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Last week, a Somali immigrant named Essa Suleiman allegedly stabbed two Jewish men in the Golders Green neighborhood of north London. London police called the stabbings a terrorist act, and a shadowy new group called HAYI quickly claimed responsibility. “Zionists were targeted by our lone wolves in the Golders Green area of London,” HAYI said in a video on social media. “Historically, the Jews are the killers of Jesus Christ, and today the Zionists are the killers of innocent women and children.”

The assault was the latest in a wave of attacks HAYI has claimed to have carried out over the past two months against Jewish, American, and Israeli targets across Europe. The terror group is now threatening to move its operations into the U.S., and its operatives recently warned President Donald Trump and his cabinet that they could be next.

“Know this, you ignorant one: Retribution will pursue you, and will pursue your children,” a post written in English and attributed to the terror network warned April 20 on one of its Telegram channels. “This is a promise from those who stand on the right.”

HAYI is an Arabic acronym for “The Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Righteous,” and the group surfaced shortly after the U.S. and Israel began joint air strikes against the Islamic Republic on February 28, warning that it was beginning “military operations” around the world.

On March 9, an improvised explosive device detonated in front of a synagogue in the Belgian city of Liège. HAYI, or Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, quickly began posting videos of the attack on Telegram and X.

George Orwell’s timeless classic Animal Farm, a “fairy story” aimed at young readers, has sold some 11 million copies worldwide since it was first published in 1945. Its allegorical subject, Soviet communism, is not subtle. After all, the book begins with a speech by a pig who stands in for Karl Marx and, after an egalitarian revolution by animals that take over the farm, features a power struggle between a Trotskyist pig and a Stalinist pig and ends with the pigs installed as dictators indistinguishable from the human overlords their revolution originally sought to do away with. According to Orwell's preface, not published until 1972, one of the four publishers who originally rejected the book explained to Orwell that the issue was that Animal Farm took as its subject the evils of a country that was then an ally of both Britain and the U.S. “If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right,” the publisher wrote. “But the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships.”

This unnamed publisher may have been a patsy and a discredit to literary freedom, but at least he knew how to read at an eighth-grade level. Sadly, this is more than can be said for the makers of a new version of Animal Farm, directed by Andy Serkis, the actor and motion capture specialist famous for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes franchise.

The new film, voiced by a cast of A-list actors including Glenn Close, Seth Rogen, Steve Buscemi, and Woody Harrelson, earned bad press when its trailer was released late last year, but the reality is somehow even worse than it seemed back then. The film feels, to put it plainly, like a bad joke about Orwell that a right-wing X account would dream up to get mad at. Hey guys, what if those crazy, woke socialists in Hollyweird actually went back and rewrote “Animal Farm” to be about the exact opposite of what the author intended? In the film, the message is no longer about how the revolutionary dreams of doing away with capitalist hierarchy are inevitably dashed by the avaricious realities of human nature. The problem, as portrayed by Serkis, is instead corporate greed under capitalism.

Welcome back to the Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss has two drinks with Lloyd Blankfein, who wasn’t bothered when a shooter interrupted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A polyglot bachelor who’s been to 803 restaurants in NYC is looking for love. Kat Rosenfield loves the new Michael Jackson biopic. And more!

But first: Will Rahn reviews New York City’s first-ever casino.

“It’s like watching a slow-motion mugging,” my friend Dale observed, as we walked past the tables at Resorts World New York City. This ugly little stump of a building, squashed in the hinterland around JFK Airport, is host to the first-ever casino in New York City. I visited on Thursday, two days after its grand opening, and was horrified by what I found.

All across America, casinos are spreading like weeds in an unkempt garden. Few who study the issue think they’re a good idea—casinos and their advocates have a habit of under-delivering when it comes to the new jobs and tax revenues politicians always promise the casinos will create. And then of course there are the social costs like addiction, or the savings accounts and college tuitions frittered away at the tables.

