In the wake of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s landslide election defeat, populist conservatives and other thinkers in the “heterodox” intellectual space have been mounting a curious defense of the outgoing leader.

Through a 16-year process of extreme gerrymandering, the weakening of checks and balances, and the dragooning of independent media, Orbán transformed Hungary into what he called an “illiberal democracy.” His strongman tactics and confrontational rhetoric earned the country, a land of almost 10 million people on the periphery of Europe, an outsize role in international affairs, eliciting opprobrium from a Western liberal establishment that portrayed him as an autocrat. But according to his quasi-defenders, Orbán’s voluntary relinquishment of power proves that he was never the authoritarian, much less the out-and-out dictator, his critics claimed him to be.

“It seems commonsensical to say that if an ‘autocrat’ loses an election, he wasn’t an autocrat after all,” my friend Mike Pesca wrote in The Free Press. Rod Dreher, one of the many conservative intellectuals whom the Orbán government welcomed to Budapest, posted sarcastically, “But. . . but. . . but, I was told by so many experts and journalists in the West that this would never happen, that Orbán is a fascist dictator who would never surrender power!” And New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asserted that “strong political parties that bend the rules to entrench their power and succumb to corruption are a consistent feature of democracy qua democracy. And if your entrenched ruling party can lose everything in a wave election, you are not living in an authoritarian state.”

As news sites like Military Times first reported last week, the government is moving ahead with a proposal to start automatically registering American men ages 18–26 for the draft starting this December.

In practice, all this actually means is that men in that cohort will lose a chore: They were already required by law, under penalty of up to five years in prison, to sign up for the draft and to notify the government of any changes of address within 30 days. The system was instituted in its current form by the warlike Jimmy Carter on July 2, 1980. So for the last 46 years, we’ve had a situation where many young men routinely committed a serious federal crime every time they move.

Making draft registration automatic rather than something that requires filling out a form, then, is really a minor good governance reform by the Trump administration. It means the country can maintain its theoretical reserve stock of draftable men bureaucratically organized without, as a function of that, threatening millions of Americans with prosecution if they forget to do paperwork properly.

American fertility rates are falling and some right-wingers know who to blame: the much-derided “girlboss.”

Katie Miller, a podcast host and the wife of top Trump staffer Stephen Miller, warned her followers that “AMERICA IS IN A FULL-SCALE BIRTH RATE COLLAPSE,” saying that women’s “biological destiny is to have babies—not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.” Emma Waters, author and policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, posted that “Girlboss feminism has a body count—in birth rates.” At First Things, Inez Stepman of the Independent Women’s Forum argued that the rise of the professional woman is the result of taxpayer subsidies and policies that discriminate against men. Get rid of those “unjust incentives and penalties,” she suggests, and more women will pursue “traditional family life.”

These critiques of professional women are part of a broader shift in attitudes about how young women choose to live. The age of millennial feminism, which emphasized work as the core of one’s identity, was dominant from about 2008 to 2020. But that era is coming to a close with few defenders. Take the reaction to a new memoir by the writer Lindy West, a leading light in the movement whose recent defense of polyamory was greeted by a near-universal shrug of disinterest, even disapproval. Many women are now searching for a better balance of work and home life—some satisfying middle ground between the sourdough-baking trad lifestyle and the 60-hour-a-week grindset mentality.

Iran has scattered mines throughout the Strait of Hormuz. Some sit on the sea floor, some bob free atop the waves, and some are tethered in wait beneath the surface. Iran has even admitted that it lost track of some of them.

Getting rid of enough of these mines to restore commercial shipping traffic is a huge priority for the U.S. Navy, which is beginning mine-clearing operations in the strait as part of President Donald Trump’s plan to blockade Iran. The Defense Department said on Monday that underwater drones would “join the clearance efforts in the coming days.”

But the Navy also has another not-so-secret weapon: dolphins.

Since 1959, the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program has trained bottlenose dolphins to find and mark the locations of mines that could endanger military or civilian ships. Dolphins have served in the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War, and both Operation Noble Eagle and Operation Enduring Freedom, launched after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They’ve guarded harbors and ships, protected a command ship in the Persian Gulf, and hunted for enemy swimmers, according to the U.S. Naval Undersea Museum.

There are few things as universal, as relatable, as the idea of being cut down to size. If I told you that I’d had an interaction with someone—a boss, a relative, a particularly tyrannical bathroom attendant at the local Chuck E. Cheese—that left me feeling about two inches tall, you would, of course, understand exactly what I meant.

And perhaps relatability was the aim of The Miniature Wife, a new series that landed on Peacock last week. The show stars Elizabeth Banks as Lindy Littlejohn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who gets accidentally miniaturized by her scientist husband, Les. The problem, which is standard-issue in stories like these, is that the technology only functions properly in one direction—which is to say, every time Les tries to restore a miniaturized object to its original size, it explodes.

