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On May 8, President Donald Trump released the first set of declassified UFO files, free for all Americans to view. But just what exactly are we meant to think about all this? For the last several months I’ve been investigating that question, speaking with numerous UFO whistleblowers, skeptics, and enthusiasts in an effort to understand what smart people should make of the possibility of life beyond our planet. You can watch the interviews below. And scroll down to read my take, with the help of some of those experts, on the files themselves, and why the release raises more questions than it answers. —Will Rahn

Will the Trump administration’s release of secret UFO documents prove more soap opera than space opera?

The first tranche of materials landed with a thud on Friday, with UFO believers and skeptics alike claiming to find support for their respective positions. True believers, underwhelmed though they were by the actual contents, called Friday’s files an important first step on the road to full disclosure. That road, however, appears to be a long one, stretching beyond the horizon and perhaps, as skeptics argue, leading nowhere.

The 162 released files are housed on a Defense Department website with a minimalist and vaguely cyberpunk aesthetic reminiscent of The X-Files. They include dozens of testimonials from civilians, federal agents, diplomats, and astronauts who reported seeing UFOs. Much of the material comprises redacted information. But there is some interesting stuff: What, for example, was the “bogey” Gemini VII astronaut Frank Borman reported seeing during his space flight? Or the “Eye of Sauron” witnessed by several federal agents in 2023 somewhere in the Western U.S.? (The files offer no conclusive answer.)

And then there are new UFO videos, albeit the kind we’ve gotten used to over the last decade: grainy, squiggly shapes in black and white that appear to move quickly. In one video, an orb navigates two fields of sea-based wind turbines like a slalom course. “Balloons don’t do that!” retired Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, one of the most outspoken proponents of the existence of aliens, told me on Friday. I grant his point. But could it be any number of other things, including a drone? Sure.

In other words, do we know any more about UFOs than we did before the release?

Happy Mother’s Day from all of us here at The Free Press! To mark the occasion, we’re publishing an essay by our newest columnist, Caitlin Flanagan, that tackles what has become one of the most contentious questions of our time: Why are so many young women ambivalent about motherhood? We also, in yesterday’s Weekend Press, ran a piece by Larissa Phillips about the joy of having adult kids, and a piece by Danielle Crittenden about the heartbreak of losing one. Each of these essays captures something so often missing from the so-called Mommy Wars: the mystical, almost inexpressible love of a mother for the child she birthed into existence. We hope you enjoy them. —The Editors

The biggest event in the history of women—bigger, even, than suffrage—was the invention of the birth control pill, which became available in the United States in 1960. For the first time, women had the ability to decide if, when, and how many children they were going to have. When that was combined with the first stirrings of modern feminism, women were finally able to do what men had been doing through the ages: break into factions and tear each other apart. The Mommy Wars will bury us all.

The Mommy Wars were originally a project of the 1980s and centered on a question still at the heart of the current iteration: If a woman can afford to stay home with her children, should she do it? At this point, about 70 percent of American mothers either work or are looking for work, many of them because they cannot afford not to, which would seem to make the question moot. Even Working Mother magazine (est. 1979) threw in the towel a few years ago, because how many things can a career woman do with a rotisserie chicken? Over the past two decades, however, a much more consequential division between young women has quietly and then loudly emerged: the one between mothers and women who are “childfree by choice,” as they often put it.

I know many such women, and you probably do too. If so, you can attest that they don’t seem torn up by the decision. In fact, they made it in exactly the way men beg women to make decisions: logically and on the merits. They know that having a baby would unmoor them from many things they cherish about their lives: the freedom to do whatever they want, untethered by round-the-clock responsibility. They have hopes and dreams about their futures, and they want their earnings to go toward fulfilling them, not toward parenthood. Most of all, they know that babies are a lot of work and that women do most of it. They want to sleep on their own schedules, not on baby time.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Liel Leibowitz remembers when Pulitzer Prize winners were deserving. Charles Koch reflects on the things he did wrong. Suzy Weiss asks: Would you travel to Korea for a new face? Two drinks with America’s reigning queen of crime writing, Patricia Cornwell. And much more!

But first: A Mother’s Day weekend special.

These days, so much of the discourse about when, whether, and how a young woman should have kids is focused on the first few years of their children’s lives. We’re obsessed with babies: how cute they are, how much work they are, how they completely reshape a mother’s life. But Larissa Phillips wants to remind both sides of the mommy wars as well as prospective parents: The baby phase doesn’t last long.

