The Free Press

It’s happened; your beloved, populist queen of TGIF has been unmasked as a certified member of the emailed-Jeffrey Epstein-community. We’re as shocked as you. Nellie has been penalized with a one-game suspension from TGIF and a $5,000,000 fine, which she assures us she is good for, but only after she goes to a big house on the Upper East Side to “pick something up.” She’ll be back for the next edition, unless someone finds a pic of her at a Diddy white party. While she figures all that out, you’re stuck with us—Suzy in the driver’s seat, and Sascha as passenger princess.

If you’re a Free Presser in Atlanta, we have a big treat for you. Coleman Hughes will be at the Ebenezer Baptist Church next month, alongside former UN ambassador Andrew Young and MLK biographer Jonathan Eig. Get your tickets here.

And now, on to the biggest stories of the week, according to us.

→ The emails will continue until morale gets worse: A specter has been haunting America—the specter of [email protected], also known as Jeffrey Edward Epstein. Last Friday, the Department of Justice said “release the Kraken” and made available to the public three million pages of documents connected to the late disgraced financier, including volumes of email correspondence. The fallout hasn’t let up since.

The “Dirty Jew” ad. The one that will air during the Super Bowl. The one that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft just paid $15 million for.

It made me take antisemitism less seriously.

It made me think that people who already kind of hate Jews will come away from this—hating them more.

Is the head of creative at Blue Square Alliance Against Hate—Kraft’s nonprofit group that is supposedly charged with fighting antisemitism—a Jewish Boomer who thinks his target audience is Jewish Boomers? Because that’s what this ad feels like.

It’s been five weeks since President Donald Trump first drew his redline on the Iranian uprising. On January 2, he posted on Truth Social that if Iran shot the protesters flooding the streets of its cities and towns, “we are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

The warning did not prevent a bloodbath. A week later, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s goons massacred protesters in the most violent crackdown since the regime took power. Today human rights groups who have monitored the state-backed carnage estimate the dead could number more than 30,000. But no U.S. strike followed. Now, the president’s top envoys will meet their Iranian interlocutors in Oman on Friday. The talks are not about the terms of Khamenei’s surrender or the fate of Iranian demonstrators. Rather, the negotiations are about the regime’s nuclear program and support for terror in the Middle East.

Has Trump pulled a Barack Obama, warning a Middle Eastern despot not to attack civilians, only to flinch and reverse course?

There are two methods to the DoorDash handoff. One: You use your phone to guide your deliverer through twisty hallways like a CIA asset on a wire, then open the door too fast and spook them, and rush through a “hithankyouhaveagoodnight” micro-interaction. Two: You listen for the metal squeak of your door handle, wait 30 seconds, then retrieve the bag and scamper back inside like a lucky raccoon.

Many of us city dwellers earnestly believe we cannot live without this kind of delivery. It’s the reason I don’t really know how to cook, despite my mom’s glowing example. Uber devours most of my income—whether it’s feeding me or ferrying me. When the food of my choice magically spawns 20 minutes after I hit a button, why would I even think about taking a step with my feet? Luckily, I am not alone. This week, a New York Times article sparked a discourse about the frankly appalling amounts of money Americans spend getting food taxied to their doors. One couple spends $700 a week on delivery. A single woman has been eating into her savings—literally.

Most jokes are not funny. Comedy is observational. When the subject under observation changes, a joke ages like fine milk. The stand-up only cracks wise in the present. The secret of comedy is time.

The oldest recorded joke may be a Sumerian proverb dating to somewhere around 2000 BCE: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: A young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” You had to be there.

Even if you were there, the first Biblical joke falls flat. When God told Sarah she was pregnant at age 90, she “laughed to herself.” This is the first recorded response to a joke that isn’t funny.

Plato noted that changes in musical taste predict changes in political arrangements. The same goes for America’s sense of humor. Something was shifting in American comedy in the 1960s and 1970s, and sometime around 1980 it changed for good, or at least forever. The political symbol of this change was the election of Ronald Reagan. But the mentality of the professional merrymaker altered years before Bonzo’s gag-feeder ascended to the White House.

I’ve written 20 books, 14 of them novels that more or less fall into the category of political satire. Many a reviewer has sniffed that subtlety is not among the tools in my fictional sandbox. But like Robin Goodfellow in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Those things do best please me that befall preposterously.”

