The Free Press

Any father would be proud to see his daughter win an Olympic gold medal. But when I watched my daughter Alysa’s stunning performance in the women’s free skate earlier this month, it hit me in a way that I think was different from what just about anybody else experienced. Sportscasters commented on the ebullient joy that enveloped her technical brilliance. That’s not something we heard very often in the past. Alysa had been through years of hard training and pressure to excel (some from her father, I will allow) and once quit the sport. But in Milan, somehow, she had transcended all of that to arrive at a higher level, a more joyous place. She had left all that pressure behind. One sportswriter wrote, “Liu wasn’t chasing a gold medal. She was free.”

Shabbat services at Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, seemed routine on Saturday morning even though a man with a rifle and explosives had driven into the largest synagogue in West Bloomfield, about 40 miles up the road, only two days earlier.

Beth Israel members chanted the final verses of the Book of Exodus, a two-part parashah that focuses on the construction and inauguration of the Tabernacle, right after the destruction of the golden calf. And just beyond the synagogue’s property, antisemitic demonstrators targeted Beth Israel worshippers—exactly as they have done every Shabbat morning for the past 22 years.

Columbia University graduate students were hurtling toward a strike when a warning arrived from a union that has been through lots of strikes: Stop making radical and ridiculous demands.

The stern message from the United Auto Workers (UAW) was delivered to leaders of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), a union representing about 3,500 student workers, last month. Since then, SWC members have voted overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike, but UAW officials have said that they will not allow it to happen or provide funding for a strike unless the students negotiate further with Columbia, according to internal union communications reviewed by The Free Press. SWC is a local branch of the UAW, which must green-light any strike.

Dear Abigail,

I’m turning 36 next month, and in a loving relationship with a man who is 31. Though he had dated before meeting me, I am his first official relationship. When we began dating, I was very clear about my timeline: I wanted to be engaged and starting a family within two years. I told him that if he wasn’t ready for that, we should part ways rather than grow attached under false assumptions. He said he wanted those things.

This June, we will have been together for two years. A proposal has still not come.

Last spring, we spoke explicitly about getting engaged, but a few months later he told me he needed more time—another year or so—and offered to pay for me to freeze my eggs, which we are doing this month.

Since then, however, the goalposts have continued to move. He now says that—although he wants these things with me—he isn’t ready to move in together, get engaged, or have children, and that he needs at least two more years. When I ask why he isn’t ready, the reasons change: sometimes it’s work, sometimes finances, sometimes needing more independence, sometimes simply “not yet.”

Three of his close friends are currently pregnant or have just had babies, and this summer we’re attending two of his friends’ weddings. Over the holidays, his mother told me—intentionally within his earshot—that she wants to help plan our wedding. He smiled when he heard it. He seems genuinely moved by the lives his peers are building, and often talks about valuing family. He comes from an immigrant family and is self-made—the youngest partner at his trading firm. And he is the primary provider for his mother, who is a single parent, supporting her and his 20-year-old sister.

I see his tenderness, especially with his sister. He’s even said that when we have a child, he hopes it’s a girl. Yet none of this translates into forward motion for us.

What makes this decision even harder is the broader dating landscape. Many of my close friends—women my age—are still on apps, searching for a partner who genuinely loves and respects them. I see how difficult it can be. Knowing this makes me appreciate what I have with him, and it raises the stakes of walking away from a relationship that is loving and stable—even if it feels stalled.

My fear is not that he doesn’t love me but that he may never feel “ready”—and that my waiting will quietly cost me the chance to have the family I want. I love him deeply. I genuinely believe he would be a wonderful father. If I could, I would start a family tomorrow. But at what point do I accept that his timeline may never align with mine? When does love require staying—and when does self-respect require leaving to search for a partner who is ready now?

Sincerely,

Jane, 35

Jane,

Every week, people write to me. Many of their predicaments challenge me. Some confound me. Others surprise. Yours is rarest of all: It fills me with horror.

If a man you’ve dated for two years asks you to undergo invasive surgery so that he can take indefinitely more time to decide whether he wants to marry you, he is a manipulative man or a very weak one—in practice, those are often the same.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, River Page reviews Louis Theroux’s futile attempt to expose the manosphere. Once (and future?) presidential candidate Andrew Yang tells us mass AI unemployment could end in brutal revolution. America’s forgotten founding mother. And more!

But first: It’s Oscars weekend!