Lindy’s accident (although, as Les admits later, it was more like accidentally-on-purpose) comes at a symbolically laden moment. Although Lindy’s first novel became a bestseller, she wrote it 20 years ago—and ever since, she has been, well, shrinking. Away from the spotlight, away from her work, into the small and wholly unappreciated role of Midwesterner, mother, and supportive spouse to a husband who wants (and, after the way he supported her, arguably deserves) his turn to shine. When she screams, “Make me big again,” it can be understood as both a literal request as well as a professional, even existential, cri de coeur.

Two years ago, in the wake of burgeoning antisemitism after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, Elise Stefanik sat across from the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania and asked them a simple question: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct? Their non-answers…

Looming over every development, negotiation, and controversy in the ongoing war with Iran is a persistent question: Could this be the prelude to World War III?

It’s not an unreasonable concern. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is squeezing the global economy. Iran’s nuclear ambitions remain at the center of high-stakes negotiations. All the while, China—reportedly aiding Iran in targeting U.S. military sites—watches closely, waiting for the right moment to launch an attack it has spent decades preparing for: an invasion of Taiwan.

This would mark the biggest crisis of this century—the moment when tensions between the United States and its foremost rival finally come to a head, and the fate of an island at the center of the world’s most critical high-tech supply chains hangs in the balance. And it is a scenario for which, according to the author of today’s Big Read, we have no plan.

Eyck Freymann is the author of a new book, Defending Taiwan, and he offers a sweeping examination of this looming conflict, and what the United States must do to prevent it. Today’s essay, adapted from the book, drops us into the opening hours of a Taiwan crisis—and explains why our failure to learn from the Iran war may already be pushing us closer to global economic disaster than we realize. —The Editors

The strike comes without warning. A night watchman streaming television dramas on his smartphone tries to refresh the page. On the seafloor beneath the Taiwan Strait, underwater drones and frogmen are severing the dozens of undersea cables connecting Taiwan to the outside world. A university student scrolling social media assumes there is something wrong with the dormitory Wi-Fi. The bandwidth keeps slowing and slowing, until nothing will load at all. Then cyberattacks start to cripple the power plants that service downtown Taipei. Neon signs and streetlights go dark. Taipei’s broad boulevards are now illuminated only by headlights of passing cars and the moonlight.

Dear Abigail,

I have been happily married for seven years, and I’ve known my husband for eight and a half. Like any couple, we’ve had our ups and downs, but overall we’ve grown closer, while building a life together and raising our three young children.

This week, completely out of the blue, I received an email from someone I don’t know. She said she felt I deserved to know something important—that over 10 years ago, my husband sexually assaulted her.

I spoke to my husband immediately. He told me that around that time, he had a brief relationship with this woman, and they hooked up a few times. He said she became unstable and obsessive, and that he cut off contact. According to him, she later accused him of rape, which he firmly denies.

Understandably, this has shaken me.

I trust my husband. Our marriage is built on that foundation. He has earned my complete trust in a thousand ways in our time together and has always been a man of upstanding character. I know in his heart he is a kind and good man.

And yet, I can’t ignore the pit in my stomach.

I’m torn about what to do next. Should I respond to her and hear her side of the story? Or is trusting my husband enough?

I don’t want to invite unnecessary chaos or give attention to someone who may be unstable. But I also don’t want to dismiss something serious or risk being naive.

—A deeply conflicted wife, 35

Dear Deeply Conflicted Wife,

A brilliant friend, a fellow law student at the time, once pointed out to me an ontological unfairness in criminal law. “You ever notice that the criminal code mostly punishes male-typical forms of violence?” he said. “Female-typical social violence—rumor, cruel innuendo, ostracism, alienating friends from you—largely goes ignored?” It was the sort of unconventional insight that came at me sideways and stuck. Because, of course, he was right.

Pop another guy in the nose, and you’ve committed an assault. You face expulsion from school or even a criminal record. But spread a devastating rumor, level a false accusation—and you can inflict bottomless, ongoing anguish on your target without anyone calling the cops on you. You’ll rarely even suffer reputational consequences yourself.

Over a decade after she briefly dated your husband, a woman has detonated a dirty bomb in your family. Her conduct will leave no physical trace. But by inviting you to mistrust your husband, the emotional pain and havoc visited on your family are potentially limitless. Do you imagine she is honestly trying to protect you or your children from your husband of nearly eight years? Does that seem even remotely credible? Don’t lie to yourself: It isn’t.

With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

The shekel-U.S. dollar exchange rate has fallen below 3 NIS/USD for the first time in 30 years. It’s been so long that around the last time the shekel was this strong, Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister, Aryeh Deri was the head of Shas, and the Israel Defense Forces were in southern Lebanon.

The strength of the shekel has its pros and cons. Let’s start with the downsides.

