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As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan looks at the history of privateering during the American Revolution. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

In 1859, Mary Custis Lee, the owner of the famed Arlington House in Virginia, published some letters by her late step-great-grandfather, George Washington. Not everyone approved of her editorial choices. Her husband, Colonel Robert E. Lee, believed she had erred by including correspondence showing that Washington had taken an ownership stake in a privateer vessel during the Revolutionary War. “I would prefer it had been omitted,” Lee wrote to Mary. “It may suit the mercantile taste of the East more than it does mine.”

Although it was too late for Mary to remove the offending letters, many chroniclers of the American Revolution have taken her husband’s advice and obscured the contributions of privateers. Perhaps the hesitancy to mention them is due to their being lumped in (usually unfairly) with pirates or perhaps to a discomfort with how these privately owned ships mixed patriotism with profits. With this week marking the 250th anniversary of the Continental Congress setting rules for privateering, it’s long past time to see these ships for what they were: the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit that would shape the new country.

In early 1776, the colonists learned that Parliament had passed a law forbidding trade with them and unleashing the world’s most powerful navy against their ships. Although the law would go into the history books as the Prohibitory Act, Continental Congress delegate John Adams favored calling it “an Act of Independency” because it broke any last ties that remained to the Mother Country. “It throws 13 colonies out of the royal protection . . . and makes us independent in spite of all our supplications and entreaties,” he wrote. “It may be fortunate that the Act of Independency should come from the British Parliament, rather than the American Congress.”

It’s Wednesday, April 1. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Kat Rosenfield asks, should we judge age-gap relationships? Peter Savodnik on the Republicans leading the polls in the Golden State. Patrick McGee on 50 years of Apple. David Patrikarakos on the European officials siding with Trump on Iran. All that and much more.

But first: Is the age of censorship really over?

Someday, when the history of the early 21st century is written, a big part of the story will be about information. As rapidly advancing technology has reached into nearly every corner of our lives, control over knowledge and opinions has become one of the great issues of our age. Think content erased for violating the wrong set of beliefs, and people fired for posting the wrong kind of content.

These are issues we’ve covered extensively here at The Free Press, because they get at some of the values we treasure the most: truth, trust, freedom. These questions are also the focus of a new book by Jacob Siegel, The Information State, in which he argues that over the past decade, a powerful new kind of censorship took hold in American public life—then finally came to an end.

Or did it?

Just a day after the book’s publication, Siegel found himself in a surreal position. His book about censorship was subjected to the very dynamic he describes in its pages when a review of it was purged from the website of left-wing magazine The Baffler after a person mentioned in the text requested a correction. Read his full, firsthand account of this strange tale, and what it says about how we get our information in 2026.

Then, consider the case of Logan Levkoff, a sex education teacher at a private K–8 school in New York City for more than two decades—until two weeks ago, when she was fired for reposting Brianna Wu, a transgender woman. “I am a sex ed teacher with an excellent 21-year record,” she writes, “and I was targeted, scrutinized, and ultimately dismissed for daring to deviate from the mob.”

• Golf legend Tiger Woods announced he is “stepping away for a period of time” to “work toward lasting recovery.” The announcement came days after the five-time Masters champion was charged with a misdemeanor DUI after he crashed his car in Jupiter Island, Florida, on Friday.

• Gasoline surpassed an average of $4 a gallon in the U.S. on Tuesday as the war in the Middle East continues and the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively blocked, constricting global oil flows. The last time gasoline reached $4 a gallon was August 2022, months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

• A federal judge ordered the University of Pennsylvania to comply with a Trump administration subpoena seeking information on Jewish students, faculty, and campus groups, rejecting the school’s argument that the request violated constitutional rights and posed safety risks. The subpoena is part of an investigation into antisemitism at the university.

• American journalist Shelly Kittleson was reportedly kidnapped in Baghdad, Iraq, by unidentified individuals on Tuesday afternoon, the Iraqi interior ministry confirmed. Officials announced one arrest connected to the abduction, but have yet to locate Kittleson. Kittleson is a longtime war zone journalist based in Rome who has covered Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.

• A federal judge blocked a Trump presidential directive to end federal funding for NPR and PBS, calling the order unlawful and unenforceable. “It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the president does not like and seeks to squelch,” Judge Randolph Moss wrote.

• The Chicago Bulls released guard Jaden Ivey from the team after he posted videos calling the NBA’s Pride Month celebrations “unrighteousness.” He also referred to Catholicism as a “false religion” during his long rant. He has previously spoken about his struggle with depression.

