The Free Press

If we’d met at a bar, Dr. Paul R. McHugh would have ordered a glass of Irish whiskey—Bushmills Black Bush. “Only one though.”

Instead, I’m visiting the 94-year-old psychiatrist at his apartment in Baltimore where he’s lived since 2022, after his wife of 62 years died and he sold the family home.

We sat at his dining table, an elegant room full of books and family photographs. The wooden chairs, he said, are better for his back than the couch.

It’s not my first time meeting McHugh. He and I became fast friends in 2018 when I was starting out in journalism as a reporter for National Review. Back then, he was one of the few leaders in psychiatry speaking both skeptically and publicly about “gender-affirming care.” He told me then that lawsuits would be what finally brought down the transitioning of minors. And indeed, just last week, The Free Press reported on the first detransitioner in the United States to win a malpractice suit.

As early as in the ’70s, McHugh has been warning that hormones and surgery are not safe and effective treatments for gender dysphoria (or gender-identity disorder, as it was then known) for patients of any age. As head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in 1979 he shut down sex-change surgeries after follow-up studies showed they weren’t improving patients’ mental health outcomes.

“I didn’t think it was such a big deal,” he said, noting that the idea of medical transition as a right—as opposed to a radical, and at best experimental, intervention—came only later.

Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Michael Friedman, 82, wrote about dealing with the grief he has felt since losing his lifelong soulmate, his wife Harriet. This week, John D. Spooner, 88, explains why knowing your family’s stories, and passing them along to the next generation, enriches everyone’s lives.

If you want to receive Ancient Wisdom directly in your inbox, sign up here.

Let me tell you a story.

I grew up in my maternal grandparents’ house in Boston. My grandfather started a business with a partner in Chinatown in the 1930s manufacturing maternity lingerie, mostly slips. I was the only child in the house of five adults that included my mother, and Katie, our cook. Katie was from Ireland, one of seven children, from a little village in Connemara. She arrived in America at age 18, escaping a famine there. She came here with one possession, a gold sovereign coin with the visage of “Bertie”—the King of England, Edward VII—stamped on it.

Katie gave me the coin on my 21st birthday. I had it put on a gold chain, and I wear it every St. Patrick’s Day.

Katie was one of the hundreds of young Irish women who worked in the houses of well-off Bostonians, and she became the most important woman in my life. She was there to help with my first steps and my toilet training. She spoon-fed me my first food, applesauce, and sang lullabies to me in Irish.

Katie taught me how to step-dance and sing along with her in her native tongue, songs like “Finnegan’s Wake” and “Whiskey, Yer the Devil.” She told me my first risqué joke and taught me how to swear in Irish. It was like she raised me as an Irish boy in a Jewish household in America. I was Johnny in English, but always Sean or Seaneen to Katie.

In the summer of 2024, I was 29; living in Tel Aviv, Israel; single; and wondering if that last part would always be true.

I was tired of the dating apps, which I would download, then delete in frustration, just to do it all over again every few months. I was tired, too, of the setups, and the wasted evenings, or the promising evenings followed by a loss in interest, the debrief with friends after yet another unsatisfying date. Mostly, I was tired of feeling uncertain about the future.

Welcome back to Second Thought, my weekly tour of the zeitgeist. I began the week watching not one but two Super Bowl halftime shows (I preferred the official one); and I ended it watching a deranged period drama that I highly recommend. . .

The new Wuthering Heights, timed to release for Valentine’s Day, has been panned as “smooth-brained” and “extravagantly superficial,” but what it lacks in intellectual heft it more than makes up for with emotional thrust, and deep-seated perversion, and that’s nothing to scoff at. Those looking for a faithful adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel should look elsewhere, but those looking for a good time are very much in luck.

A few Aprils ago, I arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport to see a man I had met just twice before. I had a hastily packed bag full of clothes and no real clue of where I’d be going or how long I’d be staying. I had a return flight to London booked for three months later, because the customs officer might ask for proof that I wasn’t going to stay forever, but I still had a small but persistent idea that I’d never go home. I knew either this man would break my heart or I’d marry him, a terrifying feeling that, if you ever have it, you should savor. When he picked me up, after I’d waited for two hours in the passport queue, he gave me three gifts: a novelty cowboy hat, a copy of the Constitution, and a bottle of Fireball Whisky. “Welcome home,” he said.

