The Free Press

The odds of winning the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize—a prestigious literary award recognizing unpublished short fiction from writers across the countries that used to make up the British empire—are tougher than getting into Harvard University.

The winners—one from each of five different regions—survived successive rounds of cuts that whittled 7,806 entries down to 200, then to 25, then to five. A team of readers took the first pass, followed by a five-judge panel chaired by Louise Doughty, a celebrated English novelist.

And those who emerged victorious were promptly anointed as among the most talented new writers across the Commonwealth. They received a cash prize and saw their work published in the literary magazine Granta.

This year’s contest, however, has been rocked by a scandalous accusation: that one of those pieces receiving the prize was not written by an up-and-coming Commonwealth author. In fact, it wasn’t written by a human at all.

On Monday, reporters lingered outside a courthouse in downtown Manhattan, waiting to see whether Luigi Mangione’s defense team would address the public after the alleged killer’s latest hearing. Two young women wearing city-issued press passes around their necks were saying things that reporters hardly ever say.

“I’m standing on business, fuck Brian Thompson,” one of the women said about the CEO of UnitedHealthcare who was gunned down in cold blood outside a hotel in midtown Manhattan in December 2024. The woman slapped a paper fan in her palm for emphasis, then added: “I don’t give a flying fuck he died.”

A video of that comment posted by a New York Daily News reporter on X has been viewed 3.8 million times. You could see their press credentials, which said: “Press Identification City of New York.”

Just moments earlier, the same woman said that she and her two friends were part of a group called “The Mangionistas.” “We’re essentially here to be Luigi Mangione’s advocate as well as bring, um, social issues to light,” she said, her lips shiny with lip gloss.

On the night of March 1, 1932, someone climbed through a second-floor window in a house on a remote New Jersey estate and took a baby. The baby was later found murdered. But it was not just any baby taken and killed. He was the son of world-famous aviator Charles Lindbergh—the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, and far and away the most recognized man in America at the time.

The case of Little Lindy, as the press called him, captured the attention of America like no crime had before or since—even more than O.J. Simpson or the Menendez brothers. The country was hooked as the investigation into the “crime of the century” unfolded through horrific discoveries, suspicions, an arrest, and a trial. But what seemed like an open-and-shut case at the time has since become far murkier. In this age of true crime, there is renewed fascination, not to mention doubt, about who actually kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. Indeed, today, there is an effort underway to force New Jersey to use DNA testing on the ransom notes to see if, 94 years later, the mystery of who kidnapped Little Lindy can be settled once and for all.

There are just so many strange details about this story. The baby was kidnapped from the family’s country house on a day they never typically stayed. Nobody in the house heard anything—not even the family dog, who didn’t bark. After the baby was taken, Lindbergh himself directed the police investigation; among other things, he refused permission for his staff to be interviewed. The police acquiesced. When ransom notes emerged, they were written in broken English and had a visible symbol of interlocking circles at the bottom of them.

It’s a story steeped in enigma, and that’s why we decided to tackle all these mysteries—all the facts that don’t add up—for a new podcast entitled The Lindbergh Conspiracies, which premieres today.

We visited the New Jersey house where it all happened. We stood under the window to the room from which the baby was snatched. We went to the cemetery in the Bronx where a $50,000 ransom was handed over. We conducted experiments. We read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s heartbreaking diary accounts and letters. We measured the distance from the crib to the ladder. In short, we became obsessed.

Obsession seems to grip everyone who starts digging into the Lindbergh case. We spoke to more than 25 researchers, many of whom had wildly different theories of what happened that night. We’ve heard it all: that the mob was involved; that an insider did it; that the man executed for the kidnapping, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was set up. These are people who have devoted an astonishing amount of time and energy into investigating the case. We came to think of it as the first great American conspiracy. So join us on the investigation into the crime of the century. Once you go down this rabbit hole—trust us on this—you’ll find you can’t turn back.

Could author Robert Zorn be correct that the real killer was a sociopath named John Knoll? Did the recent investigations into the baby’s corpse and parts of his body being preserved point to a eugenics experiment gone wrong? And just what about the mafia? Did they have something to do with this? You’ll have to listen to find out.

Listen to The Lindbergh Conspiracies, a new podcast from The Free Press.

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If you thought freezing the bank accounts of people involved in the trucker protests of 2022 was peak overreach by Canada’s government, it still has plenty left in the tank.

In March, the Liberal government introduced Bill C-22 in the House of Commons as a supposedly restrained sequel to the original “lawful access” legislation that I warned about in this newsletter last June. The backlash has only grown from civil liberties groups, technology companies, cybersecurity experts, and pretty much anyone else uncomfortable with the idea of the state building the infrastructure for digital surveillance. It comes across less like a narrow policing tool and more like something assembled by bureaucrats who binge-watch spy thrillers.

Government officials claim that the critics are hyperventilating about modern tools that could help law enforcement and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service fight everything from money laundering to child sexual exploitation to terrorist attacks. Last week, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree accused U.S.-based tech firms of “misinterpreting some of the safeguards” built into Bill C-22, including encryption protections.

But when Signal threatens to stop offering its messaging app in Canada, virtual private network (VPN) company Windscribe says it might move its headquarters to another country, and Apple and Meta warn that the personal data of users might be put at risk, perhaps the problem is worse than the companies’ reading comprehension of a bill that includes over 19,000 words.

It’s Tuesday, May 19. 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 harrowing new report on the full scope of Hamas’s sexual violence on October 7. Arthur Brooks on what’s making us miserable. Anduril president Christian Brose on what the Iran war has revealed about American power. And much more.

But first: Tyler Cowen on the ideology that dethroned wokeism—and why it’s scarier.

