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Bari here.

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Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where Europe will be a tough sell for many Canadian businesses, national power is nothing to be embarrassed about, and more. Let’s jump right in!

HockeyStickMan sells—you guessed it!—hockey sticks. And one of the men who runs the Ontario company, Joey Walsh, is grappling with what to do now that President Donald Trump has imposed new tariffs of 50 percent on hockey sticks and more than 500 other products made in Canada. HockeyStickMan is one of the largest online hockey retailers in North America, delivering items to American shoppers from a fulfillment center near Buffalo.

The possibility that Canada will become the first “associate member” of the European Union also raises the notion that an economic relationship that has long been secondary for Canada and its many industries might become far more consequential.

But that future seems far away for Walsh and HockeyStickMan. The reason: Roughly half of the company’s business comes from the U.S. and is built from relationships he has spent 15 years developing. Europe simply cannot replace them, he told me.

Walsh described himself as a “very big supporter” of Canada’s efforts under Prime Minister Mark Carney to stand up for itself, become less dependent on the U.S., and fight back with the “dollar for dollar” counter-tariffs that began two weeks ago. Walsh is deeply critical of the Trump administration’s trade negotiating tactics, but draws a distinction between the administration and Americans.

“I know that this is not an expression of Americans,” Walsh said, adding that he still believes in the U.S. and thinks the country will eventually “correct this.”

It’s Tuesday, September 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Alex Berenson on why he’s fearful of AI—and what we can do about it. Jed Rubenfeld on the three media outlets suing Trump for shutting them out of the White House. Arthur Brooks on why relying on AI writing will make you unhappy. And much more.

But first: Nikole Hannah-Jones’ school experiment.

In 2014, Nikole Hannah-Jones made a decision: She would send her daughter Najya to a bad school. The New York Times journalist, who would later become known as the face of the newspaper’s 1619 Project, explained in an essay soon after that she was doing so to help fight inequality and segregation. On Sunday, Hannah-Jones published an update on her experiment, which has been a disaster by her own admission. The education Najya, now 16, received at multiple schools was appalling, and it left her furious and feeling betrayed by her mother.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she yelled at Nikole on one occasion. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

It’s tempting to kick an ideological opponent when they’re down, writes Coleman Hughes of the admission, but it’s far better to learn from their mistakes. What, then, are the takeaways from Hannah-Jones’ decision to put ideology ahead of her daughter’s best interests? Coleman breaks that down in his piece for us today.

—Oliver Wiseman

I read Alex Berenson’s writing pretty closely, and why wouldn’t I? He’s someone who thinks for himself and has been proven right on the problems with cannabis, why public health wildly overreacted to Covid, and why mRNA vaccines were not the silver bullet they were sold as. So when I saw him laying out his fears of AI, I wanted to better understand his thought process. I asked him to write a piece for us about why he has gone from an AI skeptic to someone who worries about the harm it could cause. The piece he turned in is lucid, thoughtful—and, to my thinking, persuasive. I think you’ll agree. —Joe Nocera

• Bari Weiss and Simon Sebag Montefiore. Live in New York City. Thursday, October 1, at 7 p.m. Tickets here—selling fast!

• Virtual Book Club meeting. Zoom call to discuss East of Eden with other Free Pressers in the Forum. October 8 at 7 p.m. Sign up for updates.

• Upcoming Supper Clubs. Break bread with Free Pressers in your neighborhood. October 22 and November 12 at 6:30 p.m. Reserve your seat.

See the full schedule

• The United Nations General Assembly will begin today in New York City, bringing together hundreds of world leaders and foreign diplomats. President Trump is scheduled to meet today with the leaders of Persian Gulf nations to speak about the future of the Iran war, two officials told CNN.

• Paramount Skydance has reached a deal with a group of U.S. states, addressing antitrust concerns and clearing the way for its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount, the parent company of The Free Press, threatened last week to leave California amid antitrust lawsuits from 12 state attorneys general. The new deal, which settles those suits, bars Paramount from closing its studios in Los Angeles for at least five years.

