The Free Press

It’s Friday, January 23. Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Friday Front Page.

For as long as The Free Press has existed, Fridays have started only one way: with TGIF. And fear not, Free Pressers, that is not going to change. (If you missed Nellie’s latest, catch it here.) But here’s the thing: There’s a lot going on out there—a lot of news to make sense of. And so, starting today, we’re introducing a Friday edition of our daily email.

As you’ll see, The Friday Front Page is a little different from what we offer Monday through Thursday. First of all, it’ll land later in the morning. It will also include a roundup of some of the unmissable stories we’ve published that you may not have had time to read in the midweek maelstrom—and the latest edition of our advice column, Tough Love with Abigail Shrier.

But like any Front Page, this one will bring you plenty of up-to-the-minute news and sense-making that are the bread and butter of The Free Press.

So, without further ado, let’s get to the stories. We start with the tale of the woman who gave AI control of her life.

Would you hand over the keys to everything in your life—your bank account, your inbox, your health data, your calendar—to a robot?

That’s what start-up founder Molly Cantillon did, building something she acknowledges might seem a little creepy: a “personal panopticon,” an all-seeing AI that knows every detail of her life. She built it using Claude Code, a coding assistant that requires no technical know-how, and is available to everyone from Anthropic’s Claude AI. Before long it was paying her parking tickets, setting the time for her morning alarm, managing her stock portfolio, and more.

Molly trusts AI with some of the most important things in her life, and admits she couldn’t live without it. Does that make her a slave to this extraordinary new technology—or freer than the rest of us? And now that there’s nothing stopping you from building your own personal panopticon, would you? Should you? Read Molly’s piece and decide for yourself.

—Josh Code

It hasn’t exactly been a quiet week. There was Trump’s war of words with Europe over Greenland, ongoing questions about what comes next in Iran, disorder in Minneapolis, and more. Here are some of the Free Press stories on all that and more that you might have missed.

Minneapolis is ground zero for the biggest fight in domestic politics right now. Clashes between ICE and protesters, and the federal government and state officials, have dominated the news. As Greg Lukianoff, among the most consistent and principled defenders of free expression in the country, wrote this week, they have also offered a real-time lesson in how the First Amendment works. Read his essay on how the fight over deportations is testing Americans’ commitment to open discourse.

Carrie McKean’s latest dispatch tackles the subject at the heart of these protests: deportations. And it does so with the kind of nuance and empathy so often missing from reporting on the subject. She tells the story of Maribis Beleño, who was sent back to Venezuela without her children—and the Trump-voting pastor who had a plan to get them home.

Rod Dreher voted for Trump and says he agrees with the president that the U.S. should acquire Greenland. But, as he wrote in his column this week, he’s appalled at the way the president has been browbeating the Europeans over it. He reports on how even those on the continent usually sympathetic to Trump were angered by his actions this week.

Just when you think you’ve heard the craziest cancellation possible, another one comes along and makes you realize that the excesses of the past decade were even worse than you thought. Kat Rosenfield brings you the latest such saga. It’s the story of Jay Asher, author of the YA bestseller Thirteen Reasons Why, whose life was destroyed by anonymous #MeToo gossip. Now, for the first time, Asher is telling his side of the story.

When the Iranian people flooded the streets to call for a better future, the regime shut down the internet. The goal was to make it harder for the protesters to coordinate with one another—and to cover up the murder of thousands in a bloody crackdown. Iran’s pro-democracy activists have been preparing for such a shutdown for years, smuggling Starlink terminals into the country so that people are still able to get the message out. In their latest video report, Rafaela Siewert and Tanya Lukyanova meet the people making it happen. Watch it here:

The Front Page will be back on Monday morning. Until then, look out for the Weekend Press—which this week will be answering the zeitgeist’s question of the week: Is it okay for Brooklyn Beckham to stop talking to his mom because she danced inappropriately at his wedding?

