The Free Press

Reports this week of a new Kurdish front in the war for Iran are greatly exaggerated. That is the view of Abdullah Mohtadi, the exiled secretary general of the Komala Party of Iran’s Kurdish provinces. “We haven’t been engaged with the Americans about the substance of their support and protection yet,” he told The Free Press. “It’s too hypothetical now to say.”

Last week President Donald Trump spoke with leaders of the Kurdistan Regional Government in neighboring Iraq. The two main Kurdish parties in Iran—Komala and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI)—have bases on the Iraqi side of the country’s border with Iran. But these Iranian Peshmerga fighters have not yet been deployed into Iran. Trump discussed the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters entering Iran to serve as boots on the ground after the regime falls. CNN reported last week that the Central Intelligence Agency is considering funding and arming these groups to help foment an uprising against Iran’s regime.

When war broke out in the Middle East last week, it plunged the travel industry into the kind of chaos not seen since the pandemic. Thousands of flights to or from the Gulf have been canceled; Dubai and Abu Dhabi’s airports sustained damage from Iranian weaponry. Since these countries have all staked their future on cheap and efficient connections that have knitted the U.S. East Coast and Europe to Asia and Australia for years, this is a big deal. The travel industry—and therefore the flow of people and capital—is about to reconfigure.

And Singapore is ready. Last year, its government placed a bet on the future at a time when tiny, wealthy city-states seem more fragile than ever, beginning work on a new terminal—able to handle about 50 million passengers a year—at its legendary Changi Airport, routinely voted the world’s best. At the groundbreaking ceremony in May, Singapore prime minister Lawrence Wong drew a parallel with history that now seems a little uncanny, referring to Changi’s origin story. In the 1970s, unrest in the Middle East and soaring oil prices cast a shadow over the world, he said, and Singapore’s prime minister at the time, Lee Kuan Yew, faced a choice: Make an existing airport a little bigger, or spend far more developing a huge, entirely new, state-of-the-art location at the island’s easternmost tip. Lee chose the bolder course of action, and Singapore became the global travel hub it is now.

Whenever we publish anything at The Free Press, we ask ourselves one question: Can the reader—can you—get this perspective, this reporting, this analysis, this style anywhere else? Your time is precious. Our work should merit it.

We strive daily to meet that high bar. The essay below far surpasses it.

Longtime readers of The Free Press and “Honestly” listeners will know the name of its author, Jonathan Rosen, and, we hope, will have read his astonishing book, “The Best Minds.”

It’s days like today that we wish we had a printing press, given the importance and length of this particular piece. But we did the next best thing: Scroll down to find the link for a made-to-be-printed PDF version of this essay.

— Bari, Adam, and Oliver

Thirty-seven years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, sentenced Salman Rushdie to death on Valentine’s Day for writing a novel.

It is hard to write that sentence without feeling it is a parody of the opening line of Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” Nevertheless, that is what happened. And as Rushdie told Ezra Klein in spring of 2024, “We live in Kafka’s world.”

I remember reading about the fatwa—a word everyone suddenly knew—in the newspaper at the time. I had recently dropped out of graduate school and was trying to become a writer myself, and it seemed absurd that a best-selling novelist born in India, living in London, and famous around the world might be murdered because the octogenarian ruler of an Islamist theocracy thousands of miles away had called for his death, like the Red Queen shouting “Off with their heads!” in Alice in Wonderland.

The ayatollah died four months later, but it soon became apparent that Rushdie’s 1988 novel was no match for a few sentences read over the radio calling on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be” to kill the author of The Satanic Verses and anyone else who helped bring his blasphemous book into the world.

Ever since, the fatwa has hovered over the West it was designed to destroy, waxing and waning like a moon. Sometimes it is a pale crescent, barely there; sometimes, as now, a round blood moon full of portent. But a portent of what?

It is a few sentences read aloud on Radio Tehran—mere breath—that will remain the Islamic Republic’s most dangerous weapon.

The question remains urgent even after the joint American and Israeli strikes on the early morning of February 28 marked a new phase in the long war waged by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which came into the world chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” I have been thinking a great deal about the fatwa now that the murderous regime the ayatollah founded in 1979 is teetering on the bloody brink. Because it may yet be that of all the proxies nurtured over the years by the Islamic Republic for its apocalyptic showdown with the Jewish state and the West, and after all the billions spent on Islamist militias, ballistic missiles, and global terrorism— plus half a trillion dollars on its nuclear weapons program in pursuit of its endlessly repeated aim of “wiping Israel off the map”—it is a few sentences read aloud on Radio Tehran, mere breath, that will remain its most successful method of exporting the Islamist revolution, even after the murderous regime it created goes down.

Saturday marks one week of war in Iran. And if you’re on X, chances are you’ve noticed there’s a new headline about the war—or seemingly a new country involved—nearly every hour.

