The Free Press

Until very recently, I had no moral qualms about defending the American-Israeli war on Iran’s wicked regime. This is because the war—despite unintended but inevitable civilian casualties—was directed at the fanatics who have oppressed Iran’s people and waged war against America and the Middle East for decades.

But if Donald Trump makes good on his latest threats, a just war could lose its moral standing. On Easter Sunday the president promised on Truth Social that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” unless the “crazy bastards” in charge of Iran’s regime “open the Fuckin’ Strait.” He was talking about the Strait of Hormuz, and his threat was specifically to begin bombing the civilian infrastructure of Iran to compel the surviving leaders to open up the vital choke hold to international shipping in the Persian Gulf.

If you’ve ever been on the Catholic social media algorithm, you’ve likely come across rhetoric that’s not especially Catholic.

Take the fallout from Israel’s Palm Sunday debacle. After Israeli forces temporarily blocked Catholic leaders from worshipping at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem due to safety concerns, an author by the name of E. Michael Jones wrote on X: “Cardinal Pizzaballa was turned back because the Jews are at war with the Catholic Church.” (Elsewhere, Jones has argued that “a Christian must be anti-Jewish”—not in the racial sense, mind you, since that would be antisemitic, but just in the way they “operate as a consequence of the Jewish rejection of Christ.”)

Or take the casual mudslinging that goes on.

Until recently, the Iranian regime’s air defense system looked like a slingshot going up against a laser cannon. The closest Iran’s military got to taking out an Israeli or American jet was when an F-35 was damaged by enemy groundfire late last month, forcing it to make an emergency landing.

But then, on Friday, the Iranians downed an F-15E fighter jet over southwestern Iran and another A-10C Thunderbolt C jet near the Strait of Hormuz. One of the two airmen from the F-15 has been rescued, as has the pilot from the A-10C.

This demonstrates Iran’s ability to change tactics in a war it has been losing since Israeli air strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28. The relentless campaign has forced Iran’s remaining leaders into hiding, obliterated many of its missiles and launchers, ravaged its defense industrial base, and erased its navy and what passed for its air force.

This piece, originally published before the fate of the second missing American airman in Iran was known, has been updated to reflect the remarkable—indeed, near miraculous—facts of his rescue.

On Good Friday, two American airmen were lost in Iran, as Iranian air defenses shot an F-15E fighter jet out of the sky. The first was rescued swiftly on Friday, and early on Easter Sunday, we learned that the second airman was safe as well, saved in an extraordinary special operations mission. It is a kind of Easter miracle.

Videos that circulated widely on Friday capturing moments of a bold daylight rescue operation for the first crewmember were harrowing enough, showing American combat search-and-rescue aircraft flying behind enemy lines over Iran. Two of the helicopters involved reportedly were hit, injuring some of the crew aboard. A second American jet, a close-air-support A-10 Warthog, was shot down, though its pilot was able to fly clear of the immediate combat space before ejecting. The downing of this F-15E and of the A-10 are the first losses of American jets to enemy fire in decades.

But the second rescue, which played out into early Sunday morning, appears to have been even more intense. The second downed airman reportedly hid from Iranians searching for him in mountainous terrain, his location unknown even to Americans for some time. His efforts to evade the enemy reportedly took him up a 7,000-foot ridge, with American aircraft bombing Iranians who were in pursuit. As darkness fell for a second night, American special operations forces hastily constructed a forward air base inside Iran itself, and then rescued the airman by plane. Before leaving, American forces had to destroy several of their own aircraft on the ground that had become stuck and could not take off. Incredibly, no American lives were lost.

What kind of person flies these kinds of missions—and what kind of person assumes the burden of rescuing downed airmen from behind enemy lines?

My mind turns to a night in Cambridge, England, some years ago, spent drinking with American airmen from the nearby bases from which our Air Force has flown since the 1940s. The downed American jet, lost somewhere in the hills of western Iran, reportedly came from a squadron based in Royal Air Force Lakenheath. On weekends, the men and women of Lakenheath sometimes make the trip to Cambridge, to a pub called The Eagle.