Before she became a mother, she writes, she was also obsessed with how the early years might consume her—but when she was six months’ pregnant with her first child, an older colleague told her about going to lunch with her adult son, and Larissa had a sudden realization. “This baby right here that was not yet born—he, too, would grow up and become an adult. And then what? Would we go out for lunch? Would he turn out just like me, someone who loved reading? Would we be close?”

Now, she has two grown kids, and her essay today is an ode to them—to the experience of watching them shed the skins of childhood, and become a daughter she can ask for advice and go traveling with, and a son who likes to talk philosophy with her and, yes, go out for lunch.

“Have kids,” writes Larissa. “Not because they are so cute and hilarious when they are babies—which they are—but because of what comes after the baby years.”

The thing is, you never, ever stop loving your child—even if they’re not with you anymore. On the eve of Mother’s Day, we’re glad to share the words of a woman for whom the day will be bittersweet.

Danielle Crittenden’s daughter Miranda died suddenly in her sleep, at age 32, just over two years ago. “Some grieving parents find purpose in organizing memorial causes for their late children: marathons, charities, scholarships,” writes Danielle today. “I understand the impulse.”

But when she and her husband thought about how they wanted to honor Miranda, they concluded that “her memorial should be what she’d been: a living thing.” They wanted to plant a garden, but there was a catch: The Orthodox cemetery where they’d buried her body—within three days of her death, per Jewish custom—wouldn’t let them. And so they made an unusual decision: They’d exhume her body, and find another home for it.

“Painful as the situation was, I imagined Miranda finding it all absurdly funny,” writes Danielle in her account of this strange time, re-creating her daughter’s voice: “What were you thinking?! Burying me off a highway among these Orthodox Jews?”

Would you travel to Korea for a new face? That’s what Ben Kawaller did. “It was the worst pain I’ve ever had in my life,” Ben told Suzy Weiss this week, of a procedure that apparently involved 150 needles, is illegal in America, and cost almost $5,000. “It felt like my skin was being slowly peeled off.” So, was it worth it? Ben tells all in the latest episode of Second Thought. He, Suzy, and her co-host Dan Ahdoot also chatted about how “gay” became “queer,” the highs and lows of the Met Gala, the end of Spirit Airlines, and why nobody knows how to behave in public anymore.

Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the YouTube vid below. And if you want to keep up to date with everything Suzy does, don’t miss her newsletter!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site. Click here to meet a “recovering attorney” living between Pittsburgh and South Carolina; a bachelorette in New Jersey getting a PhD in political extremism and authoritarianism; or an AI policy adviser who’s lived in Estonia and likes making jewelry. 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, your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

Earlier this week, Suzy Weiss sat down with the “MAGA girlfriend” of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Kat Rosenfield wrote about the bestseller designed for the millennial feminists who hate tradwives. Catch up with their excellent essays, and more:

How should you spend your weekend? For a Gen Z scoop, we asked our producer and host Rafaela Siewert for her recommendations.

🐀 Watch. . . this very short documentary about New York City rats. Yes, rats! From Rat Czar Halloween costumes to the rise of Rat Daddy on TikTok, it’s clear we can’t look away from the Big Apple’s unofficial mascot. In 14 minutes, this doc takes you into the world of rat enthusiasts, rat hunters, rat walking tours, and rat obsessives. It’s a treat.

🪲 Then Watch. . . a zany, silly, and bizarre short film about bug romance—as in, grasshoppers (and other critters) navigating love and life. Behold: Bug Diner by Phoebe Jane Hart. (NSFW, thanks to the stop-motion animated bug sex.)

🎧 Listen. . . to some of the best audio storytelling: WNYC’s Dolly Parton’s America, about the queen of country; The New York Times’ The Jungle Prince, about the peculiar “royal family of Oudh” in New Delhi; and BBC’s I’m Not a Monster, about an American mom and a UK teen who joined ISIS. These are some oldies from the past few years, but they really capture the art of audio storytelling.

🇸🇾🇰🇷 Eat. . . Syrian/Korean fusion. If you’re in NYC, head to SYKO, which is owned by two brothers-in-law—one Syrian, the other, you guessed it, Korean. Delicious, affordable, and highly unique. I recommend the labandu, beef shawarma hotteok, and bulgogi kimbap!