For a long time, New York resisted this creep. New Yorkers keen on trying their luck at the roulette wheel had plenty of options in the neighboring states of New Jersey or Connecticut. But thanks in part to then-governor Andrew Cuomo’s commitment to taking the path of least resistance, the legal path was laid for the gambling industry to suck the financial capital of the world dry.

I left New York’s first casino richer, but sadder, and with questions: What will the new casino do to the neat little neighborhood it’s sprung up in? What will it do to everyday New Yorkers? Is it worth it? — Will Rahn

Spencer Pratt—once a reality television star, now a candidate for LA mayor—went viral this week with a video comparing the current mayor’s mansion to the burned-out plot that was once his home. “He knew what would be good TV,” says his former producer, Sophia Rivka Rossi, who joined Suzy Weiss on the latest episode of Second Thought. They talked about the secrets of her former colleague Ryan Murphy, who gave America Love Story; Rossi’s return to God; and, yes, acupuncture.

Listen to it 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 polyglot bachelor who’s been to 803 restaurants in NYC; a music teacher in Ames, Iowa; or a dog-mom to yellow lab Winnie in Philly.

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].

It was our absolute pleasure to welcome not one, but two fantastic new writers to our ranks this week, Caitlin Flanagan and Freya India. You’ll see their names appearing in The Weekend Press, but until then—catch up on their inaugural columns, and a couple of other treats. . .

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our reporter River Page for his recommendations…

🥩 Eat . . . Nothing from an expensive restaurant. I’ve never had an entrée that was worth more than $50 and neither have you. Yes, I have! No, you haven’t—you had a good time that was completely tangential to the $95 steak you ordered, probably because you were with people you like. Invite them to a Chili’s, order the most mediocre thing there (the app platter), and tell me you still didn’t have a great time.

🥃 Drink . . . Licor 43. It’s a perfect gold-colored vanilla-citrus liqueur that pairs wonderfully with ginger ale. If you’re having a party you can use it to make delightful little “mini beers”—just pour the 43 in a shot glass and top it with heavy cream. People have been sleeping on Licor 43 for years, and not just as a homage to the napping Spaniards who invented it. When I bring it up, and I often do, most people have no idea what I’m talking about—that needs to change. Take a sip, change your life, and spread the good news as I have.

📺 Watch . . . The films of Ralph Bakshi, one of the great animators of the 20th century. His style is distinctive, grimy, and drawn by hand—a far cry from the hideous, bloated, Fisher-Price style of computer animation we see so often today. It is not suitable for kids. Start with Fritz the Cat and work your way through the filmography—you may be scandalized, but you won’t be disappointed. True, his adaptation of Lord of the Rings is bafflingly bad, but what Bakshi’s best and worst have in common is that they all look cool as hell, and none of them could be made today, for both political correctness reasons and creative cowardice on a technical level.

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

How does a society with no widely shared vision of truth endure?

Last Saturday night, a 31-year-old computer science graduate—described by his professor as “a very good student”—checked into the Washington Hilton and attempted to assassinate the president of the United States and his cabinet.

Cole Tomas Allen had a job, was a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, and, by his own account, was acting on principle: the conviction that it was his duty to target officials he believed were destroying the country. Which is why the shooting he attempted is notable, not merely for what it was, but for what it represented: the logical end point of an education system that has mistaken zeal for truth.

Allen, after all, is only the latest highly educated person to attempt an act of violence. Think of the physics prodigy who perpetrated the December shooting at Brown University, or Luigi Mangione, the University of Pennsylvania graduate who allegedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. One survey shows that Americans with graduate degrees are about twice as likely to support political violence as those with some college or less. The problem of determining what is true and false, just and unjust, has always plagued mankind. But if even those educated at the most prestigious universities feel sufficient moral certainty to commit murder, we must conclude that the problem has grown so acute that it is rotting the civilizational pillars of our existence.

And so, the question is not only why so many of our countrymen are willing to commit violence. It is why so many of the willing are so highly educated.