Most people have heard of Scientology, but have a limited understanding of what it really is. To many, it just seems wacky–associated with Tom Cruise jumping on a couch, and science fiction books staged as religious texts. But in preparing for my conversation with Claire Headley, who was born into Scientology and rose to a high-ranking position under le…

Can a state permit therapists to assist in “transitioning” the gender of minors but bar them from assisting kids who want to “detransition”? Can therapists be stopped from encouraging kids who feel unsure about their gender to become more comfortable with their biological sex? In an 8-1 decision Tuesday, the Supreme Court answered those questions with a resounding no. It’s a victory for free speech—and, to be perfectly honest, for sanity.

The case concerns a 2019 Colorado law that banned “conversion therapy” for minors, which it defined as “any practice or treatment” that “attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” On the face of that definition, the statute seems almost anti-transgender, as if it banned therapies intended to help a child adopt a gender identity contrary to their biological sex. At a minimum, the definition seems neutral.

But Colorado was not entirely straightforward in that definition of conversion therapy. A subsequent provision in the statute allowed counselors to assist “a person undergoing gender transition.” In other words, helping kids transition was fine, but if a therapist sought to help a patient “realign” his gender identity with his biological sex, the therapist was subject to a fine or loss of license.

In these pages a few months ago, I argued that this was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, and now in Chiles v. Salazar, eight Justices have agreed. (Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter.) Colorado’s statute, the Court held, “prescribe[s] what views” a therapist “may and may not express.” “For a client ‘undergoing gender transition,’ ” the therapist can “offer words of assistance.” But if a transgender client seeks help detransitioning, the therapist is barred. And viewpoint discrimination, as the Court said, is a “bedrock” violation of freedom of speech.

Two weeks ago, after 21 years teaching sex education at Stephen Gaynor School, a private K–8 school for students with language-based learning differences in New York City, I was fired.

Why? Because, according to the school, I had violated the administration’s values about LGBT inclusion—by reposting Brianna Wu, a trans woman, on X.

Let me explain what happened from the beginning.

Reviews of my book are being censored.

Last week, I published a book called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. It describes how, as technology has advanced, American politics and government have been transformed by the shift in societal power from visible laws and institutions to opaque forms of digital and informational control.

As I explain in the book, one of the consequences of this shift has been the ability of the government-tech alliance—what I call “the information state”—to carry out mass censorship online over the past decade. This point was noted in a generally positive review of the book that ran on March 24 in a left-wing magazine called The Baffler. The information state, noted academic Richard Greenwald in his review, rests on “twin pillars—censorship and propaganda.”

So I could only savor the irony when, less than a day later, the magazine purged the review from its website.

What happened? Did The Baffler censor me? Did they censor the reviewer who, while criticizing parts of the book, also called it “at once a sweeping history of technocratic governance, a detailed exposé of the counter-disinformation apparatus, and an urgent meditation on what it means to live in a society organized around information as its ruling principle”?

I had written for The Baffler myself once before, in 2018. Perhaps, in the intervening years, someone at the magazine detected evidence that I hold unacceptable opinions. But if that were the case, why publish the review of my book in the first place?

If you’re looking for an answer, you won’t find it on The Baffler’s website. All it has, in place of the purged piece, is an editor’s note informing visitors that the magazine removed the review “after determining that it does not meet The Baffler’s fact-checking standards.” That is the kind of cryptic statement that raises more questions than it answers. Is the magazine accusing me of having made factual errors in my book, or is it leveling that claim at Greenwald? (Greenwald declined to comment for this article.) It’s impossible to say, because the note never specifies the facts that it purports to dispute.

To say that this is unusual by the standards of magazine publishing undersells it by a wide margin. Removing an already-published book review without so much as specifying the offense is not something done by any publication interested in maintaining a reputation as intellectually open and honest. Deleting articles after publication reeks of censorship. It erodes the trust of readers who are left to wonder what other machinations influence the publication’s editorial decisions. It tends to turn off independent-minded writers, who will reasonably suspect that their own work could be next on the chopping block.

Instead, when errors are found, editors generally add updates or corrections to an article so that readers can see both what it got wrong and what the publication now asserts is factually correct. If a magazine publishes something that generates significant controversy among readers or within its own staff—as happens frequently these days—the liberal thing to do is to publish a counterargument. To cite a “fact-checking” error without elaborating what it is leaves the public even less informed than before; it is an incoherent pretext and self-refuting by its own standards.

So, I set out to find what really happened.

Step out of the Foreign Office—now inelegantly renamed the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office—and almost directly in front of you is the Cenotaph, Britain’s stone memorial to its war dead. Walk north past a gallery of bronze sentinels, including Field Marshal Douglas Haig and Montgomery of Alamein, and before long Trafalgar Square opens before you, Admiral Nelson standing on his column high above it. Go south instead and the road widens into Parliament Square, where, ringed by yet more monuments to Britain’s political and imperial past, stands a brooding old bald man, hunched in his heavy coat and leaning on a stick.

