The Free Press

ST. LOUIS, Missouri — On Wednesday night, more than 600 people flooded into the Old Cathedral on the banks of the Mississippi River. There were Gen Z girls, some in sweatpants, some in lace veils; there were newlyweds standing next to young seminarians. Before long every pew had been filled, and worshippers took to kneeling in the aisles, then the back of the nave, then they stood packed in the vestibule before spilling out the doors entirely.

They had come from across the country and were there for a holy hour held in honor of Fulton J. Sheen, the Emmy-winning host of the television show Life Is Worth Living, which made him the most famous priest in America in the 1950s and ’60s. The next day he would be beatified in front of 50,000 people packed into a former NFL stadium.

Washington, D.C. — There is a story Donald Trump’s closest advisers like to tell about Donald Trump, and it goes something like this. He is the man who mounted the greatest electoral comeback in recent memory after being counted out and persecuted at every turn. He is the once-in-a-generation political talent who can sense voters’ mood before the pollsters do. In other words, he is and will remain Republicans’ single greatest electoral asset, even in a midterm cycle in which his polling numbers hover at historic lows and his name will not appear on the ballot.

And, contrary to the GOP naysayers worried Trump is dragging down Republicans this cycle, he is a president who “positively contributes, actually, to the politics and how we run campaigns.”

At least that’s the view of the man charged with executing Republicans’ midterm strategy, former deputy White House chief of staff James Blair. “I don’t know that campaign teams always feel that way about their candidates, but it’s definitely true for us,” Blair told me earlier this month in his office in downtown Washington. In this longtime MAGA operative’s view, Trump “certainly has probably the best political antenna of anybody that I’ve worked for.”

Two years ago, after a family meeting with our adult kids and their spouses, my wife and I made the joint decision to move to the same area as them, in northern Virginia. It was the kids’ idea. All three are culturally traditional; they wanted this to keep intergenerational bonds tight. And it was practical, as well: They are having children at an alarming rate, and could use some help with their kids. In fact, for the first two years, we lived together in the same house with one of the second-generation families; only recently did they get their own place just a few houses away.

But the decision was also based on an understanding of what our lives would look like a few decades into the future, when those needing the most help wouldn’t be our children or grandchildren; it would be us. At some point, we will most likely need assistance and regular attention. And the proximity of our children will make the arrangements easy to establish.

So, during that first conversation, we and our children openly discussed our wishes and plans, should we ever become incapacitated. That may sound grim to you; in truth, it was pretty funny. “Don’t worry,” one son joked. “We’ll make it look like an accident.” Now there’s true filial loyalty.

Jokes aside, we were grappling with something that will sound familiar. Most families confront elder-care issues sooner or later. For many years, mom and dad serve as the caregivers to their dependent children; it’s universally understood as their obligation to do so. But what about when the relationship flips? What is the moral duty of adult children when their parents inevitably become care-needers?

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Rob Henderson on why young Americans are falling for communist China. Liel Leibovitz on Greta Gerwig’s decision to cast Meryl Streep as Aslan in the “Narnia” remake. And River Page drinks with Rachel Dolezal, America’s most famous “trans-black” woman, who has just qualified as a sex therapist . . .

But first: Can you study your way into believing in God?

C.S. Lewis, for one, did it. After his childhood faith waned and he entered college a staunch atheist, the Chronicles of Narnia author eventually reasoned his way into believing again. When he was a young professor at Oxford, he read the works of several Christian philosophers and they made a lot of sense to him. He knelt in prayer after feeling the presence of God, conceding his atheism was wrong. He would later describe himself as “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

More recently, a couple of Gen Z philosophy PhD students at Princeton have undergone remarkably similar conversions. In our lead essay today, Suzy Weiss speaks to Joe Schmid, 26, who believed that the existence of God could never be proven—and spent years arguing against the case for God on his YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason—until he started to study miracles. “I just sort of was like, okay, I give up, I’ve lost, God has won, and I’ve got to become Catholic,” he said. Also, he became a vegan.

His friend and colleague Noah McCay, 27, has also converted—to both Catholicism and veganism. There might just be others, too. So Suzy took the train down from New York City to New Jersey to see what’s in the water at this Ivy League department.

Philosophy is supposed to be a field where reason trumps faith. In the secular halls of academia, anyone who thinks about creation long and hard enough is supposed to come to the conclusion that there is no Creator. But did these boys study their way into believing, or was the intervention more divine than that?

Read Suzy’s report to find out.

