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Hi Abigail,

My husband and I have been married for just under a year. When we tied the knot, we agreed that we wanted to wait a few years to have kids, because both of us felt strongly that we shouldn’t start a family until we were able to support ourselves. But we’re both starting to get the “should we have a baby now” itch.

We’re not currently self-sufficient. I am in medical school, and he is in law school. My husband has an amazing job lined up for after school, and we have a definite plan to reach self-sufficiency in the next three years. We’re both feeling impatient to start a family, but my husband is always the voice of reason. He reminds me, whenever I bring it up, why we decided to wait.

Another factor is that we’re near our parents, who would be helping to support us financially, if we had a baby. They would be so happy to have a grandchild nearby: All our nieces and nephews live far away. I know we’re young, and I have a while yet before my fertility starts waning, but I just feel so lucky to have a partner who I want to start a family with and parents (and in-laws) who are healthy and close. Am I crazy for not wanting to wait?

—Claire, 24

Claire,

Seven weeks after I took the New York Bar Exam, I met my husband. He lived in Los Angeles. Even accepting a date with a guy who lived on the opposite coast—a place I’d never visited and where I knew no one—risked taking a Sharpie to all my well-made plans.

I was sworn into the New York Bar six months later, packed up my things, and moved to Southern California, where—I was assured by everyone—there was almost no legal work to be had. Did I want to practice entertainment law? No, no I did not. Would my New York Bar membership be useful where I was headed? Also, no. Was I aware that I would have to take the dreaded California Bar Exam if I wanted to work there? I thanked my co-clerks for the hot tip.

Friends wished me luck in the way Marco Polo’s must have—certain they’d never see or hear from me again. I didn’t have much in the way of a satisfying response to offer any of them. Because I sensed something I couldn’t yet put into words: that there was another, higher-order logic, not reducible to a flowchart, inscribed in the human heart.

It’s Thursday, May 14. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Olivia Reingold profiles Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji. Demographers Nicholas Eberstadt and Patrick Norrick on the global population crash. Haviv Rettig Gur examines how propaganda makes its way into New York Times columns. Jed Rubenfeld takes on overheated claims about “Jim Crow 2.0.” And much more.

But first: Trump and Xi meet in Beijing.

At 10 a.m. local time Thursday, Xi Jinping welcomed Donald Trump to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The meeting, which ran for more than two hours, kicked off what is set to be a hugely consequential summit between the two most powerful men in the world. On the agenda: Taiwan, trade, and more.

“We should be partners, not rivals, achieve success for one another, prosper together and forge a correct way for major countries of the new era to get along with each other,” said the Chinese president. But, the warm words were short lived as Xi also warned Trump that the U.S. would enter an “extremely dangerous place” if Chinese concerns over Taiwan were “handled poorly”.

We’ve been laying out the stakes of the talks in our pages all week.

For our columnist, historian Niall Ferguson, the most important topic up for discussion will be Taiwan—even if Trump may not have realized it going into the talks. Read his piece on why there is so much riding on the summit in Beijing today.

For more on Taiwan, Tanner Nau reached out to leading China experts for their predictions of what the meeting might mean for the island. Read their takes here:

We’ve also put the spotlight on two victims of Beijing’s religious and political persecution—whose families are holding out hope that Trump could help free them. Frannie Block told the extraordinary story of Pastor Ezra Jin, who was arrested last October for daring to preach his Christian faith without government supervision.

Another man behind bars for living by his principles is Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong businessman and publisher of a pro-democracy newspaper sentenced to decades in prison for standing up to Beijing. His children, Sebastien and Claire, delivered a simple message in The Free Press: Mr. President, bring our father home.

On School of War, Aaron MacLean sits down with Sam Brownback—former Kansas senator and governor, and author of China’s War on Faith—to discuss a dimension of the U.S.-China rivalry that rarely gets the attention it deserves: Beijing’s systematic persecution of religious minorities, and whether freedom of religion should be treated as a central front in the competition between the two powers.

—The Editors

In early March, I—along with a handful of other journalists—discovered that Rama Duwaji, wife of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, had an extensive history of liking or reposting anti-Israel content online. There were posts that celebrated convicted Palestinian terrorists, engaged in Holocaust inversion and, as we covered in The Free Press, referred to sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, as a “mass rape hoax.”

The few times the mayor and his wife have addressed the mounting scandals, they’ve repeated variations of the same line: that she’s a “private person,” not a public figure like her husband. Is that a legitimate excuse? I called up dozens within Duwaji’s circle to find out—all while continuing to comb through her social media activity. Read my profile to find out what I pieced together about the unlikely politician’s wife who has become the undeniable “it girl” of New York City.

