The Free Press

It’s Wednesday, March 11. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Reihan Salam on how Zohran Mamdani needs to condemn jihadist bomb-throwers, not just Islamophobes. Josh Code reports on the $1,200 anti-recording gadget that promises to keep your home and office surveillance-free. Onetime opera singer Billy Binion writes about why Timothée Chalamet is right that hardly anyone cares about opera.

But first: A Free Press debate on the Iran war.

The most pressing question in the world right now is: How far should the U.S. go in its war with Iran?

Today, our own Coleman Hughes hosts a debate on whether the U.S. should have embarked on this war, and whether it can topple Iran’s theocratic regime to end it. Arguing in favor of Operation Epic Fury, Niall Ferguson posits that there are few greater global dangers than allowing Tehran to obtain nuclear weapons. Arguing against it is former diplomat Richard Haass, who served as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and who warns that the operation unleashes threats to world stability far more imminent than those we seek to eliminate.

Richard has also expanded on his reasoning in our pages today. Don’t miss his essay on the case against “preventive war,” the human and economic costs, and how the conflict could benefit Vladimir Putin.

For more from Niall on the conflict, read his initial piece on the war, explaining why Iran 2026 isn’t Iraq 2003, and his answer to another important question: Is this the beginning of World War III?

Seven American service members have already been killed in the Iran war, and some 140 injured On the home front, military families are bearing the emotional brunt of the conflict. Today, Free Press investigative reporter Madeleine Rowley, a military spouse herself, writes about the daily hopes and fears of the families of soldiers deployed to the Middle East.

And for more on what comes next, tune in to tomorrow’s School of War livestream. At 12 p.m. ET, Aaron MacLean will sit down with Iran expert Ray Takeyh to discuss what we know about the country’s new supreme leader, Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba. Click here to add it to your calendar, or join us tomorrow at thefp.com/livestream.

—The Editors

• No contender in yesterday’s special election to replace Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene secured the 50 percent majority required to win. The race will now move to a runoff between Democrat Shawn Harris and Republican Clayton Fuller in April.

• Meta has acquired Moltbook, the social media platform where AI agents talk to each other, Axios reports. The merger follows Meta’s major investment in AI labeling company ScaleAI, continuing an aggressive strategy to scoop up top AI talent and tools.

• Think you can spot the difference between a Pulitzer Prize winner and AI? The New York Times just dropped a quiz pitting the world’s best writers against AI-generated material, revealing that among 84,000 quiz-takers, 54 percent preferred AI-authored writing in the blind test.

• YouTube will expand its deepfake detection tool from content creators to cover more politicians, government officials, and journalists in order to combat AI-generated dupes. So far, creators, who have had access to the tool since last year, have flagged very few videos for deletion. “Most of it turns out to be fairly benign or additive to their overall business,” one senior company official told Axios.

• Nearly 700,000 Lebanese citizens have fled their homes as the war with Iran expands into its borders. The surge in refugees comes after Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel on March 2, prompting Israeli counterstrikes and ground incursions into southern Lebanon.

• The Pentagon confirmed that 140 U.S. service members have been injured since the war in Iran began, including eight who face life-threatening injuries. “The vast majority of these injuries have been minor, and 108 service members have already returned to duty,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement yesterday.

• Alabama governor Kay Ivey commuted the death sentence of Charles Burton, a 75-year-old man set to be executed this week for his role in a 1991 robbery that ended in a fatal shooting. He remained on death row even after the shooter’s death sentence was reduced to life in prison. “I believe it would be unjust for one participant in this crime to be executed,” Ivey said, “while the participant who pulled the trigger was not.”

• Early Tuesday morning, shots were fired at the U.S. consulate in Toronto, with no injuries reported. The attack follows recent shootings at Toronto-area synagogues, prompting a national security investigation. Ontario premier Doug Ford suggested, without providing evidence, that terrorist sleeper cells could be involved.

The question on the minds of many Americans is: What should we make of the war in Iran?

To explore that, I brought together historian and Free Press contributor Niall Ferguson and veteran diplomat Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, to discuss their differing views on the operation.

While Ferguson is broadly supportive o…

New York City narrowly averted a catastrophe on Saturday. Outside Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor, two men—Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi—attempted to detonate shrapnel-filled improvised explosive devices. Their targets were NYPD officers and a group of anti-Islam protesters. By the grace of incompetent engineering, the bombs gave off smoke and flames but did not explode. According to federal prosecutors, the suspects said they were inspired by ISIS, the jihadist group that the U.S. has tried to fully stamp out for more than a decade. They now face federal terrorism charges, among others.

