The Free Press

Dear friends,

My column on Monday focused on the fear that many young adults experience about in-person dating and romantic commitment—particularly an exaggerated concern about “red flags” (reasons to cut and run from a relationship). This anxiety has led to an explosion of pornography use and social-emotional avoidance behaviors. I urged my readers to treat relationships like start-up ventures, with courage and not a fear of failure.

One comment I got in several responses came from a stat I put into the article: that the average person experiences five painful breakups before finding “the one.” Here’s what one reader wrote in response:

I have a huge problem with this guy acting as if 5 broken hearts is something we should normalize. Maybe if you’re on the callous end of the spectrum! Is there no place in western modern culture for the tenderhearted?

In fact, I don’t find this to be so terrible at all. Fifty heartbreaks would have been worth it to get to Mrs. B. More to the point, learning to bear up under suffering is a critical part of growing up, and one that many social scientists today would say we are denying our adolescent and young adult kids in the era of safetyism.

But of course, we also need to help young people learn how to recover when the pain of rejection in love inevitably comes. There is plenty of research on this topic, of course. (Remember, professors have to get tenure by publishing research, so there are papers on everything. I’ve read them, so you don’t have to.)

Couples break up for many reasons, but big patterns emerge in the data. Much of the time when people are still dating, one partner simply loses interest in the other. In more developed relationships, breaking up is more often associated with certain behaviors. Here are the top five likely to lead to a breakup:

1. Low emotional support

2. Low commitment

3. High criticism

4. Substance abuse

5. Infidelity

If you are the breakup-ee, that can be unbelievably painful, for good reason: Humans evolved to resist social rejection. The unwelcome loss of a loved one could mean—at least in the good old Pleistocene days of our knuckle-dragging ancestors—being cast out from the tribe, wandering helpless in the savanna, and dying alone. About what your last bad breakup felt like, right?

In other words, my dear breakup-ee, if you’re in intense pain, you are normal. But things have changed somewhat since the Pleistocene: Despite what your lyin’ limbic system is telling you, you will not die alone, and in fact, won’t even be so sad after a little time has passed. In the meantime, a few science-backed approaches can help lower your suffering.

1. Learn

In a little notebook, write down a couple of sentences about the pain of the breakup. Two weeks later, come back and write below it something useful you have learned from this experience that you want to remember. I don’t mean, “I figured out where her new boyfriend lives and I am now sitting outside his house in a van, smoking cigarettes.” Rather, “I learned that the pain is not constant, and as the days pass, I have more moments of peace.” Then, after another month, come back and write down something of benefit you have gotten from the experience. Not “I hear she got the shingles, LOL.” Rather, “I am stronger than I thought” or “I have great friends.”

2. Put on a sad song

Maybe this sounds counterintuitive, but sad music has been found to be consoling in times of sadness, because it helps you to understand the complexity of your negative emotions. A friend once told me that after a terrible heartbreak, she listened to the Sinéad O’Connor version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” 900 times—and it helped a lot. Personally, I would prefer 900 breakups than to listen to that song more than once. I’ll take the Adagio assai movement from Ravel’s piano concerto, but I’m a geek.

3. Don’t surveil

The biggest mistake people make in the era of social media is to surveil your ex to see whether they are moving on with their life. Don’t do that. It’s like picking a scab over and over again. It prevents healing of the wound. Obsessing over your ex is the single best way to make sure you don’t start to feel better. As a matter of fact, I recommend unfollowing them entirely, on all platforms, blocking their number, getting a restraining order, and maybe even entering the Witness Protection Program. Okay, that may be a little much, but you get the idea.

Anyway, if you’re suffering, I hope all this helps. One last thing: You will love again.

Until next week,

Arthur

PS: In case you haven’t heard yet, my new book The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, is coming out in March! Lots more information to come in the weeks ahead, including details about a big virtual book launch event on March 27. You can find information on both at themeaningofyourlife.com. In the meantime, please mark your calendar.

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

“THEY TOOK HIM. THEY MURDERED HIM,” one woman with the username Natural-Butterfly318 wrote on Reddit this week. She was mourning the loss of her boyfriend, Orion. “Now I am back left with no one.”