—Olivia Reingold

And for more on America’s and China’s coming population crash—and what it means for the international world order—listen to Nicholas Eberstadt’s conversation with School of War host Aaron MacLean last week:

• The Trump administration is launching a nationwide audit of state Medicaid fraud watchdogs, Vice President J.D. Vance announced yesterday. Vance delivered an ultimatum to all states to comply with anti-fraud laws or risk losing federal Medicaid dollars.

• Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration more than 10,000 times in immigration detention decisions, about 90 percent of all cases, Politico reported. The flood of cases comes from a July decision from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to treat all illegal immigrants, including those who have lived for years in the U.S. and have no criminal record, as eligible for detention.

• The Republican-led South Carolina state Senate rejected a plan to initiate a redistricting process that likely would have eliminated the state’s lone Democratic district. Five Republicans voted with Democrats against the plan, including the Senate majority leader, who called it short-sighted.

• Iran has retained about 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and restored access to 30 of 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, according to classified U.S. intelligence. U.S. missile stockpiles have been severely depleted since the start of the war.

• Princeton University’s faculty voted on Monday to require proctoring of all in-person exams starting this summer. Since 1893, the school relied only on a revered honor code, but AI has made cheating easier and harder to spot, the dean of the college said.

Sam Brownback, former Kansas senator and governor, co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit, and author of China’s War on Faith, joins School of War to discuss the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of religious minorities and how its domestic oppression shapes America’s broader strategic posture toward China. How is Beijing using the d…

Rama Duwaji is the “it girl” of New York City.

According to her fans, Duwaji, the wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is a “modern-day Princess Diana.” Some have gone so far as to cut their hair in her signature “bixie.” In late January, The New York Times wrote an entire article about Duwaji’s attendance at a Whitney Museum party, noting that she “hung out with a small band of friends” while a security detail kept watch. Meanwhile, her Instagram following keeps growing. This time last year she had about 24,000 followers. Today, she has more than 2 million.

The irony, according to Duwaji, is that she is not a public figure. In the one interview the 28-year-old has granted since her husband took office, she told Hyperallergic, a social justice–minded arts publication, that she is more focused on “allowing my art to speak for itself.” The mayor used similar language in early March to brush off reports that she had liked a post supporting the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. Mamdani told reporters that she’s a “private person” who doesn’t deserve the scrutiny of an elected official.

“I, however, was elected to represent all eight and a half million people in this city, and I believe that it’s my responsibility, because of that role, to answer any questions about my thoughts and my policies and my decisions,” he added.

Almost immediately, debates broke out over the definition of a private person. Can a First Lady who lives in Gracie Mansion claim to be such a thing? Or is that just a shield she and the mayor hide behind to evade tough questions on her inflammatory politics?

“Jim Crow 2.0”—that’s the new Democratic sound bite to describe the gerrymandering fiascos unfolding in Louisiana, Virginia, and other states where Republicans are winning the redistricting wars. Democrats are blaming their losses on judges, with particular ire directed at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“I don’t know what kind of black he is,” said Alabama state representative Juandalynn Givan, referring to Thomas, who recently joined the Court’s blockbuster opinion striking down racial gerrymandering. “His ancestors had to be the ones that sold us out in Africa. He is the man who has turned us back into the hands of the master.”

Things may be about to get even worse. After the Virginia Supreme Court last week slapped down Democrats’ wildly partisan redistricting gambit in that state—designed to give them 10 out of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats—House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries called the decision “shocking” and said it aligned with the U.S. Supreme Court’s “Jim Crow–like attack” on black voters. Now Virginia Democrats have appealed the state court’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. If the justices deny that appeal, as everyone expects, that will add yet more fuel to the fire.

There are a lot of good reasons people ignore the discussion of the global birth crash. First, there’s the fact that not so long ago the big concern was overpopulation. Plus, it can seem a little creepy to even talk about. Concern about the “total fertility rate” can make you sound like a villain from The Handmaid’s Tale. Anyway, how bad could it be? There certainly seem to be enough people competing for jobs, houses, slots in colleges, and the like. Well, recently we asked Nicholas Eberstadt, one of the world’s top demographers, and his co-author Patrick Norrick, to cut through all that baggage and give it to us straight. His answer was much direr than we had previously understood. On any given day, this is not the newsiest story. But on every given day, it just might be the biggest story we are all ignoring. Are we about to hit peak humanity? Or have we already? And what will come next? —The Editors

We are in the midst of a headlong global birth crash—a plunge underway all around the world, in rich and poor regions alike, very possibly presaging an indefinite global depopulation, with our “peak human” moment coming much sooner than almost anyone imagined even a few years ago.

