The Free Press

“Very, very soon,” President Donald Trump teasingly said last week about the promised release of secret government documents related to UFOs. “This process is well underway, and we found many very interesting documents, I must say.”

The president’s announcement, at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix, pushed the conversation about UFOs yet another step closer to the mainstream and further away from the swirl of conspiracy culture, even though Trump also sounded like he hasn’t made up his own mind about what to believe. “I figured this was a good crowd because I know you people, you’re really into that,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t know if I am.”

Why did the president treat the UFO announcement so lightheartedly? Was he trying to lower expectations? Or send a signal that he isn’t alarmed by what the government has found? What should we be looking for when the documents are released?

One person with a lot to say about the last question is physicist Avi Loeb. In the second part of this four-part series, the longtime Harvard University professor explains why he keeps an open mind about extraterrestrial visitation and what Americans should make of this phenomenon.

Loeb became a scientific celebrity in 2017 after the discovery of ‘Oumuamua, the first confirmed object from another star to visit our solar system. Most of Loeb’s colleagues were thrilled about the discovery but content to reason that it was likely a comet or meteor. Loeb, intrigued by ‘Oumamua’s unusually flat shape, proposed that it might be an alien artifact. While the scientific establishment criticized Loeb’s reasoning, he was undeterred, and has since suggested that another interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, could be some sort of alien craft.

The origins of this essay lie in a recent visit to the Middle East shelf in a Washington, D.C., bookstore during a visit from my home in the actual Middle East. I was on a short break from the story I’ve been living and covering in Israel for three decades, and from the tragedies that have become routine for Israelis and for our neighbors since the war that began on October 7, 2023.

As a longtime denizen of bookstores in Western countries, I knew that almost any shop would carry a few titles about the evils of Zionism and Israel, a venerable genre on the Marxist left. But this time I saw a change: The Gaza war had inspired a proliferation of these titles so intense that they now filled much of a shelf. I noticed the same phenomenon in other bookstores in other cities, where there were suddenly more “Gaza” and “Palestine” books, it seemed, than books about the rest of the entire Arab world combined. Humanity now inhabited a new age, according to one title, The World After Gaza. According to another, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. There was Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, and Palestine and Feminist Liberation, and many more examples in the same vein, with more soon to be published. A new literary genre had been born.

The Gaza war has been fought a two-hour drive from my Jerusalem home by people I know, and has claimed the lives of several of them. For me, reading the back covers of these books left the impression of a genre related to the actual territory of Gaza as the Dune novels are related to the actual NASA space program. At the same time, it wasn’t fringe work. Among the practitioners were authors who have recently won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and additional accolades.

After reading more in subsequent months, I came to think of the genre as “Gazology.” By this term I don’t mean the study of the real territory of Gaza, or of the terrible human tragedy caused by the Hamas offensive of October 7 and by the Israeli response in the war that followed—vast tracts of Gaza destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians killed along with tens of thousands of combatants, and aftershocks across the Middle East. Gazology is not reportage, and most of its practitioners are not in or even near Gaza or Israel. This is a Western literary genre with its own rules, tropes, and goals.

It’s likely that much Western culture, journalism, and politics in the coming years will be downstream of these books and the ideology behind them. Students in disciplines from anthropology to medicine will be assigned these works and invited to see the world’s problems through the lens of “Gaza.” For this reason, the genre is important. What follows is a survey of five representative samples of the volumes in question, in an attempt to sketch the contours of this expanding body of writing and to understand what it is trying to say.

There’s a period of time in Israel, shortly after Passover, where we begin a special nine-day cycle of remembrance days. On April 14, Israelis marked Yom HaShoah, remembrance day for the victims of the Holocaust, followed a week later by Memorial Day for the country’s fallen soldiers and, in an abrupt change of tone beginning on Tuesday evening, the street celebrations of Independence Day.

What are these days all about? Why were they grouped together? What are Israelis actually marking in this period? The answer is a journey into Israel’s founding experience and culture, and how different it is from the cultures of commemoration in the West.

The people remembered in these holidays, the victims of the Holocaust, wars, and terrorism, can seem like abstractions from the other side of the world, or from four generations later. But the nine-day arc of these national holidays is all about reifying these lost souls. In gatherings throughout the country, names are read out. Stories are told of specific loved ones remembered and lost. Historical abstractions and distant cultural touchstones that a nation’s fallen inevitably become over time are pulled back into our consciousness as real remembered human beings. It is commemoration through specificity and intimacy.

