The Free Press

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan looks at how unionists and secessionists on the eve of the Civil War both tried to wrap their cause in George Washington’s mantle. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

A good reason for resisting the fad of referring to Washington’s Birthday as Presidents’ Day went unmentioned in last week’s newsletter but can be summed up here in two words: James Buchanan. On February 22, 1861, a crowd hoping to see soldiers march down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue in honor of the first president’s birthday instead saw the soon-to-be former president Buchanan come down with a case of cold feet. With an antislavery Republican named Abraham Lincoln having won the race to succeed Buchanan, Southern states had begun to secede. Warned that a martial display at this time would wreck chances for negotiations to avert civil war, Buchanan ordered the soldiers to sit out the parade—only to flip-flop later in the day upon hearing his decision had disappointed the people lining the streets.

The controversy over Washington’s birthday on the eve of the Civil War provides perspective on our own so-called “history wars” today. The battle back then was not over whether to save or tear down statues of the Father of Our Country (few could have foreseen such silliness) but over who had the better claim to his legacy: those seeking to save the Union he had forged or those seeking to break away from it.

It’s Wednesday, February 18. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: David Mamet remembers Robert Duvall. Jonathan Eig remembers Jesse Jackson. In defense of processed foods. Peter Savodnik sits down with the Republican reality TV star looking to unseat LA mayor Karen Bass. And more.

But first: Are we at an AI turning point?

Will human intelligence soon go the way of the fax machine? One tech founder thinks so. In a viral X essay last week, Matt Shumer argued that “something big is happening” in the world of AI, and racked up some 80 million views for saying so.

We are on the edge of a precipice, Shumer claimed, urging that anybody who wasn’t fully taking advantage of AI in their work needed to start doing so immediately—and that everyone should get their finances in order to prepare for the upheaval that is very quickly coming.

Shumer’s essay was shocking, and it seemed to catch a major change in the mood of the tech world. That AI is transformative is no secret. But for those closest to the tech, the changes suddenly seem to be happening with lightning speed. Are we, in fact, on the edge of the great AI cliff? And should we be terrified, excited, or more sanguine? We asked some of the best thinkers on AI—both believers and skeptics—a simple question: Is something big happening? Read what they had to say.

—Mark Gimein

• The U.S. and Iran made “good progress” in nuclear talks in Geneva yesterday, the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said. A U.S. official confirmed to The New York Times that the two nations had indeed made headway at the meeting, though diplomats from both countries declined to share specifics.

• Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin will leave her post this week, Politico reported yesterday. McLaughlin’s departure marks the second of two major communications staff shake-ups in the Trump administration recently, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s firing of Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Butler last week.

• Ukraine and Russia began another round of peace talks in Switzerland on Tuesday, though expectations of a ceasefire deal remain low. The U.S.-brokered negotiations mark the third attempt at such discussions in recent weeks, with Russia refusing to reconsider its demands for Ukrainian-held territory in the east, and Ukraine and its allies pushing for guarantees against future invasions.

• A psychedelic treatment for depression may be up for approval by the Food and Drug Administration as soon as late 2026, after the successful results of a clinical trial were released yesterday. The data from the trial “probably meets the bar for approval,” according to one neuroscientist unaffiliated with the study.

• Goldman Sachs will do away with DEI criteria when considering candidates to serve on its board, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Race, gender identity, ethnicity, and sexual orientation are among the factors to be removed from the diversity considerations, while viewpoints, background, work, and military service will remain.

• Warner Bros. Discovery said yesterday it would resume talks with Paramount Skydance, offering another chance for the media company to beat Netflix and acquire the company. Warner Bros. has given Paramount, the parent company of The Free Press, until February 23 to make its “best and final offer.”

• The German chemical company Bayer has agreed to pay more than $7 billion to resolve a spate of current and future cancer lawsuits over its weedkilling product Roundup, the company said yesterday. The firm has already paid at least $3 billion in existing settlements for cases in which plaintiffs claimed the chemical caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

• New Mexico lawmakers approved bipartisan legislation to investigate alleged sex crimes that took place at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro ranch, located about 30 miles south of Santa Fe. The $2.5 million probe began yesterday and will present preliminary findings in July and a full report at the end of 2026.

Sixty years ago I was a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. Sanford Meisner, the head of the school, was, with Lee Strasberg, the co-doyen of something that may have been called The Method.

Perennially exasperated with our student efforts, he suggested we actually go and learn something. How? By watching, in his words, the only actor worthy of the name. It was Robert Duvall. He was playing in Tomorrow, a short play by Horton Foote, downtown at HB Studio. In his performance, there was no embellishment, no interpretation, no “character”; only a man onstage, with a simple objective—telling the truth.