For Israeli exporters, a strong shekel acts as a direct tax on competitiveness. Because companies earning foreign currency must convert it to pay local shekel expenses, a massive chunk of their profit margin simply evaporates in the exchange rate. This is also true on the macro scale: Israel’s sovereign wealth fund generated an impressive 18.4 percent profit in U.S. dollars in 2025. However, because the dollar weakened against the shekel, that return shrank to just 3.8 percent in shekel terms, wiping out NIS 1.1 billion. Returns on other foreign investments face similar contractions.

It’s Thursday, April 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: what it means that Anthropic’s new AI can break into almost any computer system on Earth. How Sudan became a killing field. The ancient wisdom that helped build a $5 billion company. Eli Lake on the prospect of fresh peace talks with Iran. Peter Savodnik on the Democrats’ Hasan Piker problem. And much more.

But first: a conversation with the man accused of trying to kill Sam Altman.

This week, 19-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, a part-time community college student from Texas, was charged with attempting to kill Open AI CEO Sam Altman. In the early hours of Friday morning, authorities say, he threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home in San Francisco. He allegedly then traveled to OpenAI’s headquarters and threatened to burn down the building. When he was arrested, police say, he was carrying with him an anti-AI manifesto, and a list of the names and addresses of other AI CEOs.

Months before all of this, in late January, reporter and podcast producer Andy Mills had a conversation with Moreno-Gama. He and his colleagues were making a podcast about debates around AI, and had found the teenager in a Discord server called Stop AI, where he was posting in support of violence to stop the technology from triggering the extinction of mankind. As Moreno-Gama put it, he was interested in “Luigi-ing some tech CEOs”—an apparent reference to Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Andy asked if Moreno-Gama would speak to him, and Moreno-Gama agreed.

“As Moreno-Gama told me his backstory,” Mills writes today, “I realized that he was, in a way, an embodiment of our society’s fears about the social experiment we’ve been running on Gen Z.”

Read Andy’s piece on what he learnt when he spoke to the man now accused of attempting to kill Sam Altman—and listen to the conversation yourself.

—The Editors

Fears about the existential risks posed by the rapid pace of AI development are not confined to the radical fringe. Indeed, some of those at the helm of top AI firms are themselves concerned about the harm their creations might cause. Last week, Anthropic announced Mythos, a new model so powerful the company said it wouldn’t release it to the public. The model, it claimed, could find and exploit vulnerabilities in almost any software system on Earth—a capacity that could wreck havoc instantly. We wanted to know more about why Anthropic is so worried about Mythos, so Sean Fischer spoke to the company’s chief science officer, Jared Kaplan.

And what does the new threat of AI cyberattacks mean for everyday people? Ryan Fedasiuk is a China and technology expert who once survived a state-sponsored cyberattack. In his piece today, he explains what you can do to protect yourself in this new tech landscape—and why “we are already living through the early stages of a much less secure world.”

For more from Eli on the war, don’t miss his debate with NonZero podcast host Robert Wright. Listen to their conversation here.

Conversations with Coleman and Spiral have been nominated for Webby awards—and the people will decide the winners. Coleman is neck-and-neck with Oprah’s podcast in the Talk Show category, while Spiral has a narrow lead in the Crime and Justice category. Voting closes today—and you can vote for either or both of our shows below.

Vote for Coleman

Vote for Spiral

• On Wednesday, a jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster guilty of illegally monopolizing the ticketing market, a victory for attorneys who rejected the DOJ’s earlier settlement and continued to pursue a lawsuit. Last week, Poppy Damon and Evan Gardner went in depth on the trial in “Did Live Nation Kill Live Music?”, featuring independent promoter Tommy Dorfman, who sued Live Nation 15 years ago and now has said the verdict confirms the company didn’t just break antitrust law; it destroyed the independent music business entirely.

• Influencer Clavicular, known for promoting extreme “looksmaxxing” and openly using meth to stay lean, was hospitalized after suffering a suspected overdose during a Miami livestream Tuesday night. He posted afterward that substances are “just a cope trying to feel neurotypical while being in public.” (For more on the looksmaxxing craze, read River Page’s “The Boys Breaking Their Bones to Be Hotter.”)

• Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk pulled out of a highly anticipated Tuesday event with Vice President J.D. Vance after receiving “very serious threats,” part of a relentless harassment campaign targeting Charlie Kirk’s widow since his assassination last September.

• Trump threatened to fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell if he doesn’t resign after his term ends May 15, escalating a standoff between the two. Powell, facing a DOJ probe into a costly Fed renovation project, has called the investigation politically motivated and vowed to stay until it concludes.

• Despite massive star power from Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, and Sydney Sweeney, Euphoria season 3’s debut drew just 356,000 linear viewers and a 44 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a disappointing return for a show that was once appointment television.

• Ye postponed his June concert in Marseille after France’s interior ministry moved to ban it, following the UK’s outright ban on his entry to the country last week over his history of antisemitism. The decision is part of mounting European resistance to his attempted comeback tour.

• Average tax refunds are up about $350 this year to $3,462. But that’s far below the White House’s promised boost of more than $1,000 from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with rising gas prices from the war with Iran eating up much of the projected gains.