”

Last week, Canadian rapper Drake dropped not one but three new albums. The new songs are filled with pettiness, and retribution—some have speculated that even the release itself is an attempt to get out of his record deal—but, more importantly, some of them are the fun, dancy kind you will be hearing nonstop. As my Gen Z colleague put it this week: You know it’s gonna be a good summer when it starts with a Drake album. Luckily for us, we have three.

Our favorite polymath Andrew Ross Sorkin sat down with Jeff Bezos for an interview at the Florida Rocket Park factory of Blue Origin, Bezos’s space company. The conversation is full of juicy takeaways about everything from data centers in space to the future of tax policy. Jeff’s views on the AI economy are beyond optimistic: “You’ve been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel. And somebody’s about to hand you a bulldozer. You should be so happy!” Here’s hoping!

Last week, University of Cambridge student Maeve Halligan delivered a speech at the Cambridge Union in support of the motion, “This House Believes Modern LGBTQ+ Activism Fails Its Community.” According to Maeve, a movement built to protect gay and lesbian people has not only abandoned them by shifting its focus toward trans ideology, but is now actively harming vulnerable children by pushing them toward irreversible medical procedures.

The subject is one of the most fraught of our time—and it is one we’ve covered extensively in our pages, from Jonni Skinner’s firsthand account of the permanent damage done to him by youth gender transition to Jamie Reed’s whistleblower account from inside a pediatric gender clinic. After years in which many institutions treated skepticism of gender medicine as heresy, more voices have gradually begun challenging that consensus. Maeve’s is one of them. Below is an edited version of her remarks. —The Editors

Somewhere along the way, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem. 

The original struggle for gay and lesbian rights was not misguided. Progress has been made. But the activist movement that was built to protect those same people has, in significant and measurable ways, abandoned them. And those paying the highest price for that abandonment are, increasingly, also, children. 

After founding the Cambridge University Society of Women—the only single-sex women’s organization at Cambridge, advocating women’s sex-based rights—I have been shouted at in the street, dubbed a fascist, spat at, insulted for my appearance, and contacted online with rape and death threats. You want to talk about hatred? I can tell you all about it: A woman trying to assert her sex-based rights gets abused for doing so. This is one of the many predictable consequences of LGBTQ+ activism—a movement that has lost its way.

“I’m sure I have bad bones. I’m sure I have, like, wafer bird bones. But I don’t like protein and I don’t lift weights,” Jill Kargman tells me. “My doctor literally called me skinny fat, and said if you trace me naked, on a paper, it would look healthy, but I have 26 BMI, which is bad.”

The 51-year-old writer and actress—who’s known for her Bravo scripted series Odd Mom Out and the dozen books she’s written—says she doesn’t “really give a shit” and just wants to look good in clothes. But she has to start caring, “or I’m gonna fall down the stairs and Ivana Trump myself—except she was murdered.”

Oh?

“Someone told me she died three months before her NDA expired,” she says, taking a sip from her Bellini.

Jill and I are at Amaranth, an Upper East Side staple just off Madison Avenue. It’s the type of place chock-full of the women Jill skewers in her new movie, Influenced: the over-Botoxed, overfilled, Ozempic-loving lunch bunch with Cartier stacks and Birkins dripping off their arms. (The $39 chicken paillard is five stars, though.)

Jill cowrote and stars in the movie as Dzanielle, a momfluencer chasing one million followers, whose son at one point asks, “Mom, how come we don’t have any poor friends?”

The year was 1985; the setting, a drive-in theater in upstate New York. The movie on the screen was Steven Spielberg’s E.T., and we had come to the moment—you know the one—where E.T. says goodbye. He places his glowing finger on Elliott’s heart; he croaks, “I’ll be right here”; he ascends to the vessel where his friends are waiting to welcome him home. The music swells, and the spaceship looks like a jewel as it soars away into the night sky, and I—three years old, wearing footed pajamas, high on sugar and the thrill of still being awake hours after my usual bedtime—had never seen anything so cool. The alien! The spaceship! The action! The adventure!

