Hundreds of years ago, somebody in a Southeast Asian jungle decided to gnaw on a leaf. It gave him a burst of energy, and he told all his friends about it. For centuries afterward, people in Southeast Asia used the plant, called kratom, for a wide array of medicinal purposes, often brewing it into a form of tea. At low levels kratom produces a sort of sugar-rush euphoria, something akin to Adderall. At higher levels it acts more like a low-grade opioid and can lead to addiction, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

Kratom came to America after the Vietnam War, brought by returning soldiers and refugees, but it wouldn’t catch on until the 2010s, when bodegas and vape shops started selling it in the form of pills, fruity drink mixes, and even gummies, following trends in the burgeoning legal weed industry. As kratom became tastier and more accessible, its popularity boomed.

By 2023, CBD American Shaman, a company that sold a variety of cannabinoid products, including gummies, face creams, and oils, was chemically oxidizing mitragynine, the psychoactive ingredient found in kratom. This new substance was called 7-hydroxymitragynine, or 7-OH. Experts I spoke to told me it’s more powerful than morphine, is produced in shoddy, unregulated laboratories and, more often than not, it’s deceptively labeled. The internet has named it “gas station heroin,” and yet it is completely legal in many states. It can be purchased at vape shops, bodegas and, yes, gas stations across America.

I first heard of chess legend Daniel Naroditsky, known to his friends and admirers as “Danya,” during the great pandemic chess boom. Like hundreds of thousands of people around the world, the combination of lockdown and the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit awakened in me an obsession with the beautiful, thousand-year-old game. And it wasn’t long before I stumbled across Danya’s Twitch stream, where he would play hard-fought matches against the best players in the world, and then seamlessly pivot to making high-quality instructional content for novices like me. This is what I find myself remembering, two days after Danya’s family announced his tragic, unexpected death at the age of 29.

Chess experienced a kind of gold rush in those years. A whole slew of chess influencers emerged from this boom with newfound popularity, and Danya was one of them. But what set Danya apart was his total integrity. While many personalities relied on clickbait, thirst traps, or edgelording to get eyeballs, Danya was there simply to share his chess wisdom with the masses—gimmick-free.

There are episodes in history that never quite end. One occurred around the Mediterranean in the middle of the first century CE, when the first followers of Jesus emerged from Judea with a powerful story about their charismatic teacher, his execution by Roman authorities in Jerusalem, and his resurrection.

Members of this small group of Jews believed they held the key to understanding God’s plan and that they must spread the news fast because time itself was about to end. Their ideas and furious arguments, conducted in person and in letters that crisscrossed the Roman world, continue to shape our own.

It’s impossible to understand our era—not just religious life but the content of TikTok and YouTube, the speeches at a memorial for Charlie Kirk, a campus protest against Israel—without understanding this small number of people struggling through a few decades of turmoil 2,000 years ago.

Paula Fredriksen splits her time between the first and 21st centuries. Few scholars have more sharply or accessibly described the electric moment of the birth of what became Christianity, and the pained and incomplete process by which believers left Judaism behind. In books such as When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation; Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle; and Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years, and in scholarly work at Boston University and Hebrew University, Fredriksen sketches a startling portrait of this moment of spiritual eruption. Her readers find themselves in Jerusalem; Antioch, Turkey; or Damascus, Syria, as this new community burns with urgent faith, “racing on the edge of the end of time.”

Fredriksen, 74, was born in Rhode Island. Today she lives in Jerusalem, where I met her with the hope of better understanding the era that she studies and the one we all live in now. We sat in her quiet living room, that’s just a 20-minute drive from Golgotha.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

“I genuinely thought I was going to die.”

In the middle of the night, Shaylin Schlosser jolted awake and began throwing up uncontrollably. Her abdomen seized with a shooting pain worse than anything she had ever felt. In between bouts of vomiting, she screamed in agony. She heard a neighbor’s window slam shut.

Eventually, Schlosser mustered the strength to call a ride to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS), a condition caused by heavy marijuana use that entails vomiting, nausea, and intense cramps that can last for days on end. While a hot shower can offer temporary relief, there is only one cure: Quit smoking weed for good.

It’s Wednesday, October 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: World Trade Center bombing survivors recoil at Zohran Mamdani’s photo op with a terror-linked imam. How political violence became commonplace. And is it possible to actually “break the internet”?

But first: Inside Palantir’s enigma machine.

Few companies raise as many questions as Palantir does. Did it help kill Osama bin Laden? Is its software being used to watch all of us? Why does it help the feds identify illegal immigrants?

The company has become a lightning rod for people across the political spectrum, partly because Palantir is secretive and complex. That only fuels the sense that it must be up to something nefarious. So, in an effort to shed a little light on the secretive firm, I asked Palantir employees a simple question during a visit to their office in Washington, D.C., recently: What do you do for a living?

The answers were almost all metaphors. One engineer told me to think of Palantir as capable of finding a moving needle in a haystack the size of a small country. Another began his answer by asking me to imagine a tangle of hoses in the backyard.

It’s true that the company’s software is hard to understand, but Palantir’s leaders say their mission is simple. “We’re pro-West,” CEO Alex Karp told me. “For us, the West is led by America, but also includes allies, including Israel.”

I spoke to dozens of people inside and outside Palantir to understand the criticisms of the company. Which are fair? Which aren’t? And, to return to the question at the heart of it all: What does Palantir actually do?

—Maya Sulkin

We are nearly sold out for our latest installment of The Freedom Debates, where Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch will tackle whether the right to bear arms today is at odds with the common good, or if it is as necessary now as it was in 1791. Bari Weiss will moderate their conversation on November 5 in Chicago. Get your tickets today.

