The Free Press

In 2023, shortly before Hamas’s invasion of Israel, Oren Kessler published Palestine 1936, an acclaimed and masterful work that sheds light on the origins and history of an old conflict. This year, a movie covering the same period, Palestine 36, is short-listed for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. We asked Oren for his view, and to divine fact from fiction in a story “inspired by actual events” that, he reports, tells its tale without Jews. —The Editors

If there is one darkly positive consequence of the horrors that have engulfed the Middle East since the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, it is the renewed public interest in the conflict’s origins. It is a history I know intimately. My book, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict, published just months before the attacks, chronicles a seminal chapter in the conflict and its enduring consequences until today.

That renewed interest is visible in the film industry as well. Of the 15 films short-listed for this year’s Oscar for Best International Feature, three center on Palestinian stories—two of them period dramas. One is titled Palestine 36.

On January 3, U.S. troops landed in Venezuela’s capital and captured Nicolás Maduro in the middle of the night. The world was shocked when it saw the first images of Maduro, wearing a gray tracksuit, blindfold, and handcuffs, getting flown out of the country.

But to one bettor on Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market, the news may have been less surprising. The bettor, whom we know only by the username “Burdensome-Mix,” had created an account weeks earlier, and had placed a series of small bets on events in Venezuela. Then, hours before U.S. troops got to Caracas, the anonymous trader placed a $32,000 wager that Maduro would be out of power before January 31. The bet paid out about $400,000, a 12-fold profit in a matter of hours.

Soon after his big win, “Burdensome-Mix” deleted his account, leaving many to wonder who the bettor was, what he might have known about Maduro’s capture, and how he knew it.

Prediction markets like Polymarket are a project that has been more than three decades in the making. When the idea was first bandied about around 1990 by Robin Hanson, an economist now at George Mason University who is seen as the father of prediction markets, it seemed like the most outlandish of economic exercises. Hanson believed prediction markets could solve everything from government spending to colonizing Mars. Hanson speculated that having citizens bet on their preferred political outcomes—a form of government he dubbed “futarchy,” a portmanteau of future and anarchy—could be a better way of governing than voting.

The Trump administration can’t seem to stop tangling with journalists. The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson last week and seized two of her laptops, her phone, and a smartwatch. While the search was conducted as part of an investigation into a federal contractor charged with mishandling classified material and not the reporter herself, the raid has rattled the fourth estate.

The Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, wrote in a memo to his newsroom last week that the raid was “deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work.” Activist Sarah Leah Whitson compared the raid to the Saudi operation in 2018 to lure and murder Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement that warned: “Without assurances that journalists can protect their reporting materials, accountability journalism will suffer a major setback, eroding yet another mechanism for government accountability.”

These concerns are understandable in light of the administration’s open hostility to the press. President Donald Trump began his 2016 presidential campaign by railing against the journalists who covered his rallies. In November, he insulted a reporter at a press gaggle on Air Force One, saying, “Quiet, Piggy.” And his staff has followed his cue. The Pentagon this fall required its press corps to sign a pledge that, among other things, they would not publish or solicit information not authorized by the Department of Defense. Nearly all of the Pentagon press corps refused and lost official access to the building.

What’s in a currency value? If you are traveling abroad, it determines how expensive your trip will be. But in the geopolitical arena, currency values give you a rough guide as to which countries are rising or falling, and why.

Take Iran, a nation whose government may be on the verge of collapse. Or perhaps the theocracy will smash the resistance once and for all and move into full totalitarian mode. Either way, prospects for the country are highly uncertain.

It is thus no surprise that the Iranian currency, the rial, has fallen so low that on some exchanges its value is listed as zero. It’s not quite literally zero: The currency has not lost all of its value, as it still is used for many domestic transactions in Iran. But foreigners do not find it worth the trouble to trade the currency in open, liquid markets, given its very low value, uncertain future, and Iranian laws limiting trading in the currency at free market rates. Better to just forget about it.

