The Free Press

Say what you want about Lena Dunham—the woman bares all. Her body, in her semi-autobiographical HBO show Girls, which is what catapulted her to fame 14 years ago. And everything else in her new memoir, Famesick, which looks back on that time. In it, she meticulously describes every wart and bruise—and even an ill-fated Brazilian wax that left her with a “lumpy, pinkened, peeling pubis”—that haunted her while she bumbled through her 20s and 30s in the process of achieving her wildest dreams.

The higher that Dunham scaled Fame Mountain, the more unexplainably sick she became. She was dissociating while running lines with Adam Driver for her very own prestige television series, laid across the “cool marble floor in a sleek corporate bathroom” as Oprah Winfrey waited outside to say hello, and battled a migraine the first time that she had sex with her rock star boyfriend. She became addicted to the drug she took for anxiety, Klonopin. Dunham was getting it all and yet, simultaneously, falling apart.

The book is dedicated to all those wunderkinds who never tunneled out of that same addiction, chaos, and pressure to the other side: Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, “and anyone else who was too Famesick to be cured.”

But none of those guys spent their 20s performing nude on television and then reading headlines immediately after, on tiny screens, analyzing the distribution of fat on their bodies. While Dunham’s earlier output defined the hyper-confessional style that ruled the 2010s, Famesick—which, full disclosure, I’m only about halfway through but loving—might define another one, and that’s when people who became famous under the microscope of the internet look back, aghast, at what happened to them, what people said about them, and what they’ve become.

As war with Iran reshapes the Middle East and great-power competition intensifies, few questions matter more than how America will wield power in an increasingly unstable world.

Join Aaron MacLean and renowned historian Niall Ferguson for a special live recording of School of War on May 19 at The New York Historical. In a conversation sure to be as timely as it is wide-ranging, they’ll explore the strategic stakes of the moment, including the Middle East, China, military deterrence, and the future of American leadership.

Sir Niall Ferguson—one of The Free Press’s most widely read contributors and one of the world’s leading historians of empire, finance, and geopolitics—brings a sweeping historical lens to today’s crises. Aaron MacLean, host of School of War and one of the sharpest voices covering defense and foreign policy, has been in nonstop demand since the conflict began. His taking the time to join us live for this conversation is an opportunity not to be missed.

Paid Free Press subscribers get exclusive presale access until Monday at 10 a.m. EST, when tickets go live to the general public. Paid subscribers: Scroll below to find your access code. Not yet a paid subscriber? Become one today.

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This live event, set in one of New York City’s most beautiful and storied cultural institutions, offers something increasingly rare: the chance to hear two serious thinkers grapple in real time with the questions that will shape the future.

Ticket Options:

• General Admission—Attend the live podcast recording.

• Reception Ticket (limited availability)—Includes admission to the live podcast recording as well as an exclusive pre-event reception with the opportunity to meet Niall Ferguson and Aaron MacLean before the program begins.

It’s Friday, April 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on being targeted by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Why Trump’s pressure on Iran is working. And much more.

But first: The moral inversion of The New York Times.

Strange though it may sound, you can trace the start of The Free Press back to the publication of a single article.

In June 2020, I was part of a team of editors at The New York Times Opinion page who published an essay from Senator Tom Cotton. It argued that the rioting, looting, and violence (he called it a “carnival for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements”) was a move toward anarchy, and that the president had the authority to take action against it by sending in the National Guard.

I’ve already recounted how this all played out, but suffice it to say that many, if not most, Times staffers erupted against the premise of the piece—a call for restoring order in cities—and the paper’s decision to “platform” it. Running it, they said, put lives in danger. (Never mind that more than half of the polled American public agreed with Senator Cotton’s position.)

Disagreement over that article would ultimately lead to my defenestration from the paper. Bari Weiss left the Times that same summer, because of the same broken newsroom culture that led to the uproar over the Cotton essay.

“If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired.”

Another thing Bari said in that note was this: “The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.”

Six years on, the charge stands.

Consider, for example, the latest episode of the New York Times Opinions podcast, featuring the left-wing provocateur Hasan Piker, the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, and an editor named Nadja Spiegelman. The episode’s title: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” In the conversation, the panelists endorse and admit to theft (or “microlooting,” as Spiegelman calls it), celebrate looting, and excuse the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

There are more important things happening in the world than three out-of-touch media figures babbling in a podcast studio in New York. You can read about those here, here, and here, and in the other stories in our lineup today.

But a New York Times podcast about murder, theft, and looting is worth lingering over. Why? Because it is symptomatic of a deep moral crisis in America, where profoundly antisocial (and criminal!) behavior is put on a pedestal and valorized in our broken media.

The episode is what moral inversion looks like. The paper that saw it unfit to publish a United States senator on the rule of law now hosts a gleeful conversation about theft, looting, and the murder of a corporate executive and frames it as moral courage. And you can expect no internal revolt, no lengthy review or editor’s note. The point they are making is this: Stealing is laudable if you are stealing from the right people. Maybe even murder, too.

Today we have two must-read essays on this conversation, by Suzy Weiss and River Page. Read them to understand how some of the top voices in the media came to embrace criminality.

