The Free Press

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Maddy Kearns has two drinks with the commonsense congresswoman who’s constantly in trouble with her own party. Suzy Weiss calls a Taylor Swift expert to explain what’s gone wrong with Swift’s new songs. And more!

But first: What was Jane Doe looking for?

With all eyes on Ithaca, New York, this week, where the scandal unfolding over rape allegations on Cornell University’s campus has set the country ablaze, we turned to Caitlin Flanagan to help us make sense of the story.

Why did Jane Doe go to a fraternity house at 11 p.m. to join several men for sex? Why were the Cornell 7, as they are now infamously called, so quick to head to Chi Phi when they heard there was “free” sex to be had? Why wasn’t anyone in their fraternity willing to say: Enough, and help Jane Doe back to her dorm?

“In all of my long life, I’ve never seen the sexes pitched against each other at this level of contempt, and it’s a frightening thing,” writes Caitlin. “There is a very large number of men who hate women and an equally large number of women who hate men.”

And then there are the fraternities, which “stand for everything that campus chic stands against,” says Caitlin. “And in particular, they stand against all that is holy to a majority of college women.”

But through it all, one confounding fact remains: Year after year, young women of all political stripes flock to fraternity parties without fail. And bad things happen. Why do they keep going? Read Caitlin’s essay for answers.

Last week, newly married global superstar Taylor Swift released four new songs—with rhymes like “Now I’m wearing white, so hate all you like”—and the world immediately ripped them to shreds. On this week’s episode of Second Thought, Suzy and Dan called up Swift scholar Matthew Jordan to explain what went wrong, and whether the queen of heartbreak can make good music now that she’s with the love of her life. “It’s the equivalent of when a fat comedian loses weight,” Dan says. “Can you still be funny?” Click below to watch the episode, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This week, Suzy wrote about how Sydney Sweeney’s potential conversion could be the biggest gain for the Jewish people since Marilyn Monroe; Kat Rosenfield cautioned that we shouldn’t rush to conclusions about the “Cornell 7”; and “mom of the year” Erika Alvarez told the whole story of her husband, whom the internet tried to cancel . . .

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a lonely man in the Lone Star State; a piano man between New York and Miami; or a Boston woman who prides herself on her independence (both personal and political). 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, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our editorial assistant Evan Gardner for his recommendations . . .

🎵Listen . . .to Taylor Swift’s album Reputation. As Suzy mentioned, we all need a palate cleanser after the new releases—and this 2017 project does exactly that. At the time it was heavily criticized, but the album has aged better than any of her others; it’s filled with heavy brooding, savage shots at her exes, and the kind of pounding bass you can feel in your toes. In short, it’s a relic of the last time she pushed the boundaries, and dared to be disliked—and proof that only she could bring Ed Sheeran and the rapper Future together onto the same song.

📺Watch . . . Billions. As someone who went to a college with an open curriculum (and knows his weaknesses), I’ve avoided math like the plague, but this financial thriller makes you feel strong enough to crunch numbers with the best of them. In the year of its 10th anniversary, I highly suggest you watch this show for a glimpse at the upper echelon of hedge-fund life; but even if workplace dramas aren’t for you, the yearslong psychological warfare between its two protagonists is enough to make anyone grip the edge of their seat.

🍎Eat . . . apple butter. As Americans, we naturally give apple pie all the hype this time of year; but whether you’ve picked them yourself or just stopped at the grocery store, making this delicious compote is one of the best things you can do with your apples. Throw it on a slice of toast, in your bowl of oatmeal, or even just eat it with a spoon; it makes everything taste like the best part of fall, and doubles as a portable snack.

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

I don’t need to read one more text message or police report about what happened in the Chi Phi house at Cornell University two years ago. I don’t need any of that because I know this: A member sent out a text to all of the brothers advertising “free” sex in one of the rooms, and there wasn’t a single member of that outfit who was man enough to shut it down. There couldn’t really be a simpler test of manhood: If you got that text, would you go to the house to get your bit of free sex, or would you go to get her out of there?

I do, however, wonder how the campus newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, would receive the news of a man busting into that room during the early, consensual part of the event. “Slut-Shaming Chi Phi Tells Sophomore: Enough!” Or, worse, “Chi Phi ‘Rescues’ Sophomore Woman—From Herself.” But the headlines this week have been starkly different, and the eyes of the world are on Ithaca, New York.

