The Free Press

Portsmouth, Ohio — By the time Merit Smith met me in his office at the Scioto County Courthouse in southern Ohio last Wednesday, he was out of breath and limping slightly—old knees, he said, as he sat back in his cherry leather chair.

It was only 11 a.m., but he’d spent the entire morning lugging campaign yard signs around town in his blue Chevy pickup truck. Smith jokes he’s been “living in” the truck for the past few months as he campaigns to keep his seat as county commissioner.

The race has become one of the most hotly contested in the county. In January, 67-year-old Smith and his two fellow county commissioners voted to grant Google a 75 percent tax abatement to build a data center in Franklin Furnace, the rural town of about 1,500 that sits on the bank of the Ohio River in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains. Google is seeking nearly 800 acres of land by the river and has plans to build at least 1.7 million square feet of data centers in up to 10 phases over the course of two decades.

Trust in universities has gotten so low that even colleges can no longer ignore it. A Yale University report released on Wednesday places much of the blame in the same place that the public does: the colleges themselves.

The problems cited in the report will be familiar to readers of The Free Press, as they include nontransparent admissions standards, grade inflation, a culture that forces self-censorship, and outrageous tuition pricing. This year, George Washington University—hardly in the top tier of selective schools—started charging a sticker price approaching $100,000 a year for the privilege of studying there.

Those problems have been hanging over academia, and getting worse, for years. But a second strand of issues, though not stressed in the Yale report, concerns the rapid progress of artificial intelligence. To put it bluntly, the AIs know more than many professors, they do not tire of answering questions, they explain things clearly, and they keep unlimited office hours. They are also far cheaper and can organize a class syllabus and grade tests. So what exactly is higher education supposed to be providing us with?

New Yorkers boast about their city’s resilience, and with good reason: They’ve had plenty of comebacks. September 11, the financial crisis, and the nation’s most severe Covid lockdowns all disrupted residents and businesses, but the economy resurrected swiftly each time. It’s enough to make a young socialist take the city for granted.

Yet the real risk for New York City and other big cities doesn’t come from catastrophes. Economies stagnate when they’re layered with policies that slowly sap their productivity and orderliness—some red tape on business here, budget cuts to policing there. That’s what New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is risking with his latest tax proposal.

Mamdani announced the scheme to coincide with Tax Day. “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well today, we’re taxing the rich,” he said to the camera in one of his trademark short videos.

Welcome back to the Weekend Press! This week, the 103-year-old wellness guru Deborah Szekely spills her secrets. Suzy Weiss launches a podcast. Madeleine Kearns has two drinks with Catholic professor Luke Burgis, who refused to consult for Anthropic—and said, “I honestly can’t tell whether J.D. Vance is a true believer or not.” And more!

But first: What’s best for your child? And who gets to decide?

These are the simple questions behind some of the fieriest debates of our time—over vaccine schedules, free-range parenting, smartphones for kids. It’s a theme The Free Press keeps coming back to because the stakes feel enormous. And because everyone, it seems, has an opinion on what happens inside your home.

One of the places these debates play out most bitterly is the “momosphere,” where maternal influencers have turned ordinary parenting decisions—like where your baby sleeps, and how long you stay home after giving birth—into litmus tests for how much you love your child.

This is the battlefield where the war over breastfeeding is taking place; where moms declare that bottle-feeding mothers are selfish, and formula is poison.

Kara Kennedy says: That’s nonsense. During her first pregnancy, she concluded she didn’t want to breastfeed, at all—and talked openly about it. In doing so, she came across countless mothers who fed their babies using formula, but couldn’t bear to say so publicly. “You won’t believe the lengths I went to lie about it,” one told her.

So, knowing that moms online will shout at her, Kara has written for us today about why the decision to make parenting a little easier feels so radical—and why she doesn’t regret making it:

But it’s not just influencers who insist on telling you how to raise your kids. For Anna Keating, it was the police. Not long ago, two officers brought home her 7-year-old son; they’d picked him up while he was on the three-block walk to his grandma’s house, assuming he was lost.