The Free Press was founded because there was an urgent need for an alternative. For an outlet that could still see the difference between right and wrong, and was committed to telling the truth—even if it is uncomfortable, even if it flies in the face of whatever ideas happen to be fashionable at that moment in time. That is as urgent and necessary today as it was on day one.

—Adam Rubenstein

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The literary world has a new obsession: Gaza. Not the reality of life for Palestinians there, however. But a fantasy of Gaza that serves ideological ends. In an essential essay published this week, Matti Friedman delved into a new literary genre he calls “Gazology.” He read these books so you don’t have to.

AI could change everything—including our politics. Right now, a big fight is bubbling up across the country. It’s over data centers, and whether or not local communities will allow them to be built. These vast structures are the physical infrastructure on which the AI revolution depends—and the target of a populist backlash against the technology. Frannie Block went to one of Ohio’s poorest counties, where local politicians and residents are battling over a huge Google data center planned for their town. Is it a much-needed shot in the arm for a struggling part of the country or “the next exploitation of Appalachia”?

“Why do I do this to myself?” That’s the question Free Presser and Mets fan Will Rahn was asking himself this week as he suffered through his team’s brutal 12-game losing streak. The answer, Will wrote in his ode to America’s pastime, is because the sport breaks his heart in a way he can handle. Baseball is undergoing a renaissance right now—and Will thinks most of the explanations for that comeback completely miss the point.

Untangling the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center isn’t easy. In an essential guide to the charges against the nonprofit, Jed Rubenfeld weighed the facts and the government’s theories in the federal charges against the nonprofit.

What’s the matter with Gen Z? That was the question at the center of our latest Things That Matter debate. Liberal commentator Harry Sisson and conservative Isabel Brown—two of the sharpest voices of their generation—joined us to hash out what young people argue over, from climate change to healthcare to religion, family, and the meaning of success itself. Don’t miss their debate on modern feminism, the rise of looksmaxxing, and whether or not ordinary middle-class Gen Zers will ever be able to own homes.

With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

At 9:32 a.m. on February 28, Mojtaba Khamenei stepped outside of the family compound to “do something,” according to an Iranian official. Seconds later, the compound was struck, and Khamenei vanished.

Confirmed dead from that strike was his father, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, abruptly leaving Iran’s top job open for the regime’s favorite nepo baby. Still missing, Khamenei ran a highly successful campaign—bolstered, naturally, by his campaign advisers, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Despite Israeli kinetic arguments to the contrary, on March 8, the Assembly of Experts—with many members voting safely online—declared him the new Supreme Leader unanimously.

In lieu of an inauguration speech, four days after his appointment, a written message attributed to Khamenei was read on state TV. No audio. No video. The next day, the son of President Masoud Pezeshkian assured the public that despite the glaring lack of proof of life, the leader was “safe and sound.” Meanwhile, Iranian officials spun a tale of minor facial and leg injuries, insisting he remained entirely lucid.

The narrative has essentially frozen there. For the last month and a half, the regime has subsisted entirely on ventriloquism—statements attributed to the new Supreme Leader without a single visual confirmation—while foreign reports have described his condition as ranging between severely mutilated and dead.

Every week in this newsletter, we spotlight incidents of antisemitism from all over the world. It’s a necessary and important way of taking the temperature of our society, and of telling a story about what is happening to Jewish life in the West. That story is often not a happy one, and all too often can seem like one in which the Jews are victims of, rather than participants in, their own societies.

There is no consensus about how to deal with these threats—even within the Jewish community. There are some who think we’re still operating in a world in which the old rules apply. Who have hope that the liberal order that has seen Jews flourish in America might yet prevail. That the war in Israel will drop from the headlines; that we’ll soon be able to go back to the pre–October 7 world.

Then there are those who believe that projecting strength is the only option for ensuring Jewish survival. That antisemitism can’t be argued or ignored out of existence, that Jews cannot live with their heads down, and that sheer might is the only way to keep Jews safe in a world in which hatred reemerges time and time again.

Jews disagree about most matters, even those that are much more trivial than our safety and security, so it’s no surprise that there is very little agreement on one of such weight. But the ways that this lack of consensus manifests are important.

Some Jews are happy to contribute to ever-increasing bills for synagogue security teams, but would never carry a gun. Others believe the Jewish community should take a Christian approach and turn the other cheek, and rely on law enforcement to restore order. Others still seek comfort in guns or self-defense classes, resigned to the idea that they may one day have to stop an attack on themselves or their families.

To a certain extent, all of these solutions are Band-Aids; they are ways to treat the symptoms of Jew-hatred while the disease itself continues to spread. But while they may feel like a drop in the bucket compared to the tsunami of radicalization and hate that many Jews are facing, they also signify something important: that Jews are not only unwilling to take it lying down, but that they have more resources to fight back than ever before—especially in America.

This week, we’re bringing you a story about Jews doing just that. Over the last few months, my colleague, video journalist Tanya Lukyanova, has been delving into the burgeoning network of Jews in New York City who are responding to the rise in antisemitic hate crimes by taking up arms. First, she visited a Brooklyn gun store that opened less than two years ago—the first in the borough in nearly four decades. There, she spoke with owner Michael Bergida, who estimates that roughly 60 percent of his new clients are Jewish first-time gun owners.