As a synecdoche of British—and ultimately Western—power, Winston Churchill is unparalleled to the point of cliché: confident, clear of purpose, and victorious. He’s a shorthand of what, for a time, we were.

I thought about that grid of streets, loaded with the relics of past glory, when Donald Trump recently mocked Washington’s “once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them​ all” for finally considering sending aircraft carriers to the Middle East. “That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer—But we will remember,” he posted to Truth Social. Trump later called out the Europeans, saying that French president Emmanuel Macron had been an “eight out of 10 on Hormuz,” before adding, “not perfect, but it’s France.”

More recently, on March 31, Trump was back on Truth Social calling out America’s European allies even more strongly for their failure to work alongside the U.S. more fulsomely, and threatening to wash his hands of the entire problem of the virtual shutdown of global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which he claimed was really Europe’s problem anyway. “Build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us,” he wrote. “Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!”

In July 2021, a senior U.S. Catholic Church official resigned when he learned that a newsletter was about to publish a detailed record of his movements—where he slept, which bars he visited, which apps he used. No government was involved. No wiretap order. No subpoena.

A conservative Catholic news site appeared to have acquired all these records through an advertising broker linked to Grindr, the gay dating app. And it’s not just hookup apps. Virtually every app we use collects data that can get leaked in unexpected ways. The Strava cycling and running app has been used to locate military bases (and just weeks ago, the location of a French aircraft carrier). And then there is spyware, software designed to illicitly extract data, like the Pegasus tools used to surveil Mexico’s opposition politicians and journalists.

It’s all part of the shadowy data industrial complex that exists in the 21st century world of apps and smartphones. That world exists to a large extent because one device enabled it: the iPhone.

Apple didn’t build this surveillance economy. But it built the platform on which the surveillance economy runs, often taking a 30 percent cut of its revenue through the App Store. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007—and the steady improvement, from the addition of GPS in the next model to the current panoply of sensors and features—set the stage for the world of tracking we live in now.

Democrats’ internal polls show the two Republicans running for California governor leading the pack in this very blue state.

To hear it from Democrats and many reporters, that’s because the sprawling Democratic field has failed to consolidate in advance of the June 2 “jungle primary,” in which the top two vote-getters, irrespective of party, proceed to the general election.

In a March 3 open letter to the Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls, state party chairman Rusty Hicks asked those without “a viable path” to step aside.

The New Republic has warned that, unless “the state’s Democratic honchos” take action, “they’ll hand the state a MAGA governor.”

Ron Filipowski, the editor in chief of the progressive blog MeidasTouch, recently hinted that outgoing Democratic governor Gavin Newsom should intervene.

“The CA governor’s race is an absolute shit show on the Democratic side and it requires some degree of sanity to take hold at some point to get it fixed,” Filipowski posted on X. “Leadership at some point from people not in the race wouldn’t be a bad thing. Time is running out fast.”

Democrats I’ve spoken with in the past week all said a variation of the same thing.

A couple years ago, a group of freshmen at a college in Massachusetts staged a To Catch a Predator-style sting of a so-called “pedophile.” Their target: a 22 year-old man, who was lured to a dorm for a promised hookup with, and please prepare yourself, an 18-year-old woman.

The students were reportedly shocked to learn that this encounter was not illegal. They were even more shocked when the police charged them with conspiracy, kidnapping, and assault. But if you know anything about the Gen Z approach to matters of the heart, then this story probably does not surprise you. Because among our youngest adults, it seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife—but only one whose birth date falls within less than six months of his own, and really, ideally, it should be more like six minutes.

The precise origins of this phenomenon are hard to pinpoint, although the #MeToo movement, with its overwhelming fixation on age as a proxy for power and privilege, is surely among the contributing factors. In recent years, female celebrities who dare to date men a decade older have felt compelled to release videos explaining themselves to young fans. “I do not need you to tell me who I should and should not love,” said a 24-year-old Florence Pugh in 2020, when people attacked her for her relationship with a 45-year-old Zach Braff. The age gap between 44-year-old Chris Evans and his 28-year-old wife, Alba Baptista, has been called “gross.”

As such, it’s hard to say if Age of Attraction, a new reality dating show on Netflix, is supposed to be a rejoinder to Gen Z’s age-related hang-ups or an affirmation of their validity. Either way, I’m obsessed. The premise is simple: A dating pool of several dozen straight singles between the ages of 20 and 60 assemble at the impossibly scenic Whistler, British Columbia, where they meet, chat, and see if any sparks fly. There are no restrictions on what they can do, or talk about, save one: In the initial round of speed dating, participants may not ask each other’s ages, nor share their own.