The Free Press

President Donald Trump has finally done it. After promising to come to the aid of the Iranian people after nationwide demonstrations broke out at the end of December, the U.S. has launched a war to target not only Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, missile stocks, and navy, but the leadership of the regime itself. It’s the biggest gamble of Trump’s presidency thus far—for better or worse.

The compound of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has reportedly been turned into rubble. The Times of Israel reports that Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has also been targeted by Israeli air strikes. Unverified reports circulating on social media have also claimed top generals in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have also been targeted, including its top commander, Mohammad Pakpour, according to Israeli broadcaster N12. Already, Iran has retaliated, targeting Israel and U.S. military bases in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait.

In the closing of an eight-minute address to the world posted in the early hours of Saturday morning, Trump made a direct appeal to the Iranian people. “The hour of your freedom is at hand,” he said. “Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.”

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Joe Nocera speaks to former Nebraska governor Bob Kerrey, who took a meeting with Jeffrey Epstein—and just resigned because of it. We have an exclusive excerpt from Kat Rosenfield’s new novel, set in the darkest woods of Maine. Maya Sulkin speaks to a young mom who went from OnlyFans model to devout Catholicism. And more!

But first: What happens when an entire generation of girls is taught to hate men?

“I dont have parents, i have a mom and dad who don’t love each other, it hurts,” says the text on the screen as a young woman sobs.

This is what Freya India found on TikTok last year, while flicking through the hashtags #divorce and #divorcedparents.

“I was born in 1999. Growing up, I don’t remember many people talking to me about divorce,” she writes in today’s essay. “My parents split when I was 3, but by the time I was old enough to understand what that meant, family breakdown was so common it never felt worth mentioning.”

But now her generation has come of age, and is analyzing their childhood online. “You weren’t crazy,” says one TikTok caption, “you just realized that having divorced parents affected you because now you’re in constant belief that love isn’t real.”

Is it any wonder that Gen Z doesn’t know how to form relationships? “Imagine you are a teenage girl whose father left, and you believe all men are untrustworthy,” writes Freya. Then imagine you’re scrolling through Instagram, and you come across adults who make money by reinforcing that bleak opinion. Because before most Gen-Z girls had been kissed, they’d been bombarded with advice from dating influencers who built their platforms by saying things like: “The intense chemistry you feel with someone you just met is a huge red flag. Most likely, they are similar to an early caregiver that neglected you & your subconscious mind is attracted to them.”

Meanwhile, on the popular podcast Call Her Daddy—which averages around five million weekly listeners—­host Alex Cooper reminds girls to never relax into the relationship, not even after marriage. “They still hate you, and they’re still cheating on you, until they prove otherwise.”

Maybe Gen-Z girls were taught to hate men. To understand how this has happened, read Freya’s gripping essay—which is adapted from her forthcoming book, GIRLS®:

You’ll have to wait until publication day, March 10, to read the rest of her novel! That night, Kat will be joining Suzy Weiss live in New York City to launch the book—and you’re invited!

Get Your Tickets Here

Looking for love? Over at Free Press Cupid, we have a new batch of lonely-hearts ads for you! Click here to meet a 23-year-old Brit who loves to cook and promises he’ll “take you on a culinary tour from the comfort of home”; or to know more about a young Naval officer from Virginia who says: “I like my women like I like my books: smart, elegant, and funny.”

Your soulmate could be just one email away! If you’d like to throw your hat in the ring, write up a paragraph that defines you (and what you’re looking for), and send it over to [email protected].

We’ve published some pieces this week that you’re going to want to catch up on, including Suzy Weiss’s defense of the very drunk hockey bros of Team USA; Kat Rosenfield’s reflections on the controversial events of last Sunday’s BAFTAs, during which a man with Tourette’s yelled a racial slur, and was pilloried for it; and, first up, a wild story by P.G. Sittenfeld about what it’s like to be the target of an FBI sting:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our producer Poppy Damon for her recommendations . . .  

🎧Listen . . . Sea of Lies is a fantastic CBC podcast series that is filled with strange details. It begins with a body being washed up on a fishing boat, and a trail of deception is uncovered. If you are looking for something to binge—I highly recommend it.