Last but not least, feast your eyes on what our art director Clara Grusq says was the best outfit from Monday’s Met Gala: Chase Infiniti wearing Thom Browne.

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

“Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. ‘Polly, could you please be here by 11 o’clock this morning?’ Kawalchik asked. ‘I guess you know what it’s for.’ Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

So begins one of the most famous pieces in American journalistic history. While other reporters stumbled over each other after Kennedy’s assassination, trying to get to the vice president, the First Lady, or anyone else in power, the author of this piece, Jimmy Breslin, spent his day with Pollard, a man paid $3.01 an hour to dig graves. Pollard, it turned out, could do more than most pundits to capture the nation’s profound grief.

Breslin was someone who understood that history couldn’t be written exclusively from the halls of power or the seats of scholarship. It had to be reported, observed through the eyes of the men and women who bore its consequences. This was an insight that propelled the legendary columnist throughout his decades-long career, and won him the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1986.

After this year’s Pulitzers were awarded on Monday, I found myself reflecting on the kind of work that led Breslin to win the award all those years ago.

It’s an open secret that if you’re a man, and you’re losing your hair, you can go to Turkey for cheap plugs. Flights from there, often filled with formerly balding dudes whose skulls are scabbed from their hair restoration treatments, are nicknamed “Turkish Hairlines.” But there’s a new hub for Westerners looking to refine their image: Seoul, which is apparently the skincare capital of the world as well as being the capital of South Korea. There, teams of aestheticians deploy lasers, peels, injectables, masks, and endless tinctures, serums, and cleansers, all in the hopes of making their client look a few years younger.

Ben Kawaller, whose name you might recognize from his Free Press series Ben Meets America and the Swing State Debates, is always game to go out and try something new—and high-end. Extremely painful dermatological treatment was no exception. “It was the worst pain I’ve ever had in my life,” Ben told me, on the latest episode of the Second Thought podcast. He was describing his encounter with a dramatic and fishy—yes, it involves salmon sperm—procedure that apparently involved 150 needles, and is illegal in America. “It felt like my skin was being slowly peeled off,” he added.

So, was it worth it? Ben shrugged: “I never feel worth it.” But I gotta say: He looks great.

On Sunday, Mother’s Day will honor the women who undertake the profound work of motherhood. For most, it’s a day of gratitude and celebration. But there are millions of others for whom the day is something different: a harrowing reminder of a beloved person they’ve lost.

On February 16, 2024, journalist Danielle Crittenden lost her 32-year-old daughter, Miranda. Five years prior, Miranda had a rare brain tumor successfully removed. But on that night, a small miscalculation with her hormone medication killed her suddenly, in her sleep, at her Brooklyn apartment.

The tragedy, Danielle writes in her new memoir, Dispatches from Grief, catapulted her into an “alternate universe” of despair and confusion—until slowly, painstakingly, she began to come out the other side. Today, we’re honored to publish an excerpt from the book, in which Danielle describes the unusual way that journey began: via her daughter’s reburial. —The Editors

One year after Miranda died, our family prepared for the Jewish tradition of the unveiling.

Jewish custom obligates that bodies be buried immediately after death. But after the funeral, we wait for a year until the memorial stone is revealed: a merciful acknowledgment that mourners need a full cycle of seasons before facing granite finality. When the gravesite is ready, mourners gather again. A sheet covers the headstone. The rabbi pulls it away—literally unveiling the new marker. The last earthly duty to our dead is complete.

Some grieving parents find purpose in organizing memorial causes for their late children: marathons, charities, scholarships. I understand the impulse. You want your child’s life to have meaning beyond your own loss. Maybe then the death wasn’t so pointless. Your family’s tragedy might even save others. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) began exactly this way, after 13-year-old Cari Lightner was killed in 1980.

But what if your child just. . . dies? A car accident. An overdose. Or, in Miranda’s case, an underdose. No one marches for the randomly unlucky.

That does not, however, preclude our ability to recognize our dead with something meaningful and enduring.

I’m often asked a simple question: “Charles, how did you become so successful?” My answer is equally simple: by applying principles and being willing to make mistakes. Much of my life has been a combination of wandering in the wilderness, and trial and error. I freely acknowledge that I won the birth lottery. My father Fred was an entrepreneur and inventor who co-founded the company that became my life’s work. Both of my parents worked hard to give my brothers and me a head start in life. But I nearly squandered my blessings many times. I spent 20 years lost, narrowly avoiding catastrophes.