This is not what demography’s experts long predicted. For decades, demographers simply assumed that the postwar drop in worldwide birth rates would lead to an eventual equilibrium, with childbearing converging in one region after another at a little over two births per woman, the level required for long-term replacement. They envisioned a mere slowing of the explosive worldwide population growth from the 20th century, the extraordinary period in which human life expectancy more than doubled and the global population nearly quadrupled (from 1.6 billion to over 6 billion).

Instead it is now apparent that we are witnessing a worldwide march into the terra incognita of prolonged sub-replacement fertility, with no hints yet of how far humanity’s birth rates will ultimately fall—or when they will recover, if ever.

In the nearly three years since Hamas’s attack on October 7, as the world has changed, I’ve often wondered what future there is for Jewish life in the West.

It doesn’t take much prompting to think about: One scroll on social media and you’re flooded with blood libel conspiracies. When I turn my phone off, in the hopes of touching some grass, I look up to…

In his latest New York Times op-ed, columnist Nicholas Kristof offered a litany of horrific testimonies about life in Israeli prisons. He quoted from Palestinian detainees claiming systematic rape, object insertion, forced nudity, and even the use of dogs trained to sexually assault prisoners.

The Israeli Prison Service has a reputation for incompetence. There have been cases of abuse, even famous cases of prisoners abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face huge numbers of abuse claims. Prisons are not nice places, wherever they are in the world.

So mistreatment of prisoners by Israeli guards isn’t merely possible, it’s almost certain, as in any prison system anywhere in the world. And conditions were especially problematic in recent years. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of Palestinian detainees into the prisons, together with undertrained reservist guards in the early months—guards who had seen Hamas’s videos gleefully documenting massacres that the new prisoners had committed.

I expected, therefore, to find in Kristof’s column a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must respond to and that even Israel’s friends would recognize as a problem in need of a solution.

Twelve Congressional Republicans accused Brown University of a “pattern of eager capitulation in the face of anti-police activism” that weakened campus safety for years before the December shooting on campus that left two students dead and nine injured.

In a letter to Brown president Christina Paxson on Wednesday, the lawmakers said that the deaths and injuries “were not unforeseeable tragedies.” “Public reporting, sworn testimony, police union statements, Brown’s public records, and the assailant’s own words clearly establish that these deaths were made possible by more than a decade of deliberate policy decisions that prioritized activists’ radical demands over student safety,” said the letter.

On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump touched down in Beijing for a two-day summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The meeting’s stakes are enormous, unfolding against the backdrop of what historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson has long described as “Cold War II”: the intensifying geopolitical, economic, and technological rivalry between the United States and China. In today’s Big Read, Niall breaks down what to expect from the summit—and why, over the next two days, everything will revolve around the defining geopolitical flash point of the 21st century: Taiwan. —The Editors

The Oxford English Dictionary defines détente as “the easing of strained relations, esp. in a political situation.” But in the late 1970s it became something of a dirty word in conservative circles when it was the strained relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that were being eased. “Détente?” Ronald Reagan famously asked. “Isn’t that what a farmer has with his turkey—until Thanksgiving?”

“So far,” Reagan said, in his first press conference as president in January 1981, “detente’s been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims. . . . the promotion of world revolution and a one-world socialist or Communist state.”

He added, for good measure, that the Soviets had “openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that.”

It is often forgotten how far Reagan based his ascent from the governorship of California to the presidency on trashing the policy of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union—to the point that by the time of the 1980 election it had become almost synonymous with appeasement. How odd, you might say, that détente should make a comeback under, of all people, Donald J. Trump.

There is little doubt that Trump wants his summit in Beijing, which begins on Thursday, to be a success. “I am very much looking forward to my trip to China,” he truthed (if that’s a word) on Monday, “an amazing Country, with a Leader, President Xi [Jinping], respected by all. Great things will happen for both Countries!” He used similar language back in February after the two leaders had spoken by phone. “The relationship with China, and my personal relationship with President Xi, is an extremely good one,” Trump gushed, “and we both realize how important it is to keep it that way. I believe that there will be many positive results achieved over the next three years of my Presidency having to do with President Xi, and the People’s Republic of China!”