🍎Eat . . . If you’re in Brooklyn anytime soon, go to Mercado Central NYC (252 Third Avenue at Union Street). It is my favorite place to have a glass of wine and authentic tapas. I love to come home with things for the pantry as well. Tinned food is in, and some say it’s the cost-of-living crisis, but I think sardines are genuinely delicious.

📺Watch . . . I am going to be cheeky and throw a couple in here. Both suggestions are highly silly and highly joyful. On the small screen, Small Prophets. Never have I seen a show get such unilateral love across the political aisle. Five stars from The Guardian AND four in The Telegraph. I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say it’s a mystical sitcom featuring homunculi (if you know you know). And on the big screen: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Behold:

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

Do you want to know what it’s like to be collateral damage in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—to find yourself the subject of uninformed newspaper articles; to have associates fearful of having your name attached to theirs; to be caught in the Epstein whirlwind because years ago you attended a meeting or exchanged a few emails with the man the world now—understandably—sees as the devil incarnate?

On Thursday morning, Bob Kerrey—the 82-year-old former Nebraska senator, then governor, then Democratic presidential candidate—told me exactly what it’s been like, at least for him. Kerrey’s name popped up in the Epstein files because in 2013, he did indeed have a meeting with the pedophile, as well as a few email exchanges in which they discussed further meetings. (He told me he doesn’t recall whether he attended a second meeting.) Beyond that narrow time frame, the two men never interacted.

But because of that meeting—and the ruckus it caused—last Friday Kerrey resigned as chairman of a Nebraska-based clean energy company called Monolith. The press, of course, was all over the story, just like it was all over the Casey Wasserman story, and the J.K. Rowling story, and the many others whose glancing appearance in the Epstein files made them, you know, newsworthy.

“Let me read you this text I got yesterday from The New York Times,” Kerrey said. “Hi, Bob,” the text began. “This is Sonia Rao. Could I get you on the phone for just two minutes, just to give you a chance to defend yourself? I’m writing an article that’s running in the Times today. I would like this article to be fair and not one-sided. Otherwise, we’d have to write it without comment from you, unless you’d like to give a statement.”

“No one talks about how your childhood affects your relationships. Fear of abandonment and overthinking about people leaving you all the time sucks,” says the caption of a TikTok with 3.4 million views, in which a girl films herself crying.

I watch another: “I don’t have parents, I have a mom and dad who don’t love each other, it hurts,” says the text on screen as a young woman sobs. “I will never know what it will be like to have parents that love each other and it gives me so much pain and jealousy. Why . . .why, Mom and Dad, can’t you just love each other?”

It’s 2025, and I’m scrolling through the hashtags #divorce and #divorcedparents, where girls describe the pain of living without their mother or father, of feeling split in two, of never having seen what a healthy relationship looks like. One thing I notice, again and again, is how often they say that nobody talks about this, nobody understands.

I watched most of “Gone Girl” through my fingers and screamed so loudly in “Scream” that my neighbors complained. In other words: I always thought I didn’t like thrillers. But then my friend and colleague Kat Rosenfield sent me an early copy of her grizzly, disturbing, completely fantastic new novel, “How to Survive in the Woods”—and I was obsessed from the opening line.

You might know Kat from her Free Press articles, in which she surveys the culture with a sharp eye—commenting on everything from the hypocrisy of Hollywood to the politicization of absolutely everything. Unsurprisingly, her new novel is very zeitgeisty. It’s the tale of Emma Sharp, a girlboss raised by a prepper—who, after establishing a multimillion-dollar nutrition business, crashes out and ends up in a relationship with a very controlling man named Logan.

She starts to think he might kill her one day.

And then she meets his ex-girlfriend, Taylor, and together they decide: They should kill him first. The perfect scene of the crime? The woods of Maine. Specifically, the secluded final stretch of the Appalachian Trail, at the end of hiking season.

“How to Survive in the Woods” is out March 10 (but you can preorder now!)—and it’s our pleasure to publish an exclusive excerpt today, in which Logan, Taylor, and Emma arrive in the woods for a journey that, if all goes according to plan, should be his last.

Of course, not everything goes to plan.

