The Free Press

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, the trucker Gord Magill thinks his beloved industry is screwed. And paperback books are dead! Suzy Weiss watched a movie, about a woman who planned a school shooting, with her friend who survived the real thing. And Hadley Freeman wonders whether Kanye West deserved a “Nazi ban.” And much more!

But first: the man who went to Michael Jackson’s ranch—and stumbled into an afternoon with Jeffrey Epstein.

The release of the Epstein files forced a lot of people to reflect on their interactions—however innocent—with the man at the center of them. One such person was a literary agent named David Vigliano, who met Jeffrey Epstein once, in bizarre circumstances, and kept very detailed notes. Today, he shares them in an exclusive essay for The Free Press.

In the summer of 2002, Vigliano went to Neverland Ranch—Michael Jackson’s sprawling estate in the Santa Ynez Valley—to discuss the possibility of a Jackson autobiography. The pop star never showed. Instead, Vigliano found himself seated across from Epstein, who had arrived with a harem of college-age women. “In my line of work, I’ve met many extremely wealthy men with girlfriends half their age. None of them had nine,” he writes today. “I guess he just likes to surround himself with beautiful young women, I thought, in all my cluelessness.”

Years later, after Epstein was convicted of pedophilia, and Jackson was accused of the same thing, Vigliano found himself “struck by how easily I was seduced” by the mystique around these two men. His epiphany came after he read Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl; he had nothing to do with its publication but, he writes, it “made me think about whose stories get to be told, and the role I play in their telling.”

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We’ve published a lot of pieces this week that you’ll want to read, if you haven’t already—including Frannie Block’s profile of the triumphant head of NASA; a biting Coleman Hughes’s review of a new book by America’s most famous anti-racist; and a fascinating set of stories about how AI is changing everything from cancer treatment to your favorite song:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our senior editor Peter Savodnik for his recommendations. . .

🥃Drink. . . a classic Negroni, in honor of the arrival of spring, preferably at Florentín, a rooftop bar in downtown Los Angeles—one of the few outstanding outposts of civilization in this town.

🎵Listen. . . to Alisa Weilerstein perform Shostakovich’s No. 2 concerto for cello, with Ryan Bancroft conducting. It’s happening at Walt Disney Concert Hall, which (for the uninitiated) remains the country’s best music venue, architecturally and acoustically—and, helpfully, is just down the street from Florentín.

📺 Watch. . . A Separation, the powerful 2011 Iranian movie directed by Asghar Farhadi about patriarchy, dementia, the end of a marriage, and more. It’s a wonderful film, and, just as important, a reminder that the war over the future of this country is not only about nuclear missiles, oil, and geopolitics, but human beings trapped in a medieval theocracy.

📚Read. . . Badenheim 1939, by Israel’s greatest novelist: Aharon Appelfeld. The novel is about a colorful band of Jews in a resort town in Austria shortly before they’re all herded off to concentration camps, and it’s a brilliant exploration of human beings’ ability to delude themselves. It feels all too timely, alas.

Last but not least, a beautiful thing to feast your eyes on:

This month, four astronauts traveled to the moon and back aboard the Integrity. As someone who has loved science fiction for as long as she can remember, our art director, Clara Grusq, couldn’t help but think of the 1968 Planet of the Apes, a Cold War–era film she thinks is often overlooked, yet arguably one of the most enduring works of sci-fi storytelling. We won’t give away the ending, but we will say: The final haunting image of the ruined Statue of Liberty, half-buried in sand, delivers one of the most iconic and devastating reveals in cinema history.

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

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

On Friday evening, when the crew of Artemis II—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, it felt as though the entire world was watching.

Crowds lined the beaches of California. Children on the East Coast stayed up late to watch the broadcast. Millions around the globe anticipated the safe return of four human beings—three Americans and one Canadian—who had ventured farther into space than anyone before them.

It felt magical. It felt like a miracle.

But it was neither.