TikTok’s “Queen of Confidence,” Serena Kerrigan, went on more than 50 virtual dates to figure out what’s wrong with modern courtship—then wrote a book about it, called Let’s F*cking Date. On the latest episode of Second Thought, she explains why men should plan and pay for the date: because women are busy making themselves the “prize.” And she gives Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot one line of advice on finding the one. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch below:

This week, Katie Herzog wrote about the queer bar that got canceled for lifting its extremely strict mask mandate; Coleman Hughes reacted to the viral “New York Times” piece about the progressive mom who put her kid in a failing school for ideological reasons; and Madeleine Kearns wrote a tribute to her friend Dovie, who proved that even a life of unimaginable adversity is one worth living. Catch up here:

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. (Click here to meet a fit Minnesota outdoorsman!) 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, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our editorial fellow Tanner Nau for his recommendations . . .

🍺Drink . . . beer. Last week, Will Rahn recommended ginger beer to y’all. As much as I would like to completely endorse this recommendation, I need to amend it: I’ve never fancied the spice of the ginger root. I prefer water, malted barley, hops, and yeast. Today, you’ll find me sipping Miller Lite and admiring the glow of college football on my television.

🚗Watch . . . Disney-Pixar’s Cars. The 2006 thriller featuring the improbable Lightning McQueen is back in theaters to mark its 20th anniversary. After a handful of subpar Cars sequels, I’m ready to see the original again. Nothing short of a cultural icon, Lightning McQueen (ka-chow!) should still inspire Americans today. He’s as American as it gets: gritty, unflinchingly competitive, and yearns for the open road. Catch it in theaters before it is too late and “Real Gone” for good.

🍁Enjoy . . . the fall. In Washington, D.C., autumn is at our doorstep. Yesterday, I ordered my first-ever pumpkin spice latte to celebrate this week’s cool weather. Soon, the leaves will begin to fall, and our two-month-long pleasant chill will turn into a bitter winter. I always miss this season during other parts of the year, so I’m trying to squeeze out as much of it as I can. Go for a walk; ditch the device, but bring the beer (or pumpkin spice latte).

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

PRINCETON, New Jersey — Joe Schmid, 26, has spent years arguing that there is no God. Or at least, that you can’t prove He’s up there. As a professional philosopher, he’d devoted his career to writing articles like “Simply Unsuccessful: The Neoplatonic Proof of God’s Existence,” and blog posts like “A Failed Demonstration of God’s Existence.” He even co-wrote a book in 2022 defending the niche theory of existential inertia, the idea that there need not be an outside force—i.e., God—compelling the universe to exist. But recently, he’s changed his mind, or his mind was changed, anyway. These days, Schmid is a devout Catholic.

“Do you mind if we pray?” he asked me this week. We were at a restaurant right off Princeton’s campus, where Schmid is studying to get his PhD. He wasn’t the only newly anointed Catholic at the table. Noah McKay, 27, is another doctoral student in the same department, and he converted about six months ago. He and Schmid had just come from Mass. They bowed their heads, and when they were done giving thanks, we all dug into a summer hummus board, sans feta cheese, since Princeton’s Gen Z philosopher-Catholics are both vegans, too.

I’d taken the train to Princeton because I wanted to find out what’s in the water in New Jersey. I assumed philosophy was a field where reason trumps faith, and that anyone who thinks about it long and hard enough, in the halls of the progressive Ivy League, will come to the conclusion that there is no Creator. I thought postmodern academia had made everyone believe in nothing. Did these grad students study their way into believing in God, or was the intervention more divine than that? And does it have something to do with America’s much-vaunted “Catholic boom”?

Both these gentlemen were clean-cut—polos, khakis, a leather messenger bag—and clearly brilliant. They talked fast and opined on the finer points of magisterial doctrine from the 18th century, between bites of vegan corn ravioli. They’ve both been studying and debating apologetics for years, and met each other a few years ago at a conference, before they were students at Princeton together.

Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated.

With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado.

Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, “Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership.” In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday.

All of which raises some natural questions: Where is this revolutionary romance coming from? And as it steadily seeps into our leadership class, where will it lead?

It’s 9 a.m. in Tucson, Arizona, and Rachel Dolezal is sitting across from me in a navy-blue dress, telling me about the local Palo Verde trees, and how they evolved green trunks to sustain themselves in the dry Arizona desert.

“Resilient,” she remarks with a slight chuckle that makes it clear to me that she’s not just talking about the trees.

Eleven years ago, Dolezal was serving as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter in Spokane, Washington, when a local reporter asked if she was black. She refused to answer the question, and a video of the exchange went viral. Eventually, Dolezal acknowledged that she had been born to white parents, but identified as black anyway. What followed was an apocalyptic storm of criticism and ridicule that cemented her position as one of the most famous cancel-culture victims of the 2010s and made her name synonymous with race fakery. In fact, if you type her name into Google News right now, you’ll find headlines not about her but about the woman dubbed “Palestinian Rachel Dolezal” (more on her later).

