The Free Press

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, which is on a journey of discovery: Americans are discovering that they are Canadian, Canada is discovering that it can’t recognize a Scottish midwife’s English, and Donald Trump is discovering that Canada is a constitutional monarchy. Let’s get to it!

Behind the headlines blaring about strained Canada–U.S. relations and President Trump musing about the “51st state,” something quieter is happening. Some Americans are reviewing their family trees, zeroing in on their Canadian roots, and applying for citizenship.

The surge in interest follows a change to Canada’s citizenship law, known as Bill C-3, which became law in December 2025. The change expands who can claim citizenship by descent. As a result, millions of Americans are now eligible.

It’s Tuesday, April 14. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Peter Savodnik interviews Matt Mahan, “the normie candidate” for California governor. Arthur Brooks on what Harvard gets wrong about grade inflation. Should the government tame AI’s most powerful models? And much more.

But first: new fronts in the transgender wars.

Is a war over transgender identity still raging in America? If you ask President Donald Trump, he’ll say the dispute was settled when he was elected in 2024. By Election Day, polls showed that a majority of Americans believed “changing one’s gender is morally wrong,” while more than 60 percent opposed transition surgeries and hormone treatments for minors. Trump and Republicans pledged to roll back transgender norms and practices, and their victory seemed to reflect a broad mandate.

Yet the war has simply shifted to other fronts. Proponents of transgender identity gained influence within America’s medical and legal institutions long before the issue became a matter of public debate. Today, lawyers, judges, doctors, and lawmakers are struggling behind the scenes, either to roll back that progress, or to entrench trans identity in how the country operates despite widespread public skepticism.

For a close-up view of this quiet war, take a look at the American Medical Association. In February, it took the bold step of discouraging gender reassignment surgery for minors. But then came the revolt, with many of its members and several other groups suggesting that the change was a gross kowtow to Trump. Benjamin Ryan has the details on the fight among doctors over the basic rules for how we treat our children.

The Supreme Court entered the fray last month with a major ruling. The justices held that the practice of discouraging patients from embracing trans identity is protected by the First Amendment. James Kirchick believes this type of counseling helps undo a new kind of “conversion therapy,” in which therapists steer children with same-sex attraction toward adopting an entirely new gender. Read the piece for an explanation of how trans identity and same-sex attraction often end up at odds, despite their shared support from progressive activists.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

Conversations with Coleman and Spiral have been nominated for Webby awards—and the people will decide the winners. Coleman is neck-and-neck with Oprah’s podcast in the Talk Show category, while Spiral has a narrow lead in the Crime and Justice category. Voting closes this week—and you can vote for either or both of our shows below.

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• Pope Leo XIV told reporters yesterday he is “not afraid of the Trump administration” and will continue calling for peace, after Trump posted a lengthy message criticizing the pontiff over the weekend. For more on the escalating tensions between the Vatican and the White House, read Mattia Ferraresi’s piece “Why the Vatican and the White House Are on the Outs.”

• A federal judge on Monday dismissed Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over its reporting of a sexually suggestive birthday letter bearing Trump’s name that was included in an album compiled for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday. The judge ruled that Trump failed to plausibly allege the paper acted with “actual malice.” Trump can try to revive the suit.

• A CBS News poll released Monday found that 51 percent of Americans say high gas prices have been a financial hardship. The average price per gallon reached $4.13 on Sunday and is likely to climb now that the Strait of Hormuz blockade is in effect.

• Key NATO allies refused to join the Trump blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Among them was British prime minister Keir Starmer, who told the BBC on Monday that the UK would not support the blockade, “whatever the pressure.”

• Draft registration is going automatic. The Selective Service System will automatically enroll all American men aged 18 to 25 in the draft pool by the end of 2026, per a new law signed by President Trump in December. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to rule out a reinstatement of the draft, saying Trump “wisely keeps his options on the table.”

• The FBI yesterday raided the home of 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, who is accused of traveling from the Houston area to San Francisco last Friday to throw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home. Moreno-Gama allegedly also planned to burn down the AI company’s headquarters and kill those inside.

General Michael Claesson is Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces. I ask him: How did Russia’s annexation of Crimea change Sweden’s global strategy? Is Russia weaker than it appears? How strong is the American alliance with Europe? We discuss all this at a time when the landscape of war is rapidly and unpredictably shifting, the stakes are high,…

The Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 last month that a 2019 Colorado law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ minors violates the constitutional right to free speech. At issue in the case of Chiles v. Salazar was a statute prohibiting therapists from engaging in “any practice or treatment . . . that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.”

While the days of gay people being forced to undergo institutionalization, electroshock treatment, or chemical castration to “correct” their homosexuality are thankfully over, a form of talk therapy claiming to help individuals “eliminate unwanted sexual attractions” and “grow in the experience of harmony with one’s physical body” persists. However harmful such ideas may be, Justice Neil Gorsuch was correct when he wrote in his majority opinion that outlawing their expression constitutes an “egregious assault” on the First Amendment.

When Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote that “we are building machines that can think and reason,” America was still trying to wrap its head around AI. This was back in June 2024; Aschenbrenner had just been fired from the most powerful AI lab in the world—OpenAI—and he wanted to warn people that this technology, which still sounded like science fiction to many Americans, posed the most important national security challenge since the atomic bomb.

“By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I,” he wrote. “Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed.”

This Tuesday, Jews around the world mark Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Honoring the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, it commemorates not only the immense loss of Jewish life, but also Jewish resistance—how a community, facing unimaginable circumstances, fought back, survived, and went on to rebuild.