In 2022, Tyler Cowen wrote an influential essay arguing that wokeness had peaked. At the time, it was a controversial claim. The cancellations hadn’t exactly stopped. Corporate boards were still pushing DEI policies.

We asked Tyler to revisit his claim four years on. Did he call the turning of the tide at the right time? And what has followed the period now remembered as “peak woke”? In his column today, he dives into all of that, and comes to a disturbing conclusion for anyone who might have thought that the ebbing wokeness meant a return to more moderate politics.

Read Tyler on what replaced wokeness, and why—from billionaire taxes to a new culture of assassinations—the “social energies of the American left have moved away from the realm of speech and into plans for concrete action.”

—The Editors

Yesterday we published an important essay by federal judge Roy K. Altman. In it, he detailed the many faults in the controversial Nicholas Kristof op-ed in The New York Times alleging systemic sexual violence in Israeli prisons, and brought new details to light that cast doubt on some of Kristof’s most explosive claims. If you missed Judge Altman’s piece, read it here.

One of Judge Altman’s complaints about Kristof’s op-ed is the timing of its publication, just a day before a landmark report detailing the sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023. The effect of Kristof’s column, whether deliberate or not, was to overshadow these important findings.

We invited the principal author of that report, Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, to explain in our pages what she discovered in the two years she spent meticulously cataloging the full scope of that day’s atrocities and how the sexual violence committed “was not incidental nor borne of the chaos” of that day, but rather “was part of the plan.”

• Three people were killed by two teenage gunmen at a San Diego mosque Monday. The two suspects were later found in their car, dead by suicide. The shooting is being investigated as a hate crime. A law enforcement source told the Los Angeles Times that anti-Islamic writings were found inside the gunmen’s vehicle.

• The workers powering the country’s busiest commuter rail line walked off the job Saturday, having gone without a pay increase since 2022. Monday’s commute into and out of New York City was severely disrupted for more than a quarter-million riders as a result.

• The national average price of gasoline has surged 56 percent to roughly $4.52 per gallon since the U.S. struck Iran in late February. That’s up from $2.89 at the start of the year, representing one of the sharpest fuel price spikes in recent memory.

• A New York state judge ruled that several items recovered from suspected UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione’s backpack—including his phone, passport, wallet, an ammunition magazine, and a computer chip—cannot be used as evidence in his murder trial. A journal and a gun found in the same bag were deemed admissible, according to the judge.

• Cuba has denied reports that the country has stockpiled more than 300 attack drones to use against U.S. targets, accusing President Trump of fabricating a case for war. The claims, first reported by Axios, suggested the drones—given to the country by Russia and Iran—could be aimed at targets including Guantanamo Bay, American warships, and Key West, which sits just 90 miles from Cuba’s northern coast.

• A coalition of more than 60 Trump allies, including Steve Bannon and conservative anti-AI activists Amy Kremer and Brendan Steinhauser, sent a letter urging the president to require testing and approval of powerful AI models before their public release. (For more on the broader debate over AI oversight, read Josh Code’s piece, “Who Should Control AI’s Most Dangerous Secrets?”)

• An Oakland jury rejected Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI on the grounds that he had waited too long to file, ruling the case fell outside the statute of limitations. Musk, who plans to appeal the decision, had alleged that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman steered the company away from its original nonprofit, human-centered mission in favor of commercial interests.

• The Trump administration dropped its $10 billion IRS lawsuit yesterday in exchange for a $1.8 billion taxpayer-backed fund to compensate people who claim they were politically targeted by the Biden Justice Department. The administration’s decision to settle appeared designed to sidestep a judge’s pointed questions about how Trump could legally sue an agency he now controls as president.

• The singer Shakira has been acquitted of tax fraud in Spain and will receive 55 million euros (plus interest) in repayments, the country’s national court announced yesterday. The case, which is more than a decade old, hinged upon allegations that the Colombian singer was legally a resident of Spain in 2011 and owed taxes to the country’s government for that year.

In the final episode of The Lindbergh Conspiracies, Joe and Poppy revisit the case’s most compelling theories one last time—from Robert Zorn’s claim that a German immigrant named John Knoll was the true mastermind, to Robert Cahill’s methodical argument that Bruno Hauptmann acted alone. They also follow one lawyer’s ongoing legal battle to secure DNA te…

Charles Lindbergh is not just the father of a kidnapped child—he is the most celebrated man on Earth, and increasingly the one shaping how the investigation unfolds. But behind the heroic image is a more complicated figure: both controlling and naive, and willing to overrule the police entrusted with finding his son. Does Lindbergh’s strange behavior ho…

One night in March 1932, the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh is taken from his nursery. A warped window, a ladder, and a ransom note mark the beginning of a case that will grip the world and launch a hundred conspiracy theories. Ninety-four years later, we return to the scene of the crime to ask: What really happened that night?

Christian Brose, president and chief strategy officer of Anduril Industries and author of The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, joins the show to help us evaluate American performance against Iran so far and discuss the state of defense innovation in America. What is on the cutting edge? Where are we falling behind? And w…

The pack is back. Spurred by the Supreme Court’s recent racial redistricting decision, important Democrats are once again calling for court packing if their party can run the table in 2028.

Kamala Harris, the failed 2024 presidential nominee but an early front-runner in the next race according to several polls, flirted with the court-packing club on Friday. Talking election strategy last week with a left-wing nonprofit, she urged “Supreme Court reform, including the notion of expanding the court.”

James Carville, a longtime Democratic adviser and strategist, may be the most enthusiastic backer of the idea. “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress,” he said on his podcast last month, “I think on day one, they should make Puerto Rico, D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. Fuck it, eat our dust.”