It was just too bad that my parents clearly hadn’t enjoyed the movie very much, seeing as they were both crying.

Such is the magic of the family film: It can move adults of all ages, while delighting any children they may or may not be chaperoning.

It’s Friday, May 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: What the Democrats’ “autopsy” of the 2024 elections accidentally reveals. Peter Savodnik profiles progressive LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman. Plus: Martin Gurri asks, “Is the Cuban regime about to fall?” and Niall Ferguson joins Aaron MacLean to make sense of the new world disorder. All that and much more.

But first: Is the “doping olympics” the future of sports?

This weekend in Las Vegas, athletes will gather for the inaugural Enhanced Games. It’s like the Olympics, except performance-enhancing drugs aren’t banned—they’re encouraged. Competitors are juiced with testosterone, anabolic steroids, peptides, and all sorts of other chemical formulations banned in regular events.

Over 40 world-class athletes will compete in track, swimming, and weight lifting. Many are retired Olympians looking for another shot at glory, albeit with the help of drugs administered by doctors at a clinical trial and training camp in Abu Dhabi. Critics say the event is a gimmick designed to sell supplements. The games, which cost $31 million to put on, will certainly be a splashy event, complete with a closing ceremony headlined by The Killers. But is all that spectacle enough to attract sports fans who despise steroids and look down on the athletes who use them?

The company behind the event—which just went public, received early investments from both Peter Thiel and a firm tied to the Trump family, and is worth about $665 million—is betting the answer to that question is yes. Enhanced Group Inc. also says it will eventually make more money from supplements and over-the-counter drugs as from the events themselves.

In our lead story today, The Free Press’s Noah Bernstein delivers the inside scoop on how it all came together. He speaks to athletes and executives to understand whether the juicing Olympics are the future of sports—or an embarrassing disaster for all involved. Read the whole thing and decide for yourself.

—Will Rahn

On Monday, we ran a rigorous examination by federal judge Roy K. Altman of Nicholas Kristof’s inflammatory piece in The New York Times that alleged Israeli prison guards use sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners as a matter of “standard operating procedure.” Altman found that Kristof’s piece is a travesty on multiple levels, and one that undermines “the fundamental rules of fairness and due process that have, for centuries, served as the bulwark of our democracy.” It is perhaps the most damning critique of Kristof’s much-criticized piece out there—and a must-read if you want to understand how the American media lost its way on Israel and much else.

Have you heard about the cottage-food boom? All across the country, Americans are selling homemade foods like cookies and cake and making good money in the process. These often-delicious treats are a financial lifeline for growing families. So why, Suzy Weiss asks, are local governments trying to throttle the cottage-food industry? And is the bipartisan push to regulate kitchen-made goods really a question of whether we can still trust our neighbors? Read her eye-opening look at how the battle over cottage foods became a microcosm of American life in the 21st century.

The Trinidadian poet and author Jamir Nazir just won the extremely prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The only problem is that the story he submitted, about a rural farmer’s romantic longings, might have been written by artificial intelligence. Or at least that’s the accusation leveled by some AI experts. And while we might never know for sure whether Nazir wrote his story or outsourced it to a large language model, Novi Zhukovsky writes, the notion that we can no longer distinguish between brilliant writing and AI slop raises a number of uncomfortable questions about where literature—and our culture at large—is heading. Read this story if you want to understand just how fraught the questions of trust and authenticity are going to get in the age of AI.

In 2022, Tyler Cowen made the case that “wokeism” had peaked. It was a counterintuitive argument at the time, but it looks prescient in hindsight. In his column this week, Tyler updated his argument. The problem, he wrote, is what replaced it, which he calls “a new culture of anger and resentment.” So what does that look like? Everything from California’s unworkable proposal to levy a new tax on billionaires and the murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and, of course, the startling rise of antisemitism. Read Tyler to understand what’s coming—and why he hopes it’s not too late to change course.