That’s how the date of Yom HaShoah was chosen. Israeli leaders rejected the obvious choices: The Ninth of Av—Tisha B’Av—a traditional Jewish fast day that marks the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem, the expulsion from Spain, and other disasters of Jewish history. The legislators of the early Knesset were loath to lump the Holocaust, unique in scope and result, with the rest of that history. They considered the eve of Passover, when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was launched in 1943. They wanted to center the commemoration on that act of desperate defiance and doomed courage, rather than on vulnerability and helplessness. But that date, too, was rejected. It would interfere with the celebration of Passover.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where young workers line up for jobs they can’t get and scorn ones they don’t want, money flows out, and MAID will receive less scrutiny. Let’s jump in!

Glenn Cormier runs a pub on Bowen Island, a community of about 4,000 people less than an hour from downtown Vancouver. His problem isn’t having enough business. It’s finding someone to cook the food on the Bowen Island Pub’s menu. The island is reachable only by boat and ferry, and the local labor pool is thin. The workers who are nearby don’t seem interested.

“We have seen a decline in the interest of young people to go into the culinary arts,” Cormier told me. Casual dining, in particular, “is really not appealing to young Canadians.” He is able to find servers, but “if you don’t have the cook, you’re out of luck.”

It’s Tuesday, April 21. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Patrick McGee on Tim Cook’s legacy at Apple. Arthur Brooks on why American Catholics don’t have to choose between Trump and the pope. A study finds anti-Zionism distorts moral judgment. Can a former Republican lieutenant governor win as a Democrat? And much more.

But first: Can you escape AI disruption—or should you embrace it?

Around a year ago we published an essay about how the world was about to change—and what you should do about it. “AI Will Change What It Is to Be Human. Are We Ready?” asked the headline of the piece. In the opening line, Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit—no AI doomers—posed another question: “Are we helping create the tools of our own obsolescence?”

That question has grown only more urgent since last spring, with AI technology advancing at an eye-watering pace. Today, we bring you two stories about how AI is changing how we work—and two radically different approaches to the question on everyone’s mind: Will I survive the AI revolution?

Up first, River Page visits a trade school to investigate the idea that as the AI “jobpocalypse” comes for white-collar professions like lawyers and accountants, people who work with their hands (think plumbers and electricians) will remain safe. But does the logic really hold, or is “learn a trade” the new “learn to code”—a meaningless slogan that is no match for the fearsome disruption already underway? Read River’s piece to find out.

For another perspective on the disruptive power of this new technology, we turn to futurist Jamie Metzl. He’s just published a book about AI—with AI. And no, this is not a tale of a writer caught in an AI authorship scandal. In fact, it’s right there on the cover: “By Jamie Metzl and GPT-5.” Jamie argues that you don’t need to dismiss the risks of the AI revolution to harness its miraculous power.

—Oliver Wiseman

• As the U.S. and Iran are set to resume peace talks in Islamabad this week, a White House official has told The Wall Street Journal that Donald Trump is not inclined to extend the ceasefire past Wednesday evening, when it expires.

• Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has resigned, the White House confirmed. Her departure follows months of reported misconduct allegations, including an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, drinking on the job, and travel fraud—all under investigation by the Labor Department’s inspector general.

• At the start of the 2026 cycle, Democrats retaking the Senate seemed like a long shot—they needed to flip four Republican-held seats, including two in states Trump won by double digits. Now, with Trump’s approval at 40 percent and strong candidates in Ohio, Alaska, North Carolina, and Maine, the betting markets have moved to a toss-up.

• White House strategists are growing increasingly alarmed that rising gas prices, up more than $1 a gallon since the U.S. war against Iran began in February, could devastate Republicans in the midterms. Trump’s own energy secretary has acknowledged prices may not drop below $3 until 2027.

• A gunman opened fire at Mexico’s Teotihuacán pyramids yesterday, killing a Canadian woman before taking his own life. At least six people were wounded, including tourists from Colombia, Canada, and Russia.

