Sal Mercogliano, professor of history at Campbell University and host of the What’s Going on with Shipping? YouTube channel, joins the show once again to discuss Iran’s renewed attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Why is the ceasefire already beginning to unravel? What is Iran trying to accomplish by asserting control over the Strait?…

With the exception of Israel, sub-Saharan Africa, and a few other spots, worldwide fertility rates are low and falling. And one viral economic analysis published this month suggests that smartphones are driving the decline. What will the world be like if the number of humans shrinks as a regular and ongoing trend?

That is only half of the equation I’m interested in. Technology may or may not be driving the fertility decline, but it will certainly define our experience of it. As humans dwindle, artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent. Even if we cannot count the number of individual AI systems out there, it is like having “tens of millions of geniuses” on the scene—as the technology is often described—and the number will eventually run into the billions. In other words, the ratio of AIs to humans is rising rapidly. Imagine, for instance, a world in which countries have a fraction of their current populations and continue to shrink, yet there are billions of AI agents.

The first and most obvious result is that the relative financial returns to being human will go up. Humans still will be needed for many jobs, especially if those jobs require manipulation of the physical world in complex or idiosyncratic ways, or if they require the expression of human charisma and persuasion. Entrepreneurs, entertainers, politicians, and gatherers of original data are still likely to be humans.

It’s Monday, June 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Mene Ukueberuwa reveals what Americans really think about racial progress, DEI, and fairness in America. Rod Dreher bids Hungary farewell. Joshi Herrmann explains why Britain’s new prime minister may be even blander than its last. And much more.

But first: The triumph of anti-Israel Democrats.

On Friday evening, California state senator and Democratic congressional candidate Scott Wiener was on his way to a trans-led Pride Shabbat service in San Francisco—an event he’s attended for 22 years. On his way in, protesters surrounded him, screaming: “We fucking hate you.” “You do not belong here.” And: “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of shit.” Wiener is a Jewish gay man. He left the event, fearing that staying could endanger him or his staff.

One would struggle to honestly describe Wiener as an Israel supporter. He has accused the Jewish state of genocide in Gaza, and called for a ban on U.S. military aid to the country.

It’s a stark example of something increasingly difficult to deny on parts of the left: No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you don’t entirely fall in line with a hard-line anti-Israel stance, you risk being ostracized. And in Wiener’s case, it’s hard not to conclude that the fact he is Jewish is part of the reason he was targeted.

The incident is also the latest indicator of a democratic socialist wing of the party emboldened and aggressive in its efforts to bring the rest of the party to heel.

The confrontation in San Francisco came days after the triumph of three Zohran Mamdani– and DSA-endorsed democratic socialists, all staunchly anti-Israel, in congressional primaries in New York City. In the coming weeks, two more Democratic candidates, every bit as radical and anti-Israel, are running in primaries in Colorado on Tuesday and in Michigan on August 4. Congressional candidate Milat Kiros is five points ahead in Colorado. Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate, is the current favorite in Michigan.

Take all this together and it feels like something that has been bubbling up for a while is suddenly spilling over.

How did we get to this explosive, unpredictable moment?

Commentary editor John Podhoretz answers that question for us this morning.

If you’ve wondered how it is that a progressive San Francisco lawmaker who has accused Israel of genocide could be harassed for being pro-Israel, or how a congressman in New York—still the most populous Jewish city on Earth—can get ousted for supporting Israel by Democratic Party voters, John’s essay will help you make sense of it all.

—The Editors

Today’s great American is Stephen Sondheim, the man who reinvented the Broadway musical with shows that were psychologically complex, musically original and, more often than not, profound. And also, argues Scott Wheeler, funny. “Throughout his musicals,” Wheeler writes, “Sondheim used comedy to lay bare our ambivalence, rationalization, self-justification, and general cluelessness.”

• The United States military launched air strikes at Iran on Saturday, after the Iranian military struck Bahrain and Kuwait. The exchange of fire comes at an especially fragile time, as the countries continue to try to negotiate a permanent peace deal.

• An earthquake in Venezuela killed over 1,450 people this weekend. Rescue teams are still searching for missing people, and aid workers from across the globe are arriving to help.

• The U.S. military officials said Sunday that they are still searching for a Marine who went missing off the coast of California. The Marine disappeared during a training exercise on Thursday, making him the second missing Marine in the past six weeks.

• President Trump nominated Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper, to become the new ICE director on Saturday. Schroyer is an adviser to Markwayne Mullin, whom President Trump appointed as DHS secretary earlier this year.

