The Free Press

Last night a gunman targeted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C. The attempted shooting was the latest incident in an alarming spate of political violence in America. For our view on the attempted attack, and where it leaves the country, read our editorial: “The American Way Is Under Fire.” Now, we bring you Suzy Weiss’s account o…

At 1 a.m., in the lobby of her hotel, my colleague Jillian told me about the time her school changed its active shooter policy. We were sharing a slice of cheese pizza so big it prompted me to tell her that, in my native England, “This would be an entire pizza.” We hadn’t had dinner, for reasons that will become clear.

Jillian told me that when she was really little, she and her classmates were told to remain in their classroom if they heard gunshots but turn out the lights and stay quiet. They were supposed to pretend they weren’t there. Then at some point, someone realized that was a bad idea, and the advice changed: Kids were told to be more “aggressive,” she said, to look around for weapons—a baseball bat in the closet or maybe even a stapler, which could be thrown at the shooter’s head. They were supposed to run toward the door, and barricade it.

None of us had run toward the door a few hours earlier, when we heard what turned out to be gunshots from our table at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. My boss Olly, like President Trump, thought it might be the sound of an unlucky waiter dropping a serving tray; being of an anxious disposition, I thought to myself, That sounds like a gun. Having spent a lifetime rejecting said anxiety, my next thought was, Don’t be ridiculous. It was probably just someone knocking on the double doors 10 meters away!

There was a time in American life when elected officials and journalists could gather in Washington and enjoy bad wine and banter without fear. But not last night at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where what was supposed to be a routine celebration of the White House press corps and the First Amendment was cut short. And tragedy was narrowly averted.

The alleged shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, from California, attempted to storm the ballroom of the Washington Hilton where more than 2,000 guests and senior members of the administration were gathered. He was, according to D.C. police chief Jeffery Carroll, armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. Allen had reportedly been staying at the hotel ahead of the event. CCTV released after the incident suggests he tried to sprint past a security barrier in the lobby, and allegedly fired at a Secret Service agent before he was subdued and taken into custody.

It was the first White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Donald Trump had attended as president, and it had been previewed as an adversarial moment. Many journalists saw Trump’s mere presence as an affront to press freedom, given the lawsuits he and his administration have deployed against critics. Meanwhile, Trump was set to joke about and even mock journalists in his remarks, later saying his speech would have been “rough.”

But barely an hour into the event, the president and the press found themselves on the same side. On the floor after gunshots rang out, Free Press staff witnessed the speedy response from the law enforcement officers who kept Trump and every guest safe. As the audience and dignitaries took cover, armed agents rushed toward the gunfire and suppressed the attacker, while others escorted out the president and cabinet officials.

According to acting attorney general Todd Blanche, the alleged shooter is believed to have targeted Trump administration officials. No evidence has emerged so far that suggests that Allen is mentally impaired, and he graduated from CalTech in 2017. A December 2024 Facebook post from the tutoring service where he appears to have worked described him as “teacher of the month.”

We’ll learn more details in the coming days, but it’s impossible to ignore the fiery pitch of the current political climate. Just outside the hotel, protesters held placards that read “Death to Tyrants” and “Death to All of Them.” They waved these signs in the faces of shaken attendees even after the thwarted attack. Hatred toward public officials and ideological opponents abounds in American politics today, and has too often turned violent.

It struck us, as they waved these placards in the event’s aftermath, that it was the perfect emblem of our present moment. One in which calls for violence against people “on the other side” can be stated flagrantly in public.

If the shooter was indeed targeting the president, this would be the third assassination attempt in less than two years. One can find examples of ugly, violent rhetoric being used across the political spectrum in America today, but the animosity aimed at Trump is on a level of its own. That fixation is the symptom of a broken politics.

Trump was collected and resolved at his press conference at the White House shortly after the incident. “This was an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press,” he said. “And, in a certain way, it did. Because of the fact that they just unified, I saw a room that was just totally unified. It was, in one way, very beautiful, a very beautiful thing to see.”

Trump’s reaction to the shooting was notably different from his justifiable impulse to “fight” after being struck during the Pennsylvania rally in 2024. On Saturday night, he sought to unify. “We have to, we have to resolve our differences,” Trump said. “I will say you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, and progressives. There was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.” That impulse is sorely needed in the country today—and not just in the immediate aftermath of an emergency.

