The Free Press

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.

As violence against Jews skyrockets across the globe, we’ve launched a new weekly newsletter to track and make sense of the speed and severity of this virus. You can sign up here to receive it. This week, we begin with a reflection on the Jewish holiday of Passover. As Jews the world over gather to celebrate, Free Press digital editor Josh Kaplan shares the strange disquietude he felt attending seder this year—and the holiday’s enduring demand to keep showing up anyway.

This year, for the first time, I invited my (non-Jewish) fiancée to celebrate Passover at our local Chabad in London. I wanted her to experience the joy and the warmth that a proper seder could bring. To explain to her the traditions that, one day, I hope our children will come to embrace.

But I hesitated, in a way that I’m not sure I would have a year ago. Was I putting her at risk? The invitation felt more of a burden to place on her shoulders than a gift. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised: In recent years, life for Jews has felt more under threat than at any point in my lifetime.

But even by post–October 7 standards, it feels different this year. Why?

If you spend too much time on the internet, as I confess I do, you get a hypermasculine idea of Christianity generally and Catholicism specifically.

A quick search for “faith-based fitness” on YouTube brings up plenty of jacked men, some in clerical collars, telling you Jesus wants you to look and lift like they do. On X, there are plenty of animations of the Knights Templar among these folks, featuring armor that can barely contain their massive muscles. Another search, for the term Deus Vult, will get you videos that, at the very least, strongly imply that the Crusades to capture the Holy Land were a good idea. (They weren’t.)

We know that young men in America are turning toward God, but guys, this Holy Week, I suggest staying away from that version of the faith. Getting in shape is always a good idea. The Knights Templar probably did look quite cool as they rode along a path that’s now Israel’s Highway 1. But Catholicism is not an extension of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The savior you pray to was not a jacked warrior. Instead, Christ went to his execution without a fight. When one of his followers slashed a guardsman sent to arrest him, Christ healed him. In my humble opinion, this is a better incident to meditate on than the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099.

I’m not saying men should stay away from faith generally. In fact, I’m writing this to encourage you to go to church—not necessarily because it will get you fit, or be fun. Pretending to be a crusader is probably more exciting than just sitting in a pew. But going to church will probably make you a bit happier, and perhaps a slightly better human. Normie Catholicism is, to my mind, a lot more attractive than the “Deus Vult” version.

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.

In Iran, more than almost any of the generals and military figures, there is one man whose elimination might truly cause the regime to topple. The man could have been a Silicon Valley billionaire; instead, he joined the Revolutionary Guards: Babak Zanjani, the architect of Iran’s crypto-based sanctions-evasion system.

Zanjani’s is a fascinating story: the son of a railway worker who became a businessman and built a global empire of dozens of companies across Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, and Tajikistan—designed specifically to bypass sanctions. In 2013, he was arrested for allegedly embezzling $2.7 billion from Iran’s oil revenues and sentenced to death in 2016—but the sentence was never carried out. It turned out the architect of its shadow economy was more valuable to the regime alive than dead. Before and during his arrest he was a media fascination, and was the most famous prisoner in the history of the Islamic Republic. After his gamble on the explosion of crypto netted major returns for the regime, Zanjani was released under supervision in 2025.

It’s Friday, April 3. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Nellie is taking a week off from TGIF. She’ll be back next Friday and promises to be extra funny to make up for it.

Today: Ahead of the Final Four this weekend, Bruce Pearl on what makes college basketball great. A reformed climate activist says yes to oil. Aaron MacLean and Rafaela Siewert discuss Iran, nukes, and regime change. Our editors’ picks. And much more.

But first: Eli Lake on Pam Bondi’s abrupt exit.

President Donald Trump is reorganizing his cabinet just in time for spring cleaning. After weeks of rumors, he removed Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday afternoon. It’s Trump’s second high-profile firing in the past month, following his removal of Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. Unlike Noem, who landed with a “special envoy” role, Bondi won’t get to stick around in the executive branch. Instead she’ll take a “much needed and important new job in the private sector,” Trump announced on Truth Social.

Bondi seemed to keep to one simple rule during her time in office: Do exactly as Trump says. When the president named a list of enemies to target—including former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James—Bondi sprang into action, making sure charges were filed on each in just over a month. While past attorneys general have stressed their independence, Bondi looked happy to play the loyalist.

That may have been what Trump wanted, but not what he needed, as Eli Lake explains. Bondi’s efforts to please Trump ended up backfiring, for the administration and for her. Flawed lawsuits against universities. Prosecutors who were improperly appointed, then removed by judges. And perhaps the biggest scandal of Trump’s term: the mishandling of the Epstein files. Read Eli on how Bondi’s blunders led to this point—and what comes next.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

America is on its way to the moon—for the first time in 50 years. On Wednesday in Cape Canaveral, Frannie Block spent an afternoon with a crowd of eager Americans watching the launch of Artemis II, the first NASA space crew to travel toward the moon since the Apollo missions—and the mood was electric. “This is American pride,” said one man wearing swim trunks and no shirt. Read Frannie’s dispatch from America’s Space Coast.

