The Free Press

Welcome back to Tough Love with Abigail Shrier, an advice column from The Free Press. Every Thursday, our contributing editor will address your conundrums, with no hesitation and no sugarcoating. This week, Abigail answers a question from Matthew, a 26-year-old reader who’s recently had a spiritual awakening—and is worried it’s going to mess up his relationship. His girlfriend isn’t a fan of religion. Should he marry her or leave her? Scroll down to read Abigail’s advice.

Dear Abigail,

I’m currently in a long-term relationship with a woman whom I one day hope to marry. She is everything I have ever wanted in a partner—prudent, kind, gets along with just about everyone in my life. Most importantly, she and I have a shared vision of the life we want for ourselves: We have discussed the roles we wish to play in our household, where we would like to live, how many children we want to have, and so on. I often thank God that she exists.

My question relates to a development in my personal life that I worry may interfere with our relationship.

I’ve recently started to explore my relationship with God. Growing up, religion was not all that important to my family: I never went to church as a kid, and like most teens I found the concept of atheism cool and exciting. But in my mid-20s I’ve had a spiritual revelation of sorts. I am finding peace and understanding for what feels like the first time in my life. But I’m nervous that this will create a rift with my partner.

She is a staunch atheist—not merely agnostic, or someone who claims to “not know what’s out there”; she has a real adverse response to the existence of God. She grew up in a very conservative household that took religion very seriously (the literal antithesis to my upbringing)—but during her formative years, her parents’ loss of faith played a significant part in their rather ugly separation and divorce.

As someone who loves and cares for her deeply, I sympathize with her experiences. But as someone who aspires to have a strong relationship with God, I worry about her attitude toward Him. Our worldviews are very much at odds with each other, and I fear this is going to eventually have a profound impact on how we see our marriage and parenting our kids. And how we decide what the first principles of our shared life should be. I’ve expressed this concern to her, but I’m not sure if she shares it.

I have been very open with her about my faith journey and she is supportive for the most part, but I get a subliminal sense that she is starting to worry about me becoming some kind of religious lunatic, and I’m unsure of how to proceed. We have so much going for us, but also our relationship is largely untested at this point—we don’t have a mortgage to pay, we don’t have kids to feed. In short, life will continue to get difficult—and I want to know if we are set up to endure these struggles, or if we should part ways before there is no turning back.

Am I overthinking this?

—Matthew, 26

Dear Matthew,

When I was in college, women my age were always saying things like, “I’m very spiritual but not religious.” But for me, the reverse always seemed closer to the truth. I didn’t feel particularly close to God—but I felt certain He wanted me to keep kosher.

That brought me into mild conflict with my father’s mother, an American Jew of German extraction, and an atheist who never fully understood why my father and mother sent us to religious school. My grandmother only expressed her displeasure at the comparative religiosity of my parents’ home twice: once, when she thought I was making far too much of the bacon a restaurant had sprinkled on top of my salad, and once more, when she and I were alone in her sitting room. She peered up from a thick book cradled in her tiny lap and said, “You don’t really believe that God stuff, do you?”

It’s Thursday, January 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Are microplastics really bad for you? A crash course on the First Amendment in Minneapolis. The unlikeliest hero of the American Revolution. And much more.

But first: Is the world order coming apart at the seams?

If one speech summed up the mood among the elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, it was the one Canadian prime minister Mark Carney gave a day before Donald Trump showed up, amid the sturm und drang about Greenland.

Carney warned of a “rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.”

For ringing the alarm, Carney received a standing ovation. And he echoed the prevailing view at the conference: that globalization—and the rules and institutions that came with it—is in retreat.

Not so fast, says our columnist Tyler Cowen today. He says that while the politicians at Davos might have their own reasons to argue otherwise, the world is still globalizing—and more quickly than you might think. Read his dissent from the prevailing view in the Swiss Alps:

What about the speech by the man who appears to be driving so many of these trends? Wednesday was a good day for subscribers to the TACO view of the world: Trump Always Chickens Out. The president lowered the temperature in Davos, first ruling out taking Greenland by force in his speech (that it even needs to be said is remarkable), then withdrawing his threat of punitive tariffs against European countries. For the latest on Trump’s speech, Greenland, and everything else from an extraordinary week, catch our latest livestream. Niall Ferguson in Davos spoke to Rafaela Siewert about a world order in the balance, why Trump thinks we need Greenland, and more:

And, for more on Greenland, tune in to the latest episode of Conversations with Coleman. His guest this week is Heather A. Conley, an authority on Europe, NATO, and Arctic security. He asks how Greenland became one of the most strategically important places on Earth—and how this will change our future. Hit the play button below to listen to their conversation, or catch it wherever you get your podcasts.

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While many have heard of Dante’s Inferno, few know that his masterpiece really contains three parts, forming a trilogy that charts the journey from despair to redemption. For literature professor Joseph Luzzi, this is a story he knows all too well: After his wife was tragically killed in a car accident while eight months’ pregnant, leaving him widowed and a father on the same day, Dante’s Divine Comedy helped him overcome his grief and build a new life. Listen to his conversation with Shilo Brooks wherever you get your podcasts, or by clicking the play button below.

• A new winter storm is set to sweep across the South this weekend, threatening heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures. The extreme weather could be a “potentially catastrophic event from Texas to the Carolinas,” warned Ryan Maue, the former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• A police officer in Uvalde, Texas, has been found not guilty of child endangerment, more than three years after 21 people were killed in one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary.

