The Free Press

Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai’s 20-year sentence on Monday ended one of the longest political trials in history, a multiyear spectacle that showed how Hong Kong’s vague and sweeping national security law can be weaponized to find anyone guilty of something.

The trial, in the end, proved the wealthy media entrepreneur guilty of nothing more dangerous than practicing journalism. Instead of rebelling, he used his publications, like Apple Daily and Next Magazine, to fight for the democracy that China pledged to Hong Kong but never fully delivered. The heavy sentence confirms China’s betrayal of Hong Kong, a former British colony that had been promised freedom to run its own affairs under Deng Xiaoping’s “one country, two systems” formula after the 1997 handover.

The AI wars were raging at the Super Bowl this weekend, and Anthropic fired the opening salvo. The AI developer known for its models’ coding prowess created a series of commercials tweaking its better-known competitor, OpenAI. The ads are worth watching because they’re funny—but also because of what they suggest about the differing ambitions of the two AI pacesetters.

Neither OpenAI nor ChatGPT is directly mentioned in Anthropic’s ads, but they are obviously the target. In one, a short basketball player asks an enormously oversized personal trainer for advice on improving his game. The trainer obligingly says he’s happy to do that, then starts recommending a brand of height-enhancing insoles as the questioner’s hopeful expression deflates.

Last week brought a day that will go down in history. February 5 saw the release of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex. That may not seem especially exciting to the non-expert eye, but behind these arcane names is a new reality.

What makes these new models so important is the fact that much of the programming work behind them was done by artificial intelligence rather than humans. Anthropic insiders are claiming, for instance, that effectively 100 percent of the code behind their products is written by Claude itself. You can debate exactly how much human guidance and oversight goes into that, but other major AI labs all seem to be on the same trajectory. (Disclosure: I am on the Anthropic Economic Advisory Council.)

When we meet Nico Bonaventura, the 26-year-old protagonist of Lionel Shriver’s new novel, A Better Life, he is living a somewhat shiftless existence in the basement apartment of his mother’s sprawling house in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. To call him a failson would be both inaccurate and unfair, if only because to be a failure requires having tried something, and Nico has not; he hovers, intentionally and contentedly, in a place just above the depths of ultimate loserdom but well short of achievement, meaningful or otherwise.

“There was no future to plan for because the future and the present had fused,” Shriver writes. “He was suspended, without a care, in an eternity.”

By his own admission, Nico is “a rotten character”—not rotten as in bad, but rotten as in narratively uninteresting. In a world where so many of his peers think of themselves as the main character of the universe, Nico acts like a background extra in his own life. He has no job, no girlfriend, no hobbies, and no problem with any of it. He wants for nothing, because there’s nothing he wants—except, that is, for nothing to change.

I’m working at the table in my tiny apartment overlooking the Cincinnati skyline when three people message me, all with the same video attached. “Have you seen this?”

I watch. It opens in a familiar CorePower Yoga studio lobby in Minneapolis. Following claims that anti-ICE signs were taken down by staff, a crowd of women in yoga gear gather around two young workers, hectoring them. A couple of older women are filming, one lobbing questions in sing-song. There is snapping, shouting, and clapping from the crowd. As the employees get flustered, the mob surges in.

Oh, yeah, I’ve seen this. Not this particular scene but several like it, and all the ones that led up to it. I belonged to that exact CorePower studio for a dozen years. It’s among the myriad reasons I picked up in late 2025 and left Minneapolis, my longtime home. The internet is all agog about the shrieking yoga ladies, but nothing in that video surprises me.

In Minneapolis, it’s 2020 again. Or rather, it’s been 2020 for a long time, and it never stopped. It was only that summer that most of America began to behave this way: calling out, compelling language, ceding more and more public space to mob rule. If you live elsewhere in America, you’ll recognize the spirit of 2020 in the confrontation. “Let’s hear it, Delaney—loud and proud, baby. You want to say it? Let’s fucking say it.”

“Happiness—actually, unhappiness—is the crisis of our time.” So wrote acclaimed professor, author, and happiness expert Arthur Brooks in his inaugural column for The Free Press last month. Every week since, Arthur has taken on some of the biggest questions behind our collective crisis of meaning, from the limits of modern therapy to what the Beckham drama exposes about the tragedy of family estrangement. His column drops every Monday.