It’s almost impossible to keep track. So I did it for you. Here are all the key events from the first week of the war: what the United States and Israel have targeted, how Iran …

NEW YORK CITY — In February 2024, a few months after The New York Times published an investigation into the sexual violence that occurred on October 7, 2023, Rama Duwaji, the wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, liked an Instagram post referring to the “mass rape” hoax that was “fabricated” by the paper.

That was just one of more than 70 Instagram posts uncovered by The Free Press in which the First Lady of New York City cosigned extreme positions against Israel. A sampling of the posts say Israel is waging a “vile land grab,” and the protesters who took over a Columbia University building in April 2024 were “on the right side of progress.” Another post liked by Duwaji, who identifies as Syrian but was born in Houston, Texas, calls for the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—which Mamdani has said he would honor if the Israeli leader steps foot in New York City on his watch. One post she liked referred to then-President Joe Biden as “Butcher Biden,” and said, “Your legacy is genocide, Joe.”

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Evan Gardner reports from the front lines of the AI revolution. Kat Rosenfield reflects on an eerily prescient Iranian vampire movie. Howard Jacobson explains why he yelled at his audience during Jewish Book Week. And more!

But first, there are tens of thousands of American servicepeople in the Middle East right now, and retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling knows exactly how they feel. . . .

As all-out war explodes out from the Middle East, uncertainty reigns. All week, we’ve been wondering: Is this how World War III begins? What’s next for Iran? What’s President Donald Trump’s plan? But war is never just about nations and politics. It is also about human beings, including the people asked to fight, and the families waiting for them back home.

At time of writing, six American service members have already been killed in this war. “There will likely be more before it ends,” Trump said after the first casualties were announced. Each one leaves behind an entire life—a clapboard house, a beloved spouse, a couple of kids maybe, a dog, a lot of plans that will never be fulfilled.

No one understands that more clearly than retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Mark Hertling. Over nearly four decades in uniform, Hertling completed multiple combat tours in Iraq and commanded soldiers at every level of the Army. But throughout those years, he couldn’t shake the very rawest form of fear: that he might not make it home. So he began writing a journal that, he thought, his two young sons would read in the event that their father never returned from the Gulf.

But he did. And in his new book, If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal—which will be released next week—Hertling shares those journal entries, as well as the wisdom he’s gained during the long life he once wasn’t sure he would have.

“I’d like to say that all my training and preparation helped me face going to war. But the truth is: I was very frightened,” he writes, in the exclusive excerpt we’re publishing today. “I wasn’t ready to die. I’m still not.” Yet there’s a reason parents risk their lives to defend their countries. “For years, men have been going to war in the hopes that their children wouldn’t have to,” writes Hertling. “That is part of what love is all about.”

We have another batch of Free Press singles looking for love, and this group is highly eligible: a painter in Jerusalem, a psychology PhD candidate, and a 68-year-old retired judge who is on a “semi-competitive” canoe team. And don’t forget MJ, who never left Atlanta after college because “something about the South—handwritten thank-you notes and never returning an empty dish—speaks to my soul.” Check out the newest FP Cupid ads here, and if you want the chance to be featured next week, write to [email protected]!

We’ve published plenty of other treats this week, from Suzy Weiss’s profile of the man charged with beautifying our government’s very un-chic websites to Nick Clairmont’s entertaining ode to “monitoring the situation” in the Middle East:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our business and tech editor, Mark Gimein, for his recommendations . . .

📺 Watch . . . the films of Ruben Östlund. The problem with so-called black comedies is they are most often not funny. Not so with Östlund. His best known film, Force Majeure, is a tight family drama set on a ski trip. But his following movies, The Square, about the art world, and Triangle of Sadness, about the foibles of the rich, are even better. Vicious enough to merit the “black comedy” label, but they are genuinely funny, even if—spoiler alert—Triangle of Sadness kills off characters with more abandon than Game of Thrones.

📚 Read . . . City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai by Paul French. It is a story about how an Eastern European Jewish performer turned nightclub promoter teams up with an ex-con Navy vet who burned off his fingertips to make a fortune on illegal slots. The setting is the late 1930s, but here is the twist: The city in the title is Shanghai. Did you know that the pre–World War II Shanghai underworld was dominated by the Jewish mob? If so, you win the prize for mob history deep cuts.

🍳 Eat . . . Everyone with a kid needs a comforting oven-baked or stovetop casserole to pull out. So here’s mine. Take one pound of ground beef, and 17 ounces (one package) of tteokbokki, as in Korean rice cakes. Brown the beef, add five cloves of chopped garlic, white parts of about eight scallions, and lots of fresh ginger cut into matchsticks. Boil the tteokbokki, and toss in with the beef. Then add a mix of five tablespoons of gochujang, two tablespoons of sugar, a quarter cup of soy sauce, one tablespoon of sesame oil, two tablespoons of cooking oil, and a quarter cup of water or chicken broth. Cook until sticky with crispy blackened bits. Serves four, or two adults and one hungry teenager.