Going into the weekend, U.S. and Iranian officials had seemingly agreed to conditions that would allow them to meet in Islamabad to hash out a peace agreement. Yet so far the sides are offering differing accounts even of those initial conditions, and the primary parts of the ceasefire—that the fire would cease, and that the Strait of Hormuz would be open to commercial shipping—haven’t actually materialized.

With much of Iran’s pre-war leadership dead, it is unclear whether the Iranian officials remaining actually have meaningful centralized control over their country and its military. It is also uncertain if they have the willingness, or even have the ability, to negotiate the removal of enriched uranium buried under rubble at sites the U.S. bombed months ago—a central feature of a deal that President Donald Trump has announced, and the Iranians have disputed.

Is the U.S. backing away, or simply washing its hands of the Iranian mess? What would happen next? What are the prospects for a ceasefire the sides can agree to? And what is driving Trump to swerve between making threats to destroy an entire civilization and then back off?

To make sense of it all, I spoke to John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser to President Trump in his first term, and now a frequent critic of Trump, on Friday afternoon. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Nicholas Clairmont: I’m just going to start by asking, what is going on with Iran and with the ceasefire? Have we lost? Have we won? And what do you predict is about to happen?

To the editors:

On March 31, The Free Press published an article by Jacob Siegel accusing “people” of trying to “censor” his book reviews. Your email newsletter to subscribers led with this story, calling it a “surreal” case in which a review of his book was “purged” from the magazine The Baffler after “a person mentioned in the text requested a correction.” Yet based on an email I received from the man who wrote the review in The Baffler, it was he who requested his own review be pulled—undermining the premise of the essay and the promotional email.

I was that person who requested a correction, and thus was falsely maligned for supposedly pursuing “censorship.” I requested a correction—only a correction—because Siegel’s book, The Information State, makes allegations about me and my work that appear to have led multiple reviewers to draw strikingly similar erroneous conclusions. A correction request in response to error is not censorship—it is counterspeech. Issuing a warranted correction is ethical journalism. The Washington Free Beacon, for example, issued a correction on the review published about the book, in line with its editorial standards. The Baffler chose to remove its review.

Siegel’s article implies that I was involved in The Baffler’s editorial decision to pull the review. I was not; it is my understanding that the reviewer himself asked that his review be taken down. This understanding is based on a private email which I did not feel comfortable forwarding to Siegel in response to the list of questions he emailed me, giving me 90 minutes to respond. I am disclosing this now only because Siegel’s public account in The Free Press unfairly shifted responsibility for the decision onto me, and I believe it’s important to correct the record: There was no plot to censor his book review.

Yet Siegel posted on X that “a figure connected to the U.S. government [pressured] a publication to remove its review of my book,” and the review was “censored the next day . . .apparently at the behest of Renée DiResta.”

The claims in his X posts are false. They’ve likely helped Siegel sell some books, at my expense. His promotion of his theory, and essay, certainly generated attacks. While it is true that I did “did not deny asking The Baffler to pull its review” in response to Siegel’s list of questions, I denied it repeatedly on social media, by phone, and via email to Free Press editors. No independent fact-checker contacted me before publication. (The essay now includes the following update as a parenthetical: “After publication, DiResta told The Free Press that she did not ask The Baffler to pull the review, but rather only requested a correction.”)

Siegel implies in his article that my fact-check requests are unwarranted, too. I’ve misinterpreted what he wrote, he suggests. I want to address that claim here as well, so readers understand what I requested be corrected.

Siegel spends multiple pages in his book building a character sketch of me as someone who “came to lead” what he calls “perhaps the largest censorship initiative in existence.” He is referring to my work with the Election Integrity Project, a nonpartisan coalition that tracked and occasionally flagged election rumors to platforms during the 2020 election. It was a project narrowly scoped to claims that sought to either mislead people about where or how to vote, or that tried to preemptively delegitimize the election results. He then describes the work that this supposed massive censorship machine did, leveraging innuendo strategically: Over a hundred EIP employees supposedly maintained round-the-clock coverage monitoring social media platforms, sending takedown requests that platforms acted on within the hour. In the next sentence, he drops a statistic: EIP “classified 21,897,364 tweets” as “misinformation incidents.”