Elsewhere, Tanya found that enrollment in Israeli self-defense classes has doubled since October 7. She later met with a firearms instructor who calls himself the Tactical Rabbi and has amassed thousands of social media followers teaching defensive shooting to Jewish Americans.

Tanya also spoke to Jewish New Yorkers who are skeptical that gun ownership will solve the societal problem of Jew-hate, saying that their gun control views trumped their feelings of personal safety. Historically, Jews have the lowest rate of gun ownership of all religious groups in America. But in a post–October 7 world, is that beginning to change?

You can watch Tanya’s full video here:

Assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon announced on April 20 that she had ordered a federal investigation into the University of Washington after the student group Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return University of Washington (SUPER UW) held a fundraiser calling on supporters to materially support “the Lebanese resistance.” Dhillon noted the group “has a history of violent antisemitic activity” on campus, including a 2025 building occupation in which protesters ignited dumpster fires and 21 students were arrested. The group is also scheduled to host Raed Abduljalil, a Palestinian terrorist released from prison last February after serving 23 years for participating in attacks that killed and injured Israelis.

The UCLA Students Associated Council formally condemned a Yom HaShoah event featuring Omer Shem Tov, 23, who was abducted from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, and held in Hamas captivity for 505 days. The council called the decision to highlight his testimony “selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence” and said it “serves to legitimize and normalize ongoing atrocities.”

Hello from D.C. I’m here to see the cherry blossoms and take in the monuments. Such a beautiful time of year in our nation’s capital. And yes, fine, I may go to dinner at the Institute of Peace. It was the only place with an open reservation! How would you feel if your date nights kept the lights on at Puck? Don’t worry, loyal readers, I’ll stick some filet in my purse to bring back to you.

Some quick housekeeping before the news: Suzy’s podcast has launched, since I guess there can’t be more than two consecutive months where a member of the Weiss family isn’t commandeering a microphone to tell everyone their thoughts on Ozempic. Suzy’s podcast, I’m told, is about pop culture. It’s called Second Thought and you can watch it here, or follow it here, or if you’re really old-fashioned, read the transcripts here. Now, to the news.

→ Scammers getting scammed: The Trump men have a cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial. For legal reasons I cannot describe it as a scam, so I’ll describe it as a spram. A yam-sc. And now one of its largest backers is suing the group, alleging that they took his money and won’t give it back. From CBS News, a great website:

Cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun is suing World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture co-founded by President Donald Trump and his sons, alleging the company illegally blocked him from selling digital tokens worth up to $1 billion.

Justin Sun is also the largest holder of $TRUMP coins, another Trump-backed crypto token. He’s in deep, kids. But for whatever reason, Justin Sun decided to try to see if this fake crypto bank could be a real money bank. And when he reached into the influence-payment pot to pull out cash, did he find any? Well. He says he did not. How much liberty does World Liberty Financial really offer? It’s not a bank, Justin, it’s a DeFi platform, which means money goes in but no money comes out. Like a piggy bank that’s run by the president’s sons and that you’re never going to see again. I don’t know what you were buying with all these investments—I try not to have impure thoughts—but I hope it was worth it. When you put a billion dollars into something called World Liberty Financial or wire money to a thing called $TRUMP, you can probably get off death row. You can probably do one free spouse murder if she is over 50 and going for a Pamela Anderson Makeup-Free look, but she’s not Pamela Anderson. Certainly you can do three full tax returns of financial crimes. But you cannot, under any circumstances, get your money back.

Huw Davies, an associate dean and professor of British military history at King’s College London and author of several books, including The Wandering Army, joins School of War to discuss what the 18th-century British Army can teach us about modern warfare. How does battlefield failure drive military innovation? How did institutions of the past respond t…

Some of you may know the name Changpeng Zhao—or CZ, as he’s almost universally known in the tech and finance worlds—as crypto’s richest man. Forbes calculated his net worth as greater than $110 billion. That puts him ahead of Bill Gates, though CZ denies it.

He founded Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, transforming it from a start-up …

On this week’s episode of Second Thought, Suzy Weiss sits down with comedian, media mogul, and professional pop culture savant Claudia Oshry for a conversation about what it actually takes to survive, and even thrive, online.

As host of one of the internet’s most popular pop culture podcasts—The Toast, which she hosts with her sister Jackie—Claudia talks…

A New Yorker writer, a millionaire streamer, and a New York Times editor walk into a podcasting studio. Two out of three have close relatives with Wikipedia pages, and the other owns two homes in New York. They are here to discuss the ethics of stealing from Whole Foods and ways for the working class to take back power from the capitalists unduly profiting from their labor.

Times culture editor Nadja Spiegelman (her dad wrote Maus) opens with a proposal for a cutesy new term for shoplifting. It’s called “microlooting,” and she asks controversial left-wing streamer Hasan Piker (whose uncle founded The Young Turks, a popular long-standing progressive news program) and New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino if it’s a slippery slope.