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• Vice President J.D. Vance traveled to Israel on Tuesday to shore up the ceasefire in Gaza after the IDF exchanged fire with Hamas. Vance told the press the ceasefire is going “better than I expected” and that he is “confident that we’re going to be in a place where this peace lasts.”

• The Marine Corps is investigating a mishap that occurred during a live-fire military demonstration that inadvertently rained shrapnel on a Southern California highway. The highway was shut down prior to the demonstration and no injuries were reported. Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were in attendance.

• Sixty-two percent of Americans believe the federal government has too much power—a record high, according to a new Gallup poll. More Democrats believe the government has too much power than Republicans for the first time since 2007. Forty percent of Americans, however, believe the government should do more.

• A resurfaced video of a shirtless Graham Platner, a left-wing Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, showed a Nazi logo tattooed on his chest. Platner denied being a “secret Nazi” and says he drunkenly got the tattoo while he was deployed as a Marine in Croatia. Platner is facing Maine governor Janet Mills in a Democratic primary to unseat longtime GOP Senator Susan Collins.

• President Trump reportedly plans to demand the Justice Department pay him $230 million as compensation for Biden-era indictments and investigations, according to The New York Times. The paper reports that any compensation would have to be approved by Trump’s own DOJ leadership.

• A group of researchers has developed a blood test that can detect up to 50 diseases from just a blood sample, according to a recent study. The test was able to detect early signs of cancer and identify which organ the cancer resided in with a 92 percent rate of accuracy.

We have a packed season of conversations, debates, and live events. Here’s what’s coming up:

• Reclaiming Childhood in an Online World with Jonathan Haidt and Bari Weiss
  New York, NY • October 22, 7 p.m. • ❌ Sold Out

• Would America Be Safer Without the Second Amendment? Featuring Alan Dershowitz, Dana Loesch, and Bari Weiss
  Chicago • November 5, 7 p.m. • 🎟️ Tickets on sale here

Full Schedule

We are living through an age of political violence in America. One sign of that: Threats of violence against public figures are now so commonplace that they barely make the front page.

Consider the past 48 hours.

On Tuesday morning, we learned from a CBS News report that Christopher Moynihan, a participant in the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, was arrested for allegedly threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

NEW YORK CITY — Michael Macko hasn’t been a New York City voter for about a decade. But if he were, he said, he probably would have voted for front-runner Zohran Mamdani. Then he saw the photo that Mamdani posted of himself grinning next to Siraj Wahhaj, the imam of a Brooklyn mosque with “historical ties to terrorism,” according to a New York City federal court filing.

“I was shocked,” said Macko, 61, about Mamdani’s photo on Friday. “If I were going to vote, he would’ve just lost my vote.”

To Macko, a fashion stylist living in northern New Jersey, this wasn’t just a political miscalculation by the democratic socialist. It was personal. Thirty-two years ago, Macko dropped off his father for work at the World Trade Center only to never see him again. That afternoon, Islamist extremists detonated a bomb in an underground garage, killing six people, including his father, William J. Macko, then 48 and a supervisor for the Port Authority.

“Are they worried I’m too crazy or too evil?” Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, recently asked me.

He was disarmingly blunt, pacing around his office swinging a tai chi saber over his head.

His question came in response to one I asked about the criticism his company attracts—criticism that has reached a fever pitch over the past several months as Palantir signed a $10 billion deal with the U.S. Army and became one of this year’s top-performing stocks.

So what’s the answer to Karp’s question? A bit of both.

The left’s critique of Palantir goes something like this: Palantir is a shadowy company with operations across the globe, working with governments and corporations that give Palantir access to private data, which it uses to achieve whatever its clients ask—ethical concerns be damned. In other words, these critics say, Palantir uses data collection and aggregation to do things like identify illegal immigrants for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or allegedly kill aid workers in Gaza with its advanced targeting software.

But it’s not just the political left. Figures on the woke right—conspiracy-theorist entertainers like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens—have lambasted the company for some of the same reasons, including Palantir’s connections to Israel.

And Republicans who want America to pull back from the world, like Congressmen Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, have sounded the alarm about the danger of Palantir’s connection to the so-called “deep state,” pointing to secretive government contracts that they fear will lead to mass surveillance.

Some refuse to put their name next to their criticism, like this Republican aide who told Semafor: “These guys are freaks with no sense of humor and a very disturbing sense of morality—and now they have all the data. Someone should do something.”

But do what, exactly?

In October 2011, my wife returned from a Manhattan party wearing a pin that read “F.O.J.B.” This, I soon discovered, stood for “Friends of Jimmy Bradley”—the celebrated New York restaurateur who co-opened The Red Cat in 1999. Bradley used the code, and others like it, to indicate which diners deserved a priority table or some extra love.

The existence of F.O.J.B. intrigued me: Did other restaurants have similar secret systems? And, might there be an article in it? They did, and there was. I wrote a piece for The New York Times chronicling the “the secret codes used in the dining rooms and in the kitchens of some of New York’s finest establishments.”

The outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday was a jarring reminder of the online world’s interdependence and vulnerability. The world’s largest cloud computing platform was snarled for about 15 hours, disrupting everything from Apple to hospitals to United Airlines to Snapchat to Ring security cameras. Over 1,000 websites and apps were knocked offline.

While AWS said that the breakdown has been resolved, it left many questions about exactly what went wrong, the risks of outsourcing our technological infrastructure, and what the outage signifies about our inextricably linked digital lives. To find some answers, I spoke to Mehdi Daoudi, co-founder and CEO of Catchpoint Systems, an internet performance monitoring company based in New York City. He began working on internet resiliency and infrastructure issues in 1997.

Tanner Nau: What happened Monday?