The votes are cast. The predictions made. The dresses fitted. It’s almost time for the lights, the camera, the action of the 98th Academy Awards. The ceremony starts at 7 p.m. ET on Sunday, and to get you ready, we have a fresh piece on each of the three front-runners for Best Picture. You won’t read these takes anywhere else.

First up: Liel Leibovitz takes aim at One Battle After Another, which, according to Polymarket, has a 75 percent chance of bagging the top prize. And yet, according to Liel, Paul Thomas Anderson’s blockbuster is an ugly action movie about some progressives going to war against a version of ICE, and deserves none of the accolades it has scooped up.

He writes: “It feels like the sort of thing written by a committee of socialist college sophomores cracking each other up by casting the rapper Junglepussy—she plays a character by the same name—whose sole purpose is to deliver some silly speech about black power before disappearing from the action altogether 20 minutes in.”

Bishop Robert Barron was himself disappointed by Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which is One Battle’s closest competitor. A vampire movie set in the Jim Crow South, it had the ingredients to be great: epic acting, beautiful cinematography. But, the bishop writes, the underlying morality of the movie—that it’s possible to “divide the world into the easy binary of oppressor and oppressed, good guys and bad guys”—troubled him.

“This sort of moral reductionism obscures the dramatic tension between good and evil that all of us find in ourselves,” he writes.

And finally, a celebration: of Marty Supreme, a film that turns a ping-pong tournament into the fight of one man’s life. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, who is amoral, gifted, reckless—and a breath of fresh air for Rich Cohen, author of Tough Jews.

“I went through my 20s with a beef,” writes Cohen. “I didn’t like how Jews were portrayed in pop culture, or in the minds of my friends”—that is, as suitable husbands and good math students. That’s why he enjoyed watching this corrupt, womanizing protagonist—a Jew who shockingly says, of an upcoming match against a Holocaust survivor named Béla Kletzki, “I’m basically gonna do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn’t.”

“At a time when there is an attempt to redefine what it means to be Jewish, to characterize us en masse, to turn us into villains, Marty Supreme is a gift,” writes Cohen. “Not because it tries to defend Jews or depict them as do-gooders. But because it doesn’t.”

Looking for love? Over at Free Press Cupid, we bring you a new batch of single Free Pressers each week! Click here to meet a “semiretired” geologist who now spends his summers in Alaska; a soon-to-be therapist who’s true to her middle school AIM handle, “Bookworm4Eyes”; or even a Canadian film producer who speaks not just English and French, but also Italian.

Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to throw your hat in the ring, write up a paragraph about who you are and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

This week, Kat Rosenfield wrote a biting review of a bleak polyamory memoir, Suzy Weiss spoke to the good people in Silicon Valley who are busy trying to make our navy great again, a former opera singer confirmed Timothée Chalamet’s suspicions that nobody cares about the art form—and more! Catch up:

How should you spend your weekend? The editor of The Weekend Press, Freya Sanders, has some recommendations. . .

📖 Read . . . Our very own Kat Rosenfield published a novel this week! It’s called How to Survive in the Woods, it’s a thriller, and it’s amazing. As an editor, I hate the word unputdownable (Kat would never use such an absurd adjective), but I will say that when I was reading this book last year on a Greek island, I had to tell my best friend I could not go to the beach with her because I could not move until I’d gotten to the end. If you want a taste, read the excerpt we published!

📺 Watch . . . I liked Sinners and absolutely hated Marty Supreme, but the Best Picture nominee that affected me the most is Sentimental Value. The story of a quietly broken relationship between a father and daughter, a filmmaker and an actress, it’s an ode to the people who’ll never really leave you. I adored it. It’s a shame the lead actress, Renate Reinsve, who’s so good she makes you forget that what you’re watching isn’t real life, is up against Jessie Buckley in the Best Actress category; the latter is a shoe-in for her guttural performance in Hamnet—which I admittedly also loved. Watch that, too. But definitely watch Sentimental Value.

🎵 Listen . . . Okay, I know I just said I like quiet stories and lifelike performances, but to live is to contradict oneself, so let it be known: I cannot stop listening to the soundtrack of Wuthering Heights. It’s so over-the-top, it’s ridiculous. The tracks, by Charli xcx, have names like “Dying for You” and “Chains of Love.” But like the film, it takes seriously that feeling we all get once in a blue moon, if we’re lucky—where you’re so passionately obsessed that it feels like something is going to burst out of your chest. It makes me feel like I’m a teenage girl again, but somehow in a good way.