When shots rang out at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend, Lloyd Blankfein wasn’t scared. He asked his tablemate, Coleman Hughes, if he was going to finish his salad.

After the key players in the administration were hustled out by their security detail, “a new litmus for status among the gov’t elite,” Blankfein later quipped on X, he turned to the communications official who had proudly told Blankfein earlier in the evening that she was 57th in line for the presidency. “I guess when you’re number 57, you’re just left here to die with me,” he told her.

“I was mostly trying to see what was going on,” Blankfein, in a light blue sweater and jeans, says. He and I are both safely back in New York, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table in Blankfein’s Manhattan spread which he shares with his wife, Laura. I’m sipping an Arnold Palmer-flavored Swoon—Blankfein offered me the run of the fridge, while he drinks “four-hour-old coffee” from a C-SPAN mug. Back to the chaos at the Correspondents’ Dinner: “I saw a guy in a tuxedo holding this Uzi-looking thing and I thought, ‘Where did he keep this before he took it out?’ ”

Wryness and dryness are par for the course for Mr. Blankfein, 71, who ran the behemoth investment bank Goldman Sachs from 2006 to 2018. He steered the firm through the 2008 financial crisis, and a million other smaller storms, which he details in his new memoir Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs. In other words, he knows a thing or two about keeping his head when everyone else is losing theirs. “People joked about it at the firm: ‘Lloyd’s good in a crisis, and if there wasn’t one, he’d cause it.’ ” He is currently the senior chairman of Goldman Sachs, which employs more than 45,000 people and manages $3.61 trillion in assets. Just as distinguishing: He was an early investor, and believer, in The Free Press.

But before he was the chairman and CEO of one of the largest investment banks in the world, before he got sick with cancer and worked through his chemo treatments, before the housing crisis and the dot-com bubble and Y2K—“I sent people around the world to be there when everything broke down. I wanted people on site”—Blankfein was a kid languishing in public housing in East New York. “I had a stressful upbringing,” he says when I ask him where he learned to keep calm. “There was always fighting and I was trying to be the leaven in it.”

Before Spencer Pratt, increasingly popular candidate for mayor of LA, there was Spencer Pratt, the reality star. The pugilistic campaigner has gone viral this week with a video comparing the mansion of the current mayor, Karen Bass, with the burned-out plot of land where his home used to be. But he became famous 20 years ago, as the villain of the unscripted series The Hills, about four young women trying to make a life for themselves in the City of Stars.

This week, on my pod (subscribe here), I spoke to one of the producers of that show, Sophia Rivka Rossi. “He makes whatever he wants happen,” Rossi, who is undecided on the mayoral race for now, told me. “Every day someone else says to me, ‘I think I’m gonna vote for Spencer.’ ”

On The Hills, which debuted in 2006, Pratt did things like start a rumor that the star of the show, Lauren Conrad, had made a sex tape, which he later denied. “He knew what would be good TV,” Rossi told me. He later said he cultivated his troublemaking persona to boost ratings. But if you watch his campaign ads, you can tell: He still knows how to make TV. In a piece for The Free Press, Liel Leibovitz called his latest viral campaign ad “resonant and raw,” since, “As he’s done for 20 years now, he grabbed hold of the camera, turned it around, and told viewers an inconvenient truth.”

I was born in 1982, the same year Michael Jackson’s Thriller made its debut. At first, the album and I moved through our respective worlds on similar trajectories. Both of us were big on arrival (the album sold millions of copies; I weighed in at a hefty nine pounds) and given positive-but-not-effusive reviews. Of Jackson, John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times, “with luck he will continue to mature”—which, absent the gendered pronoun, is exactly what the doctor said to my parents after I tried to eat a dead beetle I found on the floor.