If the shooter was indeed targeting the president, this would be the third assassination attempt in less than two years.

Authorities on Saturday said the suspect will face at least two charges: armed assault on a federal officer and using a firearm while committing a crime. They expect to file more charges soon. Allen is set to be arraigned on Monday, and could face up to 30 years in prison if convicted on both of the currently announced charges.

The shooting is a reminder that the First Amendment alone cannot uphold free speech. Its legal protections for private individuals are essential, but the entire American system of expression, elections, and debate is also built on a shared culture—on the assumption that the elected representatives of the people will never lack the power to speak freely. Today, that can no longer be taken for granted. The assassin’s veto over the president is as great a threat to free expression as is the government’s power to suppress the public. If the shooter was aiming to silence President Trump, his bullet would also have nullified the views of the 77 million who voted for him, along with the entire electoral system.

While journalists celebrate free speech, it’s worth remembering that security guards and law enforcement play an essential role in allowing speech to circulate in the first place. And as in the Pennsylvania shooting, the officers who responded on Saturday acted swiftly and admirably, while the leaders in charge of preventing an attack have much reassessing to do.

The shooting is a reminder that the First Amendment alone cannot uphold free speech.

Among the guests on Saturday were members of a club that has grown too large: Steve Scalise, shot during a congressional baseball practice in 2017; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father and uncle were assassinated; and Erika Kirk, whose husband, Charlie, was murdered last year. A video shows Kirk, in tears, being ushered out of the event. It struck us that we were gathered in the same hotel where, in 1981, John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate then-president Ronald Reagan.

The venue and guests help put in context a harrowing notion: Political violence is once again a norm after several generations as a rarity. Trump has been a repeated target in the maelstrom, but it threatens to hit any American who dares to step forward in our divided and deranged era.

As the threats and attacks grow in frequency, they pass in and out of the public imagination with increasing speed. Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost was reportedly punched in the face at an event in January, and Rep. Ilhan Omar was sprayed with a vinegar-like substance at a town hall the same month. Two Minnesota state legislators, Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman, were shot in their homes in June 2025, and Hortman and her husband, Mark, died in the attack. The residence of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro was set ablaze last year while he and his family slept. And only weeks ago, a man threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

With each attack, the price of participation in American public life rises. The toll of this violence for our democracy is real and undeniable, if hard to quantify. It is measured in every speech that cannot go ahead for safety reasons, every candidate who decides not to run for office because of the risks that brings with it, every administration official forced to live on a military base because of the threats they face, and every journalist who suppresses a detail out of fear of reprisal.

In the tangle of causes of this dark trend, one thread stands out: the endorsement or justification of violence. We wish we could say that such language can only be found on the signs of protesters. Only a few days ago, The New York Times published a gleeful podcast conversation in which the participants excused the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

As was widely reported in the hours after the attack, Trump initially wanted to return to the ballroom and resume the evening’s program. Law enforcement protocol mandated otherwise. “We wanted to stay tonight,” he said. “I fought like hell to stay.”

Instead, the event will not be canceled, but postponed. “We’re going to reschedule,” he said. “We’re going to do it again. We’re not going to let anybody take over our society.”

That the event be rescheduled, and be held in as normal a manner as is safe, is a democratic necessity.

Welcome back to the Weekend Press! This week, Tanner Nau drinks with America’s first “chief MAHA officer.” Suzy Weiss weighs in on the woman who dumped a friend for going on Wegovy. Judea Pearl remembers living through Israel’s earliest days. And more!

But first: The trouble with celebrating sickness . . .

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when being ill became cool. But sometime in the mid-2010s, it became normal to scroll past black-and-white pictures with long captions about chronic fatigue or generalized anxiety, and with hashtags like #invisibleillness and #healingjourney. In real life, you’d hear the casual shorthand of “I’m so OCD” and “everyone’s a little bit ADHD.”

In 2019, the investigative journalist Christina Buttons “began encountering stories along a similar theme: women discovering, later in life, that they were autistic.” The internet was full of pieces with titles like “The Invisible Women with Autism” or “What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained.”

Throughout her life, she’d struggled socially, become easily overwhelmed, and fidgeted—and when she came across these stories, something clicked into place. She went to the doctor, and got an autism diagnosis.

