The Free Press

“The Bronx is tired of these landlords’ shit.”

That was the reaction of Linda Coleson, 23, to the hundreds of people who showed up to Fordham University on Wednesday evening for one of Zohran Mamdani’s Rental Rip-off hearings.

The Big Apple’s democratic socialist mayor campaigned as a leader who would fight for the little guy and take on the Goliaths of capitalism. The hearings, according to the city, promised to “offer New Yorkers a microphone to share poor conditions and unconscionable business practices.” This was Mamdani’s chance to shine.

When I arrived at Fordham’s brightly lit student center, the scene looked less like a struggle session and more like a science fair. A sign declaring the righteous struggle of “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords” adorned a projector screen above a stage. There were booths with tenant unions offering know-your-rights workshops and nonprofits providing free legal aid for renters. Coloring books, puzzles, and stuffed animals were set out for children (though I saw only one child at the event).

My entire community back home in West Bloomfield, Michigan, is on lockdown. I’m 5,000 miles away, sheltering from Iranian rockets in a bomb shelter in Tel Aviv. Perhaps it sounds strange to say, but I feel safer here.

At 12:59 p.m. ET, I see a text in my family group chat: Just a few miles from my childhood home, Temple Israel, the biggest synagogue in Michigan and the largest Reform congregation in North America, is under attack. A shooter has rammed his truck into the synagogue. He drove his vehicle down a hallway before he was killed during a firefight—either by a guard’s bullet or because his car caught alight. The Department for Homeland Security later identified Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old Lebanese-born US citizen from Dearborn Heights, as the suspect.

The images start flooding my phone. I have never seen so many police cars in my life. My 11-year-old brother is home, writes my mom, but his Jewish school, Hillel Day School, is just a five-minute drive from the site, and on lockdown. So is the high school I went to, the Jewish Community Center, and all other synagogues in the metro Detroit area.

I’m calling my friends in a frenzy. They are inconsolable on the phone, and the group chats are streams of texts, anxiously trying to get hold of anyone who might know something. I hear that a girl from my class was teaching a group of preschoolers at Temple Israel at the time of the attack. I hear about how she led her kids to safety—out of the synagogue and across the road. I hear worries that police are still searching for possible accomplices in the area.

Ships are burning in the Strait of Hormuz. There are rumors that the Iranians are laying underwater mines. An American submarine has torpedoed an enemy warship for the first time since the Second World War. Oceans are now battlefields.

But can America triumph in this arena? We’re not making enough ships—and the ones we have are out of date. Last April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to “restore America’s maritime dominance”—but the bureaucracy of the “Big Five” defense contractors is making it hard to do that.

Enter: the ocean-trepreneurs.

An Indian-born NASA-trained engineer who’s building flying boats for the Navy. A former Amazon employee who’s making self-piloting seaplanes. An Irish guy who’s making underwater drones that, he says, could help take out the Iranian mines rumored to be planted in the Persian Gulf. Suzy Weiss spoke to them in San Francisco, where the great Pacific Ocean meets the West’s best technicians.

You’re not going to want to miss this.

SAN FRANCISCO — It all started with the fighter jets doing tricks over the bay. It was San Francisco Fleet Week, the annual fall festival when the Navy show squadron known as the Blue Angels storms into the Bay Area to show off their precision and prowess, and to keep public morale high.

“It was the coolest thing ever,” said David Zagaynov. He was watching in 2023, with his roommates. They were all software engineers at Amazon and Lockheed Martin, and spent their workdays locked behind computer screens. But as they watched planes with names like “Super Hornet” flipping around above the Pacific, he said, “We were like: ‘Why can’t we build planes?’ ”

I met Zagaynov just over two years later, in the San Francisco warehouse of the company they started after this epiphany. It’s called Poseidon Aerospace, and it makes unmanned seaplanes. As we perched on the side of something that looks like a massive, oddly shaped hot tub—but is actually one half of a fuselage—Zagaynov told me nowadays he “wouldn’t be caught dead” building software. “If I spend so much of my time and effort building something and pouring my life into it, I want it to be something meaningful,” he said, “and not just, like, back-end optimization for some small business to operate with 1-percent greater efficiency.”

While many of America’s greatest minds are obsessed with creating artificial intelligence that will augment white-collar jobs—building ways to do online banking better or making online agents that can talk to other online agents—Poseidon, which raised $11 million in November, is producing machines that can do things in the real world. The seaplanes are named after birds—there’s a Seagull, a Heron, an Egret—and they can be used to ferry food to islands in an archipelago, or supplies to an oil rig. Or even weapons to an aircraft carrier. (The planes are remotely operated, via Starlink.) The government could theoretically store and launch drones from a Poseidon plane that floats miles offshore. In fact, the company’s website has an entire section dedicated to “POSEIDON DEFENSE,” which includes a map that shows how a plane in the sea around the southern tip of Japan could reach Taiwan, Guam, and our allies in South Korea. It is overlaid with text that reads: “BRINGING AMERICA’S ARSENAL TO OUR ADVERSARIES’ DOORSTEP.”

For 50 years, Dennis Prager, one of the most important and influential conservative thinkers of the 21st century, has made a single core argument: Without God, there is no good and evil—only opinion. He advanced it on the radio, in five volumes of biblical commentary, in more than a dozen books on religion, morality, and the foundations of Western civil…

It’s Thursday, March 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Are we on the brink of an Abraham Accords 2.0? The Joan Didion novel that explains the Oscars. Reports of MAGA’s divide on Iran are overstated. A fight over prayer time in Texas schools. The GOP has an anti-Muslim problem. And much more.