Fast-forward to a year after our respective births, however, and a discrepancy emerged: I was a 1-year-old baby, but Thriller was a global phenomenon, and its creator both more famous and more ubiquitous than any cultural figure before or since. This was Michael Jackson: the smallest cast member of the Jackson 5ive cartoon series that ran on Saturday mornings. The boyfriend-turned-zombie dancer in a spooky music video that was always popping up around Halloween time. The guy who convinced my entire third-grade class, circa 1989, that grabbing your crotch while letting out a high-pitched squeal was the only way to dance. He was an icon, a superstar, the King of Pop who brought crowds to their feet and women to their knees.

But there was also another Michael Jackson—one often featured on the tabloid covers at the supermarket checkout, alongside stories of alien autopsies, Bigfoot sightings, and the ongoing travails of a creature with pointed ears and luminous eyes known as Bat Boy. And this Michael Jackson was not a gifted pop artist, but a reclusive oddball who slept in a glorified test tube, looked like a ghoul, and once dangled his infant son off a balcony—which, depending upon whom you believed, was one of the less sordid things he ever did to a child. The year I was 12, Jackson settled out of court with the family of Jordan Chandler, a 13-year-old who had accused the musician of sexual abuse. A decade later, Jackson was accused again—and this time officially charged, with multiple counts of child molestation, as well as conspiracy to commit child abduction and extortion.

Jackson was acquitted of every charge at trial, but public opinion was not on his side. Polling at the time revealed that a majority of Americans held unfavorable views of the pop star—although opinions differed drastically depending on whether the respondent was black or white. In the former category, nearly two out of three people believed Jackson was innocent; white people, in the same proportion, believed he was guilty.

The child star, the pop icon, the tabloid freak, the accused sex criminal: How you remember Jackson will depend largely on which of these narratives about his life happened to coincide with your cultural awakening. I was intrigued to learn that my 73-year-old mother remembers Jackson almost exclusively as a preadolescent phenom, but she knows almost nothing about the salacious gossip that dogged him later in life—even though, back in 1993, she would have been standing right there next to me at the supermarket checkout where the tabloids lived. My 30-year-old editor, on the other hand, grew up in a world where it was simply assumed that Jackson was a pedophile; she had no idea that he’d even stood trial, let alone been cleared of wrongdoing.

“It’s like watching a slow-motion mugging,” my friend Dale observed as we walked past the tables at Resorts World New York City, the first of several casinos that will open here before the end of the decade.

It was late in the morning on a cloudy Thursday in southeast Queens, just two days after the casino’s public debut. And the place was already busy. Its roughly 175,000 square feet of gaming excitement somehow feel a good deal smaller than that. The first floor was mostly electric slot machines, virtual roulette tables, bright lights, and big screens entrancing at least a few hundred people. Nobody was talking to each other, but the digital din, the dings and bells and Muzak coming from each machine, was deafening. Many of the patrons were Asian, most of the signs in English and Chinese, a testament to local demographics. The gamblers skewed older but morose young men in baggy clothing milled about among them. If young women were there, I didn’t see them.

These games were Asian-themed in a crude way—cartoon dragons, samurai, vaguely pornographic anime women. Dale and I looked for a way to the real gaming tables, the ones with cards and dice and human dealers, but kept getting lost. We walked outside to a concrete patio where Chinese smokers gazed out on the old Aqueduct Racetrack, where jockeys have vied against each other since the late 19th century, its greenery and classical dimensions easily the prettiest thing about this gruesome would-be adjunct of JFK Airport. The Aqueduct’s last horse race is set for June.

On one side of the patio, there was a massive fake roulette table with giant casino chips for pieces and cornhole boards next to it. It seemed to be a place where parents can park their kids while they hit the slots. Thankfully, there were no children in sight.

It’s Friday, May 1. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Freya India joins our ranks! A new Haley for a new generation of Republicans. Hadley Freeman asks: Are my Jewish children safe in London? Tyler Cowen on Allbirds’ AI pivot. Liel Leibovitz on the reality-TV star shaking up the Los Angeles mayor’s race. And much more.

But first: a message from The Free Press’s resident boomer, Joe Nocera.