Except this week! This week, his column is arriving a day early. That’s for a good reason. Tonight, Bad Bunny will be the first Super Bowl halftime performer to deliver a set entirely in Spanish—a choice that has stirred controversy in some circles. Naturally, we thought: Who better to weigh in than a man who’s been married for 34 years to a Spanish woman who spoke no English when they first met? Read on as Arthur reflects on how language—and the barriers it creates—can challenge, enrich, and shape what it means to live a good life.

In addition to his Monday column, Arthur’s free newsletter publishes every Friday. To get both delivered straight to your inbox, sign up here.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday. —The Editors

Super Bowl XXVII in 1993 was a lousy blowout of a game. The Cowboys beat the Bills 52-17, and it was never close. For my wife, however, it was utterly epic. We had just moved to the United States from Spain, where she’d lived her whole life and I’d spent three years as an expat. New friends invited us to a rowdy party to watch the game. We ate and drank and cheered, and at one point, someone accidentally set off the fire alarm. (It was me.) The lavish halftime show featured Michael Jackson.

My wife spoke very limited English at the time and had no idea what the rules of American football were. To her, it looked like complete chaos. But she still talks about the Super Bowl as one of her happiest early memories living in the country that, as a now naturalized citizen, she loves deeply.

Fast-forward to Super Bowl LX, which takes place Sunday night in Santa Clara, California—and which I, as a Seattle native, very much hope will be a lousy blowout for the Seahawks. The halftime show will feature Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—a.k.a. Bad Bunny—the hugely popular Puerto Rican rapper, who performs exclusively in Spanish. Like everything in life these days, this has turned into a political controversy: Some conservatives have denounced his appearance as a politically motivated diversity sop, because most American football fans don’t speak Spanish.

This is exactly the wrong interpretation of events. In fact, as my patriotic wife would argue, Bad Bunny’s exclusively Spanish performance will be a purely and authentically American phenomenon—and a testament to what most U.S. traditionalists should want: the undimmed power of American culture to bring people together across ethnicities through entertainment. At a time when activists on both sides would prefer we tear one another apart based on grievance and victimization, what could be truer to our national spirit than that?

But there is a deeper question here: Can humans connect with each other across language barriers? And how do these barriers shape the perspectives and relationships that underlie our lives?

If I’m honest, I’ve been feeling hopeless lately. Sometimes I feel like giving up. What’s the point of writing when artificial intelligence will soon automate the book I just spent years on and generate my blog posts faster than I ever could? What’s the point of improving at anything? There is nothing impressive left to do or to learn. This is all there is: staring down the barrel of a life spent inputting and prompting. It feels like the worst time to try.

Then I started thinking about the next generation, and how bad that feeling must be. Why learn to drive when self-driving cars are coming? Why bother to code or start a company? Why learn to draw, why practice guitar, why study photography, why struggle through academic research? But as I thought about this happening in every direction, all at once, it began to look like an opportunity. When so few seem interested in being a person, isn’t that the best time to be one? Maybe this is a moment for optimism. You just have to be human.

Last weekend, I went to a small college in Pennsylvania to talk about history. I wanted to speak about the Jewish history that forged Israeli identity. It is a grim story, a tale of displacement and mass death, a story that explains much of the gap in worldview and politics between Israeli and American Jews.

I did not expect the history lesson to begin before I had even started my talk.

At the start of the event at Haverford College, over a dozen masked people wearing keffiyehs entered the lecture hall. It was a scene that has become dreary and familiar across American campuses and that I was told had become routine at Jewish student events at the elite college (cost to attend: $97,521 per year). Any minute now, the marching would begin, the chanting, the performance of intimidation, the masked pretense of doing something dangerous and courageous.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Free Press digital editor Josh Kaplan turns to a Kurt Vonnegut quote that captures a simple truth: In an age defined by efficiency, the frictions of daily life are not a problem to be solved, but the very point of being alive.

Will we ever need to write an email again? What about make a restaurant reservation? Go to an office? Drive a car?

When the story of the last few years of global technology is written, it’s hard to imagine that it will focus on anything other than how tech—and artificial intelligence in particular—removed all friction from our lives: a Claude to text everyone for you; a Copilot to build slide decks at work; a ChatGPT to save you a trip to a therapist. On the surface, it sounds great. A million little daily annoyances evaporated into nothing. A door opened to the kind of smooth life where everyone can focus on what really matters.