Their descendants now number in the millions and live across the globe—including among our colleagues. Today, we’re sharing the remarkable story of one of them: Free Press data and analytics lead Gabrielle Markel. Here, she reflects on her grandfather’s story of survival, and the extraordinary role it ended up playing in her marriage. —The Editors

On the morning of June 2, 1942, German soldiers and local police surrounded the Jewish ghetto in Miory, a small town in what is now Belarus. Every Jew was ordered to assemble. They were told that anyone who did not would be shot. Even the sick and elderly were forced to come.

My grandfather, Israel Lulinski, was 7 years old. He was confined in the ghetto with his father, Reb Yosef, his mother, Pearl, and his brothers and sisters. Also there that morning was a young man named Isaac Aron, then 26, a close friend of my grandfather’s family. Both my grandfather and Isaac would be among the few to survive what happened next. And their lives, from that day forward, would be forever intertwined.

Before the war, Miory had a small but vibrant Jewish community, with merchants, farmers, and tradespeople. There were synagogues and houses of study. Most children were raised observant, steeped in Jewish tradition.

Does the American Medical Association (AMA) support or oppose the medical gender transition of minors? An ambiguous statement from the prestigious group in February has set off a firestorm of accusations within the AMA and prompted threats of an investigation for consumer fraud by Republican state attorneys general.

The uproar began on February 3, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) became the first major U.S. medical association to issue a policy statement recommending against gender-transition surgeries for minors. The surgeons’ statement cautioned that there is little quality research on the long-term consequences of performing transition surgeries on young people, such as double mastectomies and genital alteration. The society cited “emerging evidence of treatment complications and potential harms” of such interventions.

When I finally got San Jose mayor Matt Mahan on the phone early Friday evening, he was in a rental car zigzagging through the west side of Los Angeles, and Artemis II was about to splash down off the coast of San Diego, two hours south.

Mahan, one of 10 candidates in California’s gubernatorial race, was back in the city to do some television hits and meet and greets, and he was sounding appropriately somber: A few hours before, the San Francisco Chronicle and then CNN had reported on several women accusing Representative Eric Swalwell, the front-runner in the race, of sexually assaulting or harassing them. One woman had accused the congressman of rape.

Swalwell denied the allegations, calling them “absolutely false,” but the long knives were out. There were a lot of votes on the line. And campaign cash. And endorsements.

If you’ve been following the news out of the Middle East, you’ve likely noticed one phrase surfacing again and again: “Israeli settlers.” The term refers to Israeli citizens living across the green line—in territories whose status remains disputed. Relations between Israelis and Palestinians there have long been strained, but recently intensified. In March alone, six Palestinian civilians were killed, alongside hundreds of reported incidents involving beatings, arson, and vandalism. Last week, the Israeli government approved more than 30 new outposts in the West Bank.

All of which prompts a series of questions: Who are these settlers? How should we understand their relationship with Palestinians—and with the Israeli government? And what will it take to stem the violence?

These are the questions Haviv Rettig Gur explores in his essay today. As with so many issues involving Israel, he writes, the reality is more complex than it first appears—but as the country continues to grapple with existential threats beyond its borders, its long-term future depends just as much on its willingness to confront the struggles at home. —The Editors

When it comes to Israel, the term settler is a word generally applied pejoratively. In some circles, it is used to describe all Israelis in an attempt to deny the Jews’ right to a state. More commonly, it describes a group of people who live in the West Bank, who right now are causing Israel a large and growing headache.

The first thing to understand is that the “settler movement” is enormous and enormously diverse. Calling it a movement does not quite do it justice. Many settlers live in Jerusalem, in neighborhoods that are technically beyond the borders established after the Six-Day War in 1967, but are very much attached to Jerusalem—just part of the urban sprawl and a cheaper place to live than the rest of the city. There are Haredi settlers and secular settlers, moderate religious-Zionist settlers, and even left-wing settlers in different parts of the West Bank.

Then you have the more ideologically fervent, who not only preach a religiously inflected form of Zionism, but who take the idea to its messianic edge. And on the extremes of that last group, you find a cadre of violent extremists eager to catalyze their version of redemption through violence—usually violence against Palestinians, but surprisingly, often also violence against the Israeli state and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.

The problem when the world uses the word settler is that it fails to encompass any of that diversity. The diversity matters not only to win some imagined brownie points in international debates, but to understand the phenomenon and available policy responses. For example, it explains why three-quarters of the Israelis living in Gaza in the run-up to Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the strip accepted government compensation ahead of time, and left their homes peacefully. Only about a quarter of this population—one of the most ideologically intense among the settlers—actually resisted removal in any meaningful sense.

To understand the problems that some settlers are causing Israel, you need to understand who they are and what drives them: their origins, their cheerleaders in government, and how they are working against the interests of the rest of the country.

Inflation is in the news again. Grade inflation, that is.

Last week, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University was scheduled to vote on a proposal to cap A grades, subjecting them to a limit of 20 percent plus four students per class. The proposal also included a plan to link academic honors not to grades, but to a percentile-ranking metric. This came after a long period of grade inflation at the university, to the point that in the academic year 2024–25, 66 percent of students were awarded As, and 84 percent received either As or A-minuses.

Alarm over this trend has been rising for years. In the words of Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, “Our current grading practices are not only undermining the functions of grading; they are also damaging the academic culture of the college.”