Donald Trump is making America slim again.

A policy currently being hammered out under his administration would make the “so-called fat shot,” as he cheerfully calls weight-loss medications, far more affordable. TrumpRx, a government-run website launching in January, will direct consumers to places where they can buy Wegovy and Zepbound at around $350 a month; that price will drop to $245 a month within two years.

It’s a victory made possible by major concessions from pharmaceutical companies Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly—which currently ask up to $1,086 a month for these drugs. In return for voluntarily lowering their prices by up to 75 percent, the companies involved will be exempted from tariffs on imported pharmaceutical products and enjoy wider inclusion of their medicines on government-approved drug lists.

For partisan Democrats, it has become necessary to destroy U.S. democracy in order to save it.

That’s one way to interpret the landslide victory of Proposition 50 in California on November 5. The ballot measure, which passed by a margin of 64 percent to 36 percent, was the brainchild of Governor Gavin Newsom and backed by the Democratic Party’s national leadership.

Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, the poet Rebecca Okrent, 75, wrote a moving essay on the importance of late-life friendships. This week, Jim Heintz, 73, explains how he wound up in Estonia, and why he’s decided to grow old there.

On a vacation to South Africa in 2024, I amused myself by telling people that I came from Estonia. Their eyes narrowed and their lips compressed as they tried to remember where Estonia is and whether they should care. If they asked how life is there, I’d smile and say, “It’s the land of no sex and no future.”

That’s a linguistics wisecrack since the Estonian language has only past and present tenses, and pronouns aren’t gendered. The joke also has another layer for me; I’m trying to build a future here after my 40-year reporting career at the Associated Press came to an end only 18 months after being transferred here from my longtime home in Russia.

I scrounged for a strategy to remain here before my legal residency, which was tied to my job, expired. I had four months to figure it out. The search’s difficulty was compounded by having to fight the paralyzing dismay—maybe self-pity is a better description—about losing a job that had always meant a lot to me. I was 73 years old, but retirement was not exactly in the cards.

Going back to the U.S. would be onerous financially and an emotional blow—expatriation can be great for an old-timer because life in a strange place demands your attention and keeps age-induced brain fog at a safe distance. I’d had a great life in Russia, but I couldn’t go back there, and returning to the U.S. after decades away wasn’t especially appealing.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, former Marine Corps officer Phil Klay marks Veterans Day by reflecting on William Butler Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”—and what it taught him about the strange horror and beauty of war.

It wasn’t all the yelling and running and push-ups and crawling through mud that I found difficult during my Marine Corps training; it was the boredom.

Fire watch—standing guard while others sleep—is boring. Waiting around at the rifle range is boring. Humping is boring, if only because “humping” does not mean what you think it does (it means a forced march, usually while carrying heavy gear).

Marines dealt with the boredom in different ways. My method was to memorize poetry.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today: Kat Rosenfield dissects the downfall of a magazine that once used the phrase “non-prostate owners.” Suzy Weiss is blown away by Sydney Sweeney’s latest performance. Elliot Ackerman investigates one of life’s great mysteries: Why don’t men call each other to catch up? All that and much more! But first: teenage dreams and the Grateful Dead.

Their parents probably thought they’d joined a cult.

The teenagers who became Deadheads—that is, passionate fans of the Grateful Dead—were often from wealthy families. But, taking an implicit vow of poverty, they grew their hair long and made cross-country pilgrimages, begging for food as they went. This was the America of the 1980s, when God was dead and the ultimate goal of middle-class life was to drive a fast car and work in a bank. So why did a vast subculture of rich kids choose rags?

When our columnist Larissa Phillips heard, this week, that Donna Godchaux, who once sang with the Dead, had died, she was transported to her tween years, when she’d wake up in her home in suburban Connecticut to find it overrun with velvet-clad teenagers talking about the origin story of Buddhism and doing backflips on the front lawn. Larissa’s brother was a Deadhead; she wasn’t.