The war over “sanctuary” policies may be reaching a climax. According to The Washington Post and CBS News, the Justice Department is investigating Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey for allegedly conspiring to impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The investigation—if it’s real and if it goes forward—will probably focus on what the White House called on Friday Walz’s and Frey’s “toxic combination of ‘sanctuary’ policies and anti-ICE rhetoric,” which “has created a climate of hostility that endangers federal officers and incites violence.”

What exactly are sanctuary policies? Are they legal, and could Walz or Frey be prosecuted for them?

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jonathan Eig reflects on the very last speech Dr. King ever gave: a profound display of devotion to the principles of a nation that had turned on him.

Didn’t Martin Luther King Jr. have someplace better to be on April 3, 1968, than Memphis, Tennessee, in support of a sanitation workers’ strike?

Not really.

By then, King was almost five years removed from his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington. His powers were waning. The civil rights movement was waning, too. The Vietnam War had shattered the liberal consensus for King’s proposed civil and economic policies, and protests in American cities were erupting in very un-Kingian violence. In a private phone call recorded by the FBI, King told one of his friends that he felt as if no one was listening to him anymore. And he was right: When asked in a Gallup survey how they felt about King, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they disapproved of his activities.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, the Metropolitan Opera has reimagined the forlorn lover in “Carmen” as an ICE agent, and Liel Leibovitz is not happy about it; Sascha Seinfeld writes an ode to the dearly departed app that taught her what a meme is. And more! But first. . .

Imagine a world in which you could spend all day watching television, drinking gin and tonics, and ignoring the phone when it rings because someone else will pick it up. In which you don’t have to fight for anything, or work very hard, or try to charm someone into going on a date with you. Sounds pretty good, right?

Wrong, says Rod Dreher. A world with no struggle, no hardship, no effort is not a world worth living in. That was the lesson of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, published in 1932, and it’s the lesson of its modern-day descendant, the Apple TV show Pluribus.

Written by Vince Gilligan, who gave us Breaking Bad, the show imagines what it would be like to live in a very high-tech, very relaxing dystopia, in which nobody disagrees or offends, because everyone is living a life of endless ease. The protagonist is a woman who resists—who’s fighting for the right to be miserable, and annoyed, and passionate, and free.

You’ll root for her, says Rod. In a wonderfully enlightening essay, he explains why Pluribus—which gives us everything we want, then reminds us that “to be human is not to be perfect”—is essential viewing for anyone currently living a comfortable life.

After this week’s news that the “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams had died, Coleman Hughes wrote an excellent essay about how Adams made him a better thinker. We also ran a great excerpt of a new book by Baptist pastor Ryan P. Burge about why his churches keep closing. Catch up on both—plus the latest column from Arthur Brooks:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our producer Isaac Grafstein for his recommendations . . .

📚 Read . . . I somehow made it this far in life without ever reading Catch-22, but I finally picked it up recently and was transfixed. With global tensions mounting, Joseph Heller’s classic satire about the absurdity of war is the perfect novel for this moment—and it’s also very funny. If your attention span has been hopelessly degraded by the internet, listen to this podcast about the book instead.

💆‍♂️Buy . . . After a proper dose of postwar disillusionment, it’s time for some self-care. I recently tried out a scalp spa. Have you ever seen the crusty, Parmesan-like skin on your head under a microscope? Neither had I. But that’s what happens in a scalp spa. I know it doesn’t sound relaxing, but I promise that it’s very satisfying to get the flakes scrubbed away and then look under the microscope again, at your squeaky clean scalp, like a pressure-washed driveway or freshly Zamboni’d ice. It’s also good for hair growth.

🍳 Eat . . . Peking duck. There is nothing better. If you’ve never had it, I strongly suggest organizing a group dinner immediately and demolishing one. Fair warning, though: This dish may inspire a sudden and powerful urge to renounce your American citizenship and move to Beijing forever.

Behold, a still from the beautifully shot “Pluribus,” which Rod Dreher recommends in today’s Weekend Press:

That’s all, folks! Enjoy the weekend.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

“In a sense,” said Nevin Shapiro, “I can be looked at as a pioneer. I was way ahead of the curve.”

