The Free Press

In February 2026, Columbia University released its recommendations for reshaping the university’s approach to Middle Eastern studies.

After Columbia lost $400 million in federal funding over antisemitism allegations in 2025, it reached a settlement with the Trump administration. As part of the settlement, Columbia appointed a senior vice provost and a Regional Review Committee to ensure “balanced” curricula for the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies departments. Two of this committee’s members, Timothy Mitchell and Bruno Bosteels, signed an October 2023 letter describing Hamas’s October 7 attack as a response to Israel’s long-standing “crushing and unrelenting state violence.”

Part of Columbia’s announcement is the replacement for the Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature, previously held by Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi held the position from 2003 to 2024, and left citing disdain over the university’s shifting priorities. The author and historian described Hamas’s October 7 attacks as “inevitable,” and criticized the university’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance antisemitism definition, which he said “deliberately, mendaciously, and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel,” making it “impossible” to teach without being accused of antisemitism.

When President Donald Trump urged Iranians last month to take to the streets and promised help that never came, the country’s Kurdish provinces stayed largely quiet. This is because the Kurds already saw that regime forces were readying for a slaughter.

“We saw them ahead of time. They had machine guns on pickup trucks and military vehicles, they were armed to the teeth, and we know they had orders to shoot to kill,” Abdullah Mohtadi, the exiled secretary general of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, told The Free Press in an interview last week. “They don’t need a pretext to kill people in Kurdistan. So when we saw them prepared and determined to shoot people, we did not call for demonstrations.”

Mohtadi’s insight suggests that Iran’s regime was not nearly as vulnerable to mass demonstrations as Trump and Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi claimed at the time. Rather, the security forces made preparations to crush the uprising that began in the last days of December, when merchants in the big cities began demonstrating against the regime after the collapse of Iran’s currency, the rial.

Kentucky senator Rand Paul is done with all the populist doom and gloom, and after nearly a decade of that from Republicans, he’s pushing back hard—defending immigrants and free trade, and floating the possibility of another presidential run.

“We still want ICE to deport criminals,” Paul, who chairs the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, told me, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “At the same time, I think some of the best Americans just got here.”

We were in Paul’s office in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., and it was less than 48 hours before his committee was slated to conduct hearings probing the fatal shooting by federal agents of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. It may be one of the few high-profile events to feature a GOP lawmaker holding the administration to account for its conduct on the nation’s most divisive issue. The heads of ICE and other top immigration officials are scheduled to appear before the committee.

In the aftermath of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January, Paul became a beacon of hope for some on the right who believe President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign has threatened the rights of some Americans. “I think to restore trust things are gonna have to improve,” Paul said after Pretti’s shooting.

Buried among the hundreds of videos in the latest release of the Epstein files is previously unseen footage of Jeffrey Epstein’s most notorious accomplice and the only person still alive who knows the true extent of his crimes: Ghislaine Maxwell.

Bitcoin crashed again recently, repeating a pattern we’ve seen at least a half dozen times. Often, these crashes are presented as a clash of worldviews between the believers who think Bitcoin is destiny and the skeptics who think it’s a fad (or worse). “The market is currently navigating a ‘crisis of faith,’ ” one asset manager told Bloomberg as Bitcoin prices fell.

But the more you look into the details, the clearer it is that what’s happening with Bitcoin actually looks a lot like crashes in all kinds of other markets: It has to do with debt—lots and lots of debt. Except Bitcoin’s debt problem is even worse. This is the one thing that bulls and bears agree on.

Bitcoin reached a total value of more than $2 trillion in 2025, with a high price of more than $120,000. It is now down to a little more than half that, which included one particularly disastrous week between late January and early February during which it lost a quarter of its value.

When I sent my friends Jon and Billy links to a test version of the Catholic mental health app I’ve been working on, they both assumed I’d been hacked.

I can’t blame them. I’m not the most technologically astute person, and then there’s the issue of my ironic and detached disposition. “This is the most sincere thing you’ve EVER done since I’ve known you,” Jon texted me. We’ve been friends for the better part of 20 years. He’s my son’s godfather. I think he said that because he knew it would unnerve me.

It all started this past Friday when I read AI expert Dr. Alan D. Thompson’s thoughts on Anthropic’s latest version of its artificial intelligence (AI) program, Claude. “I don’t want to alarm anyone,” Thompson wrote, but “this model feels both superhuman and complete.”

Several other viral articles since then have contained similar “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we’re all about to die” observations. I’m no expert in these matters, but like just about everyone not named Sam Altman, I’m worried about the rise of the robots and how it stands to upend all our lives.

After a glorious day spent tumbling into mounds of plush snow and stuffing my face with hamburgers and hot toddies at a local tavern, I woke up the morning after New York City’s January snowstorm like most of my fellow New Yorkers: hungover and cold.

My bedroom doesn’t have heat (my landlord scares me and well, there are sacrifices one makes for crown molding), so I place a heating pad on the floor beside my bed, which I turn on at the first sound of my alarm.

But on this particular morning, as I placed my cold feet on the heating pad, I felt shards of glass in my toes. I walked to work, and winced with every step. I called my primary care doctor, whose receptionist told me his next available appointment was in April—at which point, I told her I’d saw off my own toes from the pain if I had to wait that long.

I just returned from 12 days in Davos, London, and Brussels, where my goal was to encourage political leaders to raise the minimum age to 16 for opening or having social media accounts in their countries. This is the second of my four norms for a healthier childhood, laid out in my book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. I met with leaders from Indonesia, France, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Some have already acted decisively (Indonesia and France); the others are likely to do so. And just as I arrived home, Spain and the Netherlands announced that they would raise the age, too.