The event itself took place two years ago, and it comes to national attention now because “Jane Doe” has filed a civil suit against a range of parties, including Cornell, the fraternity, and the seven men she alleges took part in the rape. The news was broken by the Daily Sun, which has been reporting it with avenging anger, and made the decision to print the names of the accused men. There’s plenty of evidence for the crowd who thinks the whole thing is a money grab, and a solid case that it’s not. It seems to produce new text messages and documents every day.

Great literature, and I suppose all art, ages well with time. Or maybe we age well with great art.

When I was in my early teens, I read John Steinbeck’s 1952 book East of Eden. More decades later than I care to count, I have been given the opportunity to be the moderator for The Free Press’s inaugural online book club, where we are currently reading Steinbeck’s novel. Alongside more than 4,000 people, I have had the chance to rediscover the golden nuggets of wisdom in its mesmerizing words.

Few writers can place the reader into a scene like Steinbeck does in the opening chapter. The novel is set in California’s Salinas Valley, surrounded by, in Steinbeck’s soaring, idyllic language, “light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness.” Quickly, however, the reader learns that all is not paradise as the serpent of human folly winds its way into the story.

Welcome to Two Drinks, the column where The Free Press catches up with a newsmaker, trendsetter, or power broker. This week, Madeleine Kearns sits down with Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the Democratic congresswoman who’s constantly in trouble with the left flank of her party for voting with the GOP on everything from funding ICE to protecting the bottom lines of fishermen. Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez, who is 38 and represents a coastal district in Washington state, talked about bringing up her kid in rural America, why Blue Dogs overperform in elections, and how speaking publicly about her miscarriages made her feel “naked”—and much, much more.

“I am always going to be an underdog,” says Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the Democrat serving Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District. “This seat was drawn to be a Trump district. It is not a purple district. It is the only district Donald Trump won in the last three elections that a Democrat is holding and is running for reelection.”

The 38-year-old, who before running for office owned an auto-repair shop with her husband, Dean, in Portland, Oregon—not far from their Washington home—defied the odds in 2022 when she flipped her seat. She did it again in 2024, defeating Republican Joe Kent for a second time. (“Good hair, bad ideas,” is how she describes her erstwhile opponent.) And this November, she hopes to pull it off a third time in a toss-up against the GOP’s John Braun.

Her success—which she says is rooted in her “respect for people’s reasonableness”—is generally attributed to the fact that she’s a moderate; a co-chair of the Blue Dog Coalition, Gluesenkamp Perez regularly gets in trouble with her party for voting with the GOP, on everything from immigration policy to environmental matters.

Not that she minds. “I think it’s generally bad for democracy when we’re like, ‘There is one way to be a Democrat,’ ” says Gluesenkamp Perez. “I don’t think that’s good for anybody when there’s one way to be anything.”

It’s Friday, October 2. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Arthur Brooks wants a hobby. Should we bring back the firing squad—or get rid of the death penalty altogether? And much more.

But first: Is Iraq the next front in the Iran war?

Yesterday, President Donald Trump said the war with Iran will be over by the midterms, or soon after. But getting there may be harder than he lets on. Negotiations have stalled over Iran’s nuclear program, which Washington wants on the table now and Tehran refuses to address until its own demands are satisfied, including an end to the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz and the release of billions in frozen funds. Today we have two pieces on where things stand—and why the war may soon spill into a different front.

Michael Doran says Trump has the upper hand for now, with American pressure draining Iran’s economy. But the war is shifting power in Tehran from religious clerics to the generals of the Revolutionary Guards. And rather than cut a deal, Doran argues, they’re preparing to widen the war, turning neighboring Iraq into a launchpad against America’s allies. “Iran is indeed undergoing a regime change, just not the one Washington hoped for,” he writes. Read his piece on what the regime is planning.

Meanwhile, the last American troops left Iraq this week, closing out more than two decades of U.S. military involvement there. Elliot Ackerman, who led a Marine rifle platoon there in 2004, calls it a strategic blunder—one America has made before, with disastrous results. Read his column on what we risk by walking away.

—The Editors

This week, Tennessee’s attempt to execute Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death in the 1990s for the brutal murder of a fellow student, ended with her surviving two doses of pentobarbital and being rushed to the hospital. Today, we have two pieces on what that failure reveals about capital punishment.

When Oregon revived the death penalty after a three-decade pause, Frank Thompson was the prison official charged with designing how it would work. By the time his job was done, he had turned against the practice completely. Now 83, he talks with Noah Bernstein about his faith and his unusual proposal for lawmakers whose policies determine whether convicts live or die. Read their conversation here.

