The Free Press

Air travel in America is a mess right now. There are interminable lines at airport security, near misses or crashes on the ground and in the air, and the airports themselves remain overcrowded and antiquated. Although it is easy to blame short-term causes, such as the failure of Congress to appropriate money for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the bigger problem is the government is simply not good at running air travel.

The idea of letting the private sector manage passenger security, air traffic control, and airports may seem far-fetched, but it is the norm in much of the world. The United States, supposedly home to ardent free marketeers, actually has one of the most socialized air travel sectors anywhere. Other countries have demonstrated the success of a private-sector model. America should learn from them.

Take airport security. Just two months after the 9/11 attacks, a panicked Congress passed a bill to nationalize airport security under a new bureaucracy, the TSA. While older airport security systems, contracted out to private companies, had clearly failed on that day, nobody convincingly explained why a federal agency staffed by civil servants would be better.

The following is adapted from a March 26 post in The Liberal Patriot titled “No Learning Please, We’re Democrats!”

Last July I wrote a piece asking, in the wake of Democrats’ catastrophic defeat in the 2024 election and the obvious need for serious party-wide change, “Is Our Democrats Learning?” At the time, I saw little evidence that Democratic learning was, in fact, taking place.

Posing this question again in early spring 2026, it is my sad duty to inform you that our Democrats continue not to learn. If anything, they are increasingly adamant that such learning is not even necessary. Their mantra now might be, paraphrasing that old joke about the British: “No learning please, we’re Democrats.”

The reasons for this complacency are not hard to discern. Trump and many of his administration’s actions are very unpopular and voters’ views on the economy, their most important issue, are dire. Consistent with these sentiments, Democrats did well in the 2025 elections, continue to clean up in special elections, and appear poised to have a very good election this coming November.

When a baby girl is the size of a sweet potato—about 10 inches from head to toe in her mother’s womb—she has the most eggs she will ever have in her entire life.

By the time she’s born, those 6 to 7 million eggs will have dropped to about 1 or 2 million. And by the time she’s 27.5—the average age an American woman has her first child—only 200,000 remain, if she’s lucky.

Most people, and especially most men, don’t think about those odds until they’re sitting in a fertility clinic.

That was the case for Travis Potter. In 2022, the then–40 year-old Wall Street hedge-fund manager and his wife, 37, had spent months in IVF clinics, and tens of thousands of dollars on hormonal treatment, trying to have a second kid.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss celebrates the spring breaker who says, “Who the f— is Ayatollah!?” River Page drinks with the conservative influencer who gets so many death threats she’s got the FBI on speed dial. And as the “Hannah Montana” cast reunites for a 20th anniversary show, Sascha Seinfeld remembers the glorious original.

But first: Why are we so quick now to ask people if they’d like to die?

That’s the question Miriam Lancaster found herself asking last year. The 84-year-old woke up one day with excruciating back pain, was rushed to the emergency room, and was promptly asked by a doctor if she wanted help killing herself.

That’s because Miriam lives in Canada, where physicians are encouraged to ask patients in agony if they want MAID—medical assistance in dying.

“I was stunned,” Miriam writes in her essay today. “No one had even told me what was wrong with me.” She responded to the offer with a firm: No, thank you! And soon, she had a simple diagnosis: She had fractured her sacrum, the tiny bone at the base of the spine. With bed rest, the break healed.

“But being offered MAID changed something in me,” Miriam writes. Before, “I had assumed that in my 80s I would simply slow down: read my books, watch some television.” But the experience “made me want to lean into living.”

So she traveled to Cuba, where she sang, danced, and played piano with locals. Still, she’s haunted by what’s happening in her country—where nearly 1 in 20 deaths is a result of MAID.

We’ve covered the rise of assisted dying extensively here at The Free Press; it’s happening not only in Canada, but also in the Netherlands, and here in the U.S., where New York just became the 13th state to legalize it. Every week, there seems to be a new story about how such legislation fails to distinguish between irredeemable suffering and reversible hopelessness. This past Thursday, for instance, a 25-year-old Spanish woman—who had been left paralyzed from a previous suicide attempt in which she jumped from a building shortly after three men allegedly raped her—was granted permission to seek assisted suicide. Her parents desperately took her to court to try to stop her.

For everyone who is considering assisted suicide, Miriam has a message: “Think very, very carefully about what you’re giving up,” she writes. “The world is way bigger than you can imagine.” That’s what she found—after she chose to live.

—Josh Code

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site! Click here to meet a young man in Iowa serving in the National Guard and at Chick-fil-A; an eagle-spotting, ballet-enjoying corporate professional in Minnesota; or an octogenarian in Israel who won’t let war stop her from finding love.

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].

This week, we’ve published plenty of other pieces worth catching up on, including . . .

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our new international editor, Nick Clairmont, for his recommendations…

📺 Watch . . . the new Netflix stand-up special by Mark Normand, None Too Pleased. The 42-year-old’s new material veers between edgy and corny, truly clever and merely punny, and it’s never pious. He’s in it to make you laugh, not to lecture.