• Anthropic’s powerful new AI model Mythos is reportedly on track to become available again soon. The model has been offline for over two weeks, after the Trump administration deemed it a threat to national security. The two sides are said to be close to reaching a new deal.

• Bill Maher received the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center on Sunday night. While Maher has been known to skip award shows, he appeared onstage last night alongside fellow comedy legends, including Louis C.K. and Jay Leno.

Welcome back to The Honesty Project, a new series of opinion surveys from The Free Press. We’re asking Americans what they believe about the most important issues in public life, from political violence to the AI revolution. And we’re going deeper than a typical poll. We partnered with Populace, an opinion-research think tank, to design surveys that gauge respondents’ “private” opinions—the views they feel are too sensitive to share publicly. Our goal is to overcome the bias inherent in polls, which often elicit less-than-honest responses, and to understand what parts of American life people don’t feel they can speak about freely.

Our first edition last week asked questions related to the health of America’s civic life. And we discovered some disturbing trends. View the previous round of results here.

Today, many of our questions address fairness and equality in American life. That includes meritocracy in hiring, the value of hard work, the ethics of Donald Trump’s presidency, and more. We found that:

—Most Americans believe Trump’s inner circle is enriching itself at the public expense.

—A majority of Americans say publicly that race relations have gotten worse over the last five years. A minority of Republicans agree in public, but that figure rises to 59 percent for privately held views.

—Only 13 percent of blacks say in private that merit should trump representation in hiring, though a majority say so publicly.

—Among blacks, Generation Z, and the working-class, support for letting illegal immigrants who haven’t committed violent crimes remain in the U.S. drops significantly in private.

For a closer look at the methodology we use to capture people’s privately held views, watch our explainer video below, and view our full methodology here.

In the week since New York City’s primaries—when three democratic socialist, staunchly anti-Israel candidates swept to victory—we’ve published a series of stories examining what the results mean for the country, and in particular, for Democrats, some of whom say they don’t recognize their own party any more.

This weekend brought a visceral illustration of the new mood we’ve been trying to capture. On Friday evening, California state senator Scott Wiener was on his way to a trans-led Pride Shabbat service in San Francisco—an event he’s joined for 22 years. At the entrance, protesters surrounded him, screaming: “We fucking hate you.” “You do not belong here.” And: “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of shit.” Wiener is a Jewish, openly gay man.

His offense? His stance on Israel—specifically, his refusal at a campaign event to declare that “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” He later reversed course, but no matter. The damage was done.

If you haven’t seen the video, we encourage you to watch it. It’s a stark example of something increasingly difficult to deny on parts of the left: No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.

How, exactly, did we get here? According to John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, the DSA-style antisemitism now permeating large parts of the Democratic Party did not emerge overnight. Rather, it was cultivated over decades, tolerated and emboldened by leaders who declined to confront it. And if we ever hope to understand it, Podhoretz writes, we must go back to the very beginning. —The Editors

The political story of the year isn’t just the emergence of open and unabashed anti-Zionism among successful insurgent Democratic primary candidates for the House of Representatives in New York and New Jersey. It’s that the ideological prior they all have in common, the idea that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state, was not an impediment to their victories, but rather, their secret sauce. Over the next five weeks, two more states will host primaries that will show whether this attitude has the same kind of appeal to Democratic voters elsewhere in the nation.

Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary pits two relatively conventional Senate candidates (both mildly to severely critical of Israel) against the Muslim radical Abdul El-Sayed, a former public-health official in the state. Trained as a doctor, El-Sayed deployed his professional credential to excuse away the monstrous crime of the Hezbollah-inspired Lebanese immigrant who drove a truck into a Michigan synagogue last year. He released a video explaining that his time on a psychiatry rotation had taught El-Sayed how “hurt people hurt people.”

Asked about the difference between Hamas and Israel, El-Sayed told CNN, “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one: Hamas evil, Israeli government evil. You can say both.” He appeared alongside Hasan Piker, the social-media firebrand who has said Hamas is “a thousand times better than Israel,” and responded to criticism of his friendly and unchallenging posture toward Piker by declaring that “my understanding of America is, it’s a place where we have freedom of speech.”

El-Sayed is favored to win the primary on August 4.

“Bill Clinton operates by sonar,” observed Robert Reich, who knew the 42nd president as a friend and served for four years as his Secretary of Labor. “He emits a huge number of policies, ideas, and initiatives and he sees what kind of response he gets. And where he sees an opportunity to move, he moves.”