This past Tuesday, Chinese communities around the world celebrated the Lantern Festival, which, coinciding with the full moon, marks the end of Chinese New Year celebrations. Releasing lanterns into the sky is supposed to symbolize letting go of your old self. Here’s how the festival was celebrated in Taiwan:

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

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

The Iran war is the biggest story in the world right now, and it’s moving fast. Since day one, The Free Press has mobilized the deepest bench in independent journalism to make sense of it: Niall Ferguson, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Eli Lake, Michael Doran, Haviv Rettig Gur, and more, with each bringing the kind of expertise and independence you won’t find anywhere else. Below is everything we’ve published so far. The war isn’t over. Subscribe so you don’t miss a thing.

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This war will likely go on for weeks. Don’t miss a thing—subscribe for free for full access to everything we publish, starting with the stories that matter most right now.

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“If you’re in this room, all your family and friends think you’re crazy,” the host calls out.

It’s Wednesday night and, along with over 1,300 others (the line wrapped around an entire block), I’m at New York City’s inaugural ClawCon. Here, passionate fans of the personalized AI agent OpenClaw can meet each other and, among other things, chat about all the ways they love it. Launched in November under the name Clawdbot, then changed to Moltbot in January and finally OpenClaw, it can do everything from organize your email to set your alarms to even set up an options trading portfolio.

The host is Michael Galpert, a mega-fan of the product, who has come all the way from San Francisco. “Everyone’s here because we’re ready to ride the claw,” he said. “It’s not normal for the rest of the world. So it’s going to be on us to help shepherd that new era that has already started.”

In the past two months, OpenClaw has taken the AI world by storm: What started as a self-described “weekend project”—the brainchild of an Austrian man named Peter Steinberger—drew two million visitors in a single week, charted unprecedented growth on GitHub, and eventually earned Steinberger a shiny new job at OpenAI. In January, OpenClaw went viral when a man named Matt Schlicht created a social media platform for its bots called Moltbook, where the AI agents could talk to one another; soon after, the bots used that network to sprout “Crustafarianism,” a religion complete with its own five tenets.

All of which is to say: The Claw community is perhaps the closest thing we have to a post-human world. And yet here we are, in a sweaty New York auditorium, surrounded by hundreds of living, breathing people, sipping from plastic cups of liquor, hovering around a DJ table, dancing beneath flashing red lights—and decimating a mountain of lobster tails, piled high atop a tower of ice.

“This isn’t a meetup; it’s a movement,” declared Scott Breitenother, CEO of Kilo Code, who co-sponsored the event. “People truly are hungry for the claw.”

Welcome back to Second Thought! Before we get into it—don’t worry, I will of course be covering the sex politics of the upper echelons of the artificial intelligence industry—some housekeeping.

Firstly: Free Press Cupid has relaunched, and it’s even better than I could have imagined. I’m not saying The Free Press is a matchmaking service wrapped in a media company, but I’m also not not saying that. If you want to believe in love again, read these ads, then email us at [email protected] with a 200-word or so letter about who you are and what you’re looking for.

Secondly: I’m looking forward to seeing some of you in Manhattan this coming Tuesday! I’m hosting a conversation with Kat Rosenfield about her new, thrilling novel “How to Survive in the Woods.” If you live nearby, there are still a few tickets left—take a break from monitoring the situation and join us!

America’s favorite Mormon mom—and its favorite Mormon mom to hate—is now, at 35, a mom of nine. Hannah Neeleman is a former pageant queen and ballerina, and the face of Ballerina Farm, a lifestyle brand and direct-to-consumer food business. On Instagram, she pumps out gorgeously addictive videos that show her making cheese, bags of bone broth, and hot cocoa mix and organic flour that she sells on her website. She usually has a baby strapped to her somewhere, and often a toddler or two wanders into the shot; occasionally we see her husband, Daniel (whose father has founded five airlines). Though it doesn’t really need to be said, they live in Utah.

Last week, Neeleman announced her ninth pregnancy in a highly produced video featuring some strong brass instruments and a big American flag. Along with the new kid, she promoted some protein powder. She also reflected on the discipline and beauty of ballet. “Before the curtain rose, there existed discipline, sweat, blistered feet,” she said, after a shot of her cradling a massive bump under a gingham dress. “Despite what some people think, that strength never leaves you.”

Then this week, the Neelemans had the baby. It’s a girl, their sixth in a row.

SOHO, London — Howard Jacobson’s big brown eyes are ringed with purple bruises, and he has a wrist brace on his right hand. He slipped off the curb the afternoon before we met. I’m not in much better shape: My right hand and wrist are bandaged after a bout of overexuberant gardening.

When Howard shuffles into the café down the street from his apartment in London, all leonine beard and bedraggled mane, our server greets him as a regular. She looks at his bruised face and then at my hand—and asks me if I did it.