One last thing, before you dive into this addictive story: Kat’s launching her book in New York City on the evening of March 10 with Suzy Weiss—and you’re invited! It’ll be a great conversation between two of our most entertaining columnists. Get your tickets here! —Freya Sanders

“The hotel is just up here,” Taylor says.

They’re passing into a neighborhood where old but neatly maintained homes sit up close to the side of the road; Emma sees freshly painted trim, a few front gardens, clusters of hydrangea bushes still clinging to the faded pinkish remnants of their summer blooms. The speed limit drops from 55 to 30, and over the next rise Emma sees the town, which is hardly a town at all but a cluster of buildings lining either side of the road, extending for maybe a quarter of a mile. There’s a red barn with “ANTIQUES” painted in huge block letters on one side, and a municipal building, and a tiny post office. There’s a long and sunken-looking storefront that must have been a trading post once upon a time but now houses some sort of gallery, and a Victorian house with a peaked roof and bay window and a placard out front that reads: “GENERAL STORE.” The row of buildings on the west side of the road backs up to a lake, and thick stripes of late afternoon sunlight are beginning to slant gold between the buildings and across the road.

The hotel (Emma cannot believe Taylor called it this with a straight face) is on the second floor of one of the buildings whose foundation seems to have sunk at the center, giving it the slightly off-kilter look of a crushed milk carton. While Taylor and Logan go to pick up supplies from the general store, Emma peers through the dusty windows of the restaurant on the ground floor—it looks closed, or maybe it’s just too early—and then circles the building twice in search of an office, a person, anything. The second time, she emerges back onto the sidewalk to find a dark-haired, bearded man waiting for her, sitting on a wooden staircase that runs up the side of the building and looks like it’s one hard step away from falling off. A lit cigarette dangles from his lips, and he’s wearing a flannel over a bright-green novelty T-shirt that says “margaritas made me do it.” On someone else, the shirt would be a joke, the kind of thing you wear at parties as an ironic joke. This man, with his unkempt beard and intense, close-set eyes, does not look like he gets invited to parties.

“Are you the manager?” Emma says. “I’m checking us in.”

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, Keaton Swett reflects on Sam Walter Foss’s “The House by the Side of the Road” and what it means, in an age of fracture and fury, to “be a friend to man.”

There’s a particular story my wife likes to tell. It comes from those early days of our relationship, when every glance carried meaning, and even brushing hands felt electric. We were out for Thai food one night, lingering longer than necessary in the easy Palo Alto air. She was in the Bay Area for graduate school and I was chasing the Silicon Valley tech start-up dream. Midway through dinner, the playful banter gave way to something more serious. I looked across the table and said, without irony, “Just so you know, I plan on moving back to New Hampshire one day. If that’s a deal-breaker, it’s better to say it now.” I had spent my childhood climbing the white mountains and swimming in the clear waters of Lake Winnipesaukee. I knew that one day, I wanted my kids to have the same experiences that had profoundly shaped me.

Luckily, she wasn’t scared off by long winters or my complete lack of tact. Still, our path back to New England took a few detours. Three years after that dinner, we traded Northern California for a seven-year stint in North Carolina for more graduate studies and start-up adventures. We were there, in March 2020, when the world abruptly shut down. Schools and churches closed. Restaurants went dark. Working remotely became as common as a glove compartment full of masks. Like everyone else, our lives were upended. The everyday connective tissue of friends, co-workers, and community thinned almost overnight. Above the chaos of it all, I felt a pull toward home.

A soulful Chinese ballad plays as the white Zoomer boy squats atop a park bench, solemnly smoking his cigarette. In typical Gen Z speak, the caption on the video reads: “Type Xi I’ve been on since wasian winter started.”

Welcome to the world of “Chinamaxxing,” aka “Becoming Chinese,” a new TikTok trend that’s part meme, part genuine Sinophilia. Basically, it’s Americans adopting mundane Chinese mannerisms and lifestyle habits like squatting in public, drinking hot water, or wearing slippers inside, both ironically and otherwise. “You’ve met me at a very Chinese time in my life” has become a common refrain.

Most of the content revolves around cozy but simplistic habits that can be incorporated into one’s daily life—an alternative to the increasingly elaborate and consumerist self-care routines that have proliferated on American social media over the past few years. Stoically drinking a cup of plain hot water at night seems a lot easier than starting the day with a 10-step skincare routine and a collagen-infused French press with a thousand different syrups and cold foams from a can.