Anna, who was born in the ’80s, grew up walking downtown and biking to school without adult supervision. She wants her kids to have the same independence. “Still, when the police brought my second grader home, I felt like a horrible mother,” she says. Read her story here:

​​Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!

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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].

We’ve published a lot of other pieces this week worth catching up on, including . .

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our news editor Rick Brooks for his recommendations…

📚 Read . . . Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. When winter finally let go of New York City, and there were no more slush puddles to leap, I found myself thinking about walking—to the park, to Shenanigan’s Pub, to the Catholic church with the flimsy homilies and streaming sunlight. That’s when I remembered Gros’s book, opened it to a random page, and landed here: “Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found. To walk, you need to start with two legs. The rest is optional.”

🎵 Listen . . . to the playlist “The House That Built Me: Songs About Making and Going Home.” It was created by Natalie Weiner, whose Don’t Rock the Inbox online newsletter celebrates country music that hasn’t fallen to the corporate cookie-cutter, brocentric FM dial. These 30 songs—from Loretta Lynn’s “I Don’t Wanna Play House” to Leon Bridges’s “Coming Home” to Ashley McBryde’s “Light on in the Kitchen”—make me think of the little house where I grew up, the house party that my sister and I stupidly believed we had destroyed all evidence of, and letting myself in with a key every afternoon after school.

🍳 Cook . . . these baked white pepper chicken wings. I have made them so many times that my kids believe this is my own recipe, when in fact it belongs to Kaitlin Leung. You can do the scut work—of mixing the wings with white pepper, Sichuan pepper powder, and vegetable oil—while everyone is still asleep, let it sit in the fridge all day, and pop them in the oven when you get home. Seeing the bones pile up on my kids’ plate is a triumph.

As usual, we asked our art director, Clara Grusq: What beautiful thing has been on your mind this week? She replied: “There’s so much to do in New York, but sometimes I can’t help missing my hometown of Paris, where you could just wander into La Galerie Dior and feast your eyes on the creations of Christian Dior, who reimagined the feminine silhouette with a cinched waist, and lines so precise. His designs seem sculpted on rather than worn.”

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

It’s been a hell of a week for American Catholics.

It began Sunday night, with the president of the United States calling Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” in a long rant on Truth Social. (The Pontiff had criticized Donald Trump’s threat that, unless Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz, “a whole civilization will die.”) The Pope was not cowed; on Monday, he said he will “continue to speak out loudly against war” and that he has “no fear” of the administration.

Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance—who has a book coming out in June about his conversion to Catholicism—headed over to Fox News to say that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on with the Catholic Church.” He later said that, when it comes to the Iran war, the Pope should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

If you’re both a faithful Catholic and a patriotic American, how should you feel about these competing loyalties? I needed someone smart to help me make sense of it, so I asked professor Luke Burgis if he was free for two drinks.

Luke is the founder and director of the Cluny Institute, a fascinating project within The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Its aim is to “invest in the human person,” at a time when all the things that make us uniquely human are being eroded by technology. Last month, he was invited by Anthropic to be one of 15 Christian leaders to attend a summit to help make its AI chatbot Claude more moral. He declined on principle.

One of the wonderful things about reading old books is the way it can make you feel less alone. The more distant an author is from us, the more comforting it is to find him or her sharing feelings we can recognize.

Maybe that’s why I, a millennial who grew up in the oft-idealized 1990s, find it so moving to read this short poem by Fujiwara no Kiyosuke, a court poet from 12th-century Japan. It perfectly captures the mood of wistful nostalgia that has pervaded so much of life for people of my generation. Here’s my translation of Kiyosuke’s poem:

If my life is long,

Will I remember these days,

Even these, fondly?

That lost world I suffered in. . . 

I look back on it with love.

It’s a tanka, or “short song,” a form that dominated Japanese verse from the 7th to the 12th centuries. Like its more famous cousin, the haiku, tanka proceeds in short verses with a set number of syllables each: five, seven, five, seven, seven. Because it’s so spare and simple, the art is in placing each word for maximum impact, so that a vast emotional landscape opens up within a tiny space. The more you run your mind across it, the more texture you find.