Well, yes, I suppose. In a sense. Two decades before the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling that college football players could receive money for endorsements and the like, Shapiro, then in his 30s, was paying University of Miami football players, under the table, to play football. And not only that: He was throwing parties for them at his lavish home in Miami. He was picking up the tab at strip clubs. He was taking them out on his yacht. He was providing them with women. Anything they needed, Shapiro took care of. “I spent millions on the team back then.”

Shapiro, who’d made millions through a business that distributed groceries, loved the team. And he hated the iron rule of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which back then held that, while coaches and administrators could get rich from college sports, any player who took money to play their sport would fry in hell. Or at least be banned from college sports if they were caught.

Shapiro made a mockery of these rules, and for a long time, he did not get caught.

Hey kids! Suzy’s on a no-phone retreat this week, so I’m taking over Second Thought—hunched over my laptop, or lying flat on my back with it perched on my stomach like a seagull on a whale. In keeping with this week’s collective 2016 nostalgia, I want to start by revisiting the adorable social media app we almost forgot about. Like any baby animal of any species, it was irresistible at first. And then life engaged with it, it engaged with life, and the innocence drained out fast. Hope you enjoy!

When I was 13 my family hired a “manny” named Marcus Johns from Tallahassee, Florida. He was in his late teens, and he was more than a babysitter; he was an entertainer, singer, dancer, game inventor, video editor, freestyle rapper, and drummer, a grown-up kid with an outsize personality and cartoonish lifeguard six-pack. At my bat mitzvah he was the star of the show as my friends swarmed around him. But I didn’t mind, as I was, obviously, infatuated.

One afternoon my mom showed us a new social media app she’d heard about. It was called Vine, built on six-second looping videos—created, consumed, and “revined” (reposted.)

When the app was launched in 2012, the time constraint felt oddly specific, like Twitter’s original 140-character limit. But users found their footing, embraced the parameter, and started to break through. A driver passes a sign and says, “Road work ahead? Uh. . .yeah, I sure hope it does!” A little girl with a lisp stands in a field of geese and marvels, “Look at all those chickens.” A Frenchman asks the camera, “Why is everybody afraid of love?” then screams “Love!” at a woman shopping for groceries. A boy in a choir uses a helium balloon to reach a high note. Suddenly, the limitation wasn’t a bug. It was a revelation. Turns out, six seconds is plenty.

Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our weekly series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, John Stossel, the famously libertarian former ABC and Fox journalist, explained why, at 78, beach volleyball has helped him stay young. This week, David Margolick describes the pleasures of being 74 with a mother who’s almost 102.

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When my new book, When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy, recently appeared, my mother mobilized.

First, she ordered a dozen copies to send to her friends—which, by momentarily jacking up my Amazon ranking, made her middle son feel good. She quickly turned her dining room table into a command post, covered with the promotional flyers she’d had me commission from my publisher and the envelopes into which she’d stuff them. She began sleeping fitfully, hounded by nightmares of not getting to the post office until just after it closed.

I guess the proud mothers of many authors would do the same thing. But two weeks ago, I turned 74. And come this March, my mother will turn 102. Having a parent so old, and remaining someone’s son so long, proves one thing about aging: It happens at different rates for different people. In my case, in this as in many other respects, I am a late bloomer, a perpetual Peter Pan. For better or worse (actually, it’s surely some of each), I still feel very youthful. Or very immature. Or both.

While all of us regularly remember that we’ll die, I don’t dwell on it much more than when the realization first hit me as a boy. True, scrolling all the way down to my birth year on all those online forms now seems to take forever, like reaching Wyoming under “State.” And while my synapses fire more slowly now, making names and adjectives and even the spellings of elementary words ever more elusive, I don’t assume I’m losing my wits, or that my best or happiest or most productive years are behind me.

In fact, freed from various past constraints (and thanks to an insistent editor), I feel this new book of mine is my best: I’m finally finding more of my own voice, with still more of it, I hope, to unearth. At the age, to repeat, of 74. (Just FYI, Ernest Hemingway was 61 when he died, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was gone at 44.)