But what if that’s not actually what we need? What if we lose something when we outsource all our annoying jobs to the machines?

It’s the Super Bowl Press! This week we have an abundance of football stories, our favorite jokes, and what we’re cooking for the big game. But first, Free Press politics editor Mene Ukueberuwa welcomes the arrival of Super Bowl weekend:

This is the weekend when all stories lead to football. Once each year, the mammoth star of the Super Bowl dims all other sports, and swallows pop culture and politics besides.

For all the casual fans tuning in Sunday night, the jerseys might look familiar, but the names have all changed. The New England Patriots have returned to the summit sooner than expected after years at the top under Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. They’re now led by fresh faces: second-year quarterback Drake Maye and new coach Mike Vrabel, who won three rings as a linebacker during the Pats’ legendary run.

They’ll face the Seattle Seahawks, who have recaptured lost glory with a 14-3 record and a charge through the playoffs. No veterans there either—only a stellar young defensive lineup and Sam Darnold, their new-old QB.

If you happen to be a New York Jets fan, that last line may sting. Gang Green drafted Darnold in 2018, but he sputtered under the MetLife Stadium lights, playing three pitiful seasons in East Rutherford, before bouncing through several teams en route to Seattle. Free Press senior editor Joe Nocera explains why no matter who wins on Sunday, Jets fans will lose.

Fans of another long-suffering New York team will also tune in Sunday, but perhaps in higher spirits. The Buffalo Bills have never won a Super Bowl and have faced one tragedy after another along the way. But somehow their supporters take it all in stride. Carolyn D. Gorman explores what psychology has to say about resilient sports fans—and finds lessons that lead to a happier life.

Aside from New England or Seattle fans, the most anxious Super Bowl viewers will likely be those with more than pride on the line. As many as 70 million Americans are expected to bet on the game, and platforms like FanDuel and DraftKings have become inescapable on phone and TV screens. Heavy users risk their savings and peace of mind. But high school student Raphael Shrier describes how the distraction of betting ruins game day for kids like him.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

While you’re waiting for the big game, catch up on a few great (non-football) pieces we ran this week . . .

How should you spend the hours until the big game? We asked our reporter Gabe Kaminsky for his recommendations . . .

📚 Read . . . Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo. Because a) there is pretty much no scenario in which I land the Weekend Press “What Now?” spot and don’t recommend my favorite author. And b) if you recently had the misfortune (hey, or fortune, I’m not telling you how to live) of being trapped inside your home because of the infamous Winter Storm, this is a novel where you can project that memory of confinement—or blissful seclusion—onto a rock star holed up in an unfurnished apartment in Manhattan as he goes through an existential crisis. Look on the bright side: You could always be 26-year-old Bucky Wunderlick, the butt of a 1973 satire.

📺 Watch . . . The Secret Agent. I’m generally opposed to movies with subtitles, as were the two octogenarian gentlemen sitting next to me last week at Landmarkʼs Bethesda Row Cinema, and whispering (that is a generous verb) to each other for two hours and 40 minutes about their confusion. But this thriller, centered around the persecution of a professor during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the late ’70s, was a wild ride, gripping and violent and intense, toggling between morbid absurdity and comedy: In one scene, a severed human leg found in the belly of a dead shark reappears in a park at night and beats the shit out of those engaging in illegal sex acts. (According to director Kleber Mendonça Filho, the scene is actually based on a bit of urban folklore that was cooked up by a Brazilian journalist who was fed up with the government blocking him from reporting on the terror it was inflicting on locals for minor things like smoking pot.)

🍳Cook . . . Chicken wings. It’s Super Bowl weekend, after all. My plan is to bake this dry rub recipe and lug five pounds of wings to my friend Cole’s house. Ideally, this gets me back in his good graces after I ruffled feathers last year by bringing a store-bought container of buffalo wings and pawning them off as my own handiwork. (I fessed up out of unadulterated guilt, when they got one too many rave reviews, and I was fielding an unsustainable amount of questions about how I “made them.”)

Last but not least, feast your eyes on Snow Queen Mariah Carey performing at yesterday’s Milan Cortina Olympics opening ceremony, which you can catch up on here:

That’s all, folks! Have a great Super Bowl weekend.