She wasn’t alone. Hundreds of women replied, grieving the loss of their own boyfriends. Only, their boyfriends didn’t die. They were never even alive. They just got deleted.

Hello, and welcome back to the news. If you’re in the market for an evening out in NYC on March 10, Kat Rosenfield is talking about her new book, How to Survive in the Woods, with none other than Suzy Weiss. I have it on good authority, meaning Suzy is manifesting it, that this will be an unofficial Free Press singles mixer in addition to a book talk. Tickets are here!

And now, to the week that was:

→ Are you monitoring the situation?: Two U.S. E-3 Sentry radar aircraft en route to Saudi Arabia. Russian Il-76TD aircraft in Iran. A U.S. Air Force KC-46A Pegasus tanker, call sign ROMA11, attempting an Atlantic crossing alongside six F-22 Raptors from Langley Air Force Base, marking a third try after two earlier tanker-related aborts. Which is all to say: Are you monitoring the situation?

Do you have your laptop, external monitor, and phone open to see where the Pegasus tanker is today? As America looks to alarm Iran—and potentially strike it—we are inundated with real-time information. The Situation Room is now the Situation Planet, and any man with internet is a four-star general. What used to be really hard to do (real-time tracking military aircraft and tanks) is now insanely easy. And so there are many, many OPSEC (operations security) accounts sharing OSINT (open-source intelligence) that just let you watch war unfold, refold, and unfold again (never-ending hellscape). The average American dad can have more information about global military movements than Churchill had on any given day. It’s 2026, and we are all OPSEC experts. About once a week, an unnamed member of my household pulls up one of these accounts and announces that WAR WITH IRAN IS TONIGHT. (Yes, it’s my 3-year-old.) War with Iran is never tonight, and yet every night I wait.

Regardless of which tonight the war will start, I salute everyone who is monitoring the situation. And for those who aren’t, I recommend this OSINT account for beginners. Now get to your command stations! Do not abandon your post, cadet!

For the first time, after years of public questions and congressional hearings, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was forced to take the stand in front of a jury and a group of bereaved parents to defend the alleged effects of the company’s products on teenagers. Faced with accusations that Facebook and Instagram sought to push teens into a cycle of dependence, Zuckerberg declared that he is “not trying to maximize the amount of time people spend every month” on the platforms.

The trial is central to the future of social media, and Zuckerberg must contend with the public record on Meta’s efforts to make itself an indispensable part of teens’ lives. Meta in the past, as Zuckerberg acknowledged at the trial, sought to to keep its users on the screen; Zuckerberg himself a decade ago urged the company to increase the share of users’ time it took. Adam Mosseri, the head of Meta’s Instagram division, once set the total time teens spent on the app as a company goal.

There’s a new factory in Austin, Texas, that is all industrial aesthetic—unfinished gray concrete with pipes veined across the walls—except for a large American flag hanging from above. An engineer operates machinery that cuts large sheets of reinforced steel down to size. Five engineers build dozens of panels—walls, floors, and roofs—along with complete kitchens and bathrooms. They are building houses, almost as easily as if they were cars on an assembly line.

The product, designed and manufactured by the American Housing Corporation, is a row house that can be packed into boxes, crammed into four shipping containers, and assembled on-site. It is larger than an apartment but smaller than a suburban single-family home. It also could be part of the solution to America’s housing affordability crisis.

If you were to name the defining figures of the 21st-century conservative movement, Dennis Prager would surely rank near the top of the list. A longtime radio host and founder of digital educational platform PragerU, he is one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals, publishing more than a dozen books on religion, morality, and the foundations of Western civilization.

His latest book, “If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil,” hits shelves next week. Drawn from a weekend-long lecture Prager delivered to 74 teenagers in 1992, it is a full-throated defense of objective, biblical morality at a time, he says, when more people dispute its existence than ever before. Though rooted in an earlier moment, the book holds new weight: In 2024, Prager suffered a catastrophic fall that paralyzed him from the waist down.

“A certain percentage of this book,” he reveals in the introduction, “was written by dictation and editing from my hospital bed. Were it not for Joel Alperson, who also organized and recorded the entire weekend, the book would not have been finished. We completed the book together. It is a testament to how important we both consider this work.”