It’s Friday, February 27. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Maya Sulkin and Frannie Block on the bombshell documents at the center of Meta’s social-media addiction trial. Rafaela Siewert interviews neuroscientist and sex researcher Dr. Debra Soh on the social and moral costs of sexbots. How an antisemite hijacked the president’s Religious Liberty Commission. Miles Hargrove knows what it is like for a parent to be kidnapped. He offers his advice to the Guthrie family.

But first: What is happening in Nigeria?

Africa’s most populous nation is split almost evenly between Muslims and Christians. And for nearly two decades, it has been one of the most violent places on Earth.

Since the 2009 uprising of militant group Boko Haram, jihadist factions and criminal militias have burned churches, raided villages, killed tens of thousands of Christians, and displaced millions. In one attack, as Madeleine Kearns reported last year, more than 200 Christians were slaughtered in a three-hour rampage on a small town. President Donald Trump has called the violence in the country an “existential threat” to Christianity, and on Christmas Day authorized airstrikes against Islamic militants.

Yet sustained international attention has been scarce, largely obscuring the crisis from Western audiences. And some of the most powerful figures in the country—including the First Lady of Nigeria, who spoke with Maddy earlier this month—dispute claims of systemic religious persecution against Christians.

So, what is the truth on the ground?

David Patrikarakos went there to find out. In today’s story, he reports from three of the districts hit hardest by the conflict, speaking with displaced citizens, Christian farmers, a Muslim youth leader, and local officials. The result is a vivid, unflinching portrait of the front lines of a country trapped in a sectarian civil war.

Read his dispatch to understand why the bloodshed won’t end anytime soon—and why the world continues to look away.

—Jillian Lederman

“We’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it,” Trump freestyled during his State of the Union address. Whether or not our country is winning as much as our president would like you to think depends on who you ask. But if you missed our coverage of Trump’s address, where vibes ran high and bipartisan harmony ran low, catch up on our livestream from the night, and read Eli Lake’s analysis of Trump’s “Feel-Good State of the Union” and Yuval Levin on whether or not Trump has finally run out of ideas.

To Trump’s credit, there is one arena where America’s winning streak is indisputable—and it’s a literal arena. Team USA finished strong in the winter Olympics last week with Alysa Liu’s gold medal in women’s figure skating—our first in 24 years—and a historic victory by our men’s hockey team.

Read Will Rahn’s tribute to Team USA. And don’t miss Suzy Weiss’s words to the pundits who want to use the victors as a political hockey puck: Leave our hockey heroes alone.

This past weekend, Tucker Carlson aired a confrontational, nearly three-hour interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee where a single question ran through every exchange: Does the United States government still belong to its citizens, or does it serve a transnational elite, dominated by the Jews? Why did Tucker take that line of questioning? Mike Doran answers that question in a must-read essay on what Carlson is trying to achieve. And where do things stand between Tucker and Trump? Read Eli Lake on the hot-and-cold relationship between the president and the podcaster. And don’t miss Ashley Rindsberg’s investigation into how podcasters like Tucker and Candace Owens foment rage and monetize antisemitism—and just how much money they make doing it.

“I needed to get home in time to be arrested by the FBI.” So begins P.G. Sittenfeld’s extraordinary account of how he went from up-and-coming politician to the target of an FBI sting. It’s a wild tale, featuring a spell behind bars and a presidential pardon, and it poses a lot of uncomfortable questions about our justice system. Don’t miss it.

A few more highlights before we go: part two of our “Epstein Tapes” release, Josh Code’s delightful account of his day as part of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s NYC Socialist Snow Corps, and Catherine Morissette making the case for hazing.

The Front Page will be back on Monday morning. Until then, look out for The Weekend Press, featuring Freya India on how her generation of girls were taught to hate men, the latest round of Free Press Cupid ads, and an exclusive excerpt of Free Press columnist Kat Rosenfield’s new novel.

In Monday’s column, I argued that today’s stress epidemic is largely driven by our screen use. I’ll have a lot more to say on that topic in the next few weeks, because it’s a central theme of my new book, The Meaning of Your Life, which will be released on March 31.