In fact, she forgot all about the Grateful Dead until she herself was the mother of a wayward teenage boy, who was struggling to find meaning in a world that had slowly, then suddenly, lost so many of its belief systems. Today, in one of her characteristically gorgeous personal essays, she writes about how she “began looking back wistfully to those days when a traveling revival tent of misfits roamed the country, holding out open arms for disaffected kids.”

Here at The Free Press, we’ve closely followed one of the most interesting trends of the moment: the ways in which young Americans are gravitating toward religion; and reading Larissa’s essay, you might see Deadheads as the ancestors not only of Swifties, but of the kids across the country who have turned away from the nihilism that defines their generation, and turned to God instead. — Freya Sanders

This week we’ve published pieces on a couple of new books and heard from our favorite prophet, Paul Kingsnorth. Read all about it . .

How should you spend the rest of this weekend? We asked our reporter Maya Sulkin how to unwind after the mayoral election she’s helped to cover. . .

📚 Read . . . The Bonfire of the Vanities. As one of the younger people in our newsroom, I hear a lot about the golden age of magazines, so I wanted to see what it was all about. Tom Wolfe’s novel was first published in installments, in Rolling Stone, and my goal was to underline all the masterful sentences I was jealous of, in the hope of writing better ones myself. But as it turns out, I finished the novel at the perfect time: the night before Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. In Wolfe’s fictional version of ’80s New York, you can see the city of today. There are political candidates who say the right things to win votes, press-obsessed district attorneys, and, of course, drunk journalists. Some things never change.

🍳 Eat . . . I’m not a cook. Following a recipe feels like building an IKEA dresser for me: I have none of the tools, I never know which step I’m on, and it’s just a matter of time before things fall apart. Instead, I have mastered something else: my Thai food order. The issue is that when you order Thai food, you want a few bites of multiple things. So I’ve switched from delivery to pickup, put in some real face time, and fostered a fun rapport with the hostess, who has finally agreed to give me a half order of pad see ew and a half order of green curry. Dinner (for one) is served. If you’re in New York City, pay your respects to Thai Villa on East 19th.

🎨Visit . . . To escape it all, a couple other Free Pressers and I hopped in the car and drove upstate to Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre sculpture garden in the Hudson Valley. We saw a Roy Lichtenstein mermaid. We rolled down the Wavefield Conservation. I marveled at concrete fixtures sitting atop sweeping vistas of perfectly groomed grass. They sell hot apple cider. It is a perfect fall day. Some of their current exhibitions end on November 10; go if you can!

That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just tell us what you’d have done with a billion dollars when you were 22; we’re at [email protected].

It was a great week for Democrats. Candidates steamrolled their Republican opponents on Tuesday, taking back the governor’s mansion in Virginia and keeping it in New Jersey. They scored unexpected victories in the Deep South, flipping two statewide offices in Georgia while breaking the GOP supermajority in the Mississippi senate.

Even Jay Jones, who looked snakebit after leaked texts revealed he had fantasized about murdering his political opponent, beat a Republican incumbent to become Virginia’s next attorney general.

But the biggest story was what happened in New York City, where socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor and won over 50 percent of the vote against a divided field. It was the biggest turnout in more than 50 years.

We’ve been covering Mamdani’s campaign closely since the beginning of the year, with our Olivia Reingold reporting on his past and his plans for the city.

This week, we featured a number of fantastic writers on Mamdani, what his victory means, and how exactly New York got here.

But there was also a lot else happening out there this week. More on that below.

While at Mamdani’s victory party in downtown Brooklyn, Olivia wrote about her experience covering the mayor-elect and how he’s already changed our politics. “Throw out the old rules,” she wrote. “What used to hurt politicians helps them now. Socialism is no longer a political liability. The public, at least in New York, wants cheaper housing, groceries, and childcare—immediately.”