Next week, our Abigail Shrier will interview Prager from his hospital room, so stay tuned for their full conversation. And below, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from his book, answering a question that many of us ask every day: In a world where profoundly evil things happen, how do we raise good people? —The Editors

Ever since I was very young, I have been preoccupied with one issue: Why do people hurt other people? Why do people do evil?

I was born in 1948, only three years after the Holocaust. I’m a third-generation American. Yet, when I was a kid, from the earliest time I could think, the Holocaust consumed me. When I was about 10, I watched a program on television, and I saw an image of Adolf Hitler. I asked my father, “Who is that man?” He said, “He was Hitler, and he killed six million Jews.”

“Everyone here is insane,” says a man who introduces himself as Wizard.

He is holding a staff, and uses it to gesture at the desert around us. His long white beard trickles over the slogan on his T-shirt: “I support sex workers.”

Wizard, in his late 70s, has lived in Slab City for more than a decade. He describes himself as an amateur sociologist, which is a polite way of saying he has spent decades watching broken people arrive, then try (and usually fail) to knit themselves back together.

Slab City is often described as “the last free place in America.” In reality, it’s a collection of semipermanent camps squatting on land in Imperial County in Southern California. There is no running water, official electricity, taxes, or real government infrastructure.

You may have noticed Things Worth Remembering was published a couple days early this week, instead of in its traditional Sunday-morning slot! That’s because we’re shaking things up a bit. From now on, you’ll find Things Worth Remembering in Saturday’s Weekend Press. (This week, Eli Lake wrote a gorgeous reflection on the day the late Jesse Jackson asked for forgiveness.)

Sundays will start with Tough Love with Abigail Shrier, our advice column. Scroll down to read what she had to say to a dad who doesn’t know how to deal with his nearly 40-year-old son, who’s still dependent on him. (If you’re a Tough Love superfan don’t worry: You’ll still get the column on a Thursday, if you're signed up to this list.) Now, onto Tough Love!

Abigail, our 38-year-old son has been living in our garage apartment rent-free for close to eight years now. He graduated in four years from a prestigious university with a degree in physics and astronomy, but chose not to pursue a graduate program in that field.

He proceeded to work for seven years as a circuit-board repairman, living independently but dissatisfied with his work. We agreed to fund his continued education in computer science, and he earned a degree in data science but has thus far been unable to find employment in the field. It seems that his lack of experience is the sticking point for all of the jobs he has interviewed for.

We’ve recently (reluctantly) agreed to fund another round of training that he claims will enable him to find employment, but we are out of patience.

To complicate matters further, his girlfriend of three years lives with him—she has a degree in accounting but works as a server in a local restaurant. We’ve made it clear that the gravy train ends in six months and he either moves or starts paying rent, but I have no confidence that things will change by then. How can we get him to become financially independent without alienating him or his girlfriend?

— Darrill

Darrill,

“What is man that thou art mindful of him?”

This line from Psalms is carved into the limestone entablature of Harvard’s Emerson Hall.

It’s a provocative question to choose for a campus of undergraduates. Not You’re the man! but What is man? Why do you even concern yourself with him, Lord, when you are such a superior being? Why bother with such a humble creature, so entirely beneath your notice?

The frieze was carved in 1905, and for generations, it invited college kids to supply the answer. King David answers the question with this: “You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet.” An emboldening statement of young people’s possibility: Strive to become worthy of divine notice. The world is at your feet.

We no longer think of young people this way. Now, we assume they must be protected. Even criminal behavior is excused; after all, they are “just kids”—even at ages when their grandparents were returning from war, starting families, and becoming indispensable to their communities.

It’s Thursday, February 19. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Is social media really addictive? Are property taxes about to skyrocket in New York City? And more.

But first: Is the U.S. heading to war with Iran?

President Donald Trump may not yet have made up his mind over whether to attack Iran as American diplomats look to make a last-minute deal with the Islamic Republic. But there are reportedly already enough U.S. forces in the region to commence a war as soon as Saturday.