But first: What happened when a Ukrainian woman found her name in the Epstein files.

Nearly seven years after Jeffrey Epstein died in a prison cell, we are still learning the full extent of his dark empire. It spanned multiple continents and relied on a web of enablers, co-conspirators, and alleged victims turned recruiters—young women who were pressured, or persuaded, to bring in others.

For anyone still wondering how a scheme of such scale could operate in plain sight for so long, and how so many women kept getting pulled into Epstein’s orbit, my story today offers part of the answer. But this is not another harrowing account of abuse. Instead, the tale of Elizaveta “Liza” Grinenko, a Ukrainian actress, is about a young woman who narrowly escaped Epstein’s grasp—and realized how close she came to a very different fate only when she searched her name in the Epstein files.

—Tanya Lukyanova

• Amid market disruptions tied to the war in Iran, the International Energy Agency said its member governments agreed to an unprecedented release of 400 million barrels of oil from emergency reserves—the largest joint release in its history. Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has plunged to less than 10 percent of normal levels. Member nations will immediately release supplies to stabilize markets and protect energy security.

• The Pentagon has told Congress that the first week of the Iran War cost more than $11.3 billion. The figure was presented to lawmakers in a classified briefing on Tuesday.

• A preliminary military inquiry has reportedly found that U.S. Central Command’s February 28 strike, which killed at least 175 people at an Iranian elementary school, relied on outdated data. The school was misidentified as a military target because it was once part of a naval base used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. After initially blaming Iran, Donald Trump said yesterday, when asked about the report, “I don’t know about that.”

• Health and Human Services secretary RFK Jr.’s vaccine advisory panel scrapped a proposal to halt recommendations for Covid-19 mRNA vaccines after GOP pollsters warned further changes to vaccine policy could be “politically risky” ahead of midterm elections. For now, there are no new changes to federal guidance. The CDC’s September update already moved away from recommending Covid shots for everyone 6 months and older, instead advising Americans to consult with their healthcare providers about whether vaccination is right for them.

• A new report released yesterday revealed that about 40 percent of nonorganic fruits and vegetables grown in California contain “forever chemicals.” The analysis, based on a review of the state’s own testing data, detected PFAS residues—chemicals linked to cancer, immune suppression, and reproductive damage. “PFAS pesticides went from being the exception to now they’re the rule,” Nathan Donley, environmental health science director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told the Los Angeles Times.

• The Department of Homeland Security has relaunched its Global Entry program after a two-week pause due to the ongoing partial government shutdown over immigration funding. The halt exposed airport vulnerabilities as Customs and Border Protection staff were redirected from kiosks to manage long security lines, causing major travel delays. A House-passed DHS funding bill has stalled in the Senate, meaning the partial shutdown will continue until a compromise is reached.

• Columbia’s graduate student workers’ union voted to authorize a strike as negotiations with the university over compensation and anti-Israel demands stall. Over 90 percent of the union’s members voted to approve the measure, and if union leaders decide to strike, hundreds of classes could be canceled. (For more on the strike, and why it matters, read Jonas Du’s report for The Free Press.)

The perfect book to read before the Oscars this weekend? Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays.

In this episode, Shilo sits down with Peter Savodnik to discuss Didion’s 1970 novel—a book that seemed to anticipate everything ugly about Hollywood, celebrity culture, and the spiritual emptiness that we now take for granted on the red carpet and on social media.

T…

Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty, joins the show to talk about the origins, evolution, and possible future of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What forces produced the 1979 revolution, and how did it reshape Iran’s political …

Why are we at war with Iran? The Trump administration has so far botched its rationale for Operation Epic Fury.

For several days after the initial strikes two Saturdays ago, Trump officials’ explanations were vague. Then, last Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “We knew that there ​was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we ​didn’t preemptively go after them before they ​launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

These comments triggered an almighty political argument—and the administration quickly tried to walk them back. But the bigger problem was legal. Though the Trump administration has claimed that Iran posed an imminent threat, it has not publicly provided detailed evidence for that claim; Rubio’s comments remain the most concrete explanation offered so far. If what Rubio said was true, and Israel did force America’s hand, the administration is relying on a shaky interpretation of the Constitution to wage war.

In one weekend, the U.S. used Anthropic’s AI to fight a war—and blacklisted it from any further government work. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has borne the brunt of the blame for starting a conflict between the military and the leading-edge AI developer. Really, though, this fight started when Anthropic demanded the right to set the terms on which the military would use its technology.

That’s not a confrontation that a private company should be getting into.

I founded and run a defense AI company. I’ve been working with AI language models long before almost anyone outside tech had heard of them, but my life has been dominated by defense since long before that. My father flew A-10s. My brother is a brigadier general. My dissertation was on algorithms used in war. When I watch an industry I work in debate whether the military should have access to AI tools during an active conflict, I’m thinking about the people in my life who depend on those tools to keep all of us safe.

This week, Tennessee GOP Rep. Andy Ogles posted on X: “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.”

Those familiar with Ogles’s career wouldn’t have been shocked. In an X post last summer calling for Zohran Mamdani to be deported from the country, he referred to New York City’s current mayor, who is Muslim, as “little Muhammad.” Last Thursday, Ogles said “America and Islam are incompatible,” and called for a “Muslim ban.” In an interview published the same day, Ogles told Fox News: “Mass Islamic immigration, legal or illegal, has transformed America and brought destructive consequences.”

Ogles is not alone. Last week, Georgia GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde posted to X: “No more Islamic immigration. Denaturalize, deport, repeat.”