Do you want to judge my parenting? Then let me tell you: The police brought my 7-year-old son home last week because he was walking alone to my mom’s house.

Does it help if I tell you he turns 8 in a few days?

What if I tell you that we live in a nice neighborhood in downtown Colorado Springs where everyone knows one another?

I’m not fond of most parenting trends, but I do like free-range parenting; it makes intuitive sense to me that we are raising kids for adulthood, not childhood, and so we need to let them do things on their own. A 2023 nationally representative survey found that three in four parents of a child 5 to 8 years old say they make it a point to have their child do things themselves. Worry about the child’s safety, the same survey found, is the number one reason kids don’t do things independently.

The first time I casually mentioned I wasn’t planning to breastfeed, I got an hour-long lecture about how formula was poison—complete with the charming observation that, since small boobs make less milk, I’d be absolutely fine. The woman doing the lecturing—a friend of a friend I had only met once before—finished by admitting that, for her, breastfeeding had been physically painful, emotionally punishing, and terrible for her marriage. “But,” she said, “it’s one of my biggest accomplishments.”

This was a few months into my first pregnancy, and suddenly horror stories about breastfeeding were everywhere. Friends told me about weeping as they pumped, glaring at their snoring husbands, white-knuckling their way through mastitis to squeeze out every last drop. Around 70.3 percent of mothers report breastfeeding difficulties—cracked nipples, fatigue, low supply. About 10 percent of American women who are nursing get mastitis, a painful inflammation of the breast tissue. And then there’s dysphoric milk ejection reflex—a particularly bleak condition that causes some women to experience rage, anxiety, and dread while lactating. All in all, 60 percent of women stop breastfeeding sooner than they had planned to. Sure, I had a couple friends who took to it straightaway. There are women who find it easy and convenient, even joyful. Lucky them! And I heard from women who chose to push through the difficulty because it feels worth it.

But I decided that breastfeeding simply was not going to be my thing. After a Las Vegas honeymoon at 25 followed by a botched attempt at natural family planning, I wanted to control the few things I could.

And so I was initiated into one of the most toxic debates in the momosphere: breast milk versus formula.

As I approach my 104th birthday, I’m often asked about the secret to longevity. My answer is there are no “secrets,” but living in alignment with a few timeless truths can help. I learned this as a 7-year-old in Brooklyn when my mother came home with steamship tickets to Tahiti and told us we were moving there.

“Where’s Tahiti?” my dad asked. “I don’t know,” she answered. “But we’re going in 16 days.” And we did.

Tahiti was lush and gorgeous; after bleak Depression-era Brooklyn, I felt as though I’d stepped into Technicolor. We lived on a lagoon and slept under a thatched grass roof.

Our family had to be flexible and practical to make a life in the South Seas. I learned French quickly, then Tahitian. Mother planned for us to live as fruitarians—she had been vice president of the Vegetarian Society of New York—but the sugar in all that fruit gave my brother and me boils. So Dad studied how our neighbors lived: fruit, vegetables, and fish. When we added fish to our diet, it fixed the boils, and I remain a pescatarian.

Welcome back to Second Thought, my weekly tour of the zeitgeist! This one’s a big one: I’m announcing my new podcast. But before I let you in on why I’m launching one, and how you can follow along, I want to tell you about my first guest. His name is Casey Neistat, and he is one of the earliest, and most successful, YouTubers in history.

Since running away from home at 15, and then starting a channel where he started posting about New York’s bike lanes and layovers, Casey has amassed millions of followers and billions of views. But I wanted to talk to him not because he’s popular but because he saw what was coming. Casey, who’s 45 now, knew that YouTube would upend media. He saw that self-appointed celebrities—the people we now call “influencers”—would dominate our screens. In our interview, he argues that the one-two punch of iMovie, which is the editing software that came with Apple iMac DV computers starting in 1999, and then YouTube, which launched six years later, would change everything about who gets to make movies and how we watch them.