The Eagle is much like any other such establishment you might find in Cambridge—the same kind of quaint old building; the same clientele, a mix of students and faculty and tourists. But since the middle of the last century, it has also been a gathering spot for British airmen and their American comrades—the forces that battled for, and have since policed, the skies over Europe and beyond. Its walls are covered with the unit insignias of squadrons from around the world. Its ceiling is graffitied with signatures of airmen from World War II. As the Nazis swept through Europe, the flat, marshy land of East Anglia, so close to the coast of the continent, was destined to become in effect the world’s largest aircraft carrier. Famous fighting organizations like the Eighth Air Force—the “masters of the air”—left from this part of England each day to attack Adolf Hitler’s factories.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Joe Nocera on why America chooses to shoot for the moon. Will Rahn makes the case for churchgoing—even if you’re not a believer. River Page prays for a Kristi Noem biopic. And: Imagine finding out your wife is cheating on you by stumbling across a review of her memoir.

But first: On the way to the butcher, farmers sometimes get cold feet.

If you’re celebrating Easter this weekend, perhaps there’s half a lamb in your freezer right now, waiting to be roasted. If you eat meat at all, you probably get it from a grocery store. But once upon a time, people would’ve been involved in the care and killing of the animals that fed them.

If anyone now understands what that’s like, it’s our columnist Larissa Phillips, who runs a small farm with her husband in upstate New York. When they first moved there, 12 years ago, they wanted to breed animals with the utmost care, then kill them with the utmost respect. “We knew it would be hard,” she writes. “I didn’t realize that every single animal would be fodder for this existential battle.”

Growing up in a city, she was fed stories like Charlotte’s Web and Babe, “morality tales” designed to make meat-eaters feel better, because in fantasy-farmland the very sweetest animals get saved from slaughter. But as a real-life farmer, she couldn’t afford to feed an animal that wasn’t pulling its weight.

Then along came a young ram with a little spot on his nose, who let kids eat out of his hand, and her husband said: “Let’s keep him.” And as a family they were forced to confront what happens when you fall in love with an animal that’s destined for the oven.

A fresh batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site! Click here to meet a bike-riding cinephile in Düsseldorf; a “very” left-leaning graphic artist in Vermont; or a British expat and ex-military theologian working in tech.

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 plenty of other pieces this week worth catching up on, including Frannie Block’s rocket-watching dispatch from Cape Canaveral, and Freya India’s reaction to Meta being found guilty of profiting from kids’ distress:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked the aforementioned pewsitter Will Rahn for his recommendations…

📺 Watch . . .How did I not know about Shoresy until its fifth season recently dropped on Hulu? Created by and starring Jared Keeso, this Canadian sitcom about an aging minor-league hockey player is exceptionally crude. It also somehow has a heart of gold, and is high in the running for the funniest show made this decade. You now have 30 episodes to watch before the sixth season arrives next year.

⚾Go…to a baseball game. There’s a reason our national pastime may have once again secured its place as America’s second-most popular sport, and it’s not just because Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge are doing their best impressions of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. Get in a game or two this spring while the weather is nice and (almost) every team still has a shot at making a miracle run to the World Series. It’s practically a civic duty.

🍿See...Yes, it’s true: Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling as a lonely science teacher turned Earth-saving astronaut, is both quite good and deserves to be seen on a big screen. It’s beautiful to look at, and while the plot is familiar—think Interstellar remade as a buddy comedy—it’s fun, well done, and a great excuse to hit up your local cineplex.

Last but not least, a beautiful thing to feast your eyes on: Our art director Clara Grusq recently visited The Frick collection and found herself especially moved by one of Anthony van Dyck’s most exquisite paintings: Lady Anne Carey, Later Viscountess Claneboye and Countess of Clanbrassil, circa 1636.

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

Even as a 10-year-old, I knew we were losing the space race. My parents rarely talked about world events at our dinner table, but in April 1961, they were stunned when the news broke that a Soviet, Yuri Gagarin, had become the first human to orbit the earth. They talked about it in front of us kids, expressing a grudging admiration for what the Soviets had accomplished, but also a real sense of anxiety about what it said about the U.S. Did it mean we were losing the Cold War?

I didn’t know what the Cold War was, but I knew the Soviets were the bad guys. Everyone knew that.

Still, you could certainly make an argument in the early 1960s that there was no particular reason to conquer space other than scientific curiosity. Some people did make that argument. But President John F. Kennedy understood that it was more than that.

On the one hand, he knew that a serious space program was meaningful for our competition with the Soviet Union. “With East and West competing to convince the new and undecided nations which way to turn . . . ,” wrote Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen in his biography of Kennedy, “the dramatic Soviet achievements . . . were helping to build a dangerous impression of unchallenged world leadership generally and scientific preeminence particularly.”