Last month, former reality-television star Spencer Pratt announced he would run for mayor of Los Angeles—exactly one year after a huge fire ripped through the Pacific Palisades, killing 12 and incinerating nearly 7,000 structures.

That included the home Pratt shared with his wife, fellow television star Heidi Montag, and their two kids, ages 8 and 3.

So far, Pratt’s entry into the race has elicited mostly smirks: He’s an unfiltered, untested, totally unpolished Republican running in one of the most progressive cities in the country, and even though Democratic mayor Karen Bass is unpopular, she has managed to scare away serious potential challengers like developer Rick Caruso. (I recently profiled Caruso for The Free Press.)

And yet.

That might—just might—work in the June 2 “jungle primary.” (In California, the top two vote-getters in the primary, irrespective of party, proceed to the general election.)

Pratt has a huge following, including more than a million followers on Instagram. And he has a certain charisma. And he’s fueled by a righteous indignation that many Angelenos, astounded by Bass’s mishandling of the fires, no doubt share.

Most importantly, Pratt has learned the most important lesson of the Age of Trump—which has somehow eluded most every Democratic officeholder everywhere, including Bass—which is that authenticity is everything.

Recently, I spoke with Pratt while he was having lunch with his family at a Mexican restaurant. He was as expected: crass, funny, informed—and alleged that Nithya Raman, the progressive LA city council member who just jumped in the mayoral race, is secretly colluding with Bass to ensure that Pratt doesn’t make the primary cutoff. He was also a little miffed that a bird had picked over his carne asada tacos while he was speaking with me.

I didn’t ask Jesse Jackson for his autograph. But I got one anyway.

In 2016, while writing a book about Muhammad Ali, I interviewed Jackson at his Operation PUSH office on Chicago’s South Side. Before I left, he asked his secretary to bring him a few 8×10 glossy photos that showed Jackson and Ali together. She also brought him a picture of Jackson with Martin Luther King Jr. He inscribed them to me, added the message “Peace,” and signed his name.

It struck me as a very Jesse Jackson thing—and a wonderful thing—to do.

I went on to meet him four more times over the next decade, and I never felt like he was anything but himself. I mean that as the highest form of praise. Whether he was poking fun at Muhammad Ali or lecturing me on the difference between integration and desegregation, Jackson, who died Tuesday at the age of 84, seemed to me a straight shooter—which is an extraordinary thing to say about a man with a career as complicated as his.

Processed foods have become the go-to villain in America’s health story. Picture the packages crowding supermarket aisles: frozen dinners, canned food, soda, chips. They’re packed with preservatives and additives and often blamed—especially by champions of the Make America Healthy Again movement—for soaring rates of obesity and chronic disease. On Sunday, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would “act on” a citizen petition calling for an overhaul of how such foods are regulated.

But just how harmful are they, really?

That’s the central question in a new book by professors Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg, released Tuesday. Feed the People! Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better doesn’t deny that the modern industrial food system has serious flaws. Still, the authors argue, it has dramatically improved food access and safety—reshaping public health in ways that would have once seemed unimaginable.

In the excerpt below, adapted from the book, they contend that processed foods—even ultra-processed ones—aren’t the dietary demons many make them out to be. And today’s calls to purge them entirely and “eat clean,” they suggest, offer no magic fix. In fact, such advice may even leave us worse off. —The Editors

In 1929, the canned-meat company Libby, McNeill & Libby printed a now-legendary pumpkin-pie recipe on the side of cans of its 100% Pure Pumpkin. It was an enormous hit, and pumpkin pie became a national superstar. But the can’s branding wasn’t quite accurate—and still isn’t. According to FDA regulations, the contents of a can of pumpkin can be made of a variety of squashes we don’t conventionally call pumpkins. And, in fact, most canned pumpkin you’ve ever eaten is probably something called a Dickinson squash.

Apologies if you’re a pumpkin purist. But if you are, and you’ve just found this out, what’s the alternative? Roasting and pureeing a pumpkin yourself? That’s a bad idea. Store-bought pumpkins don’t have the right starch or water content for the custard. Go to any bakery or grocery the week before Thanksgiving and ask them what they use for their pies. They’ll tell you the truth: It’s from the can.

A viral X essay ricocheted around the tech world last week. Written by a young tech founder named Matt Shumer and titled “Something Big Is Happening,” it told readers that “this might be the most important year of your career.” Shumer argued that AI was about to bring the world of work a disruption as sudden and dislocating as the shutdown at the onset of Covid—but even more comprehensive. And it would be permanent. The essay received more than 80 million views.

We are on the edge of a precipice, Shumer claimed, urging that anybody who wasn’t fully taking advantage of AI in their work needed to start doing so immediately—and that everyone should get their finances in order to prepare for the upheaval that is very quickly coming. His argument hinged not just on predictions of what was coming, but on the power that AI has already attained. If you’re not maximizing the use of AI, you will soon be obsolete. Or so Shumer says.