“Suddenly, every aspect of my life, every little inadequacy or abnormality that had once tormented me, had a medical explanation,” she writes today.

At the time, she was living alone and working remotely, but a couple years later, she became a journalist—and realized that “not only was I competent at socializing, I was good at it, and I improved the more I did it.” She realized having intense interests wasn’t necessarily a symptom. And she began to question the whole idea that she was ill.

The high priestess of the very online millennial women who turned illness into identity is Lena Dunham, who just released a wildly bestselling memoir, Famesick.

While working on Girls, the show that made her famous, Dunham was at war with her own body, suffering from endometriosis or shingles or impetigo, and struggling with an addiction to the anxiety medicine Klonopin. She documented it all on Instagram, posting nude photos to mark the anniversary of her hysterectomy or announcing she’d been diagnosed with something called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

But, writes Kat Rosenfield today, what Dunham’s new book reveals is that real, genuine illness is not aspirational—not a label you should seek—and not in any way romantic. “It made her a person who disappointed people, or clung to them, or betrayed them,” writes Kat. “It made her a person whose boyfriend told her, ‘You are making it hard for me to love you.’ ” Her story is a cautionary tale for anyone who desires a diagnosis. Be careful what you wish for.

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a cold-plunging neuroscience professor based across the pond; a fit, steak- and coffee–loving PhD in politics in Calgary; or a 71-year-old in Florida training for her first Spartan Race (seriously!).

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].

This week, Will Rahn published a piece on how the Mets are breaking his heart—and the next day, they won! Also, Jamie Metzl explains what it’s like to co-author a book with a chatbot:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our digital editor Josh Kaplan for his recommendations…

📚Read . . . With the first American World Cup in more than 30 years coming this summer, what better time to finally get into what we in Europe call football, but you might know as “soccer”? This week, I picked up a copy of Atlantic writer Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World. Written for an American, soccer-skeptical audience, it dissects how the sport has transformed life for billions of people—and is full of observations that will change the way you think about the world.

🍻Drink . . . a light beer. The days are getting longer, the evenings are brighter, and warmer days are nearly here. As millions of people in bars across the world begin to order margs and Aperols and even rosé, for my money there’s nothing more refreshing than a God-fearing 3-percent domestic beer. I live in London, which for all its perks, is still in thrall to the tyranny of craft beers. When I’m in the U.S., I like to bask in the world’s foremost selection of easy-drinking, refreshing options. I am partial to a PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon) or Miller High Life, but anything light and frothy does the trick.

🥗Eat . . . asparagus. A few years ago, I became what I like to call “season-pilled,” basically hyper-fixating on specific fruit and veg at specific times of year, to the point where my fiancée said that my spending habits on cherries were becoming “financially unsustainable.” Right now, the thing to look out for is asparagus. Pretty much everywhere across the northern hemisphere is about to enter asparagus abundance season, which the Germans call Spargelzeit, or “asparagus time.” They take it to some pretty weird places, and many towns and villages even crown an “Asparagus Queen.” But you can just go to a farmers market and buy a bunch and enjoy a delicious seasonal vegetable at the time that nature intended.

Last but not least, we asked our art director Clara Grusq to tell us about a beautiful thing she’s been thinking about this week. She said: “This past weekend, I had the pleasure of stumbling across a movie theater that was showing the 1986 neo-noir classic “Blue Velvet” by David Lynch—in which Kyle MacLachlan, as college student Jeffrey Beaumont, gets pulled into a dark police investigation and falls for the tortured cabaret singer Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini. Feast your eyes on this shot, in which Dorothy is held by Jeffrey as if his arms are the only place she could find refuge”:

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

Whenever I pull a cigarette out of its pack, I don’t get the sense of relief that so many people do knowing that they’re about to feed their brain some soothing nicotine; instead, my body tenses up. For years, I never understood this—why my heart rate increases or my palms sweat—until I thought about it properly and realized that this response goes back to when I was a teenager.

Hiding behind a building at the back of my school, I would light a cigarette while ducking from teachers. Later, I would walk through my front door covered in cheap perfume, trying to mask that familiar smell from my mother. I confessed this to her a few years ago. Her reaction: “Do you think I’m an idiot?” It was the sort of teenage caper that I now look back on fondly.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As soon as Steak ’n Shake announced it had hired a “Chief MAHA Officer,” I knew I had to speak to him. Michael Boes is the first American in the history of fast food to score that title—and he told me he’s sure he won’t be the last.