Brooklyn Beckham has spent most of his adult life trying on personas in the way that rich children with famous parents often do. First he was a photographer, dropping out of art school after just one year, but not before gracing us with a book of photos including one of a barely visible elephant with the caption “elephants in Kenya. so hard to photograph but incredible to see,” and another of a blurry dining table. “i like this picture,” he wrote under the latter, “it’s out of focus but you can tell there’s a lot going on.” Soon after that, Brooklyn became a chef; then a wine collector, stating that his favorite bottle of wine costs a cool £2,500; then, a model. Each phase arrived with flashing lights, fully branded and merchandised, and collapsed just as quickly. The pictures were bad, the food looked like crap, and the wine recommendations were a punch in the face to anyone who wasn’t a Rockefeller or a Rothschild. The internet responded with mockery, which was effective and largely deserved.

But this week, Brooklyn has managed the unthinkable. He has earned my sympathy, which, given he has no aptitude nor any apparent shame or insecurity, was pretty hard to do. On Monday night, he posted a long statement on Instagram, in which he accused his parents—former footballer David Beckham and former pop star Victoria Beckham—of having sent his younger brothers to “attack” him on social media, of interfering in his marriage, and of treating one of the few genuinely private milestones of his adult life—his wedding—like an Instagram opportunity.

NEW YORK — One of the great advantages to growing up in the Northeast is the occasional snow day. Yet here in the region’s biggest city, kids will likely be subjected to silly and ineffectual “remote learning” if, as predicted, Mother Gaia drops a foot of snow on us over the weekend.

That means that instead of a day of snowball fights and sledding, the city’s kids will be stuck staring at a screen in their bedrooms.

There is still time for our new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to reverse course; on Wednesday, he said he would make a final decision as forecasts become clearer. But that announcement came just after his handpicked schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, said that schools will go remote in the event of a large storm.

Hello and welcome back. Just one announcement today, which is that Coleman Hughes will be talking to that wonderful skeptic Michael Shermer on February 9. The topic is: How to Tell What’s True When Everyone’s Yelling. Seems. . . topical. And it’ll be at the Comedy Cellar, so you know it’s a good vibe. There will be drinks. Get your tickets here.

Now to the news.

→ Trump’s Board of Peace(™): President Donald J. this week has launched his Board of Peace. It’s a parallel United Nations, but run by the United States and Trump is the leader of it, indefinitely. Will it replace the United Nations? It “might,” he said, but later said the board would have “tremendous potential with the United Nations.” So really he’s just creating more competition for international federations. A free market for free markets! By the way, everyone’s invited to Trump’s version of the UN: Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, even the Pope. No one is quite sure what the new Board of Peace means, exactly. “The pope has received an invitation and we are considering what to do,” the top Vatican diplomat told journalists. “I believe it will be something that requires a bit of time for consideration before giving a response.” Does the Board of Peace have an army? A constitution? Does it include Trump golf club memberships? Gift bags? Is it just that you get invited to Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff’s text chain? All we know for sure is that it costs $1 billion for a permanent seat on the Trump Board of Peace, which is just a little less than your average private K–8 school board seat.

When news broke about how expensive membership would be—ONE BILLION BIG ONES—the White House Rapid Response team pushed back. “This is misleading. There is no minimum membership fee to join the Board of Peace,” they wrote. Okay, cool, no membership fee! But then their next sentence: “This simply offers permanent membership to partner countries who demonstrate deep commitment to peace, security, and prosperity.” Okay, well. So. It’s not a membership fee, it’s just a demonstration of deep commitment that you want to keep your seat. This is like when the FP business team debates whether to rebrand our subscriptions as memberships. Like, I’m okay with that, I won’t fight it, but let’s all be adults here—it’s a subscription to a digital magazine, albeit with America’s most gorgeous Friday columnists. But it’s not a velvety club to drink a martini in. The United Nations, that den of iniquity, should absolutely be disbanded. I’m not sure I would replace it with the team behind the Trump Steak of the Month club and such, but no one else is offering. Not unrelated: Here is New Gaza, presented by Jared Kushner:

What is this, a clothing website I almost bought something from two years ago? And look at that new Board of Peace logo! It’s so. . . shiny and gold. Wasn’t NATO kind of the original Board of Peace? Are we ditching that one too?

A few months ago, I surrendered to the Matrix. I plugged all of my information—bank accounts, email, investments—into Claude Code, a coding assistant run by Anthropic’s Claude AI, and started letting it automate my life.