🎵Listen . . . to the new album by Sturgill Simpson, who with his band is now going by the moniker Johnny Blue Skies & the Dark Clouds. The country star with technically perfect vocal range and control has spent a career making albums that buck genre, and this strange, sexy, funky album keeps it up. Just as interestingly, Mutiny After Midnight has been released on every format except digital streaming. To hear it, you have to go outside and find a store that’s selling it on vinyl, cassette, or CD, or find a retailer online. It’s the first album since 2023 to hit the top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart without existing on the internets. Speaking of which . . .

🚶🏼‍♀️Walk . . . outside. Consumption is for the dark days of winter; it’s spring! Find a park, a hiking trail, your own yard, whatever, and go find the things that grow. Find a plant you particularly like the look of, and learn its name. Find out what kind of soil it grows in and when it blooms. (This year, I am learning how to plant and tend raspberry and blackberry bushes.) Pl@ntNet is a great app for identifying species from just a picture. Nobody has ever regretted being able to see the green, growing world around them a little more knowledgeably.

Last but not least, a beautiful thing to feast your eyes on: Last Friday, Andie Dinkin opened one of her first solo shows in Soho at Charles Moffett Gallery for her new exhibition, In the Spirit World. Our art director Clara Grusq shares one of her favorite paintings in the show: an intoxicating ode to Jean Cocteau.

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

Hannah Montana—the Disney teen comedy starring Miley Cyrus as a homegrown high schooler living a secret life as a golden-blonde pop star—premiered 20 years ago this week.

The premise was simple: A teenage girl constructs a second, public-facing identity to preserve her authentic self. For 8–12-year-old girls like myself, it was as fantastical as it was captivating.

The show gave us scenes we could only dream of: your crush parachuting out of the sky in a tuxedo to profess his love for you; a rotating closet; a choreographed dance number to get your class out of detention; and a glittery Y2K Malibu Barbie lifestyle. And at the center of it, a girl with enormous energy, a Tennessee twang, and a face so warm and expressive you couldn’t look away. Every line was delivered as if the director had just said, “Now for this one, go as big as you can.”

My husband, John, was lying there, frail but perfectly lucid, with our priest at his side, ready to administer the last rites. Doctors had discovered in him an aggressive form of cancer that had, by that time, spread throughout his body. The priest had communion bread in his hand, and a chalice of wine was sitting on John’s bedside table. There was a kind of quiet, holy stillness in the room. Then a young doctor walked in, looked at the chart, looked at John, looked at me, and delivered this line as though he were reading from a script: “I am required by law to offer you MAID.”

I had heard of MAID—medical assistance in dying—once or twice before, but now I was facing it up close. A doctor offered it to John within minutes of his arrival at the hospital, 10 days prior. He had declined it then, and he declined it again, just as calmly: “No, thank you.”

Our priest said nothing, though his brow furrowed slightly. He turned to the work he had come to do: He anointed my husband, said his prayers, and gave him the last rites. John died 48 hours later.

In my home country of Canada, MAID has grown rapidly since it was legalized in 2016; it represented 4.7 percent of all Canadian deaths in 2023, which translates to about 15,340 lives ended through assisted suicide. After my husband died, I began to see MAID everywhere I looked. A couple of friends in their 80s told me they’d been offered it during hospital visits. In the local newspaper obituaries, I began to spot euphemisms like “died by her own choice.” We all know what that means now.

Still, I thought John’s passing would be my last personal brush with MAID. I was wrong.

I was walking through the park this week and saw a folding table set up with a sparkly purple tablecloth, manned by a woman in a purple beret. “BUY WEED FROM WOMEN: Join the movement,” a large sign in front of the table read. That’s sort of odd, I thought to myself. And then a friend sent me a post from the editor in chief of Jezebel, the feminist blogging site popular in the 2010s that’s somehow still going, reminding its readers that it’s still “covering abortion rights” and “calling out celebs.”

At this point I had to accept it: Helen Lewis is right. Millennial feminism, which has apparently committed itself to breaking into male-dominated world of drug dealing, and canceling Gwyneth Paltrow, is past its “use by” date. Or at least it’s become a caricature of itself.

Lewis wrote about this in an essay this week about Lindy West’s memoir, Adult Braces. The book is about how West forced herself to embrace an open marriage that her husband insisted on—I will cheat on you and you will like it! Lewis’s point was that the memoir was the nail in the coffin for early internet feminism. “At the beginning, the movement felt intoxicating and liberating, but it soon became clear that sticking with millennial feminism would have required submitting ourselves to a voluntary lobotomy,” Lewis writes. “After all, Lindy West essentially did.”

As Iranian missiles fly into Saudi Arabia, Emily Austin is sitting with me in a Midtown New York City barbecue joint that smells of succulent braised pork, bemoaning the fact that she keeps kosher. The 24-year-old sports reporter turned conservative influencer has 2.6 million Instagram followers, a cushy gig as a boxing announcer, a twice-weekly podcast, and a place in Riyadh, because, well, that’s where the action is.

“It started with boxing, but now they’re getting everything,” Austin says of the Saudis. “Golf, tennis. They’re trying for the NBA. There’s a lot of reasons the NBA doesn’t want to sign with them.” But she only gave me one.