All of this happened less than two months after Australia enacted the world’s first nationwide age limit, which requires users to be 16 for opening or maintaining social-media accounts, and which puts the responsibility for enforcing the age limit on the platforms themselves.

The tide is turning, 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?

The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker can help explain it. His most recent book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, explores the massive social change that can occur when widespread private knowledge suddenly becomes public knowledge. For example: Many people may privately know that a dictator is brutal, or that an ideology is bankrupt, yet nothing changes for many years until something happens that lets everyone know that everyone else knows it too, and that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows. Once that threshold is crossed, new forms of coordination become possible. Social movements ignite. Regimes and walls fall. Norms can change almost overnight.

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 George Washington on the eve of his birthday in 1776. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

In February 1798, President John Adams shocked the then-capital of Philadelphia when one of his terser letters leaked to a newspaper. “I have received your polite invitation,” he wrote, “and embrace the earliest opportunity of informing you that I decline accepting it.” Had the second president tried (and he may have), he couldn’t have found a less tactful way of announcing that he wouldn’t attend a ball in honor of George Washington’s birthday on February 22. Although the usually wise Abigail Adams insisted it would have been improper for her husband as the sitting president to celebrate a former president’s birthday, she got it backward: Among the many reasons to honor Washington was his resolution to retire to private life after two terms in office.

It’s Wednesday, February 11. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Kat Rosenfield on the Olympian who Trump called a loser. Patrick McGee on the marvelous, myriad uses of drones. Tanya Lukyanova watches the Epstein tapes. Seth Pinsky, CEO of the 92nd Street Y, asks: Can Jews gather safely in New York City? All that and much more.

But first: The Afrikaners who came to America—and the Ukrainians being forced to leave.

Who gets to come to America? And who gets to stay? Those are among the most contentious questions of the second Trump administration. Today, a pair of stories that address those questions in relation to refugees.

Last October, the Trump administration lowered the maximum number of refugees allowed into America in 2026 to 7,500. Under Biden, the annual figure had been 125,000. One group of refugees Trump has welcomed are the Afrikaners.

The decision to welcome these white South Africans, but not others, led to much opprobrium and charges of racism from Democrats. But now that the Afrikaners are here—and the political conversation has moved on—how are they doing, and how have they been treated? The answer, according to Madeleine Rowley’s investigation, is not well. She talks to some of the Afrikaners Trump invited to America and hears tales of languishing in cockroach-infested apartments, walking miles to the grocery store for food, eating just one meal a day to save money—and very well-paid nonprofit executives. Read her full investigation:

From the South Africans Trump welcomed to the Ukrainians being forced out of the U.S. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration launched the Uniting for Ukraine program to offer safety for Ukrainians fleeing the war. When Trump returned to office, he paused the program. That left Ukrainians here in America in legal limbo, with some forced to leave the country because of nothing more than a bureaucratic backlog. Frannie Block talks to the Ukrainians dealing with this uncertainty, and to those who got a taste of the land of opportunity before having to leave.

—The Editors

On January 30, the Department of Justice released more than three million files related to Jeffrey Epstein, including roughly 2,000 unpublished videos. While the videos are indeed public, they are stored in a way that makes them very hard to find or browse: You can download hundreds of gigabytes of data—or click through hundreds of web pages, one by one.

The Free Press’s Tanya Lukyanova did both.

These are videos seized from Epstein’s devices: footage he recorded himself, received from others, or downloaded from the internet. They paint the most vivid picture yet of Epstein’s dark world. She watched them, and you can too:

• The Trump administration is poised to reverse a 2009 scientific finding that provides the legal basis for federal greenhouse-gas reduction policy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Repealing the guidance, which claims that greenhouse gases pose a threat to humanity, “amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin told the Journal.

• Bay Area Rapid Transit’s new fare gates may be a lifeline to the dying California transportation system, which is facing a $400 million annual deficit after years of rampant fare evasion. The new technology is expected to save the system $10 million annually and has already drastically reduced maintenance costs, the agency announced.

• Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who has drawn criticism from Trump for her frequent breaks from the party line, announced a campaign for reelection yesterday. Collins is seen as one of the most vulnerable GOP incumbents, a linchpin in Democrats’ plans to retake the Senate by flipping four seats.

• The White House deleted a post from Vice President J.D. Vance’s X account commemorating the anniversary of the Armenian genocide, with one aide claiming the message was posted in error. Though Congress and former president Joe Biden have both acknowledged the 1915 massacres were a genocide, Trump omitted that language in his comments on the killings last year.

• The FBI released the first photos of a suspect in the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, showing a masked man approaching Guthrie’s porch with what appeared to be a handgun holster. “We believe she is still alive,” Nancy’s daughter and Today show host Savannah Guthrie said on social media.

• A Norwegian Olympian made a desperate appeal to win back his girlfriend by admitting his infidelity in an emotional interview after he earned a bronze medal in the men’s 20-kilometer biathlon. “I regret it with all my heart,” he said. “Maybe I’m dumb as a rock. I’m a member of Mensa, but I still do stupid stuff.”

• Canadian prime minister Mark Carney is seeking to resolve tension with President Trump, who complained of “virtually no U.S. content” in the construction of a new bridge between Michigan and Ontario and threatened to block its opening. “This is a great example of cooperation between our countries,” Carney told reporters. “I look forward to its opening.”

• An annual gathering of the nation’s governors is in flux after reports that President Trump invited only Republican governors. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican and chair of the National Governors Association, confirmed in a letter to his fellow governors that the White House intended to invite only Republicans to the association’s meeting.