Shumer’s essay seemed to catch a big change in the mood of the tech world. That AI is transformative is no secret. But for those closest to the tech, the changes suddenly seem to be happening with lightning speed. Are we in fact on the edge of the great AI cliff? And perhaps more directly: Should we be terrified? We asked some of the best thinkers on AI—both believers and skeptics—a simple question: Is something big happening?

“Are we the Italians?” was the best British politics meme I’ve seen for a while. (If you missed “Are we the baddies?,” I can’t help you. Do keep up.)

If Sir Keir Starmer is driven from 10 Downing Street by (among other things) the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, it will bring the total number of prime ministers Britain has had in the past 10 years to seven (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Starmer).

That is certainly reminiscent of Italian politics in the second half of the 20th century. The Italians had seven prime ministers in 10 years not once but twice: in the 1950s and the 1990s. (I won’t list them all; life’s too short. The only name you’d recognize would be Silvio Berlusconi.) But the resemblance is superficial. British politics is much funnier than Italian politics has ever been. It is also much more British to behave this way than most Americans realize.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where one of the most difficult weeks in recent memory leaves many unanswered questions, tariff relief is rumbling, and so are those separatists in Alberta—with help from America. Let’s jump in!

After last week’s mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, speculation swirled about whether the shooter being transgender was the main cause of the horrific attack. But there is no confirmed evidence that Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, had medically transitioned, had received gender-affirming medical treatment, or was in inpatient care, according to the regional healthcare authority in northern British Columbia.

It’s Tuesday, February 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Mike Pesca on why he’s rooting against Eileen Gu. Tyler Cowen proposes a simple test for what people really think about immigration. Arthur Brooks on why you should take risks to find love. And more.

But first: The world is going electric—without America.

A lot of people think they know the story of Detroit’s failure in electric cars: Under pressure from Tesla’s success, and the Biden administration, they bet big on an electric transition only to find out that Americans don’t want the cars. That’s become the conventional wisdom on Detroit’s $50 billion worth of electric vehicle losses.

But it’s just not true. So argues Michael Dunne in The Free Press today. Michael is one of the most perceptive experts on America’s auto industry, and he walks through the series of mistakes that have led to America’s electric vehicle fiasco. Buyers in the U.S., just like in other countries, wanted electric cars. But Detroit didn’t know how to build the cars that they wanted, and created chaos as it tried to adapt its gas-powered lineup.

Read Michael’s report on why America is losing this vital economic race—and why it matters. —Mark Gimein

On March 9, join The Free Press’s Coleman Hughes for a special conversation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—the church led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Together with MLK Jr. biographer Jonathan Eig and civil rights pioneer Ambassador Andrew Young, he’ll explore what King’s legacy can teach us today, at a time when America seems to be reaching a boiling point. This event brings together three extraordinary voices in a legendary venue for an unforgettable conversation. It’s our first-ever event in Atlanta, and one you won’t want to miss.

Get Tickets Now

• A nuclear power plant took flight for the first time in American history over the weekend as the military transported a miniature reactor from an Air Force base in California to a base in Utah. President Trump has pledged to get at least three nuclear reactors up and running within the U.S. by July 4.

• Robert Duvall, the Oscar-winning actor known for his roles in The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, died peacefully at his Virginia home on Sunday, aged 95. He won an Academy Award for his role as a country singer in 1983’s Tender Mercies and received six other nominations, including for his performance as Lieutenant Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, famous for the line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

• A partial government shutdown continued yesterday after lawmakers failed to make a deal with the White House to fund the Department of Homeland Security through September. Most DHS employees are working without pay as Democrats push for changes to immigration enforcement.

• The Food and Drug Administration will act on a citizen petition to overhaul federal regulations of ultra-processed foods, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told CBS News’ 60 Minutes in an interview Sunday evening. The petition, started by scientist and former FDA commissioner David Kessler, calls for the FDA to cease classifying artificial sweeteners such as corn syrup as “Generally Recognized as Safe.”

• The Pentagon may soon end its relationship with AI company Anthropic over its insistence on limiting how the military uses its models, Axios reported. The clash comes after months of disagreement between the government and the AI pacesetter, whose AI technology was reportedly used by the U.S. military in operations like the capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

• As a motive for the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie remains unknown, the FBI is analyzing DNA from a glove found near Guthrie’s home that appears to match one worn by a suspect recorded in doorbell camera footage. In an interview with the New York Post on Sunday, President Trump said he would urge the Justice Department to seek the death penalty if the 84-year-old mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie is killed.

• The FBI is refusing to share evidence in the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month, Minnesota’s top investigative agency said yesterday. The state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said the refusal to cooperate is “concerning and unprecedented.”