What else? “No one cared that for many Jewish New Yorkers, the prospect of a Mayor Mamdani felt existential. The claims of antisemitism didn’t stick. No one believes in that anymore. They call it something else: anti-Zionism, and no, it’s not antisemitic. It’s justice.”

Read her whole dispatch here.

And fresh off co-hosting our election night livestream with our Will Rahn, the brilliant Reihan Salam had some thoughts on the new mayor as well. For Reihan, Mamdani can be thought of as an “accidental mayor” in the sense that very few of his own allies could imagine his victory just a few months ago.

So what now happens to New York, a place where millionaires have been steadily vanishing for more than a decade now? If Mamdani has his way, the ones who remain will be paying 60 percent of the city’s taxes to pay for the various goods and services he’s promised, like free buses and universal childcare. And if they leave . . .well, I’ll let Reihan explain what happens.

We’ve had so much great Mamdani coverage that I can’t include it all here. But I’ll end with this Ruy Teixeira piece on whether Democrats are celebrating a little too much and too soon. Make no mistake: Tuesday’s results were a gut punch for the GOP, but Ruy argues that Democrats still have major problems they have yet to address ahead of next year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Whether you’re hoping for Democrats to win or lose next year, this is something you’ll want to read.

Okay, one more: Read this fascinating Q&A with Peter Thiel. He explains to Sean Fischer why for years he has been predicting the rise of socialism in America:

It was a split-screen reality this week in American politics. While Democrats cheered their wins, the right was tearing itself apart. Things got rolling when Tucker Carlson gave a chummy interview to Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who has said “Jews have too much power in our society” and often praises Adolf Hitler.

Some on the right rushed to Carlson’s defense, saying that Fuentes—who also mentioned his profound love of Joseph Stalin on Tucker’s show—must be welcome on the right, or at least engaged with. Others warned that failing to stand up to the extremes of the right would be a catastrophic mistake. . . .

One person making the latter argument is Texas senator Ted Cruz. The battle over right-wing antisemitism has been brewing within the movement for a good while now. And Cruz has been sounding the alarm louder than most of his colleagues. He sat down with Peter Savodnik in Las Vegas and described this moment as an “existential fight” for conservatism.

“I can tell you the last conversation I had with Charlie Kirk several months ago—Charlie was a very good friend—was on exactly this topic, where both he and I were deeply concerned about rising antisemitism on the right, and we spent 30 minutes on the phone talking about how to fight this poison,” Cruz told Peter.

Read the whole thing.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, meanwhile, argued that this fight on the right is really about influencers versus actual conservatives. “The fight roiling the right isn’t about young people turning on Israel,” she says. “It’s a turf war between conservatives and content creators, between those who want votes and those who want views.” Read her piece here.

Finally, Victor Davis Hanson tried to make sense of the right’s growing antisemitic streak. I don’t want to spoil it, but this is the piece to read to make sense of why Jew-hatred is everywhere.

That’s it from me this week. But be on the lookout for a host of great stories this weekend, including Joe Nocera’s “Two Drinks With” the legendary Gay Talese, and Elliot Ackerman’s latest installment of “A Man Should Know,” which this week focuses on making friends, in addition to Suzy Weiss on Sydney Sweeney’s new film and much more.

See you next week.

Welcome back to Second Thought, where we think about the zeitgeist, then think about it some more. This week, three 22-year-olds became the youngest billionaires in history. How? Artificial intelligence, of course. Where? Obviously, San Francisco—where I recently spent a few days hanging out with the young founders and builders trying to cash in on the AI boom.

Down the block from Elon Musk’s old house, about 10 minutes from San Francisco International Airport, there’s an 18,000-square-foot mansion with a pool, a bocce court, and a koi pond that absolutely no one is enjoying. That’s because the property—which is sprawling, lush, and gated—is the home to 10 or so young men and women who rarely step outside, because their worlds are on their monitors.