My early life was defined by a search for meaning. I vividly remember my third-grade teacher writing math problems on the blackboard. The answers were obvious to me, but not to others. That realization was my first clue that I had a gift. It took many years before I realized that my gift went beyond solving basic math problems; rather, I had a talent for understanding and applying abstract concepts. As a child, however, I had no time for the abstract. I was too busy getting in trouble. My father had no intention of allowing my brothers and me to grow up to be “country club bums.” His solution was a daily regimen of manual labor. Starting at age 6, I spent my afternoons and weekends feeding animals, shoveling manure, and milking cows on the family farm.

I didn’t respond well to my father’s hard-nosed approach; it left me feeling like I had little value. Despite my third-grade epiphany about math, I put no effort into my education, so my grades were less than stellar. My parents sent me to eight different schools with little improvement. Starting at age 14, I sneaked out at night on the weekends. My friends and I would head for bars and strip clubs.

Only later did I begin to see that I needed to associate with people I could learn from, rather than those who brought out the worst in me.

When I was 29 and six months’ pregnant with my first child, an older co-worker told me about a fancy lunch she’d just had with her young adult son. They’d gone to some haute cuisine downtown restaurant, ordered the cheese plate, and tried a variety of wines. But as she shared the details of their fine-dining experience, my mind wandered to an entirely different topic.

In all my daydreaming about my soon-to-arrive baby, I had hardly thought past the infant stage. But now this wild realization began to bloom in my mind: Babies grow up. And this one, this baby right here that was not yet born—he, too, would grow up and become an adult. And then what? Would we go out for lunch? Would he turn out just like me, someone who loved reading and traveling and making things? Would we be close?

As my co-worker continued describing the outing with her son and their warm relationship and shared love for fancy foods, a definitive thought rose from the depths of my still vague image of motherhood: That’s what I want.

I eventually had two kids, and they both did, in fact, grow up. Now, as I listen to the intense discourse about why people aren’t having children, the expense of day care, the exhaustion and sacrifices of the baby years, I think the conversation is missing the larger point. Most things worth doing are hard, and those years don’t last. Parenting keeps going for years and years after the last diaper change; it is truly the longest of games, but the rewards are ever increasing, and totally exquisite.

The crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has sold more than 120 million books and has been asked about nearly everything: the helicopters she bought for research, the blistering 1997 Vanity Fair profile that outed her as bisexual, and the 35-year journey through Hollywood that finally brought her heroine, medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, to the screen this year.

In her extraordinary new memoir, True Crime—published May 5—Cornwell reveals herself to be strikingly similar to Scarpetta: brilliant and stubborn, imperious and generous. Long after her divorce, her ex-husband Charlie, continuing as her beta reader, sometimes noted in the margins that Scarpetta was too “bitchy.”

“She was too driven, too cold, too forceful, and even unlikable,” Cornwell writes of Charlie’s thoughts on Scarpetta. “His view of her was very different from mine, and at times I wondered who he was really talking about.”

Scarpetta and her creator shared that complex spirit with the woman who shaped Cornwell more than perhaps anyone else: Ruth Graham, wife of the legendary evangelist Billy Graham. She was the first to recognize her talent and the one who gave her the idea—and the opportunity—for her very first book, when she was just 24 years old.

So when I reached Cornwell, who will be 70 in June, in her Boston office, surrounded by the Jack the Ripper artifacts she has collected for decades, I told her I didn’t really want to talk about the books that made her a celebrity. Instead, I wanted to discuss the first one she ever wrote, undoubtedly her worst-seller: an authorized biography of Ruth Graham published in 1983.

“I learned a lot from Ruth,” she told me, pausing. “I’m still learning a lot from Ruth.”

This is how Cornwell met Ruth: When Cornwell was nine, her mother, in a burst of religious mania inspired by attending a Billy Graham event in Miami years earlier, burned all of her children’s clothing and dropped her kids off at the Grahams’ home in Montreat, North Carolina. She handed a note to the minister’s wife: “There’s going to be a flood, and I’m sailing away on a ship. Please raise my children in your kingdom.”

Improbably, it worked.

It’s Friday, May 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Gad Saad says the West is on a suicide mission. Faye Flam on life in space. Mene Ukueberuwa on why the Trump administration is suing The New York Times. Max Raskin on “Shabbat 250.” And much more.

But first: the culture war over right-wing women.