We fade in.

It’s 2024, South Dakota. (That’s the one that has Mount Rushmore in it, not the Fargo one.) Wind sweeps through the prairies, kicking a plastic bag up to a billboard that declares: “Meth. We’re On It.” Across the road, the governor’s mansion, where in the window Kristi Noem is on the phone with a book editor.

“Yes, Laura, I did actually meet with Kim Jong Un. It just wasn’t covered at the time, because of course it wasn’t,” Noem says, in that accent you have to be ancestrally Lutheran to have. “You tell that fact-checker of yours he needs to learn about something called liberal media bias.”

A moment passes. You hear a pop in the distance. Noem’s husband, Bryon, yells apologies from a locked bedroom across the hall. “Just, uh, trying out balloon animals,” he says. Another excuse. Noem rolls her eyes and continues on the phone, exasperated.

“Yeah, so I double-tapped a wirehaired pointer, who gives a shit?” she yells, fiddling with her hair extensions. Human, obviously. What is she, a refugee? “I shot a goat too. Didn’t like his attitude. That’s real America. It’s staying in. Nonnegotiable.”

And scene.

This is how I hope and pray Kristi Noem’s inevitable biopic will begin. Veep is a masterpiece, but not even Armando Iannucci could’ve written a story like Noem’s off the dome. Her bumbling political life is one of the most fascinating to have ever taken place: a woman who destroyed her own chances of becoming vice president by lying about meeting foreign leaders and then admitting to dog murder in a memoir published just months before the Republican National Convention, then became secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), then lost the job amid accusations of adultery, corruption, and incompetence, and an uproar over a multimillion-dollar PSA that prominently featured her on horseback. She’s now serving as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a fake-sounding diplomatic post Trump created for Noem after he fired her from DHS last month.

The Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are a painful reminder that for all the changes of the past decades, much of the world economy still runs on oil. With every additional day of war, the effects ripple out through the rest of the world. Might our fate be decided by the price of oil? On a daily basis, I’m asked about the economic implications of the war. Here’s the not-so-good, the bad, and the ugly.

Can an oil price spike cause a global recession?

Absolutely. In fact, a significant portion of recessions, at least since the advent of fossil fuels, have been caused by spikes in the price of energy. Maybe you are still smarting from the collapse of real-estate prices in 2008, but historically, problems with energy costs have been a bigger problem. Those days are back.

The most vulnerable nations here include South Korea and Japan, which have little in the way of domestic fossil fuels. They also are used to purchasing much of their oil from the Middle East. Import-dependent Latin American nations also are in dangerous positions. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz also has effects beyond oil; much of Africa faces a crisis in food prices, which depend indirectly on affordable fossil fuels.

During our four decades together, my wife and I raised two children, held full-time teaching positions, cared for our aging parents, and mourned their deaths. We lived in many houses in many states before settling in a home in Cape Cod. We also published over 20 books between us. And here is the one thing that set us apart from other writer couples we knew: We never read each other’s work.

We made this pact early on, and our agreement endured. But when the pact was broken in 2019, our marriage ended.

We were never competitive; the opposite, in fact. I cheered when her novels received laudatory national reviews. She celebrated my fellowships and academic appointments.

“We have to slaughter that lamb.”

I said this to my husband one evening a few years ago, as we took a break from our evening chores to watch the adorable antics of the young ram in question. It wasn’t a controversial statement. By that point, we’d been raising sheep on our farm for years—for their meat. But every time we discussed this particular lamb, my husband hedged. “We might want to keep that one,” he said.

As he and I began to debate, yet again, the merits of killing him, the lamb was busy gamboling about the barnyard. He was the only baby on the farm at the time and was as spoiled and content as the famous pig Wilbur in the classic novel Charlotte’s Web. I’d made Instagram reels of the little guy’s antics. The children who came to our farm school were training him to eat out of their hands. They would kneel, motionless, palms outstretched, offering a cookie. The adolescent lamb would shyly tiptoe up to them and accept the snack so gently.

This couldn’t last. The lamb was cute, but he was still a ram, with budding horns and imminently surging testosterone levels; the clock was ticking. Most rams grow up to be aggressive; even if we neutered him, there was no room on our farm for more animals that didn’t pull their weight. Besides, it’s the reality of farming: Most animals are destined for the slaughterhouse.