Last week, progressive Los Angeles city councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running to be the city’s next mayor, sat down for a one-hour interview with leftist streamer-slash-Chinese Communist Party–apologist Hasan Piker.

Piker has become something of a divining rod for Democrats: Senators Cory Booker and Elissa Slotkin, among others, refuse to be interviewed by him, arguing that Piker’s disparaging remarks about Orthodox Jews and his comment that “America deserved 9/11” render him beyond the pale. Others, including Rep. Ro Khanna and, presumably, Raman, insist Democrats should avoid “purity tests.”

Seated in Piker’s West Hollywood home studio, Raman and Piker discussed public housing and street trees and sanctuary cities—all of which Raman knows a great deal about and Piker seemed to find a tad boring—until they finally arrived, around minute 50, at the “elephant in the room,” as Piker put it. He meant Israel, which has become Piker’s very own purity test. “Do you agree with dozens of human-rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, that Israel has committed a genocide?” Piker asked.

Raman, who is running against Mayor Karen Bass and former reality-television star Spencer Pratt in the June 2 “jungle primary,” must have known that this was the whole point of the interview. She did what she and her team believe she has to do to convince undecided twenty- and thirtysomething über-progressives on LA’s east side to vote for her.

Lowering her voice just a bit, she replied, “I do, yes—I’ve said that.”

On Memorial Day weekend, Megan Romano will swim in her first race since retiring from the sport a decade ago. At 35, she is eight years older than the average woman in the most recent Olympic 50-meter freestyle final. Her fingertips and toes will grip the edge of the starting block, she will launch herself into the pool, and then she will propel herself with a relentless, efficient churn of her shoulders, back, legs, and core muscles. But unlike in previous races, Romano will rely on more than her body: On Sunday, a personalized slate of performance-enhancing drugs will course through her blood, and she will wear a swimsuit so drag-resistant that traditional competitions have banned it.

Romano won’t be swimming in a sanctioned competition. Instead, she is racing in the very first Enhanced Games, created to reveal what more than 40 world-class athletes in swimming, track, and weightlifting can achieve if they are encouraged to use drugs that would otherwise destroy their reputations and end their careers.

An old wound was reopened for Democrats on Thursday when a long-suppressed “autopsy” of their 2024 election loss was finally revealed to the public. Commissioned by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the report contains ugly truths the party brass preferred to avoid, and they suppressed it for more than a year before it leaked to the press. But as a former Democratic operative myself, I know that looking right at the mess is a first step toward healing.

President Donald Trump shattered Democrat’s expectations by winning the presidency for a second time. Not only did he topple the blue wall, but he became the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004. He even made massive gains among Democrats’ core constituencies, winning working-class Latino men and chipping away at a portion of black male voters, too.

I was one of those people who decided to give him a chance. In a viral essay for The Free Press, I wrote about voting for Trump after spending my entire professional life raising $50 million for Democratic politicians. And there was a brief moment in time when it did seem like they were sincerely searching for answers and seemed truly interested in learning what went wrong.

The autopsy ordered by new DNC chairman Ken Martin was supposed to guide that learning process. But it was a telling sign when months went by and it was never released. Senior officials were busily assigning blame to one another, fighting about whether Joe Biden’s late exit from the race had doomed their chances, or if Kamala Harris’s progressive image put swing voters out of reach. They didn’t want to reckon with the policies and positions that had tainted the entire Democratic brand.

Earlier this week, just as there was a rare moment of sunshine in London, I descended a flight of stairs into a basement. There, in the dark, I shuddered as the sound of gunfire ricocheted around me, recoiled as screams of innocent people rang out, and paused in moments of solemn reflection at the sheer scale of death perpetrated at the Nova Festival on October 7.