How should a woman conduct her life? It’s a totally uncontroversial subject—whether a woman should marry as young as possible, or focus on her career; whether she should get plastic surgery, or not; if she should cook bountiful, homemade seed oil-free meals for her family; or live alone, as a childless cat lady. There seem to be no right answers, only blaring alarms from a judgmental public when some women go a little too far. Five years back, they came for the girlbosses, and now, they’re coming for the tradwives.

Tradwifery, the online trend where women document their commitment to their domestic life by posting videos of themselves making cumbersome recipes, or photos of their offspring in matching organic-cotton dresses, is the subject of a buzzy new book: Yesteryear. In it, a present-day tradwife influencer wakes up in the 19th century and has to contend with what life was actually like in the era she glorifies online. (Spoiler: It was brutal!)

Kat Rosenfield reviewed Caro Claire Burke’s book, and beyond that, dove deep into why tradwives seem to enrage liberal women so very much. Yesteryear is “parasocial hate porn for millennial feminists,” Kat writes, a book aimed at “women who can’t stand tradwives, and also can’t stop watching their every move.”

And if the ultimate culture-war figure women love to hate is the tradwife, her second cousin might be the clean-eating health nut who goes to Burning Man and votes for Republicans. Last week, The New York Times put out an article about Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, the girlfriend of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who the Times called a “firebrand in Trump World” and “outspokenly conservative.”

Brin, who at a net worth of $300 billion is the third richest man in the world, has moved rightward in recent years, and the Times posits that Gilbert-Soto, who calls herself a “California Republican,” is to blame. I thought there was more to the story when it came to the 32-year-old former health coach who once interned for Kris Jenner, so I met up with her a few hours before she was set to appear with Brin, 52, on the stairs of the Met Gala, to see what she was all about.

Read Kat’s piece, about the difficult women who hate difficult women, and mine, on GG Soto and her yacht-tripping, clean-eating, Sergey Brin-dating life.

—Suzy Weiss

Jonni Skinner says that, when he was just 13, a therapist told him he was too feminine to be openly gay, and that transitioning to female was his only way to survive. He spent the following years on puberty blockers and hormones. He is 23 now, de-transitioned, and living with consequences he says no one warned him about. Jonni writes about the medical system that failed him, what it did to his body, and what he’s doing to ensure this doesn’t happen to another generation of children.

“When Operation Epic Fury was launched on February 28, I was confident of one thing: that it would be a short war,” writes Niall Ferguson in his latest column. “Well, here we are, nearly 10 weeks later.” So how did Trump’s short war turn into a stalemate? With the president resistant to further military operations, the U.S. is still hoping for major concessions from the Islamic Republic, most importantly an end to its nuclear ambitions. But as of right now, Tehran has all the incentive in the world to delay a final peace deal. Read Niall on how we got here, and how “wars take much less time to start than you think they will, and last much longer than you thought they could.”

Cruise ships are enjoying a renaissance, with some 38 million taking a voyage on one just last year alone. But a cruise ship off the Canary Islands is in the throes of a hantavirus outbreak that has killed three people, and has many wondering whether this is the end of the cruising boom. Jillian Lederman says no. She’s logged 10 family cruises and has a prestigious Royal Caribbean status that she’ll be able to pass down to her future children. And she argues that for big families like hers, nothing else comes close to a cruise: reasonably priced, all inclusive, and the rare vacation where everyone ends up at the same dinner table every night with nowhere else to be. “Cruises are a triumph of democratic capitalism,” she writes. “They allow millions of people to visit islands and countries they never would have seen otherwise.”

Meanwhile, every woman on the internet is apparently perimenopausal—celebrities are going on hormone replacement therapy, influencers are touting the benefits of lubricant, and fridge magnets declaring “Perimenopause Is Hot” are flying off the shelves. Kara Kennedy investigates how perimenopause went from a hushed-up fact of life to a cash cow for wellness brands and pharmaceutical companies. And she asks the essential question behind all this: At what point does all this talk of perimenopause become fearmongering?

Dating today is a mess: Only 21 percent of young adults are satisfied with their options, apps are overrun with narcissists, and the manosphere is telling men to only look out for themselves. Although it may seem bleak, Arthur Brooks makes the case that most young adults, men and women alike, still want what people have always wanted: “a permanent, loving relationship with a good person who is a loyal mate.” The real issue, he argues, is that nobody has told young people where to find each other, or what it takes to attract the right one.