That quote, from Joe Klein’s profile of Clinton published by The New Yorker more than 25 years ago, came to mind recently when I was trying to think of how to capture Andy Burnham, the man who is near certain to become Britain’s next prime minister after Keir Starmer’s resignation. I run a start-up newspaper in Manchester and have been covering Burnham closely for six years now, in his role as the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, and yet I still struggle to define exactly what it is he believes in. The public sees him as a successful mayor, who is running on his record of improving Britain’s second city, but they know little else about what he stands for and what he’ll do in office.

Like Clinton, he emits his sonar waves to build a picture of what it is that he thinks voters and party activists want and then shapes his views accordingly. Since he emerged in British politics in the early 2000s as a high-flying adviser and then cabinet member in Tony Blair’s Clinton-inspired “New Labour” government, Burnham has been regarded with suspicion by many political commentators, not to mention members of his own party.

Stephen Sondheim was a master of the Broadway musical and one of its greatest innovators. The breadth of his subjects is dazzling: the French pointillist painter Georges Seurat (Sunday in the Park with George), the opening of 1850s Japan to Western commerce (Pacific Overtures), the killers and would-be killers of American presidents (Assassins). Even his adaptations had distinguished source material: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is based on the works of the Roman playwright Plautus, and A Little Night Music is a reworking of the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night. (The title is a translation of Mozart’s string serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik.)

Sondheim (1930–2021) has the reputation as the most highbrow of Broadway composers. His music is psychologically subtle and astute, and notoriously challenging to perform. It’s not hard to understand why a 1994 New York magazine article had the title “Is Sondheim God?” But if we glance under the hood to see how the machinery works, what we find is comedy. And he knew it. When Sondheim was awarded the 2013 MacDowell Medal, his acceptance speech began: “I take genuine pride in being the first to represent the former runt of the arts: musical comedy. Yes, I mean musical comedy, not musical theater.”

Born to upper-middle-class New Yorkers, Sondheim was a child of divorce and found a surrogate father in a neighbor, the famed Broadway lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. He pushed the budding young composer toward musical theater and devised a program of study that paid lifelong dividends. Sondheim wrote his first musical at 15. By his mid-20s, he was collaborating with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story. (His story is well told in Daniel Okrent’s recent biography: Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy.)

Welcome to The Weekend Press! Today, the woman who planned JFK Jr.’s wedding on how Taylor Swift could get married in secret. Two Drinks with the Republican senator who says Iran is running rings round our president. Sitcom star Mayim Bialik gets real about her “personal neuroses.” And more!

But first, Suzy Weiss introduces the origin story of a media empire. . . .

The beginnings of media empires are seldom smooth. The Free Press began on Substack, when Bari and Nellie created an account using crappy airplane Wi-Fi. But after that, it was like we were News Corp. Just kidding: There was endless confusion about everything from incorporating (hello, Delaware!) to office kitchen-cleaning politics (ceramic coffee cups are a privilege, people!) to office leases on both coasts. (Thank you, Craigslist!)

Dave Portnoy knows what I’m talking about. He started Barstool Sports—the bro-tainment juggernaut that pumps out sports articles, gambling picks, podcasts about getting girls, and fodder for internet drama at an industrial scale—with a loan from his dad that he used to buy 100 newsstands, which his mom helped him set up all over Boston.

He was just a recent Michigan grad (Go Blue!) with a deadening sales job and a hunch about what guys really wanted to read, and the gambling companies that might take an interest on the ad side. But he eventually sold a stake of his company for millions upon millions of dollars. These days, the brash-talking Boston kid is, somehow, the Rupert Murdoch of people who spend weekends shotgunning beer.

In today’s lead essay, Portnoy lays out exactly what the beginning of Barstool Sports looked like: broken-down vans, drunk contractors, Hooters ads, and all. The first edition of the paper introduced it as a publication by normal dudes, for normal dudes: “The people at Barstool Sports are a bunch of average Joes, who like most guys, love sports, gambling, golfing, and chasing short skirts.”

And that, says Portnoy, is the secret to his success. Long live the bro. —Suzy Weiss

She’s an anti-diaper mom of two, an award-winning sitcom star, a neuroscience PhD, a former Jeopardy! host, and a certified lactation educator. Meet Mayim Bialik, who sat down with Suzy Weiss for the latest episode of Second Thought, to talk about it all. “I wouldn’t consider myself normal by a lot of [Hollywood] standards,” she said. But she does think of herself as “normal” in other, more relatable ways: “personal neuroses, fears, anxiety, insecurity.” Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the YouTube video below. And to hear Suzy’s thoughts on the episode, check out her newsletter.