The Nova Music Festival Exhibition, an immersive and heartbreaking spectacle, first opened in New York nearly two years ago and has since traveled to cities all across the world. On May 20 it opened in London, arriving under a cloud of darkness: a tsunami of antisemitism plaguing the city, kick-started by the very same monstrous acts the exhibition memorializes.

Hello, and welcome back to TGIF with me, your corrupt host. And tune in to our mascot Joe Nocera’s new Free Press podcast, The Lindbergh Conspiracies. Oh, you bet we’re getting into true crime.

→ Massie lost but don’t worry, the party continues: The great all-our-problems-are-Israel coalition unifier, Kentucky Republican congressman Thomas Massie, lost his primary race this week. The far left and far right are very upset. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California cried out that “He lost because he had the guts to take on the Epstein class.” It’s always fun to hear new dog whistles for Jews. Last week it was globalists, this week Epstein class, maybe next week we’ll get “Spielberg’s ilk.” A girl can dream. Or here’s Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut: “So there you have it. If you lead a campaign against powerful pedophiles, you get drummed out of the Republican Party.” Anyway, Massie lost the race to be a congressman, which is a little like losing a race to become, I don’t know, a septic tank cleaner. What I’m saying is it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. A lot more paperwork than you thought, and still, it’s mostly shit. And now I’m sure he’ll get rich on the new hard-right populist podcast circuit. It’s booming. Did you know that the new coalition of “Questions Regarding the Holocaust” is having a conference? Sorry, that’s not fair, they are just Men Who Perceive All Problems Jewishly. Yes, they’re gathering at a convention center in Dallas. The speakers have lots of beliefs that really appall people, like that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote in elections anymore. But let’s not focus on that, they say, not today. That’s not important. What’s important is the Epstein Class controlling everything. And lo, Americans are into it. It’s relaxing to think that there’s just this one skeleton key that makes everything magic and good. Any niche political ideologies that you want to get through fast, just attach it to being anti-Epstein. Women voting is vaguely Zionist, did you know that? Suffrage kind of sounds like Pentateuch, if you squint a little.

The only little tiny glimmer here that I see is the apparent drop-off in Massie support in the 17–25 crowd, from a poll taken a week before the election. Maybe their brains have been less rotted by China’s TikTok warfare against American morale? Or maybe Massie is too soft for them.

→ This is a Dem who is, so far winning, her primary: Lest you think there are only Massies on the right, here’s Maureen Galindo, who finished first in her Texas district’s congressional primary, moving ahead to a runoff next week. Galindo wrote that she will “turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking. (It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists).” Don’t you just love when a politician has a light touch? It’s been missing from our discourse, I think, this level of civility and thoughtfulness. She later explained: “Putting Zionist billionaires in prison does not mean putting all Jews in internment camps.” Thank you for that clarification. Hands up if you’re relieved!

→ The IRS can never audit a Trump: It’s been a doozy of a week in President Trump Corruption Watch. It was too many corruptions, a scheme behind every gold picture frame. This week, after Trump sued the IRS for the leak of his tax returns (not cool guys), the government agreed to never audit Trump, his family, or his businesses again, which means Trump is never paying taxes again, my friends, if he ever even did. But there’s something worse. The government also moved to provide a new $1.8 billion slush fund—the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”—for Trump to give away to any of his allies who believe they were victimized by the Biden administration. A truth-and-reconciliation cash grab. I can only assume being victimized by the Biden administration means not getting an email back from the White House. Victimization is doing Meatless Mondays in the EEOB, right. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says the fund will be “a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.” To be clear, that is $1.8 billion (actually, $1.776 billion; yes, it’s a 1776 reference, obviously) that is being taken from taxpayers and given to whoever exactly is a victim of Biden. Anyway, aren’t we all sort of Biden victims in that we had to watch while everyone pretended a lovely but senile old man was president? That caused me distress. Can I apply for some cash?