In the Persian Gulf, two American carrier groups are poised to strike Iran, with additional refueling planes and troop and cargo carriers moving into position. Yet negotiations still continue over Iran’s nuclear capabilities, as Washington looks for a deal that would help avoid a lengthy and highly risky military commitment in the Middle East. At this precarious moment, Michael Doran reports on whether war with Iran is inevitable, how it could play out, and why Tehran acts with such confidence when dealing with the U.S.

“Iran operates on a different theory of war,” he writes. “It celebrates steadfastness. Civilian deaths and military losses are tragic but acceptable. Time is an ally. Conflict with the United States is not a technical dispute to be solved through compromise but a prolonged ideological struggle. No single round is decisive.”

How should Trump approach such an adversary? Michael has some ideas.

Meanwhile, inside Iran, protesters who courageously stood up to the regime in January are mourning their dead. In The Free Press today, foreign correspondent Amy Kellogg reports on ceremonies taking place across Iran in place of weddings, birthday parties, and other milestones.

“They are desperate celebrations of young lives lost in the deadly demonstrations last month,” she writes. “Marking 40 days since death is important in Iranian culture. And these ‘40ths’ are becoming a sort of revolution in themselves—and an opportunity for another wave of protests could rise out of the grief.”

Read her piece on how the spirit of the January protests has been rekindled in recent days, and the Iranians who say they are “angry and getting ready for the second go.”

—The Editors

• Eight skiers have died and one is presumed dead after an avalanche near Lake Tahoe. Six others were found after they used emergency equipment to contact rescuers Tuesday afternoon. Officials say nearly 90 people were searching for the skiers.

• Peace talks in Geneva between Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S. ended yesterday without a breakthrough. Progress was made on “military issues,” but Russia has not relented from its territorial demands, which Ukraine has said are unacceptable.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been holding secret talks with Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the grandson of Cuba’s de facto dictator Raúl Castro, Axios reported. The Trump administration hopes that the younger Castro will help facilitate major changes in Cuba, which is experiencing its worst economic crisis since Fidel Castro took control of the island in 1959.

• The authors of a Federal Reserve report showing American businesses and consumers were bearing the bulk of the costs from President Trump’s tariffs should be “disciplined,” said Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council. “It’s I think the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system,” he said.

• The White House said “parties are still pretty far apart” on negotiating funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which lapsed Saturday, leaving much of the department working without pay. However, the shutdown has had little effect on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the most controversial DHS agency, because it received separate appropriations last summer.

• The Food and Drug Administration reversed a previous decision and agreed to review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine for approval. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been skeptical of mRNA vaccines, and last week the FDA declined to review Moderna’s vaccine, claiming its research design was flawed.

• Buffalo Wild Wings can keep “boneless wings” on its menu even though they are “essentially chicken nuggets,” a U.S. district court judge ruled. A customer, expecting “wings that were deboned,” filed a lawsuit in 2023 claiming the company violated the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act.

One particular novel is all over the Epstein files: Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”

Among the more than three million files related to Jeffrey Epstein that were released three weeks ago are scores of references to the book. “Lolita” pops up in emails and in photos, released by the House Committee on Oversight, that show young women with quotes from the book written on their bodies.

Reportedly, this was the one and only book Epstein kept at his bedside table. He owned a first edition. He was a massive fan of Nabokov. And, of course, his plane was famously nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

“Lolita” is a book about a 37-year-old man who kidnaps and serially rapes a 12-year-old girl. There has long been a fascination with “Lolita” in American pop culture. The illicit relationship it depicts is often glamorized in film, music, and art.

Today, Rafaela Siewert interviews Shilo Brooks about “Lolita”—and how a novel about a homicidal pedophile rapist came to occupy such a prominent place in American life. You can watch the full episode below or listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Why is Humbert Humbert such a compelling character?

Rafaela Siewert: There are moments where Humbert Humbert refers to himself as a pervert. He has some degree of self-awareness. Does the book ask the reader to humanize this man, even though he’s a predator? How do you understand Nabokov’s intent here?

Shilo Brooks: Part of the genius of Nabokov as a writer is that you do come to sympathize with Humbert Humbert in a bizarre way. And it makes you feel uncomfortable because you start to see his point of view, even though it is clear from the very beginning that this book will be told from the perspective of an insane person. Nabokov is interested in exploring, like any great artist, the full range of human psychic possibility in all of its goodness and all of its evil.