The Free Press

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.

It’s rarely a good time to discuss football with your friends who are New York Jets fans, but this week, with the New England Patriots set to play the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl, it was especially painful. The Jets have a connection to both teams, and it amounts to just another dagger to the heart for fans of a team that hasn’t been to the playoffs since 2010, and has a pathetic winning percentage of .421 this century.

Talking to these downtrodden Jets fans about those connections over the last few days, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the legendary season 10 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when one of Larry David’s golf buddies kills himself over the nonstop misery the Jets have caused him. His suicide note reads, “I couldn’t take any more disappointment.”

Welcome back to Second Thought, The Free Press’s weekly culture column. This weekend, it is necessary for me to care about sport, but the brave men of The Free Press have football covered, so I turned my attention to the very campiest competition in the Winter Olympics, which began Friday night in Italy.

I’ll be watching the opening ceremony—let’s hope, for everyone’s sake, that they do a better job showcasing their country’s culture than we saw in France in 2024. And yes, I’ll also watch the field activity that happens on either side of the halftime show this Sunday.

Let the games begin!

Whoever wins the 100-meter dash during the Summer Olympics is considered the fastest man in the world; if you win enough swim races, you become a national superhero. But making the national curling team, or huddling your helmeted head against your fellow countrymen in a bobsled, makes you a guy with a very fun fact. Sure, the skiers have a bit more star power. Who could forget Linsdey Vonn’s epic, gold-winning, downhill run in Vancouver in 2010? But the stars of the Winter Olympics are all so geared up, it’s hard to get excited watching them.

Or at least, that’s what I used to think.

Then I watched a new series on Netflix called Glitter & Gold: Ice Dancing, which is all about figure skating, the theater kid of all the Olympic events, with its lycra and pumping music and panache. There are no goggles or snow pants here; the athletes’ chests are heaving, their personalities are very much on display, the behind-the-scenes drama is off the charts. And that’s especially true when it comes to ice dance, the most subjective of the four figure skating disciplines, and the focus of the documentary.

“So how are you feeling about this whole ‘Fuck Parkinson’s’ thing?” I asked Michael J. Fox, as I took my seat in his office on the Upper East Side of New York.

“I like it,” he replied. “I like the defiance of it.”

In case you missed it—and I hope you didn’t—TV viewers heard Fox utter those memorable words a week and a half ago, during the first episode of season three of the Apple TV show Shrinking.

One of the show’s main characters, Paul, played by Harrison Ford, is a curmudgeonly psychologist who has Parkinson’s. As season 3 begins, he has clearly deteriorated: His hands shake uncontrollably, and he has trouble doing simple tasks like brushing his teeth. In the waiting room of his neurologist’s office, he meets Gerry, played by Fox, whose condition is far worse than Paul’s. But when Paul tells Gerry he feels stupid complaining about his problems to someone whose symptoms are so much worse, Gerry reassures him. “We’re all on the same shitty train to Sucksville,” he says.

Super Bowl LX this weekend will close the books on another National Football League season that has tortured no fan base as much as that of the Buffalo Bills, whose supporters are known affectionately as the Bills Mafia. The Bills are the only team in history to reach four consecutive Super Bowls—and lose all four. The first loss, to the New York Giants in 1991, was by a single point. The Bills later endured a 17-year playoff drought from 2000 to 2017, the longest such streak across the four major American professional sports leagues.

This season ended brutally for the Bills. On January 17, stud quarterback Josh Allen—the NFL’s 2025 MVP—threw a controversial “freak interception” that led to a divisional-round loss to the Denver Broncos. Head coach and champion of Buffalo Sean McDermott was fired two days later, after nine seasons of playoff appearances with no Super Bowl berth. As sports writer Tyler Dunne wrote, no other coach in NFL history has won more playoff games (eight) without reaching a Super Bowl. The same is true of Allen among quarterbacks.

Since I can remember, the Super Bowl has always been about chili dogs, guac and chips, rooting for your team, and hanging out with friends. But today, for even young fans, it’s about making sure your “play” hits while staring at a split screen of DraftKings and statistics of the big game.

As a high school sophomore at an all-boys school, I can tell you firsthand that the experience of watching sports has been corrupted by online gambling. In today’s National Football League, it is hard for fans to get through one quarter without hearing constant mentions of betting odds, picks, and sponsorships from the sportsbook companies. And my generation is finding the lure of betting irresistible.