But despite all of this, the weaves and braids stayed on. Dolezal never backed down, apologized, or started self-identifying as white. She carried on, sporadically posting life updates on social media. Recently, after news broke that she has retrained to be a sex therapist, I remarked on X that she is “the ultimate individual.”

As if we were lacking for outrage, a new front in our unending culture wars opened this week when director Greta Gerwig announced that she had cast a woman (specifically: Meryl Streep) to voice Aslan in Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew—her upcoming film adaptation of the sixth book in the globally beloved Chronicles of Narnia series.

In case you’ve never stepped through that famous wardrobe door and into C.S. Lewis’s magical world, you should know that Aslan is a lion and the King above all High Kings in Narnia. Why, then, would anyone mind if Streep—a lioness and the Queen above all High Queens of Hollywood—gives the big cat a new purring sound?

The usual pop pugilists, still licking their wounds from the fight over Christopher Nolan’s casting choices in The Odyssey, rose to offer the usual arguments. Gerwig, growled the culture warriors on the right, is feminizing a quintessentially male figure; they could overlook her decision to turn Ken into a bumbling bobo in Barbie, her previous film, but giving the mightily maned lion a bit of gender reassignment surgery is a step too far. Relax, cooed their counterparts on the left, this is Meryl we’re talking about here and, really, there’s no one that woman can’t brilliantly portray.

It was tempting, listening to the discussion drone on, to tune it all out and worry about weightier things. Except that, sadly, this one matters: Gerwig’s decision is neither a stroke of brilliance nor a microaggression against conservative America. It’s something much more profound and dangerous: an offense in a war not of culture or politics but of ideas and convictions.

To understand why, it helps to first know Aslan.

It’s Friday, September 25. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The Free Press guide to cuffing season. Andreessen Horowitz launches a new university for the AI age. And much more.

But first: why this Israeli Netflix show is a worldwide hit.

It’s been fascinating, and more than a little heartwarming, to see so many viewers tuning into the latest season of Fauda, the Israeli show about a counterterrorism unit that operates undercover in the West Bank and Gaza.

Until recently, Fauda was just a well-produced Netflix series—one of many. Then, October 7, 2023, happened.

To say the least, many people across the globe have been quick to dismiss or distort what took place that day and why Israel has responded the way it did. The fifth season of Fauda, oddly enough, is something of a corrective. It’s a make-believe story, but it’s also based on real life, and it hews closely to the facts. And it does a better job, a more powerful job, of conveying the feeling of that day than any news report or footage or podcast I’ve encountered (and I’ve spent the better part of the past three years consuming a lot of October 7–related coverage).

I recently reached out to Avi Issacharoff, one of Fauda’s co-creators, and Omri Givon, the director, to find out why they think the show has gained such a wide following—not only in Israel but worldwide, including many Arab countries. Read my piece to understand why the series may do more than almost anything in recent years to shift public opinion on Israel.

Fauda also captures something striking about Israel—particularly Israeli Arabs. When Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar planned the October 7 attacks, he assumed that some (many?) of the country’s two million Arabs would join the fight. They didn’t—as is depicted in the show. “And why would they?” writes Seth Mandel today. It’s a reminder, he observes, “that Israel’s democratic character and its national culture are far healthier than you would ever imagine from watching or reading Western news.”

—Peter Savodnik

If you ask 10 people how artificial intelligence will affect education, you’ll probably get 10 different answers. It’s one of the most important questions of our era—and one for which there is absolutely no consensus. Which is why, here at The Free Press, we’ve covered it from many different angles: from the school integrating technology into every step of the learning process to the high school English teacher who banned AI in her classroom altogether.

But has AI’s breakneck pace outrun education altogether? Do tech-minded students even need school—particularly higher education—at all? If you ask tech titans like Peter Thiel or Alex Karp, you’ll get an answer that’s pretty close to “no.” Indeed, they’re already founding alternatives to college. That’s why it caught our eye this week when Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced that, rather than encouraging students to drop out of college, it is starting a new one. We wanted to know more. So we asked Erik Torenberg, one of the school’s co-founders, to explain why he’s betting big on a university built for the AI age—and the change he hopes it will bring. —Jillian Lederman

Fall has arrived, and with it, cuffing season: a term recently added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary (definition: “a time of the year when people who are not married or in a relationship begin looking for a short-term romantic partner to spend the colder months of the year with”). Today we bring you stories about how to fall in love—and find a partner who will stick around even after warmer weather returns.