They say that the most stressful things you can do in life are to get married, have kids, move, or grieve the death of a loved one. He and I have done all of that now, and we did it all within about one year of meeting. But back at that airport, we didn’t know any of that was coming. We were too busy looking at Google Maps and planning a road trip. He wanted to show me America, he said. I wanted to see it. But we also wanted to show each other ourselves. We knew just enough about one another to know that we needed to know everything else.

I may be making this sound at least slightly more dramatic than it really was. By the time I had reached the U.S., we at least knew we could tolerate one another for several days at a stretch. We first met in late 2023, in Washington, D.C. I was on a work trip, visiting the American office of the British magazine I wrote for. He was there because he was also a journalist. It was an uneventful lunch at an oyster bar, organized by my editor—the sort of polite industry gathering where everyone has exactly two drinks and exchanges pleasantries and nothing of consequence is supposed to happen. But there I encountered a melancholy man who was too revealing about himself. He told the table about how he was three days sober after being drunk for six months straight, and still pining—his word—for his ex-girlfriends. Something about him stuck with me.

It’s Friday, February 13. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: A retired FBI official on the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping. A Harvard student who is happy about tougher grading. Hadley Freeman on why it’s okay to wait to have kids. Rupa Subramanya on a mass shooting in Canada. Gabe Kaminsky on why a top Trump administration antitrust official got the boot. And much more.

But first: Kara Kennedy investigates why everyone is having less sex.

Every Valentine’s Day, we tell ourselves the same story: That everyone else must be having more sex than we are.

But the data suggests something else. One in four American couples now have sex once a month or less. Weekly sex among adults has plummeted since the 1990s. And it’s not just singles who aren’t hooking up—even couples who share beds are opting out.

So I set out to find out why.

I spoke to men and women of different ages who insist they’re still attracted to their partners—but that they’re just “tired.” Or they don’t want to “perform.” Or it’s just not a priority.

I dug into research on testosterone decline, hormonal birth control, social media addiction, and porn. And I spoke to Debra Soh, whose new book Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy—an excerpt of which we are publishing today—argues that what we’re witnessing isn’t just a dry spell but a cultural shift. She told me that before writing her new book, she was among those who thought all the talk about a “sex recession” were overblown. But, she added, she’s come to believe that the lack of sex is a serious issue, and suggestive of a large problem. “We, as a society, are on the way to becoming more disconnected from one another.”

Read my dispatch on America’s sex recession, and Debra’s piece on the decline in human intimacy and the alarming rise of artificial intelligence-powered sex dolls.

—Kara Kennedy

This week’s biggest story was Tanya Lukyanova’s blockbuster dive into the Epstein tapes. She unearthed the hard-to-access videos from the DOJ’s latest release of Jeffrey Epstein-related material and watched some 14 hours of footage. Her disturbing report is the most vivid look yet at Epstein’s private world.

This week, we profiled two Republican politicians. Peter Savodnik interviewed libertarian Senator Rand Paul, who is charting his own course in an age where loyalty to President Donald Trump has been his party’s sine qua non. Meanwhile, River Page traveled to Florida to follow James Fishback, a very online young candidate who is courting the Groyper vote in a bid for the governor’s mansion. He is almost certainly not going to win—but his rise is nonetheless a sign of things to come for his party, argues River. For a look at a party in the midst of an identity crisis, read these two profiles.