Lethal injection has become America’s go-to method of execution. Nicholas Clairmont argues that if the state is going to kill murderers, it should bring back the firing squad: a faster, more reliable method that’s honest about what an execution actually is. “If we can’t stomach a killing that looks like a killing, we shouldn’t do it at all,” he writes. Read his piece here.

The biggest story of the week was the miraculous averted disaster in the skies above the Middle East on Wednesday morning, when passengers aboard a plane bound for Tel Aviv thwarted an attempted hijacking by the co-pilot, a suspected terrorist. Neria Kraus spoke to one of those passengers as soon as he landed safely in Israel. In an exclusive interview with The Free Press, Yaniv Hayoun described how he stormed the cockpit as the plane went into a nosedive, put the attacker in a choke hold, and grabbed the controls himself.

The attempted hijacking was, as Douglas Murray put it in his column for us this week, “a metaphor for three years of war. The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course.” As the third anniversary of October 7 approaches, Douglas reminds us how often, and how thoroughly, Israelis have overmatched those enemies. Read his column on why, despite constant trials, Israel is winning.

If you were online at all this week, you couldn’t escape the case of the so-called “Cornell 7.” In 2024, a female student told police about a night at a fraternity house involving drugs, alcohol, and sex with seven men at the college. The district attorney declined to bring charges, citing her description of the events as consensual. But last month, she filed a civil lawsuit alleging she was too intoxicated to consent. Within days, the Cornell 7 were being named online, and this week, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten reopened the investigation. We published two essential pieces on the story.

The internet has already declared the seven men guilty, but Kat Rosenfield says none of us actually knows what happened that night. She walks through how Jane Doe’s two accounts differ and why the rush to convict on social media is a dangerous substitute for due process. Don’t miss her latest column.

The online mob didn’t only go after the accused. Frannie Block exclusively reported on Sergeant Matthew Ingalls, an active-duty Marine who shares a name with one of the accused men and was mistakenly served in the lawsuit, despite never attending Cornell. Since then, his family has been doxxed and flooded with threats.

This week, Mahmoud Khalil, the anti-Israel activist who led protests at Columbia University after October 7 and was later detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, published his memoir, No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention. Eli Lake finds the book unconvincing, saying it recasts the protesters as victims while ignoring the brutality of Hamas’s 2023 terrorist attack. Still, Eli argues Khalil shouldn’t be deported, since doing so would set a dangerous precedent.

In January this year, the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers resigned, following 19 seasons at the helm. After much “thought and reflection”—presumably, about the team’s prolonged lack of postseason success (they had not won a playoff game since the 2016 season)—Mike Tomlin stepped down. At the time, I wondered less about his decision, and more about how someone could possibly do a job like that for 19 grueling years and maintain his sanity.

It turns out I didn’t have to speculate, because just in the past few days, Tomlin has revealed that for the last 12 of those seasons, he has had an elaborate secret hobby: building a complex city in the video game Minecraft. This game is something like digital Lego combined with an enormous explorable world, and is currently played by 155 million others. “It was therapeutic for me,” Tomlin explained. “It allowed me to detach from the pressures and the reality of life.”

I will confess to being gobsmacked by this. I am always shocked when I learn that a prominent high achiever has an odd hobby, like tying flies or building birdhouses—activities that require special skill and effort, but without outside compensation like money or professional advancement. I imagine these people doing nothing but their jobs, obsessed and single-mindedly.

On September 29, President Donald Trump and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), commanded by Major General Ahmad Vahidi, each claimed victory. At the White House, Trump said Iran was “failing very badly” and the war would be “over with very, very soon.” Oil prices, he promised, would tumble back to where they had been before “that little excursion to the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The same day in Tehran, Vahidi’s IRGC delivered the opposite verdict. In an open letter to the American people, it declared that “the United States and Israel have suffered a crushing defeat, while the Islamic Republic of Iran has achieved a decisive victory.” After seven months of war, it wrote, the U.S. military “has scored no wins,” while Iran had won “operational control over the Strait of Hormuz.”

So, who’s right? As of now, Trump has the stronger case. But it is not quite as strong as he claims.

On Wednesday night, the state of Tennessee failed to execute Christa Pike, a convicted murderer, despite giving her a double dose of a drug that was meant to kill her. Since then, Pike has been in critical condition and is receiving medical attention, according to her lawyers, and has reignited a fierce debate about the role of the death penalty in the criminal justice system.