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site! Click here to meet an intellectual fitness trainer in Brazil; a pickleball-loving gay woman in New Jersey; or a new Washingtonian looking for a love to last a lifetime. Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance on 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].

We’ve published a lot of stories worth catching up on this week, including Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger’s reaction to being banned from the site, and Madeleine Kearns’s deep dive into the controversial practice of letting babies cry themselves to sleep. . . .

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? This week, we only have one recommendation: our latest true-crime podcast, The Lindbergh Conspiracies, which we released last month.

Joe Nocera spent years digging into one of history’s oddest cases: the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. For nearly a century, people have questioned if the man blamed really did it, with no major leads, hints, or clues since—but 2026 could finally be the year that changes. Kurt Perhach, a lawyer in New Jersey, is trying to get the court to unseal new evidence, and the state government is fighting him every step of the way.

The full series is now out and available for all to listen to. Plus, in a new bonus episode, Joe sits down with Perhach to find out what he knows, and why the authorities are trying to stop him. You can find the episode—along with the rest of the series—here, or wherever you get your podcasts. It’s the perfect binge-listen for a long drive.

Last but not least: While it may not be our national pastime, the Team USA soccer team dominated its group stage at the World Cup and will be advancing to play Bosnia and Herzegovina in the round of 32 next week. Our country salutes you! Here’s the team celebrating victory.

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

Sitting inside his Senate office late Wednesday afternoon, Montana senator Tim Sheehy holds up his arm to show me the silver memorial bracelets he wears as a daily reminder of the friends he lost in Iraq, killed by radical Shiite forces that are funded and directed by the Iranian regime.

“This guy was cut in half” by an Iranian explosively formed penetrator, he tells me, pointing to a bracelet commemorating fallen soldier Benjamin Tiffner, an Army Special Forces captain killed in action in Baghdad in 2007. Sheehy was one of the service members who carried Tiffner’s body off of a plane at Dover Air Force Base. “I buried him in Arlington.”

This is Sheehy’s reaction to my question on the administration’s suggestion that Iran’s leaders have turned over a new leaf and are less radical than their predecessors—who were killed in the war by Israel and the U.S. At the G7 summit earlier this month, Donald Trump said, “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with. . . . They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

“I hope they’re correct,” Sheehy tells me in an interview on Wednesday afternoon in his Senate office while drinking his beer of choice, a Coors Banquet. But he wants to remind the administration that the Iranian regime hasn’t crossed an ideological Rubicon simply because its former leaders were whacked. This is a regime that wants us to “die in brutal, disgusting ways” and wants “to videotape us being raped and burned alive.”

We at The Free Press have been consumed by Taylor Swift wedding rumors for weeks. Is it happening at Madison Square Garden next weekend? Is it a decoy? Is Travis Kelce’s entire team really booked at the Marriott Marquis? But there’s one question we keep coming back to: How does the most famous woman in the world actually pull off a secret wedding? We asked RoseMarie Terenzio, the woman who helped JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette pull off their famously secret ceremony 30 years ago this fall. —The Editors

When you’ve helped plan the most secret celebrity wedding in history, you watch the Taylor Swift circus a little differently. First the wedding was in Rhode Island—until it wasn’t. Now it’s rumored to be in Madison Square Garden on July 3: The permits are filed, Travis’s teammates are said to be booked at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani has publicly welcomed the wedding in the same breath as the Fourth of July and the FIFA World Cup.

I don’t know where Taylor and Travis are getting married, but I do know what a decoy looks like. I was John F. Kennedy Jr.’s chief of staff for five years, and 30 years ago I helped him and Carolyn Bessette get married on a remote Georgia island while some press outlets were chasing a flight to Ireland for a party that didn’t exist.

It all began on the Monday after Fourth of July weekend in 1995. Carolyn called me: John had proposed. I was thrilled for them, but even in that first conversation, Carolyn was clear-eyed about what came next. Being JFK Jr.’s girlfriend was one thing—being his wife was something else entirely. She knew she was about to face a different level of public life, obligation, and scrutiny. She just wanted a little more time before the world knew too.

So we got to planning. I had lots of conversations with Carolyn and John about where and how the wedding would happen. In the beginning, it wasn’t about keeping it top secret at all costs, but the more we planned, the more John and Carolyn wanted to protect it. They had good reason to.