My column on Monday in The Free Press talked about the culture of therapy today—and, more to the point, whether therapy can make you happier (or just less unhappy). One of my arguments was that mental pain—the reason most people seek out therapy in the first place—was not an inherently bad thing. On the contrary, negative emotions serve to alert us to threats of various types, and negative experiences are important for growth and learning in life.

To this point, many people make the mistake of trying to eliminate their mental pain—to somehow turn it off. That’s both impossible and undesirable. What is desirable is finding ways to cope with pain. In this newsletter, I want to introduce you to a Tibetan concept for managing pain that has helped me a lot.

Over the past 12 years, I’ve had the privilege of working frequently with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He often talks to me about pain and suffering, but he doesn’t use the terms interchangeably. On the contrary, he teaches that they exist together in the following way:

Suffering = pain x resistance

Pain can be physical or mental, and happens to you because of an outside stimulus—you slam your hand in the car door by accident, say, or (just hypothetically) read a thoughtless criticism from a reader about your latest Free Press column. By contrast, suffering is the struggle that ensues when you experience pain. The formula above says that suffering is your pain multiplied by your resistance to that pain. There are thus two ways to suffer less: Either you can try—fruitlessly, as long as you are in this mortal coil—to eliminate pain, or you can lower your resistance to pain when it inevitably comes.

Lowering your resistance to pain is a mysterious idea. To Buddhists, resistance means indulging in fear, anger, or self-pity when people feel pain. When defined this way, we know that resistance heightens our suffering. That’s one reason why people who wallow in self-pity after a breakup tend to move on more slowly from their old relationship.

So, resistance means something like “railing against our pain.” Nonresistance, on the other hand, means accepting some pain without fear, anger, or self-pity. The pain just is.

His Holiness teaches that, in many instances, the right approach is to work more on the resistance side than the pain side, so that your suffering falls and your well-being stays high, despite a painful emotion or experience.

That, in fact, is how you know you’re doing it right: when your pain is high, but your suffering is not.

Does this sound inaccessibly Eastern to you? It shouldn’t, because you can find examples of this all around. In my family, for example, two of my three adult kids are U.S. Marines. One is currently active duty (my daughter, who is a second lieutenant). She’s four feet, eleven inches, and the notoriously brutal Marine training has inflicted mental and physical pain on her beyond anything she ever experienced. But her suffering is actually very low, because she has learned not to resist that pain. It simply happens to her, and she has no self-pity that this is so.

Of course, nonresistance is easier when you volunteer for pain, as my daughter did. The real skill in life is nonresistance when you don’t invite it, physically or emotionally. One way I’ve gotten better at this is through my morning prayer, in which I ask for whatever the day will bring—including the parts I don’t like. Without submitting to the divine will, I’d be more prone to rail against the painful parts of my day. Instead, my prayer helps me to accept these parts with an impassive interest.

What’s your method of nonresistance? Throw it in the comments.

Enjoy your weekend,

Arthur

P.S. Speaking of His Holiness, he recently shared the following endorsement of my new book The Meaning of Your Life: “My friend Arthur C. Brooks clearly articulates how to live a meaningful, compassionate, and purposeful life.” You can preorder the book now to get several free bonuses, including VIP access to my virtual book launch event.

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

It’s Friday, February 6. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: How DoorDash gets you, why Donald Trump’s voters will (probably) back an Iran strike, the problem with the Super Bowl antisemitism ad, Woody Allen’s favorite joke, Olivia Reingold talks exclusively to the antisemitism official fired by Zohran Mamdani, and much more.

But first: Let’s talk about jokes.

At the Grammys last Sunday, comedian Trevor Noah suggested President Donald Trump wanted to acquire Greenland “because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new island to hang out with Bill Clinton.” Not a great laugh, but Trump’s reaction was even less funny—he threatened to sue Noah.

It set us to thinking about one of our most fragile national institutions: the joke.

The latest installment of our series on America at 250 is all about humor. Because, without it, what kind of country would we have?

Up first: a famed satirist who says he is throwing in the towel. Forty years ago, Christopher Buckley—author of Thank You for Smoking, among many other books—poked fun at Ronald Reagan in a satirical novel about a president refusing to leave office. The idea that a world leader would never surrender office to his successor was “a quaint notion,” writes Buckley. And then came Trump.