• FBI director Kash Patel is suing The Atlantic for $250 million over a story alleging excessive drinking and unexplained absences on the job. The magazine, which cited six current and former officials, says it stands by its reporting.

• The House Ethics Committee published a list of all 28 publicly disclosed sexual misconduct investigations into members dating back to 1976, as two congressmen resigned last week over separate allegations. At least half of the probes occurred in the past decade and one sitting member, Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL), remains under active investigation.

Major General Mick Ryan (Ret.), Australian Army—Senior Fellow for Military Studies at the Lowy Institute, adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and author of the Futura Doctrina Substack—joins School of War to assess the current state of the war in Iran. Is the conflict entering a postmortem phase, or are we still deep in…

Steve Jobs always said Apple was founded at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. Under Tim Cook it’s come to exist at the intersection of operations and finance. Under John Ternus, announced Monday as Cook’s successor, Apple will exist at the intersection of silicon and supply chains.

Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering and a 25-year Apple veteran, is, by all accounts, calm, collegial, and technically formidable. No doubt there are people who will lament the choice, yearning for someone more like Jobs and designer Jony Ive. That partnership, from 1997 to 2011, forged the soul of Apple with a spate of hit products including the candy-colored iMacs and iBooks, plus the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Back then Apple’s achievements weren’t just in tech; they were in design, even human spirit. Jobs wanted to build products that “make our hearts sing.” And he did.

Last summer, I was invited to give a lecture on artificial intelligence and spirituality at the famed Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. The invitation followed the publication of my most recent book, Superconvergence, in which I explained how, for all the legitimate concerns about AI, the new technology can help improve our health, more efficiently and sustainably grow our food, generate new industrial materials from living cells, and store our essential data for millions of years.

But the centerpiece of my talk went further. AI, I argued, could not only help us live healthier and more sustainably, but has the potential to help us live more morally. To illustrate my point, I described my process of giving GPT-5 the following prompt:

Drawing from the full spectrum of human history including philosophy, religion, spiritual teachings, indigenous wisdom, and humanist traditions, what are the 10 most fundamental rules that, if sincerely followed by all people, would most likely create the highest levels of love, peace, mutual respect, and justice across humanity?

The response I received was simple and profound:

1. Treat every being with compassion and dignity.

2. Do no harm; actively protect the vulnerable.

3. Speak and act truthfully, with integrity and humility.

4. Share generously, especially with those in need.

5. Seek to understand others before judging them.

6. Resolve conflict with fairness, forgiveness, and the intent to heal.

7. Live in harmony with nature and all forms of life.

8. Value wisdom over dominance; cultivate inner growth.

9. Honor the freedom and uniqueness of others.

10. Remember the sacredness of life. Live with awe, gratitude, and love.

NORCROSS, GEORGIA — Geoff Duncan, former Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia, won’t stop apologizing.

He’s sorry for supporting the state’s 2019 “heartbeat bill,” which bans abortion at around six weeks, after a fetal heartbeat is detected. He’s sorry for facilitating the passage of a “constitutional carry” bill in 2022, which allows most people to carry a concealed handgun with no license or background check. He’s also sorry for opposing Medicaid expansion, arguing at the time that it was not fiscally responsible.

“I’m sorry for those positions and any harm that they may have done,” Duncan told me.

Duncan first rose to prominence as one of the Republicans who resisted President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 win in Georgia. Duncan has been speaking out against what he calls Trump’s “toxic” and “dangerous” Republican Party since leaving office in 2023, and even endorsed Kamala Harris and spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2024. After being excommunicated from the Georgia Republican Party in January 2025, Duncan switched parties in August. He is now running for governor as a Democrat in what will be one of the most closely watched races in the midterms.

Chase Stephen says he’s not worried about AI coming for his job “at all.”

“I’m an electrician,” he said. Chase, 24, did what he describes as a pointless semester at Southern Virginia University. “I went for criminal justice and they gave me a bunch of random classes—English, some communications class,” he said. He dropped out and started working for the Long Island, New York, firm RMD Electric—and he has no regrets. “I have friends who went to college and now they have to get jobs in things their degrees aren’t even related to.”

If you believe the hype about the AI apocalypse, his trajectory is about to become a lot more common. “Learn a trade” has become, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, “a rallying cry,” spurred by “fears of an AI ‘jobpocalypse.’ ”