• Thousands of flights were delayed or canceled on Monday across several major airports on the East Coast due to a telecommunications error. The loss of connection was caused by a circuit failure in a Philadelphia air traffic control center and prolonged by the accidental severing of a backup fiber line in New Jersey, one FAA official said.

• A jury on Monday found a Vermont man guilty of attempted murder in the 2023 shooting of three Palestinian students who were walking in his neighborhood. The verdict rejected the assailant’s insanity defense, which hinged on claims that he believed he was doing the bidding of U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies.

• An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on Sunday shot and wounded a man in Austin, Texas, who had illegally entered the U.S. and “had a final order of removal,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. The man is in stable condition and “in federal custody pending removal,” officials said.

• Cindy Crawford’s son Presley Gerber died on Sunday at 27 in a rehabilitation facility following a yearslong struggle with substance abuse and mental health issues, the Associated Press reported. A cause of death has not yet been determined, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner.

• Lindsay Clancy’s lawyers have requested an investigation of the lone juror who wanted to convict the Massachusetts mother of murder in the deaths of her three children. The motion, made public Monday, asks the court to probe the juror about alleged cell phone use during deliberations and his truthfulness on a questionnaire filled out during the jury selection process.

Could Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey form a “Muslim NATO?” Pakistan has the nuclear arsenal, Saudi Arabia has the wealth, and Turkey has the NATO-trained military—“you put these three together and it becomes a pretty formidable force,” says CBS News senior foreign correspondent Imtiaz Tyab. Today, he joins School of War to discuss whether the pact c…

It is a sad reality of the modern era that when an ideological opponent admits they made a terrible mistake, most people are tempted to kick them while they’re down. This exact situation has arisen with Nikole Hannah-Jones’ latest essay in The New York Times Magazine, which returns to a decision she wrote about a decade ago in a viral piece called “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.” In it, she explained why she was sending her black, 4-year-old daughter, Najya, to a bad public school when she could have sent her to a good one, or even to a private school. Now she’s telling a different story about how that choice played out.

At the time, Hannah-Jones’ rationale was that bad schools are caused by a lack of upper-middle-class parents. Those parents, she argued, have the resources and connections to lobby on behalf of the entire student body (including poorer students from dysfunctional families), raise additional funding, and generally improve the quality of the education for all. As an upper-middle-class parent herself, Hannah-Jones—best known as the face of the Times’ 1619 Project—felt she had an obligation to be part of the solution, which meant sending Najya to a bad school. On the progressive left, her experiment read as noble. To everyone else, it was madness.

Ten years later the results are in, and the skeptics have run the table. By Hannah-Jones’ own account, her presence didn’t lift up the Brooklyn school; the school dragged down her daughter, and barely seemed to notice she was there.

When Najya was in third grade, Hannah-Jones decided to visit her school at lunchtime and found that kids were sitting there with “no lunch and no adult supervision.” Other kids were “running wild, chasing, hitting, and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” At a private school this would be an emergency that led to immediate firings. At a dysfunctional public school, it’s just another day. Hannah-Jones was left trying to lobby an absentee principal who “regularly wouldn’t engage with [her] or wasn’t in the building at all.”

You may know me (if you know me) as the guy who was kicked off Twitter in 2021 for saying mRNA Covid shots didn’t stop infection. (They didn’t.)

Or the guy who was called an ageist psychopath in 2020 for saying Covid lockdowns were wrong and schools should be open. (Conventional wisdom now.)

Or the guy who was called a racist in 2019 for saying cannabis causes psychosis, and legalizing it wasn’t a great idea. (It wasn’t.)

Yeah, I’m that guy. The Covid Contrarian, the Pandemic’s Wrongest Man (hee-hee). My opinions aren’t always popular, particularly with the liberal and journalistic elite. I don’t care. I do my own research (uh-oh) and work out what I think for myself, not for clicks or controversy but because I like to write the truth, or near as I can get to it. It doesn’t mean I’m always right, but I do my best.