If video killed the radio star, Buckley argues, current events have almost certainly killed the humorist. Our reality is much more absurd than anything even the most seasoned satirist could write. Read him here:

But perhaps nobody anticipated the descent of American comedy from social observation into shared delusion more clearly than Martin Scorsese. Today, Dominic Green returns to The King of Comedy, the master filmmaker’s 1982 character study of a man named Rupert Pupkin. As played by Robert De Niro, Pupkin is an unfunny and unstable man whose fantasy of fame exposes a truth about America: that many of us would rather be a king for a day than a schmuck for a lifetime.

If laughs seem few and far between these days, we have just the thing for you—a recording of our Free Press “Right to Laugh” event held last month in New York City.

Hosted and curated by fearless veteran comic Judy Gold, the lineup included Colin Quinn, Robert Kelly, and Alex English, each taking on America: its ideals, its contradictions, and why it’s important—even patriotic—to push the envelope.

Be warned: Some of these jokes were written for a 1 a.m. audience with a two-drink minimum. In other words, it gets blue, and the phrase “not safe for work” very much applies.

And last but not least, don’t miss a short and sweet roundup of some of our favorite jokes, including submissions from Woody Allen, Joseph Epstein, Quinn, and more. Careful with some of these jokes—they’re antiques.

—Josh Code

What should you do when your son tells you you’re visiting his family too often? This week, our advice columnist, Abigail Shrier, responds to a question from Elizabeth, an infuriated grandmother who wants to stay over and help with the kids. Abigail starts her reply like this: “Elizabeth, mind if we get real for a second?” Read the rest of it:

Anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City have increased 182 percent since Zohran Mamdani took office last month, and his administration is responding by replacing New York’s top antisemitism watchdog with a progressive activist. Moshe Davis, the ousted official and a “proud Zionist,” speaks exclusively with Olivia Reingold about why he was fired.

Robert Kraft has paid $15 million for an ad to help fight antisemitism that will air during the Super Bowl. But its message is all wrong, writes Peter Savodnik. Read his column on why the “Dirty Jew” ad made him take antisemitism less seriously.

This week, Nellie Bowles was busted for the crime of reporting. Why? Because her name, and a few polite emails, appear in the latest tranche of Jeffrey Epstein documents since she had coffee with him in 2018. Does she have any regrets about that coffee? Yes, but not that she met him. Instead, she wonders why she didn’t dig deeper into a man who quickly grossed her out. Read her dispatch here.

For more on this week’s latest revelations about the disgraced New York financier, check out this great Rod Dreher essay on how the Epstein files show how we’ve reached a pre-revolutionary moment à la the last years of Czarist Russia or the Weimar Republic. It’s a scary but necessary essay to make sense of how Americans are responding to these latest revelations about the decadence of our elites.

On a slightly lighter note, Will Rahn sat down with Timothy Cardinal Dolan, outgoing Archbishop of New York and long one of the Catholic Church’s most influential and outspoken cardinals. He talks about everything from his role in electing Pope Leo XIV to the Church’s criticisms of the Trump administration. Check out the video here:

Speaking of, Allie Beth Stuckey is one of the most influential conservative Christian influencers out there. So influential, in fact, that none other than Hillary Clinton took aim at Stuckey in a recent article in The Atlantic, saying she is part of a “war on empathy.” Do yourself a favor and read what Stuckey has to say in response.

Reza Pahlavi, the would-be Shah of Iran, was forced into exile at age 17. Now, somewhat improbably, he has become a central node of resistance to Tehran’s embattled Islamic Republic. Read Eli Lake’s profile of the man who many Iranians wish would return, despite his previous ambivalence about doing any such thing:

Finally, don’t miss Benjamin Ryan’s report on a groundbreaking legal case that could upend gender medicine. Benjamin was the only reporter to cover the whole trial.

And for a longer look at how The Free Press has reported on gender ideology, from when the subject was a third rail to today, read Emily Yoffe’s essay on the rise and fall of youth gender medicine:

The Front Page will be back on Monday morning. Until then, look out for a special Super Bowl Edition of The Weekend Press—in which Joe Nocera opines on the NFL’s most blighted franchise (hint: it’s the Jets). Plus, enjoy Two Drinks with Michael J. Fox, and Suzy Weiss looks forward to the Winter Olympics and Bad Bunny’s halftime show.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

Last weekend, Free Pressers braved below-freezing temperatures and schlepped to the legendary Comedy Cellar for an evening of stand-up from comedians who still believe in saying the wrong thing out loud. The event was part of our year-long celebration of the country’s birthday, America at 250.

Hosted and curated by fearless veteran comic Judy Gold, the …