“They say it’s because of Jamal Khashoggi,” says Austin, referring to the journalist who was murdered and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. She’s not buying it. “I don’t think the NBA gives a shit about him, if I’m being honest. They don’t care about human rights violations.”

Austin speaks bluntly, but acts carefully. As well she should, having endured her fair share of brutal criticism, from both the left and the far right, for her pro-Israel commentary and her unwitting participation in the “Epstein binders” fiasco at the White House (more on both in a moment). As we settle into an empty corner of the restaurant, she orders some nonalcoholic elderflower concoction, pushing back her long blonde hair. I order a beer.

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.

“How much time do I have?”

“Between an hour and two months,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu answered.

The question came from Shlomi Binder, head of Aman—the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence branch. It is the question no one seems able to answer: How much longer will this war with Iran go on?

“I don’t want to see it go on too long,” President Donald Trump told CNN on March 2. “I always thought it would be four weeks. And we’re a little ahead of schedule.”

Well—happy March 27. We’ve now reached the four-week mark, more than doubling the length of the June war. As for being “ahead of schedule”—to channel Ronald Reagan, you should never expect the government to be on time.

It’s Friday, March 27. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. If you missed TGIF, catch it here. (Nellie is in rare form.) Today: Tony Blair on the West’s antisemitism blind spot. Matti Friedman on the Jewish volunteers who parachuted back into Nazi-occupied Europe. Jean Twenge wonders: Where did all the bisexual women go? Gabe Kaminsky speaks to the CEO whose Trump pardon didn’t cost him a cent. And much more.

But first: when Ozempic is bad for the soul.

There are scientific miracles—and then there’s Ozempic. It curbs appetites, of course, which can lead to significant weight loss, and eliminate obesity for many people. It’s also been found to reduce alcohol consumption and to cause people to cut down—or cut out—smoking. Not to mention that it may be helpful for treating drug addiction and even compulsive shopping.

But we’re also starting to understand that, for some Ozempic users, it has some not-so-pleasant side effects. As Evan Gardner reports in today’s lead story, one such possible side effect is an overwhelming lethargy, even depression. One Ozempic user told Evan that the emotional impact of the drug was almost unbearable. “I just feel worthless,” she told him. Others have lost their sex drive, their desire to be around other people, or the motivation they always had at work. Patients who suffer these effects face a difficult choice: to stay on a drug that allows them to gain control over their appetite and their weight, or get off it because of the way it affects their mental health. Evan talks to the Ozempic users who have lost their hunger—for everything.

It’s been a busy week in our newsroom. If you’re still catching up, start with one of these not-to-be-missed Free Press investigations.

First, Olivia Reingold’s probe of Chicago’s perplexing “Peacekeepers” program, part of a billion-dollar crime-fighting experiment, which pays ex-gang members a weekly stipend to keep their neighbors out of trouble. Today, a growing chorus of city leaders, law enforcement officials, and even one donor are saying it doesn’t work. Read Olivia’s investigation into the program, and watch her video report here.

Next up, the latest in Tanya Lukyanova’s Epstein files investigation. Earlier this month, Tanya spoke with Liza Grinenko, who was nearly recruited into Epstein’s web by his assistant Svetlana “Lana” Pozhidaeva. Soon after, Pozhidaeva received a sympathetic profile in The Wall Street Journal—which caused Tanya to dig deeper into Pozhidaeva’s story. Was she a victim—or an enabler? After Pozhidaeva DMed Tanya and said she wanted to talk, things got interesting.

Finally, don’t miss Jay Solomon’s investigation into the curious case of 21-year-old Calla Walsh, the progressive activist who once campaigned for Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren. Her life today looks a little different: Walsh is now living in a Hezbollah-controlled neighborhood of Beirut, making pro-Iran propaganda—and she’s on a U.S. government watch list. This is a tale of our times.

The ongoing war in Iran continued to grab headlines this week, but there was one part of the narrative conspicuously missing: What is Iran’s real reason for waging war? Yardena Schwartz argues that for the Islamic Republic, this is a holy war—one aimed at preserving Islam as a colonizing force, overthrowing Israel, and bringing the entire Middle East under Islamic rule.

If you want a break from the war news this weekend, we get it. But before you start your digital detox, read Niall Ferguson’s latest essay on why Iran’s choking of the global energy supply is worth your attention. Niall warns us: History shows that oil shocks like the one we’re currently experiencing almost always bring about a major financial downturn.

Meanwhile, our Coleman Hughes debated one of the most hard-line critics of Israel in the public sphere: independent journalist Glenn Greenwald. Watch their debate here, and be sure to read Coleman’s essay debunking one of the most pervasive myths of our time: that an all-powerful Israel lobby effectively controls American foreign policy.

And in case you missed them, read James Kirchick’s piece on the designer-clad far-left influencers posing for photo ops in Cuba, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s nephew on why he has a bone to pick with today’s protesters.

The Front Page will be back on Monday morning. Until then, look out for The Weekend Press—featuring a deeply personal, darkly funny essay from an 84-year-old Canadian woman who refused assisted suicide after a spinal injury, made a full recovery, and took a trip to Cuba.