🍳 Cook . . . As the editor of The Weekend Press (which means being glued to a laptop screen until at least eight o’clock on a Friday night), it is not easy for me to host let-the-weekend-begin dinner parties—but host them, I do. Thanks to a very easy but somehow impressive salmon recipe. It’s based on this one, from BBC Good Food—but I ignore the fussy Step 1 with the fennel. The key is: Buy a really big fish. Like, a kilo of salmon. Cover it with as much harissa paste and honey as feels decent. Shove it in the oven while you’re waiting for a writer to finish their final edits. Then make lots of couscous—at least double what the recipe calls for: 600 grams of the stuff—plus 100 grams of currants, a lot of stock powder and lemon juice and olive oil, a couple cans of chickpeas, and a liter of boiling water, all in a big bowl. When you hear the doorbell go, a few minutes after you’re done working, throw some mint and parsley in the bowl, and put the big fish on a nice platter. People will be impressed by its majesty and not realize it took you all of five minutes to prepare. (Vegans can just eat the couscous and be thankful.)

Last but not least, when we asked our art director Clara Grusq, “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve seen this week?” she replied: “Sorry, Chalamet, opera is very much not dead: If you have the chance, go see ‘Tristan und Isolde’ at the Metropolitan Opera; it was devastatingly beautiful and changed my life.” Behold:

Have a great weekend!

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

What would I do if I were one of America’s greatest film directors?

The thought occurred to me sometimes as I was dawdling through film school, admiring the work of men and women whose talent I knew I lacked. With little hope of ever joining the pantheon myself, I daydreamed about what it must be like to be, say, Paul Thomas Anderson.

Suppose I were him? Having delivered three of the finest cinematic masterpieces in recent history—Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), and There Will Be Blood (2007)—to be later followed up with a handful of looser and more intimate works like Licorice Pizza (2021), what would I do for an encore?

In my hazier moments, I began to hatch out a fantasy. A genius of Anderson’s magnitude, I reasoned, is surely looking around him and feeling nothing but revulsion for what has become of Hollywood. An industry that now mandates diversity and inclusion standards in order to be considered for its highest honor—better find some way to work a host of BIPOC actors into that Leif Eriksson biopic you’re working on, bub—is no place for anyone committed to art for art’s sake. What’s a true auteur to do to state his or her disdain for the petty politruks ravaging popular entertainment?

And then it hit me: If I were Paul Thomas Anderson, I’d pull off the greatest prank in Hollywood history.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, in an excerpt from her new book, We the Women, Norah O’Donnell recalls the story of the Goddard Broadside, the only version of the Declaration of Independence inscribed with the name of a woman: Mary Katharine Goddard.

To receive Things Worth Remembering directly in your inbox every week, sign up here.

On January 18, 1777, the Second Continental Congress ordered the printing of an authentic copy of the Declaration of Independence, with the names of the signers, so that each of the states could put the founding document into its archives. It was the first time that the country would learn the names of almost every signer of the Declaration. America was at war, and they needed to know the men leading the charge.

The lawmakers were meeting in Baltimore because British troops were in New Jersey, and getting close to Philadelphia, “the seat of war” and the nation’s then-capital. Baltimore was the home of Mary Katharine Goddard, the first female postmaster in the United States. The printing shop she had inherited from her family was just a few blocks away from the new Congress. Since the move south, Mary Katharine had printed a number of resolutions and notices for Congress, so when it was time to quickly print the country’s most important document, they called on her.

In just two weeks, she gathered the names and printed copies, and sent them to the 13 colonies. Earlier versions of the Declaration had circulated without all the signatories’ names to avoid British detection. Printing the version with nearly all the signers’ names was an act of defiance and extraordinary bravery.

I felt a bit underdressed when I met Andrew Yang for lunch. He was wearing a suit, and I was wearing a dingy flannel shirt, which I’d gotten for Christmas in 2019, the year before Yang ran for president on a plan to institute universal basic income to deal with the specter of artificial intelligence-induced mass employment (among other things). I remember scoffing at his campaign at the time—an unrealistic solution to a hypothetical problem.

But the problem wasn’t hypothetical for long.

According to recent reports, AI is already replacing thousands of workers every month, and things could get much worse, with AI CEOs like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei predicting that unemployment could spike to 10 to 20 percent within the next five years. This week, polling showed that a third of voters think neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are good at “dealing with artificial intelligence”—and, presumably, the myriad threats it poses to the good life.