Remember the Afrikaner refugees? Trump triggered outrage by opening the door to them even as he shut the door to many others. Well, now that they’re in America, things aren’t exactly going smoothly. For her latest investigation, Madeleine Rowley spoke to the migrants who describe a woefully inadequate system for helping them settle in the country. Her reporting sheds light not just on this group of controversial newcomers, but on a system of government-funded nonprofits that is not fit for service:

Jonathan Haidt is not tired of winning. The social psychologist’s anti-screen crusade has led to real policy changes both in the U.S. and around the world. In his latest essay for The Free Press, he recounts the latest flurry of victories—on social media bans for teens—and how they came so thick and fast. “The tide is turning,” writes Jonathan. “But I have been shocked by how quickly it is happening. Social media has been dominating kids’ attention for decades. Now, in the span of just a few weeks, the landscape has been transformed. What happened?” Here’s the answer:

When we look back on the most important thing that happened in 2026, it may well have nothing to do with politics or foreign affairs. Instead, this could be remembered as the year the artificial intelligence revolution truly arrived—and turned our world upside down. In his column this week, Tyler Cowen explained why this month’s AI advances are nothing short of historic. Read his piece, and then check out two accounts by Free Press staffers Will Rahn and Maya Sulkin about how this great leap forward has affected their lives:

Maryland governor Wes Moore, a rising star in the Democratic Party, will join senior correspondent Norah O’Donnell to talk about key issues affecting America and the future of his party. Tune into CBS or Paramount+ this Sunday at 8 p.m. ET/PT to hear their discussion on affordability, immigration, and more, brought to you by Bank of America.

The Front Page will be back on Monday morning. Until then, look out for The Weekend Press—our Valentine’s Day special featuring the relaunch of Free Press Cupid, Suzy Weiss on “Wuthering Heights,” and more.

Dear Friends,

Happy Valentine’s Day for tomorrow to those who celebrate it. Although Mrs. B and I are still in love after lo, these many decades, we don’t much observe the holiday. Being of foreign birth, she always regarded it cynically as an event, like so many of our unofficial holidays, made up by marketers. (Which, you might be thinking, is no worse than a holiday made up by politicians.)

Even so, I often take the occasion to write a bit about romantic love, which is an endlessly fascinating topic for behavioral scientists like me—not least because it’s a perfect example of a research topic that is actually me-search. Romantic love can reduce even the most grizzled, logical scientist to a quivering, limbic mass of desire, passion, and regret.

But enough about my problems.

Last Sunday’s column in The Free Press talked about how people can love each other deeply across language barriers. As a dedicated me-searcher, I included the example of my own marriage, which was built on zero languages in common and even linguistic confusion at our wedding ceremony. I also took the opportunity to connect this topic to the uproar over Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s all-Spanish Super Bowl halftime show. That created its own uproar, sending me down six rings of internet hell as seemingly half of America schooled me about Señor Bunny’s morally dubious themes and spicy politics.

For example, one reader wrote:

It’s not the Spanish language here that is the objection, it’s the suggestive and gross dancing, crotch grabbing, and, oh yeah, THE LYRICS.

Okay, fair enough. But my point was that we truly can love each other across big cultural and linguistic differences—and even because of them. This might even be biological. Consider the famous 1995 shirt-sniffing experiment, in which young men wore the same T-shirt for two nights. Then young women sniffed these T-shirts and rated the men on attractiveness based purely on odor. Women preferred the shirts worn by men whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes were different from their own. (Different MHC genes indicate immune-system differences, so this study tells an evolutionary story: The more different our mate’s immune system is, the wider array of defenses from disease our potential offspring will have.)

One reliable way to find attractive differences, short of sniffing one another like dogs, is meeting people who speak languages that aren’t yours, as Mrs. B and I did. Predictably, doing so also produces communication difficulties that initially reduce emotional understanding for about half of such couples. But, for the great majority, this effect dissipates very quickly, within months. (After about eight weeks of dating Mrs. B, we could still barely communicate in words, but I knew full well when she was mad at me. Boy, was that clear.) Other research shows that very culturally diverse couples are no less satisfied in the long run compared with those who are culturally homogeneous.

Here’s the bottom line: Differences enhance attraction, but they don’t diminish ultimate compatibility. So, if you have dated a good many people but haven’t felt much of a spark with anybody, the answer might be to stop looking for your cultural twin: Being alike is not hot. Instead, try looking for someone who excites you because their background, upbringing, and opinions are so different. Then, once you have the irresistible attraction, learn to live together in harmony.

With love,

Arthur

P.S. Valentine’s Day actually does have special significance for me: It was my father’s birthday. He died in 2002, but this year he would have turned 90. A brilliant statistician and lifelong college professor, he was, in fact, a direct intellectual descendant of the great 19th-century mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss, insofar as my dad’s doctoral dissertation adviser’s adviser’s adviser (and so on) was Gauss.