Meanwhile, down on Earth, Niall Ferguson wrote about the Iran war, and how the U.S. must avoid snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Britain tried to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, then turned tail and backed down. The Iran war is winnable, but if President Trump decides to cut and run, the result could be a global hit to U.S. power, just as Britain experienced 70 years ago.

In California, the gubernatorial race has taken a curious rightward turn with two GOP candidates leading the polls. The Golden State’s June 2 “jungle primary ” is fast approaching, in which the top two vote-getters, irrespective of party, proceed to the general election. Will Democrats get it together in time? Peter Savodnik dug into a race in which both parties have fielded awful candidates, and weighed the GOP’s chances of turning the state red.

For Jews all over the world, this Passover might feel a little heavier than usual. For the last few years, Jews have seen a rising tide of antisemitism met with platitudes from politicians. But British Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch is not one of those politicians. This week, she wrote an open letter to Jews in the UK: “Do not pack up your suitcases and leave,” Kemi writes. “Britain is your home.”

And in case you missed it, read Olivia Reingold’s deeply personal essay on her return to Judaism. Since October 7, she’s found herself in some of the most hostile spaces imaginable to Jews. This week, she reflects on faith, tradition, and how her work for The Free Press led her back to her roots.

Look out for a special Easter edition of The Weekend Press this Saturday, including Will Rahn on the case for normie Catholicism, Joe Nocera on JFK’s moon landing speech, and Larissa Phillips on the hardest part of farm life—taking lambs to the slaughter.

We won’t have Pam Bondi to kick around anymore. President Donald Trump bit the bullet and fired his attorney general on Thursday after a year of failures big and small. Hardly anyone seems sorry to see her go.

It’s not hard to see why. Let’s start with Bondi’s biggest blunder. In February 2025, Bondi announced that she would release the Justice Department files related to sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. When Fox News asked her at the time about the “Epstein client list”—a supposed list of high-profile elites who had been provided access to underage girls—Bondi answered that the list was “sitting on my desk right now.”

Things went downhill from there. The administration invited right-wing influencers to attend a much-hyped first release from the files, but the documents it included had mostly already appeared in public court filings. This bait and switch burned Bondi’s reputation with Trump’s base, which had demanded the release of the Epstein files for years.

On Wednesday night, President Trump delivered a 19-minute address on Iran. As expected, he stressed his accomplishments: “In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. . . . Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them. . . are now dead.” And he issu…

What do “orgasmic meditation” advocates and the Amish have in common?

A lot of people think they’re really, really weird.

That may not sound like a compelling point of similarity. But a dubious criminal prosecution of the former group sets a precedent that could make strange bedfellows (no pun intended) out of hedonists and puritans—and other insular groups deemed offensive or, yes, weird—when prosecutors decide to test the limits of the law. It is a saga about personal agency, #MeToo-adjacent gray areas, and whether words have meaning.

Nicole Daedone, the founder of a group called OneTaste, was sentenced this week to nine years in federal prison for her role in operating a company centered on teaching orgasmic meditation with various courses and seminars. The practice involves a woman disrobing from the waist down before a partner methodically strokes her genitals, with gloves and lubrication, for 15 minutes. Started in 2004, OneTaste said this ritual—an unorthodox marriage of carnal and clinical—was not primarily about sexual satisfaction. It was a way to connect with others, to overcome trauma, to achieve a sort of enlightenment. The company slogan was “Powered by Orgasm.”

Each spring, Americans of every stripe partake in the national rite that is March Madness. They make their picks in the office pool, or with family or friends, and spend three weeks watching men’s and women’s collegiate basketball teams battle it out for the national championship.

I’ve been blessed with a front-row seat to this phenomenon for more than 40 years. From my early days as an assistant men’s basketball coach in the 1980s to coaching the Auburn Tigers in the Final Four last season, and now as a commentator on TNT and CBS Sports, I’ve seen it all.

This tournament transcends sports and has captured the country’s imagination, in the same way as the Super Bowl, The Masters, or the U.S. Open. And as the Final Four games approach on Friday and Saturday, I am compelled to reflect on the reason why. Every year, right in front of our eyes, we witness young men and women passing from youth to adulthood. We observe the discipline, accountability, teamwork, and sacrifice that forge champions. On display for all to see are the qualities our country is losing but desperately craves: honor, loyalty, passion, and valor.