First, where should you find love? New data from the Institute for Family Studies reveals that increasingly, the top places to start a relationship are cities where marriage and family values are a part of the social fabric. Freya India unpacks the shifting attitudes driving this change and asks: “What if there’s nothing wrong with who you are, but something wrong with where you are?”

Next up, women are earning more money now than at any time in history. But this becomes a recipe for disaster when high-earning women seek even-higher-earning men—a common practice known as “marrying up.” Aleeza Ben Shalom, also known as the Jewish Matchmaker, has set up hundreds of marriages, and today she explains why women must embrace a new definition of “up”: men who don’t have high paychecks but rather a strong character, discipline, and emotional intelligence. Those virtues don’t show up on a W-2, she writes, but they are much better predictors of lasting relationships.

Finally, TikTok’s “Queen of Confidence” Serena Kerrigan went on more than 50 virtual dates to figure out what’s wrong with modern courtship—then wrote a book about it. On the latest episode of Second Thought, she joins Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot to talk about what she found and why she believes four dozen first dates led her to crack the code on love.

The midterm elections are fewer than 40 days away, and a hotly contested Senate race in Michigan could decide control of the chamber. But something striking is happening in the state: Some hardcore Democrats are considering voting red for the first time ever. It’s not because they love the GOP candidate, Mike Rogers; it’s because of how his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, responded to a terrorist attack six months ago on their synagogue, Temple Israel. This week, Olivia Reingold spoke to congregants who were shocked at El-Sayed’s apparent sympathy for the attacker. “I can’t support someone I don’t think will keep my family safe,” one mother said.

On Wednesday, shareholders of The New York Times filed a lawsuit against the paper of record, accusing it of ignoring years of complaints about antisemitism and skewed reporting. Maya Sulkin had the exclusive on this story about allegations of inexplicable edits and unchecked bias in the newsroom, including how one Times freelancer was quietly rehired after being let go for praising Hitler on social media. Read her entire report below.

Speaking of The New York Times, one the paper’s own pieces went viral this week. Written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, high priestess of woke and the face of The 1619 Project, it detailed the consequences of her decision to send her daughter to a struggling school system in the name of racial justice. Or, as the piece puts it, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” Coleman Hughes knows something about the subject: As a kid, he went from a public school that was 30 percent black to a private school where he “was one of four black kids in a class of 50 or so.” But framing this kind of experience as racist, he wrote this week, “helps no one, least of all the kid experiencing it.” Read his full reaction to Hannah-Jones’s piece—and the important lessons we should take from its admissions.

Finally, this week, the internet lost its mind over a Boston Globe article about a “Covid-cautious, gender-inclusive, anti-carceral, anti-profit lesbian bar” in western Massachusetts that recently did the unthinkable: relaxed its N95 mask mandate (yes, this happened in 2026). But Katie Herzog had the story first—she dug into it a few weeks ago on her podcast with Jesse Singal, Blocked and Reported. Don’t miss her piece this week, which is complete with juicy, unreported details about the absurd locale, and how she got the story before everyone else.

If you ask 10 people how artificial intelligence will affect education, you’ll probably get 10 different answers. It’s one of the most important questions of our era—and one for which there is absolutely no consensus. Which is why, here at The Free Press, we’ve covered it from many different angles: from the school integrating technology into every step of the learning process to the high school English teacher who banned AI in her classroom altogether.

But has AI’s breakneck pace outrun education altogether? Do tech-minded students even need school—particularly higher education—at all? If you ask tech titans like Peter Thiel or Alex Karp, you’ll get an answer that’s pretty close to “no.” Indeed, they’re already founding alternatives to college. That’s why it caught our eye this week when Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced that, rather than encouraging students to drop out of college, it is starting a new one. We wanted to know more. So, we asked Erik Torenberg, one of the school’s co-founders, to explain why he’s betting big on a university built for the AI age—and the change he hopes it will bring. —Jillian Lederman

This should be the best time in history to be 18. The distance between imagining something and building it is shrinking. A teenager can now turn an idea into working software, or a film, for a fraction of what it would have cost just a few years ago. Yet when we discuss what artificial intelligence means for the next generation, the conversation so often begins with what young people might lose: their first job, their career prospects, the value of their education.

Some of that anxiety is about the technology itself. Some of it, I suspect, stems from an education system designed for a different world.

The modern university developed when access to knowledge was far more limited. It brought libraries, experts, and students together in one place. But since then, the internet and AI have made knowledge widely available. What remains surprisingly rare is the ability to turn that knowledge into useful work. We need to teach this.

I am a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and I’ve invested in dozens of influential tech startups over my career. What these companies repeatedly tell me is that they need new hires who can solve problems and work with other people. These abilities cannot be learned in a lecture hall alone; they require practice, feedback, and experience in the real world.