Early on in his career as a poorly paid assistant professor with a young family, my father took on summer jobs, like driving a city bus, to make ends meet. Below is a watercolor I painted, when I was 4, of my dad behind the wheel of his bus.

I am a senior at Harvard. Last week, a faculty committee released a proposal to combat grade inflation at my school. The proposal would do two things: First, it would cap the number of A grades issued to undergraduates at 20 percent for every class. Second, Harvard would cease using grade point average (GPA) to rank students for academic honors and prizes and instead turn to average percentile rank—a measure of how students perform relative to their classmates. If passed by a full faculty vote later this spring, the proposal would take effect in the 2026–27 academic year.

How do the students feel about this proposal? You will perhaps not be surprised to hear they are up in arms. While faculty, according to the campus paper, lent cautious support to the initiative, an overwhelming 84.9 percent of my peers “definitely” disagree with limiting A grades to 20 percent, according to a Harvard Undergraduate Association survey.

I’m among the minority who support the proposal. Let me explain why.

Hello and welcome back to TGIF, the only source of biased news left in America.

For our Southern friends: On March 9, The Free Press is coming to Atlanta—to Ebenezer Baptist Church—with Ambassador Andrew Young, who marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and Jonathan Eig, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life. Leading the conversation will be the great Coleman Hughes. Tickets are here!

→ Where is Nancy Guthrie!: America this week is gripped by the hunt for Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie’s mom, who appears to have been kidnapped. The strangest part right now is the video footage of the person who could have been involved in her disappearance. They waddle up to the house, a little knock-kneed. They’re masked and gloved, their eyebrows appear trimmed, and there’s a gun in a holster around their waist. But the gun is holstered right over the crotch, sort of bouncing loosely. The person sees the doorbell camera and waddles away into the shrubs to grab some plants and cover it up. What I’m saying is this all just looks kind of amateur? Wouldn’t a professional have known there was a doorbell camera? A professional definitely would have known how to holster a gun. And I’ll be honest, I’d rather be kidnapped by a professional. The wandering, slow, sloppy nature of this person alarmed me more than anything.

I don’t know about other cohorts, but America’s moms are united in panic over this situation. After preschool drop-off, a group of us were standing around hoping someone had a tidbit of new information. One mom apparently hit rock bottom when she was up after midnight just watching a livestream of a Tucson hospital. FaceTimes with my mother-in-law have turned into press conferences over the latest in the Guthrie case. We need to find Nancy. If we live in a country where Nancy Guthrie isn’t safe, then we need to burn the whole thing down. TGIF stands with the Guthrie family. Bring her home.

What if human beings just stopped having sex?

This question isn’t as outlandish as it seems. There’s something about modern life that has already, as Kara Kennedy writes today, led us to have a lot less sex. Dr. Debra Soh has spent years trying to understand why—and published the results of her work this week, in a terrifying and highly readable book called Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy.

As technology advances, many people are swapping the turmoil of human relationships for the instant gratification of Instagram, OnlyFans, and YouTube. But in the following excerpt, Dr. Soh says that technology is replacing sex in much more disturbing ways. Highly realistic robotic sex dolls—equipped with sensors and artificial intelligence—are quickly moving from novelty to mainstream availability, especially among men.

Dr. Soh has seen the factories where these robots are made. She’s spoken to the men who’ve used them. And today, she asks: Will robots start replacing sex? And, more importantly: Could they begin to replace women? What happens when people turn not just to virtual substitutes, but physical ones? —The Editors

I first encountered an early prototype of a sex robot when I was completing my PhD in neuroscience in 2017, and a friend sent me a viral video of a silicone head wearing a wig attached to a broomstick. A sheet had been draped over the head’s broomstick body so the viewer couldn’t see the mechanics behind the head’s steady motion. All that was visible was the robot’s face as it ate a banana (reader, it was not actually a banana). Even though the entire thing looked hysterically bad, bordering on horrific, there was clearly a market for such a product. Many people had watched the video and felt enchanted enough to buy it.