The column provoked reader feedback not only about screen use, but also about ways to lower stress in general. For example:

For Lent I’m putting my phone away at 5:00 pm and not looking at it til after I return from Mass the following morning. The same goes for my computer. I got my landline back and informed my kids to call if they need to reach me after 5:00. An alarm clock wakes me up to the sound of waves crashing along the shore.

and…

I’m closing down and reading a book.

All good and solid advice. But I want to make the point that stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing per se. It doesn’t have to be the enemy.

A lot of the stuff in life we hate is stressful, it’s true. But many of the things we love most are also extremely stressful. This is illustrated in one of the most interesting recent papers I’ve come across. In 2023, researchers surveyed a representative population and ranked the 43 most stressful events in an average person’s life. (Why 43? This study was inspired by a classic scale created in 1967, which originally included 42 stressful life events. The newer study added one extra variable: “single person, living alone.”)

You won’t be surprised by some of these rankings. The No. 1 most stressful life event is the death of a spouse or life partner. This is followed, in order of stressfulness, by detention in jail or other institution, the death of a close family member, getting divorced, and marital separation. Nothing very remarkable there—except perhaps to note that one way to cut down on your stress is to get divorced before your spouse dies.

I’m kidding. Geez.

Stress of this sad, tragic type is generally bad. We don’t invite it into our lives on purpose, and when it comes, it’s deeply unwelcome.

But that’s where the plot thickens. Go down the list of stressors a bit further, and you will find that many of these supposedly stressful life events are actually good things in life. Consider that pregnancy ranks No. 6, just over 2 percentage points less stressful than marital separation. An “outstanding personal achievement” is more stressful than having trouble with your boss.

In other words, stress isn’t necessarily your enemy at all, and can even make life more meaningful. For example, parents simultaneously experience higher stress and higher levels of transient well-being when with their children. In the classroom, students who undergo “academic stressors” (such as challenging assignments) tend to enjoy greater meaning and well-being in the long run.

In fact, a stress-free life might sound great, but it would mean not just avoiding the hard parts but forgoing many of the sweetest moments. A better approach is to learn to manage and accept the hard and the sweet together as parts of a normal life. In my upcoming book, I go into lots of detail on how to practically do this, and I will share some of this in the newsletter in the upcoming weeks.

Stressfully yours,

Arthur

The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks will be back next week with a column on Monday. His newsletter returns next Friday.

Welcome back to the week that was. I’m getting late-breaking news that I run CBS News and CNN now. I’m processing it all. Thanks for checking in. Life takes all kinds of twists and turns, and sometimes bad things (becoming a mogul) happen to good people (me). But here we are.

→ Olympics heroes and villains: The U.S. men’s hockey team won the gold, defeating Canada! It gave us an incredible photo of Jack Hughes, mouth bloody, missing teeth, American flag around his shoulders. Iconic. Inspiring. Or is it? It is not. Because then Donald J. Trump (the current president of the United States) called the boys in the locker room to congratulate them, on speakerphone, and they were thrilled. Jubilant! And then Trumpo made a mild joke about the women’s team, and they laughed. Wrong move, boys.

Here’s the New York Times’ sports section, The Athletic:

Ah, yes. It is the responsibility of sports teams to police who is rooting for them. Everyone knows this. Or here’s HuffPost:

If my political opponents cheer for you, it means you’re bad. You’re the villain. Them’s the rules. Actually, if Americans celebrate you, you’re probably racist, says the American press. Did you know that Eileen Gu, a young woman from California but who competed for Team China, is not being celebrated as much by Team Trump? Well, then she’s good. The best. We root for Team China here. Think I’m being hyperbolic? Here’s Vox making it really simple:

Me, as the reasonable centrist, who everyone loves to yell at, I think both are incredible. I love Eileen Gu and I love the men’s hockey team. Listen to Eileen’s explanation of how she controls her mind. The woman’s amazing. I don’t care who she does the sports for, she’s American. I’m a little afraid of her, and I respect her for that. And look at Jack Hughes wrapped in the flag with that broken, bloody smile. Amazing. U-S-A! U-S-A!