Read in sequence, the implication is that this was the scale of some “censorship” operation. Some reviewers, and readers on X, have processed it that way, writing that EIP flagged or censored 22 million tweets. That never happened. Hence my correction requests.

Siegel knows that the 22 million figure actually describes a postelection dataset of the most viral rumors of the 2020 cycle. It was not a count of items flagged to platforms at all; that count was 4,800 URLs, including 2,890 tweets. Platforms ignored 65 percent of those, and removed approximately 10 percent. The rest were mostly labeled. I explained this to Siegel personally. Somehow, the smaller number and enforcement stats didn’t make it into the book.

In his Free Press article, Siegel argues he never said the EIP censored or flagged 22 million tweets. If so, he should have welcomed—or initiated—corrections in The Baffler’s, the Free Beacon’s, and the Brownstone Institute’s reviews himself. He should also have Henry Holt, his publisher, fix the manuscript. But the problem is, the number supports the “mass censorship” conspiracy theory. This is Schrödinger’s statistic: large enough to support claims of a massive censorship operation as innuendo, but something totally innocent when one presses for details.

The question discerning readers should ask is: If you knew EIP never flagged nor censored 22 million tweets, what exactly justifies calling EIP “perhaps the largest censorship initiative in existence”?

Siegel appears angry that the real person behind his fictionalized character is pushing back against errors and innuendo. So, he’s constructed a narrative in which corrective action is recast as proof of the conspiracy he alleges. If I ask for fixes, I am “suppressing” his work. If a publication—or a reviewer—independently decides the claims don’t hold up, that is the information state at work.

This is not a defense of free speech. It is immunity from scrutiny.

In the summer of 2002, I got a call from a top publicist asking if I was interested in representing Michael Jackson’s autobiography. At that point, I’d been a literary agent for 16 years, and I had represented everyone from Pope John Paul II to Britney Spears. But this was something special. Michael was a transcendent performer, and the prospect of working with such a brilliant artist could be a career highlight. And, of course, there was the appeal of a large payday.

At the time, Jackson was in precarious financial shape. Nine years earlier, he had been accused of sexually abusing 13-year-old Jordan Chandler and paid a rumored $20 million settlement. Shortly thereafter, Jackson proposed to Lisa Marie Presley. They quickly married and divorced. Michael maintained a wildly expensive and reclusive lifestyle he could not afford. He had not toured for three years, and his biggest asset, ATV Music publishing, was heavily leveraged.

The allegations of child sexual abuse were well known, but so was the withdrawal of the complaint and a richly funded public relations onslaught that framed the incident as a shakedown. The issue of whether Michael was a predator had been jumbled, and I didn’t pause to carefully consider the authenticity of the allegations. In short, I didn’t know back then what has now become so clearly, damningly, obvious.

Last weekend, “the five kindest, and swiftest, and wisest bunnies in the whole wide world” delivered baskets of Easter eggs made of chocolate and marshmallow and glitter and gold to every child on Earth. And the bravest of the five, Mother Cottontail, delivered her baskets while wearing a special pair of little gold shoes.

Or so DuBose Heyward tells us in his classic 1939 picture book, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. A book for children, yes, but like all good children’s books, it’s also a book for the parents who read it to them.

It was never my plan to have a child before 30. My mother, my grandmother, and the mothers of pretty much every kid I grew up with in Manhattan were well into their 30s when they gave birth, and my friends and I assumed we would follow suit. Career now, family later.

But then I married a man 25 years my senior and started to rethink the timeline. At 27, I’d submitted my dissertation at Cambridge, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton, and had been profiled in The New York Times in an article with the print headline “The Aspirations of Solveig Gold.” Two months later, though, those aspirations moved to the back burner. I was pregnant.

Sometimes technological progress has an irritating habit of making life less convenient. For the latest disappointing example, we need look no further than a recent pronouncement from the American book trade: ReaderLink, the largest distributor of books to non-trade merchandisers in the United States, will cease to distribute the cheap and reliable mass-market paperback—undone by thin margins and dwindling sales, which in 2024 had fallen to just 3 percent of units sold at major retailers.