It almost happened by accident. For context, I’m the founder of NOX, an AI-assisted inbox organizing tool, and I have a very busy schedule. I was making commitments that I couldn’t keep track of and had become so overwhelmed by thousands of notifications that I had put my phone in a perpetual state of Do Not Disturb. I was desperate and Claude promised salvation. All I had to do was give it every bit of data about my life and it began coding “agents”—little AI helpers living in your computer—to accomplish all the tasks I needed to do.

It’s a personal panopticon. This isn’t the first time in history that our every click has been tracked. It’s just the first time that we can use it for our own benefit. Tech companies harvest terabytes of behavioral data from us. They guard it, store it, and analyze it for profit, not people. We are tracked, monitored, and studied by systems we cannot access, much less understand. It is unlikely we will ever be able to delete these tranches of extremely personal data scraped from decades of internet use. But now, we can use the watchtower to make our lives better, freeing up time and mental space. All it takes is a little elbow grease.

The first thing I asked Claude to do was tackle the subscriptions I pay for and never use. Gym memberships, streaming subscriptions, and cell service providers are banking on the fact that you’re too tired, too overworked, and too forgetful to cancel.

If you want to understand the philosophy behind Donald Trump’s new Board of Peace and his vision for a “Gaza-Lago” resort city in a rebuilt war zone, no political or historical tract will be helpful. To understand Trump’s gambit to end the enduring war between Israel and the Palestinians, you’ll need Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking.

Peale’s text, which Trump has credited as a major inspiration for his personal philosophy, helps explain the wildly optimistic vision for the decimated Gaza Strip that the president unveiled Thursday at Davos. As Peale writes, “When you embrace the power of positive thinking, you unlock a world of infinite potential.”

When fentanyl arrived in Washington, D.C., around 2014, none of our patients in the methadone clinic knew they were consuming it. They thought they were buying their usual heroin. But the Mexican cartels and major distributors that trafficked heroin across the border were starting to mix in fentanyl, a lab-synthesized opioid. Even the local dealers were unaware.

Our patients could sense that something was different, though. At 50 times the potency of heroin, how could they not? The high from the fentanyl component of what they had just snorted or injected came on more quickly and intensely than did heroin, thereby accelerating addiction to the drug. For dealers, this ensured an even more faithful customer base.

The mayors and governors behind “sanctuary” policies are tearing apart the constitutional order. By encouraging illegal migrants to enter the U.S. and shielding them from deportation, sanctuary jurisdictions are directly thwarting federal law. These policies should be struck down by the courts, and with the Justice Department’s investigations into the efforts of Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey to obstruct federal immigration policy, this appears to be underway.

Defenders of sanctuary policies claim they are valid because they don’t directly impede federal enforcement. Sanctuaries merely ban state or local authorities from cooperating with the feds. But that minimizes their actual obligations under federal law. The United States Code lays out strict rules for how illegal migrants must be dealt with, and the rules apply to state and city governments along with individuals. Anyone who knowingly or recklessly “encourages or induces an alien . . . to reside in the United States” may be imprisoned or fined by federal authorities.

When Maribis Beleño boarded the chartered deportation flight in El Paso, Texas, on August 8, 2025, she remembers frantically scanning the rows of seats. During her month in the detention facility, she says, she had reminded the guards and immigration officers—anyone who would listen—that if she was going to be deported, she couldn’t leave without her three young children, who had entered the United States with her.

“Each day, I gave them the address of my cousin who was looking after my children,” Maribis, 27, told me, through an interpreter. She says she’d write directions to the small apartment in Dallas on any scrap of paper she could find. “Each time the guards told me, ‘Don’t worry! When you are deported, your children will meet you at the airport.’”

She told me the immigration judge at her final hearing had told her the same thing.

But when she got to the airport, her children—who are 5, 10, and 12—weren’t there. And they weren’t on the plane, either.

“You’re fired” was one of Donald Trump’s favorite things to say long before he became president. In the White House, he’s said it to more top appointees than any past commander-in-chief.

But President Trump crossed a line when, last August, he tried to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Cook is one of three Democratic appointees on the seven-member board. Replacing her could make the board more willing to adopt the interest rate cuts that Trump wants.

It was the first time in U.S. history that a president had sought to remove one of the Fed’s governors, who by statute can be fired only for cause. Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard argument in Cook’s case, and it didn’t go so well for the White House.