So, as the fight over the risks of artificial intelligence explodes, you might think I’d be in the AI-doom-is-hyped, Anthropic’s-just-looking-for-a-bailout crowd, like many other contrarian/conservative thinkers.

You’d be wrong.

President Trump announced last week that three news organizations—CNN, MS NOW, and Politico—would be banned from White House press briefings because they are “Fake News Media Outlets” publishing “one-sided,” “never good,” “purposely negative stories” about him. Over the weekend, reporters from those outlets were denied entry to the West Wing. On Monday the three organizations sued Trump, claiming the ban is unconstitutional. Now the rest of the press is chattering about the prospects of that suit.

Take it to the bank: The media companies will win. My guess is that the district court will enjoin the ban within a week.

Here’s why I’m so confident. The case was filed in the federal District Court for the District of Columbia. That court is required to follow decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. And that appeals court has confronted this issue several times in the past and has expressly, repeatedly held that this kind of ban violates the First Amendment.

What was the basis for the D.C. Circuit’s rulings? After all, the ban doesn’t prevent the affected news organizations from publishing whatever stories they like. Trump’s defenders argue that news organizations have no constitutional right to enter the White House, nor to receive any briefings from White House staff. And they’re correct about that. The president could put a complete stop to all press briefings if he wanted. He could limit White House access solely to government personnel, barring all newspeople completely, and there would be no constitutional violation.

Different rules apply, however, once the president has chosen to have his press team conduct briefings open widely to Washington’s press.

One evening last spring, my husband, Nick, took a picture of our friend Dovie, grinning widely and holding up a copy of the New York Post. Half of the page he held up was occupied by the passionate case Dovie had made against New York’s new assisted suicide bill.

“The logic of assisted suicide leads inevitably to the conclusion that those with doctor-approved expiration dates are living lives not worth living,” Dovie wrote. (The article, first published by UnHerd, was also reprinted in The Free Press.) Dovie’s life—which he often experienced as borrowed time—was a rebuke to that idea. He was a much-beloved son, brother, uncle, and friend to many. He also happened to be disabled.

Dovie suffered from a recessive genetic disease called nemaline myopathy, which causes muscle weakness. His condition—which impacted every aspect of his life—left him reliant on a motorized wheelchair to get around and a portable ventilator to help him breathe. In his article, he described what had happened several months earlier, when his ventilator hose became accidentally disconnected: He was found “not breathing, and with no pulse” by a police officer and rushed to the emergency room for life-saving treatment.

The same evening that Nick gave Dovie a copy of his Post article, Dovie asked him to take video instructions of what to do in the event that his ventilator became disconnected again, so Dovie could share them with others. The next night, his worst fear came to pass. But this time, help did not come quickly enough. On May 18, 2025, after suffering severe hypoxia, Dovie slipped into a coma, which lasted 16 months and from which he never recovered. He died on September 11. He was 35 years old.

Over the past two weeks, a firestorm has erupted over claims from AI researchers—and leaders of the companies they work for—that artificial intelligence is on a breakneck path toward developing the potential to destroy humanity. The technology, they say, will soon have a mind of its own, ruthlessly efficient but utterly amoral, at which point it might hack nuclear launch codes or allow nefarious actors to produce biological or chemical weapons. In response, some AI entrepreneurs have called for a slowdown in development and the introduction of tighter government regulation.

Some experts and commentators consider these fears overblown. Personally, I am a skeptic of the doomsday scenarios; we’ve adapted to technology before, and we inevitably will do so again. But no matter what you think about whether AI will imminently end our lives, there is one thing I can say for certain: It does threaten to steal the quality of our lives—and by extension, our happiness.

Take, as just one example, what is already happening in one activity we have all taken for granted: writing.

It’s Monday, September 21. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Tyler Cowen considers the other scary AI future. Coleman Hughes meets the Harvard economist bucking progressive orthodoxy. A new book goes behind the scenes of the post–October 7 war and asks: Who really won? All that and much more.