Is there any generation of Americans—be it Gen X, millennials, or even Gen Z—that isn’t sick of us boomers? I kind of doubt it. Their taxes pay for our Social Security and Medicare—and there is a legitimate question about whether anything will be left for them when they’re ready to retire. More and more of us are going to require expensive medical care as our health deteriorates. We dominate the country’s politics; the Senate is practically a gerontology ward. Our current president is a boomer—as were four of the previous five.

As Jeff Giesea, the entrepreneur—and Gen Xer—writes in our lead essay today, boomers “are wealthier and healthier than any generation before them, deeply embedded in political, economic, and cultural power, and often understandably reluctant to step aside.” I’m not saying the younger generations want us all to die, but if they did, could you blame them?

Sadly (for me, at least), we are all going to die. Giesea calls the next 20 years or so “The Long Boomer Farewell.” And what we’ll be leaving behind once we’re gone, he says, is a mess. Can the younger generation fix what we baby boomers have broken? Yes, argues Giesea, if it doesn’t waste any time. You’ll find out how in his insightful essay. —Joe Nocera

If you look at our list of contributing writers, you’ll find some unexpected bedfellows. That’s the glory of The Free Press: Nobody who works here thinks quite alike, but one thing unites us, and that’s an allergy to groupthink. With that in mind, it’s our absolute pleasure to welcome Freya India to our ranks.

Earlier this year, in an essay for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel that we knew we had to reprint as soon as we read it, Freya wrote about what she aims to do as a writer:

“I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be auto-completed because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. . . . I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of. What good am I otherwise? What am I otherwise?”

In her first essay for us as a contributing writer, Freya writes about the reception to her debut book, GIRLS®, which dives deep into the misery of Gen Z women, exploring how they’ve been commodified by Instagram, corrupted by pornography, destabilized by decline of religion, and isolated by the internet.

The book is out next week in the United States—and we highly recommend you preorder it!—but it came out a couple of months ago in the UK, and Freya was struck all over again by how her work was interpreted by a corner of the media that insists there’s only one explanation for women’s misery, and it’s this: Dudes suck.

Read on to find out what Freya makes of this, and please join us in welcoming her to The Free Press.

Donald Trump’s political rise was built on breaking the rules of the old political establishment—to remarkable effect. If it proved anything, it’s this: Disruption works. The question, as the post-Trump era looms, is what form that disruption will take next.

Today, two stories offering two answers from opposite coasts.

In South Carolina, Nalin Haley, 24-year-old son of former UN ambassador and presidential candidate Nikki Haley, has spent the past year arguing against foreign wars, rejecting free market neoliberalism, and railing against the very establishment he grew up inside. He disagrees with his mother on a lot, and young conservative men love him for it. Isaac Grafstein went to South Carolina to find out why—and what Haley thinks comes next for the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, reality-TV star turned mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt just dropped a campaign ad with nearly 11 million views and counting. He filmed it standing outside incumbent Karen Bass’s mansion, then cut to the trailer where he’s been living since the wildfires burned down his house. The message: Bass doesn’t live in the mess she made. You do. Surprised a darling of the political establishment is losing ground to a former reality-TV villain? You shouldn’t be, says Liel Leibovitz: “The last 20 years of American public life have been one big reality television show.”

This week, the nation was shaken when 31-year-old Cole Allen attempted to breach the White House Correspondents’ dinner and assassinate the president and his cabinet. In the days since, we’ve been trying to make sense of the incident, and the alarming rise of political violence.

First, as Douglas Murray observed, Allen’s actions didn’t occur in a vacuum. Douglas began the night like everyone else: being harangued by protesters shouting slogans remarkably similar to those later found in the shooter’s manifesto. That overlap, he argues, underscores how disturbingly normalized this kind of discourse has become, and hints at the consequences of letting it fester unchecked.