These cheap, pocket-size books measure roughly 7 by 4¼ inches and are printed on thin wood-pulp paper, glued rather than sewn. The lineage of the mass-market paperback runs back to 1939, when Robert de Graff’s Pocket Books began selling 25-cent books that could fit in the American commuter’s pocket. Soon, they found their natural home on the spinner racks of supermarkets, drugstores, and airport newsstands. At their peak in the 1990s, Americans were buying them in the hundreds of millions annually.

In its glory days, it was the most widely sold physical book format in the country: the book of beach bags and coat pockets. Now, thanks to a supply-chain decision, it will soon disappear. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I meet Gord Magill at Fall Creek House in Ithaca, New York. It’s a dive bar, a real one, cash only, with a bathroom door that doesn’t lock and Miller Lite ads taped onto the wall. Across the street is a towering red brick smokestack with the words ITHACA GUNS inlaid in white stone, the last remnant of a firearms factory that shuttered in the 1980s.

Although he has lived in Ithaca, his wife’s hometown, for about 10 years, Magill has been everywhere. He was born in Canada and began trucking as a teenager, following in his dad’s footsteps. He spent nearly three decades driving all around North America, as well as Australia and New Zealand, hauling just about everything you can imagine: logs, produce, waste-oil sludge. Magill, who’s 47, tells me he lost his last trucking job two-and-a-half years ago. He still has his license, but he’s spent the last few years working construction; he hasn’t found a trucking company that’ll pay him enough to deal with the bullshit.

“I feel very strongly that the industry is being fucked by a number of forces and choices and policy decisions that didn’t need to be made,” Magill tells me.

This is the subject of his new book, End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, which was published a few weeks ago. In it, Magill describes how truckers—the most common occupation for young men without a college degree—are forced to contend with, among other things, shrinking wages, competition from exploited migrants, the threat of automated vehicles, and mass surveillance through driver-facing cameras and electronic logging devices, or ELDs, which monitor how long a trucker has been driving.

Welcome back to Second Thought. Thanks to River Page for filling in last week—and letting us in on his Mr. and Mrs. Noem fan fiction. There are major spoilers for The Drama below, so proceed with caution.

Imagine this: You’re the young, handsome head curator at the Cambridge Art Museum, deciding between which skin-contact wine you’d like to serve at your rapidly approaching wedding to a gorgeous, funny woman whom you adore. And then you find out during a lighthearted game with friends that 15 years prior, when she was 15—not to mention unchaperoned, bullied, and too online—she’d planned to take her father’s rifle and do a school shooting.

There’s the premise of The Drama, which stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as the engaged couple, and which is framed as a dark psychological drama, a rom-com, and a black comedy all at once. The film is more concerned with a thought experiment than virtuosic filmmaking in any genre, and the experiment, done very well, is this: What would you do if you found out something deeply unsettling about someone that you thought you knew? And what if that something was that they were geared up to commit mass violence on innocent children? And you’re geared up to marry them.

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.

We’re used to wars that look like movies. Operation Midnight Hammer, the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, was a short action thriller with a clear beginning, middle, and happy ending. Operation Roaring Lion, the joint military operation with the U.S. against Iran, however, is a TV series. Following season one’s Rising Lion, we are now in season two, with a third season—my suggestion is Screaming Lion—likely in the early stages of development.

That isn’t to say war will become a biannual event. Roaring Lion was a significant operation, but success isn’t binary. It delivered a substantial reduction in nuclear capabilities, an even greater crippling of ballistic assets, and a potentially fatal blow to the regime’s long-term survival. Iran now resembles a movie character, but one from a comedy, not an action film: the armless, legless Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, threatening to bite at Israel and the U.S.’s shins.

Its funding apparatus in ruins and sanctions still in place, the regime’s resources are stretched incredibly thin, forcing an agonizing financial dilemma. With its still-depreciated rials, it must choose between rebuilding a ballistic missile industry, outfitting a brand-new navy, or investing in air defense. It could also try investing in improving the lives of its population, but that is far less likely.