The burger and shake joint announced Tuesday, on X, that Boes will be in charge of “nutritional integrity, ingredient transparency, and the healthiness of our products.” The job description sounds like a contradiction in terms. The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is, famously, not keen on fast-food restaurants. Its high priest, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said Wednesday that he would support banning TV ads for fast food—which he once described as “poison.”

But Boes, 37, sees no tension in his new job. The toxic nature of junk food is, according to him, a recent development. “We’re going back to what fast food used to be in America,” he says, “when every fast-food chain used tallow for its french fries and actual bread for a bun.”

In other words, they’re Making Fast Food Healthy Again.

From Giuseppe Verdi’s Violetta to William Shakespeare’s Ophelia, the young woman ravaged by disease has long been a fascinating, and romantic, figure. So fragile, so adorable, so strangely beautiful—and so terribly, tragically sick. But two centuries after audiences first wept for the consumptive heroine of La Traviata, as she collapsed and died beautifully in her lover’s arms, a new sick girl archetype emerged online, one for whom illness was not just romantic but aspirational, even a personal brand for millennial women.

There were hospital bed selfies, aesthetic photos of pills scattered like candy, and lots and lots of hashtags: #invisibleillness, #healingjourney, #disabledandproud. The women called themselves spoonies, after a famous metaphor offered by the blogger Christine Miserandino in 2003, when she used a handful of spoons to illustrate how even small and ordinary activities, like washing her hair, required spending down her limited supply of energy. They were tragic figures but also savvy marketers; as The Free Press’s Suzy Weiss wrote, their world was “an illness kingdom filled with micro-celebrities offering discounts on supplements and tinctures; podcasts on dating as a spoonie; spoonie clubs on college campuses; a weekly magazine; and online stores with spoonie merch.”

But among these micro-celebrities, there was one woman who was the real thing: Lena Dunham, the patron saint of the extremely online millennial. Posting from her hospital bed after she was rushed to the emergency room from the Met Gala; sharing her journey through surgeries, struggle, and addiction; spinning stories about her health journey the same way she once captured the millennial zeitgeist as the creator and star of HBO’s Emmy-winning drama Girls.

When I speak at schools or synagogues, students often ask me, “Are you a Holocaust survivor?”

I answer, “No. I am a redemption survivor—a member of an almost extinct generation that witnessed Jewish rebirth and redemption.” If they ask me to explain, I don’t begin with history. I begin with a song. It is a Hanukkah song we learned in kindergarten, sung by Zionist pioneers in the 1940s:

No miracle happened to us.
We found no vessel of oil.
We carved the rock till we bled.
And there was light.

Legend has it that in 1630, the Puritan John Winthrop delivered a sermon aboard the ship Arbella while sailing to Massachusetts Bay from England. On the way to the New World, he declared: “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

America existed then only as a smattering of fledgling colonies, of which the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the most prominent. As its first governor—elected in 1629 shortly before leading its settlers to the Americas—Winthrop was proud of his colony. But his message was not self-congratulatory or self-promoting; it was cautionary. If the Puritan colony failed morally, it would fail publicly. Those with wealth and power, he warned, were obligated to attend more to others and less to themselves. Or, in his words, “more enlargement toward others and less respect toward ourselves and our own right.”

Winthrop then quoted a Hebrew prophet who called on people “to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly.” He said “we must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together”—that is how we will live peacefully in society. Living as a city on a hill was a kind of communal test, and the world would take note of whether we passed.

In 2019, I was 30 years old, living in Los Angeles, sharing an apartment with my two cats, and working remotely as an artist. Most of the people my age I knew at the time were setting down roots: getting married, building families. Meanwhile, I spent almost all my time alone, surrounded by plants, animals, and murals. I had no desire for anything else. I enjoyed having a space where I could keep the world, and other people, at a manageable distance.

This had been the case for most of my life. From childhood on, I struggled to make friends, which took a toll on my self-worth. By adolescence, my mental health had deteriorated, and I spent close to a year cycling through multiple psychiatric hospitalizations, outpatient programs, and group homes for depression and self-harm. At age 15, I was groomed online by a much older man, culminating in a traumatic sexual assault. Immediately afterward I tried to end my life, then spent a year in a youth residential treatment center in Utah.