But first: The flawed data driving the climate news.

What happens when an influential climate organization, one based out of the prestigious Imperial College London, uses flawed science to produce a preferred outcome? And what happens when they do this again and again, year after year, churning out press releases that quickly find their way into newspapers around the globe?

Less than a month after thousands of people died in a catastrophic Himalayan flood, that organization, called World Weather Attribution (WWA), published a report linking the disaster to human-caused global warming. Now Nepal is seeking $20 million in UN compensation on the basis of that report.

For more than a decade, the WWA has been churning out these reports whenever an extreme weather event like the Himalayan flood takes place—and invariably chalking up the disaster to climate change. Though the media accepts WWA’s conclusions as gospel, Roger Pielke Jr. asked what ought to be a pertinent question: How sound is their methodology? Pielke, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, went for a deep dive into the group’s work and found it lacking.

Pielke replicated 96 WWA reports and found that rather than analyzing whether climate change caused the event, the organization simply assumes it did. On the one hand, this shouldn’t be surprising: The group’s leaders have been explicit that they are trying to alarm the public about the threats posed by climate change. But what Pielke found was that, using WWA’s approach, you can link almost any trend to climate change, from an increase in baseball players hitting home runs to a rise in patent applications. It’s a model designed to produce all manner of absurd results, garnering headlines while doing a disservice to real climate science.

Read Pielke’s investigation into the group shaping global climate policy and whether any of the science behind it holds up.

—The Editors

• A Palestinian gunman shot and killed an Israeli man near a settlement of Neve Tzuf, while Israeli soldiers fatally shot a Palestinian driver they said deliberately drove at them, in two separate episodes of deadly violence in the West Bank on the eve of Yom Kippur. The gunman was arrested hours later at a hospital in Ramallah.

• In an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday, Patrick Clancy discussed his life since his ex-wife, Lindsay Clancy, killed their three young children. “There was a time when I didn’t think I would make it to my 35th birthday,” Patrick, now 36, told correspondent Ross Douthat. Patrick also said he had forgiven Lindsay despite her never asking for it, and that he is starting a family with his new wife, Dr. Rachel Danis, a fertility doctor in New York City. Watch the entire 60 Minutes interview here.

• President Trump will visit Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion today, while in New York for the UN General Assembly. Immigration enforcement is expected to be on the agenda, as is Mamdani’s push for billions in federal money to build housing over a sprawling Queens rail yard.

• Ukraine unleashed its largest ever drone offensive against Moscow on Sunday, striking an oil refinery and killing at least three people as Russians cast their final votes in parliamentary elections. Moscow’s mayor blamed Kyiv for deliberately targeting the vote, and Russia claimed it intercepted nearly 2,000 drones in total.

• U.S. embassies in the Middle East warned Americans across the region yesterday to exercise heightened vigilance amid fears the Saudi-Houthi conflict could spiral further, without citing a specific threat. The alerts came as Trump said he is in “deciding mode” on Iran, saying: “My question is, if and when do I blow the entire nation up? They better behave.”

• Ed Sheeran used the opening of his Philadelphia concert Saturday to call what is happening in Gaza “catastrophic and unjustifiable,” while also condemning the attacks of October 7. The remarks came after weeks of turmoil over the removal of Macklemore from his tour following the rapper’s pro-Palestinian comments onstage. (Read Josh Kaplan on why banning Macklemore from the tour was the wrong call in the fight against antisemitism.)

• U.S. forces struck a suspected drug smuggling vessel in the Caribbean on Saturday, killing four people and pushing the death toll from America’s yearlong campaign against alleged traffickers in Latin American waters to at least 231.

• President Trump said on social media Sunday that he intends to outfit his planned triumphal arch near Washington with drone storage and rooftop snipers, saying it came at the “strong request” of the military. It is the second major project he has framed as a national security necessity, having made similar arguments for his $400 million White House ballroom complex.