Among those rattled by the incident is Frank Thompson, the former superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary. The state has carried out only two executions over the past 60 years, in 1996 and 1997. And he oversaw both of them.

Now, Thompson is 83 and says the death penalty should be abolished. When I asked him about Pike’s botched execution, he told me that he was less concerned about why exactly it went sideways and more focused on the bigger questions it surfaces. Carrying out executions turned Thompson against the death penalty turned Thompson against the death penalty, and he hopes that Tennessee governor Bill Lee’s decision to postpone the last execution scheduled for this year will give lawmakers time to have a similar change of heart.

Hello and welcome back to TGIF, where we do news summaries. Just the facts, ma’am.

In housekeeping notes: Our October and November Supper Clubs are now live! Sign up here. And please watch this endorsement from Free Press Supper Club Queen Sylvia. And a quick note: We’ve published so much on the Cornell 7 this week that I’m skipping it today. Read Kat’s brilliant essay. We will dive into all that next week. For now, this will have to suffice.

→ America got a website!: Joe Gebbia, Chief Design Officer of America, co-founder of Airbnb, has given this country its first proper website. No, not X, and not Brazzers, you freaks. It’s America.gov. And it’s a search bar powered by AI, so you ask it things and it pulls from about 29,000 government websites. It also has helpful suggestions like, “Which military service is best for me?”

I tried to come up with Magic 8 Ball questions I had for America (Where is my closest polling place? R u racist? Will Bryan Johnson live forever? Do you want me here or should I leave?), but my mind went blank. I don’t have any questions for America, more like musings and the occasional yell. Still, it’s very nice-looking. The more we see the government as a consumer product, the more we will demand it work and be cheaper and tax us less. This website says “How can I help you, citizen,” and I like that. The more it looks like Uber Eats, the angrier we will be at what’s missing and damaged or wrong, and how long it took to get here. A country in 2026 is mostly a delivery service. It’s a thing we give money to in exchange for services, like roads or fire engines, and now search engines. Good for Joe Gebbia. And Hello, America!

→ AI summit delivers some great body language: All the Big Tech leaders came together with President Donald J. Trump to sign a “morally binding” pact that they won’t build artificial intelligence that kills us all. I love that. Morally binding. Call it what it is: a pinky swear for boys. I feel as though morally binding is another term for not legally binding, if you get me. It’s like if someone says they’re “morally monogamous” in this marriage, so I immediately understand they are cheating on each other. Here’s the president: “The biggest people in the world signed that and I signed it as president. And it really is a form of protection.” And: “I’m seeing tremendous self-policing.” Again: Self-policing means absolutely no policing. This meeting of kings was organized by House Speaker Mike Johnson. Now, on the one hand, morally binding and self-policing are both completely fake things that mean utterly nothing. Morally binding to whom? Trump? Morally binding. . . to Trump. At best, that means nothing. At worst, it means our tech leaders are about to collectively get a new set of younger, hotter wives. On the other hand, do I actually want the government regulating AI? The man who gathered everyone together for this high-tech summit of the future, Speaker Mike Johnson, literally doesn’t believe in evolution. Sorry, he believes in morally binding evolution. Intelligent self-design, if you get my drift. I’m not faulting the speaker for that, per se; I’m just suggesting that perhaps our government bodies are not the best group to decide complex regulations for developing technologies. Maybe it’d be better if AI regulated our government. Just an idea. It already made such a good website for us. I think AI would make a nice president. Cold, direct, and yet sycophantic. Take my vote!

The best part of the summit was watching Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei trying to act normal. At some point he gave a brief statement and then when someone in the press asked a question, he got so flustered that he started stimming, excused himself from the dance circle, then turned to hide behind someone (anyone), and it’s all so awkward that everyone around him tried not to laugh. Poor Dario. He wanted to make the computer do tricks and talk about rationalism on a bean bag chair and now there’s a CNN reporter screaming at him about data center water usage. Someone get this man his fidget spinner and give him back his over-the-ear headphones.

As part of the summit, Trump rebranded artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.” And I guess this encouraged everyone to get .si domain names. Trumpo has so many corruption schemes that at this point I’m very open to new, baseless corruption conspiracies, and here’s one: Maybe Trump told insiders about his “super intelligence” rebrand early because before anyone announced anything, a lot of people scooped up all the good .si domain names. It’s lucrative stuff. For example, Build.si seems to be for sale for $10 million. That’s a nice, tidy sum. Also, if you didn’t think artificial intelligence versus super intelligence would become a new culture war issue, think again, my homies!