The episode was, in many ways, a test for New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. As a progressive Muslim leader whose own home was the site of this near disaster, his response was bound to draw scrutiny.

It has been just over 40 years since historian Barbara Tuchman published The March of Folly. The book is about wars that ought not to have been fought, as they went against the interests of the empire or country that undertook them, when better alternatives were available. I agree with Tuchman’s thinking and have since termed these kinds of conflicts “wars of choice” as opposed to those of necessity.

Today’s war in Iran is a war of choice.

As has been widely pointed out, evidence of the kind of immediate threat from Iran that the Trump administration cited to justify its massive military attack has yet to emerge. The U.S. had many other options, including enhanced sanctions and diplomacy.

Deployment worry feels different. Physically, it feels like cold sweats and heart palpitations. That is exactly how I felt when I heard, while driving somewhere in the spring of 2024, that hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones were heading directly toward my husband’s location overseas.

“Ballistic missiles?” I remember texting him. “Please stay safe.”

Mentally, deployment feels like dread, usually followed by a quick reality check. I was pulled back to the present moment by my toddler daughter, who loudly requested “Baby Shark” from the backseat of the car. I switched the radio from news to my Spotify app. I zoned out. I sang along. “Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo.”

After winning the presidency in 2024, Donald Trump sent a loud signal about his interest in the artificial intelligence revolution by choosing Sriram Krishnan as senior policy adviser for AI.

Within hours, Krishnan, an immigrant from India with a distinguished career in Silicon Valley, was subjected to a storm of attacks from the online right. “Did any of y’all vote for this Indian to run America?” one person wrote on X beneath Krishnan’s photo. Laura Loomer called the appointment “deeply disturbing” and said that America was built by “white Europeans” and “not third world invaders from India.”

Two days later Vivek Ramaswamy, a onetime biotech entrepreneur who endorsed Trump after quitting the Republican presidential campaign in 2024 and is now running for Ohio governor, defended Krishnan by saying that the influx of foreign-born engineers at U.S.-based companies was the result of America having “venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” Ramaswamy, born in Cincinnati to Indian parents, was then savagely attacked, too.

I’m rarely surprised by online controversy. It’s 2026 and my heart is hardened. Yet the massive backlash to Timothée Chalamet’s recent comments about opera and ballet still managed to shock me.

“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore,’ ” he said last month in a CNN and Variety town hall opposite Matthew McConaughey. “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”

As a general matter, opera people did not take that flippant remark with “all respect.” After Chalamet’s comments were clipped in isolation and published online late last week, the outrage crescendoed rapidly, from a social media backlash to a transatlantic opera chorus of indignation.

It started, as so many things do, with a 90-second video on X.

A young, bespectacled woman with a charming German accent speaks, to camera, about Spectre I, “the first smart device that stops unwanted audio recordings from happening around you.”

Then, like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the device appears—a sleek, black dome with small perforations, bathed in a ring of soft orange light.

It is beautiful. And it whipped the internet into a frenzy. Some were eager—“instant buy” and “excited to try it”—while others were skeptical: “This seems like the perfect Trojan horse for an intel agency or malign actor to infiltrate and actually use to monitor targets.”

The young woman in the video is Aida Baradari, the product’s inventor. And at the end of last week, she found herself, somewhat unexpectedly, in the eye of the latest technology hype hurricane.

“I did not expect it to blow up like this,” she told me.

Not long after he arrived on the Stanford University campus in 2022 as a 17-year-old freshman, Theo Baker received a tip about the school’s president, the neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker, the son of two prominent Washington, D.C., journalists, had joined the staff of The Stanford Daily and was looking for a story he could dig into. And here it was: On a website called PubPeer, a forum for discussing scientific papers, critics were claiming that papers coming out of Tessier-Lavigne’s lab contained manipulated and fraudulent data. And that it had been going on for years.

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. Here’s Amit’s daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

Last night, Donald Trump told CBS that the war is “very complete, pretty much.” According to the president, “We are far ahead of the original estimate we made.”

From the Israeli perspective, the early victories were impressive—but not that impressive. Israel still fears a repeat of the June war, when targets were left untouched after Trump’s patience for the campaign was exhausted. At the start of this war, he spoke of a “four to five week” timeline. Israel is hoping for something around that to exhaust its target bank—not the 11 days we’re currently at.