For all that was grim about the night, it also offered a reminder of what people are capable of when things go sideways. After shots rang out, Suzy Weiss couldn’t help but notice that many of the men in the room activated. Military veterans mapped exits; journalists spoke of “perimeters”; and lobbyists turned into bodyguards. It was a big night for “the best of the masculine traits: calm, humor, dependability, protection, chivalry, and knowing, offhand, an oddly specific level of detail regarding Secret Service procedures.”

And then there’s the great Caitlin Flanagan, announced this week as a Free Press columnist. She wasn’t at the Washington Hilton that night. But when the news came across her phone, she felt nothing. “That’s when I realized that political violence is truly back,” she writes, “that an attempt to assassinate the American president is within the realm not just of possibility but of the unremarkable.”

Jeffrey Epstein’s executive assistant managed his schedule, arranged his travel, and coordinated the young women he brought to his island and ranch. Her name, Lesley Groff, appears in the Department of Justice files over 150,000 times. Yet today, Groff lives in one of Connecticut’s wealthiest towns, hosts game nights, does Pilates, and dines at high-end restaurants. How did she emerge from the scandal unscathed? Our Tanya Lukyanova went to New Canaan to find out.

Two hours after anti-Israel protesters pitched an encampment on Dartmouth’s campus, President Sian Beilock called the police. Eighty-nine people were arrested, and Beilock was the only Ivy League president to avoid a federal civil-rights investigation. Jonas Du sat down with her to ask why she thinks American universities have lost their way, and what Dartmouth is doing to buck the trend.

Even amid a relentless cycle of bad news, moments of extraordinary human achievement break through. On Sunday, Sabastian Sawe of Kenya became the first person ever to run a sanctioned marathon in under two hours. Joe Nocera spoke with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and a record-setting long-distance runner, about the remarkable innovations that made the feat possible.

If you look at our list of contributing writers, you’ll find some unexpected bedfellows. That’s the glory of The Free Press: Nobody who works here thinks quite alike, but one thing unites us, and that’s an allergy to groupthink. With that in mind, it’s our absolute pleasure to welcome Freya India to our ranks.

Earlier this year, in an essay for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel that we knew we had to reprint as soon as we read it, Freya wrote about what she aims to do as a writer:

“I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be auto-completed because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. . . . I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of. What good am I otherwise? What am I otherwise?”

In her first essay for us as a contributing writer, Freya writes about the reception to her debut book, GIRLS®, which dives deep into the misery of Gen Z women, exploring how they’ve been commodified by Instagram, corrupted by pornography, destabilized by the decline of religion, and isolated by the internet.

The book is out next week in the U.S.—and we highly recommend you preorder it!—but it came out a couple months ago in the UK, and Freya was struck all over again by how her work is interpreted by a corner of the media that insists there’s only one explanation for women’s misery, and it’s this: Dudes suck.

Read on to find out what Freya makes of this, and please join us in welcoming her on board. —The Editors

Why are young women so unhappy? Rates of anxiety disorders, depression, and self-harm are soaring; in the U.S., almost one in three teenage girls seriously considered suicide in 2021. Read the mainstream press and you will overwhelmingly find the same answer: teenage boys, misogyny, masculinity, Andrew Tate. For years, blaming men has been the accepted explanation for our misery.

Into this climate landed a viral cover story from the flagship magazine of the British left, The New Statesman, headlined “Meet the Angry Young Women.” Gen Z women in Britain, they found, feel unhappy, hopeless about the future, and hostile toward men. According to new polling, around 72 percent of young men say they have a positive view of women; only half of young women say the same about men. And while just 7 percent of young men have a negative view of women, 21 percent of young women have a negative view of men.

The piece itself was balanced, finally acknowledging that the “femosphere”—left-wing female influencers—also “reinforces this hostility toward men.” But plenty of commentators still read the report as yet more evidence that men are the problem; even an op-ed offering an economic explanation for the angriness of women couldn’t help but conclude: “a woman can choose to subjugate herself to a man, or to the man.”