• Federal immigration officers are asserting a sweeping power to enter American homes without a judge’s warrant. The policy, outlined in an internal ICE document, is a significant change to previous guidance and raises significant concerns about violating the Fourth Amendment.

• The House Oversight Committee recommended that the Clintons be held in contempt on Wednesday. The announcement came after Bill and Hillary declined to appear before the congressional body for a hearing on the Epstein files.

• The United States captured another Caribbean oil tanker with ties to Venezuela on Tuesday morning. The move marks the seventh seizure of a vessel for allegedly defying President Trump’s sanctions in the region.

• In a new court filing, the Trump administration disclosed that a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee shared confidential Social Security data without the agency’s knowledge. The document alleges that the employee leaked the data to a political advocacy group aiming to overturn election results in certain states.

• Minnesota Republican Michele Tafoya announced her bid for the Senate on Wednesday. Tafoya began her career as an NFL sideline reporter before becoming a conservative political commentator. “As Minnesota’s senator, I will clean up the system, fighting corruption, ending the fraud, and protecting your tax dollars,” Tafoya said.

• Prince Harry of England took the stand in a privacy case against the Daily Mail’s publisher on Wednesday. Harry is one of seven public figures who are plaintiffs in this case, including musician Elton John and actress Elizabeth Hurley.

Dante Alighieri is one of the most consequential poets in human history, and his The Divine Comedy is essential to understanding Western civilization itself. And yet, though most of us have heard of Inferno, Dante remains one of the least read of all the greats. His masterpiece unfolds in three parts—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—charting a journey …

Honestly is taking a pause. We’ll be back soon.

Greenland—a vast, frozen island most Americans could barely place on a map—has suddenly found itself at the center of a rapidly intensifying global contest. In this episode, I’m joined by Heather A. Conley, an authority on Europe, NATO, and Arctic security, to discuss how Greenland became one of the most strategically important places on Earth.

Heather e…

The big story from Davos is that globalization is in swift retreat. And that may well be what the insiders are saying to each other in speeches and at exclusive private parties. From the world outside the peaks of Switzerland, though, what I am seeing is that globalization, all things considered, is likely accelerating.

Take free trade. Though Donald Trump seems to be calling off his latest trade war, the United States has indeed retreated from free trade with a new era of tariffs. It’s a development I rue. But Canada just opened its market to Chinese cars. So Trump did in fact find the recipe to nudge an oft-protectionist Canada toward freer trade, though it is the opposite of what he might have been wishing for. Soon, Canada will have access to better and cheaper electric cars than what we can get in the United States. And even if you think that spyware could make those cars a security risk in Washington, D.C., due to spying possibilities, I am less worried about their proliferation in Quebec and Nova Scotia. Keep them out of Ottawa if need be.

Plastic is everywhere. We all know that. And we’ve all heard about the danger that plastic can pose to our health when specks of it from, say, soda bottles or take-out food containers wind up ingested.

For instance, there was a highly publicized study of cadaver brains in February 2025, using a new technique for finding plastic particles in the body, that concluded that in the most extreme cases, plastic shards made up 0.48 percent of the brain—enough to make a plastic spoon. Other studies, using the same technique, came to the same conclusion, leading to lots of shocking headlines and scary quotes from scientists. Matthew Campen, co-author of the plastic spoon study, even implied that plastic lodged in the brain might cause dementia.

Fast-forward to November, when another group of researchers published commentary in the journal Nature showing that the technique used to find all this plastic couldn’t distinguish the stuff from ordinary fat molecules. The Guardian, which had run some of the most alarmist headlines (“Microscopic Plastics Could Raise Risk of Stroke and Heart Attack, Study Says”), suddenly reversed course. Last week, it published a lengthy article slamming the research, with critics calling the original 2025 brain study a “joke.”

Over the past two weeks, Minneapolis has given the country a crash course in the First Amendment.

The actions of protesters and politicians, during and in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have become real-world lessons in the law of speech. The clashes have demonstrated which types of speech aren’t protected, along with passionate, angry, and unsettling speech that is protected. We’ve also gotten a chilling reminder of what goes wrong when the government pretends not to know the difference.

For starters, the Justice Department has issued grand jury subpoenas to Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, and at least three other Democratic officials in the state, as part of an investigation into whether state and local officials obstructed federal immigration enforcement. Grand jury matters are secret, so we may never see the subpoenas themselves. But the public justification keeps circling back to speech. Federal officials have portrayed Walz’s and Frey’s criticisms of ICE as incitement, which is not protected by the First Amendment.

Just weeks ago, few Americans were thinking about Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory. Then, in early January, Donald Trump announced he wanted to buy it. He went as far as to threaten eight European countries with escalating tariffs until the sale was approved.

The statement caused uproar in Europe. But this morning, at the World Economic Foru…

The Davos World Economic Forum, a yearly gathering of many of the world’s most influential people, is not usually the stage where leaders castigate each other in public. But this year is different, in large part because President Donald Trump insists that the U.S. take control of Greenland, long a Danish territory. In a speech yesterday in Davos, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said the West could no longer depend on an American-led international order. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney said. So is America’s global hegemony coming undone in Davos? Celebrated author, historian, and Free Press contributor Niall Ferguson is on the scene, and today he joins Rafaela Siewert to talk out what all this means for the U.S., Europe, and the world at large.

Don’t miss the livestream conversation at 12:45 p.m. ET, available to paid subscribers only. Click here to tune in.