Uh, thank you? But is this what America is asking for? Is this the new Gulf of Mexico versus Gulf of America? Artificial, super, I don’t really care. Just as long as it tells me I’m right.

→ Is this a new racial stereotype?: Here’s Trump speaking about his new ballroom to, presumably, a Hispanic group. “So there’s a tunnel going to what will be, I think, the greatest ballroom ever built—it’s also a tremendous military complex with a drone port on top. It’s quite the place. And you literally will be the first group ever to enter the premises. So be very careful. Don’t fall over the edge, ’cause it’s a long way down. And only a Hispanic could survive that fall. So I’m not overly worried.” My question: Are Hispanic people really durable? ¿No son frágiles como Humpty Dumpty? Is this a racial stereotype I missed? Hispanic readers, please answer in the comments, thank you.

→ New army motto: Here’s our Secretary of Defense announcing the new, more hardcore military.

My fear is where exactly Pete intends to recruit from if these are his parameters. No fatties and no weirdos? There are only so many Mormons, Pete. Everyone else here is a little fat and pretty weird.

Also, hold on—the future of war is AI with robot soldiers and drones that can bomb. The whole thing is going to be recruiting fatty weirdo beardo wimps. You think warriors build frontier computer programs? Honey. Weirdo Beardo is their middle name, Pete. You’ll be throwing your body at their feet, Pete, begging them to turn down $1 billion at Anthropic to help with the Houthis instead, please. You’ll offer to pay these freaks in rare Pokémon cards and Baja Blasts. I’m now going to include a photo of the founder of America’s foremost defense technology company, Anduril Industries. Here’s Palmer Luckey:

It’s not too late to apologize, Pete. The country depends on it.

→ Oh, hell yeah, they’re going after ticks: Trump is launching a new anti-mosquito and anti-tick campaign, via (what else) executive order.

The goal is to “reduce the Asian tiger mosquito, Egyptian mosquito, and other invasive mosquito populations, as appropriate, by 90 percent and reduce the tick population by 50 percent, with further reductions as practicable.” Oh, I get it: They’re branding the mosquitoes as illegal immigrants. Nice. I gotta say, figuring out a way to carpet-bomb ticks is where Republicans will win. You know the Dems are going to be against this. They’ll say calling Asian and Egyptian mosquitos invasive is racist. Or they’ll say it’ll harm a local newt, wilt some beautiful wildflower, and give us all a little extra cancer. When I was a kid on the family farm, my dad used to put on a backpack of Roundup to spray the weeds and I would follow behind, and I’m fine. I’m completely fine, minus some stuff. My point is, ticks are a choice. They are tiny terrorists, and they must be crushed by the iron fist of the American empire. Read my friend Ross Douthat’s Lyme disease memoir and tell me how you feel about eliminationist rhetoric around ticks. Trump, if you have to burn down Connecticut and Martha’s Vineyard just to do a reset on the whole tick thing, I support it. We’re at war. No fatty (ticks).

→ D.C. loves its corrupt council member: D.C. council member Trayon White was allegedly so corrupt that he was caught on camera in 2024 accepting cash in exchange for political favors, authorities say. It was really well documented, as far as crimes go: According to prosecutors, an FBI informant paid White $35,000 on four occasions, showing that he was accepting cash for helping to extend government contracts. His fellow council members dutifully ousted him after that. And then I need you to know that in the subsequent special election, his district reelected him to the open seat. And now a jury has declared a mistrial in the criminal proceedings. According to White’s attorney, they voted 9–3 to acquit. Nine to three! My only conclusion is that D.C. loves its corrupt council member, and they want him to keep going. Corruption is resistance. I say, let them have him. America is a diverse nation. If a group of people likes living in squalor with a corrupt official leading them and pocketing the community’s resources, just let ’em. I mean, don’t bail out Ward 8 when they start asking why all their services are crap. But the only alternative to this is to abolish jury trials, which I think is less than ideal. So. Godspeed to Ward 8!

How do you fight a superpower you can’t afford to stop trading with? The Dutch faced that problem at the start of the 17th century in their war against Spain, and their answer was the Dutch West India Company, a business built to wage war. Alexander Bick, a historian who served on the National Security Council under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, joins Sch…