My first novel was published in 1986. It opens on January 20, 1989, as the president-elect’s motorcade pulls up to the White House to collect about-to-be-ex-president Ronald Reagan for the trip to the Capitol and the swearing-in ceremony of his successor. But there’s a problem: President Reagan has gone a bit, well, dotty. He’s still in his pajamas and just doesn’t feel like going out. It’s not a power grab. The old guy just isn’t up for leaving today. Maybe tomorrow.

Forty years ago, the idea of the U.S. president refusing to leave office was a quaint notion. The opening scene got the novel noticed, and the book made the bestseller lists.

I confessed to an interviewer that I was somewhat nervous about how President Reagan—much less Mrs. Reagan—might feel about it. I’d worked for two years in his administration and had known the Reagans, through my parents, since I was a teenager.

Three days after the interview appeared, a letter arrived, franked, the upper left corner embossed in gold: “The President.” My bowels loosened. But its theme wasn’t Et tu, Brute. It was a handwritten note congratulating me on the book’s success. Reagan was “delighted that I was able to play some small role in it.”

Here’s a snapshot of something commonplace just five years ago: During a lecture on endocrinology, one medical school professor begged the students to forgive him for his offensiveness. His wrongdoing? Saying “pregnant women.” Another doctor received so many online complaints from students in real time while she was lecturing that when the class finished she burst into tears. Her misdeed? Saying “male” and “female.”

These incidents, and many more, were reported in a pathbreaking story, “Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex,” by Katie Herzog, published in July 2021 in The Free Press, or Common Sense as it was then named. It was our first story about a gender mania that was sweeping the country and undermining institutions, from education, to government, to the media, to—most shockingly—medicine itself.

This ideology had come on so quickly, and was enforced by activists so fiercely, that using the wrong pronoun could and did put one’s job in jeopardy. People were told that biological sex was a fiction. Many, depending on their profession, were forced to say they believed this. Remember the attestation that “trans women are women”?

On Wednesday afternoon, Moshe Davis, executive director of the New York City Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, said he heard a knock on his door at City Hall. It was a Zohran Mamdani staffer there to deliver “unsurprising” news.

“We’re looking to go in a different direction,” he said the staffer told him.

To Davis, a 28-year-old Brooklyn native, it was clear what that direction meant.

“Look, I’m a loud, proud Jewish person with a kippah on my head, a proud Zionist,” he said. “This administration maybe felt that was too much for them.”

There is an old joke about the weather in New England: If you don’t like it, just wait a few minutes. The same could be said about American attitudes toward foreign intervention.

This variability tends to embarrass ideologues. MAGA leaders and commentators confidently promote the claim that the era of “endless wars” in the Middle East is behind us, and that “knowing what time it is” requires us to acknowledge that the American right is no longer a friendly place for interventionism. That kind of thing, say the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Steve Bannons and Tucker Carlsons of the world, is for zombie Reaganites and neocon Bushies.

Well, MAGA voters feel differently. A Politico poll, which went into the field only a few days after the president told protesters in Iran that “help is on its way,” found that half of Trump voters supported “military action” in Iran, with 61 percent of “MAGA Republicans” backing armed intervention. Even more Trump voters (65 percent) supported military action in at least one country, with Iran being their favorite option.

Dear Abigail,

I have one son, age 35. He and his wife live in the Midwest with my two grandsons, who are 1 and 4. My husband and I try to visit them several times a year, because the little ones grow up so fast, and we want to form relationships with them. Our normal routine is to arrive Thursday afternoon from the West Coast and leave Monday morning.

My son recently told me that these trips are too long and that he and his wife “need more space.” I looked at my calendar: We visited for a total of nine days in 2025 and 14 days in 2024. We try to be very helpful on these visits: cooking, shopping, cleaning up, walking their dog, babysitting, and staying in a nearby hotel. So the suggestion that our visits are a burden infuriates us.

What should the visiting approach be in 2026? Part of me wants to take a complete break on these trips.

—Elizabeth, 64

Elizabeth,

Mind if we get real for a second? You drive your daughter-in-law crazy.

You don’t mention her, but she is there, conspicuously off-screen, inspiring all the drama like Boo Radley. I know you don’t mean to drive her insane during your visits. It may not even be your fault. But sometime between all the helpful ministrations—the cooking, the cleaning up, the walking the dog, and babysitting—you’re probably doing some . . . commenting. Sprinkling nuggets of advice, over the suds, which you’ve tried to mask as observations. A few minor suggestions here and there, perfuming the air like so much Febreze. That’s what your son means by “needing space”: distance from your judgments and advice.

Elizabeth, I’m leveling with you: You’re a little annoying.