They call the place AGI House—as in, artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical point where machines can outdo humans in all mental tasks—and here, wannabe tech titans sweat over their ideas for companies, attend networking events, sit through research summits on agenticism, and decline alcohol at happy hours—they’re there to discuss cybersecurity.

Essentially, it’s the Playboy Mansion for nerds.

The house is rented by Rocky Yu, a local real estate agent who runs AGI House. Jeremy Nixon, who has since splintered off to start another AGI House, was an early resident there. He and Yu are currently in a legal battle over who came up with the name. But that’s by the by. Today, standing in a grand dining room that’s been refigured with rows of cheap tables and dozens of chairs, Josh Payne, one of the original residents, tells me that AGI House is dipping its toe into incubation.

For the hundredth time since I had arrived in San Francisco just three hours before, I had to ask: What does that mean?

They say you should never meet your heroes because you’re bound to be disappointed. But that’s not always true. Let me tell you about the time I recently spent with the greatest magazine writer alive, Gay Talese.

“How nice to see you again, Joe,” he said graciously as he opened the door of his elegant town house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In truth, we barely know each other, having only met a handful of times over the years, usually at someone’s book party. Many years ago, he sent me a handwritten note congratulating me on a column of mine he liked back when I was at The New York Times. I still have it, and I still treasure it.

We were meeting at his home because, as he told me, “I don’t go out much anymore.” He continued, “I used to go to dinner parties or restaurants every night. I used to hang around all the usual places”—places like Elaine’s, the legendary haunt on 88th Street, where he could enjoy a good stiff martini and the company of the writers and editors who made it their joint for 50 years until it closed in 2011.

Talese is 93 now and needs a cane to get around. His angular face is handsome as ever, but his voice is a little creaky. Writing is difficult because he has Parkinson’s disease. He told me that his 92-year-old wife, Nan Talese, a legendary book editor whose writers included Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and George Plimpton, has a difficult time being on her feet for any length of time. “Every day I’m alive, I just want to stay at home so I can be with her,” he told me.

Five years ago, young people’s interest in socialism was often written off as stemming from entitlement, or from a lack of knowledge as to what “socialism” really was. The rise of politicians like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and millennials’ support for candidates like Senator Bernie Sanders, was largely shrugged off.

But not by Peter Thiel.

Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist behind PayPal and Palantir, is many things: a center of gravity in Silicon Valley, a boogeyman of the left, a vanguard of the counter-elite, and an early backer of Vice President J.D. Vance.

The kids I knew who were into it, the real ones—not the merely curious or the dilettantes or the false worshippers—gave up almost all of their material possessions. They dropped out of school, took an implicit vow of poverty, and roamed the country. They begged for food and rides and dressed in rags, sewing and patching their clothing in accordance with their anti-worldly views. This was the 1980s, an era of red meat and fancy cars, but they ate simple meals like rice and beans. If they had cars at all, they were beaters or vans that doubled as rough living quarters. They had an earnest and plainspoken manner; they were likely to exclaim with wonder and gratitude over the simplest offerings, like a sunset, a piece of pretty fabric, or a bowl of soup. They hated to cut their hair.

Whenever possible, they gathered in great numbers before their gurus and, often under the influence of drugs, threw themselves into whirling physical ecstasies. Although I was never a true devotee, I went to a few of these events in my teen years. At one of them, I remember watching a girl, skinny and freckled and dressed in a gauzy skirt and primitive leather sandals, sway her arms and twist her body, her eyes closed in what seemed like a meditative trance. Then she threw back her head and wailed the name of the main guru: “Jerrrrryyyyy!”

These were Deadheads, of course, not members of a Christian sect. But it could be hard to tell the difference between the superfans of the Grateful Dead and religious fanatics. In fact, I’m not sure there is much of a difference. I’d always thought the Dead and its culture were holdovers from the counterculture of the ’60s, but lately, as the age of atheism becomes a solid event that we can examine, possibly in the rearview mirror, I’ve begun to think they were holding out on something else, something actually entirely normal to every culture.