The Free Press

Iran is at a crossroads. The largest and most sustained wave of nationwide protests since the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising in 2022 and 2023 is now sweeping the country. The current marches may soon eclipse them. What began in late December 2025 as demonstrations over a collapsing currency and rising living costs has spread rapidly across cities and regions. As repression has intensified and casualties have mounted, the protests have hardened into open demands for regime change.

No matter what happens next, there is no scenario in which the Islamic Republic survives 2026 with its power intact. Too much has happened; too many uncontrollable yet intersecting factors are conspiring to erode the regime’s power. But that does not mean that revolution is inevitable and Iran will blossom into a free open society once more.

The Islamic Republic has faced mass unrest before. Over the past 15 years, it has weathered repeated nationwide protest cycles. Each time, the pattern held: Demonstrations surged, the security services cracked down violently, and opposition networks fragmented. The regime survived intact.

That history matters—but it no longer governs the present moment.

Welcome to the final edition of A Man Should Know, a column from Elliot Ackerman about how today’s lost boys can become tomorrow’s good men. This week, Elliot rounds out the series with a reflection on speaking itself. It’s a gift, he says, to get to tell a story to an audience. Here’s how to do it well.

A decade ago, in Afghanistan, one of my friends was killed. He and I had fought alongside one another in the Marines years before. After news of his death arrived in the U.S., I learned he’d left plans for his own funeral. He wanted me to deliver a eulogy.

The ceremony was scheduled for a few weeks later. He had left behind a wife and three children, and I felt overwhelmed trying to come up with something to say that would feel worthy. As I struggled with this assignment, my wife offered me a bit of advice: “You know who the eulogy is for, don’t you?” I had to confess that I didn’t. “It’s for his children,” she said. Suddenly, my audience became clear. I knew who I was speaking to, and this allowed me to speak from the heart about their father.

Public speaking is part of life. Whether addressing your team at work, giving a toast at a wedding, or delivering a eulogy, most of us will have to stand in front of a crowd and speak at some point. Some find it very natural, but most suffer a little anxiety. My past life as a military officer and my current one as a writer demand that I often speak in public. Along the way, I’ve learned a few lessons.

As anti-government protests gain momentum in Iran, one question looms above all else: Will the latest round of protests finally topple the country’s theocratic regime, which has ruled the country with an iron fist for nearly half a century? Or will the government once again use force to snuff out this hint of revolution?

On the one hand, we’ve seen this movie before: There was the 2009 Green Movement, which drew millions of disaffected Iranians into the streets demanding a recount after a rigged presidential election. Then came the protests of 2017 and 2019, and finally the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising in 2022, sparked by the killing of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman in the custody of the morality police. Each time, the pattern repeated itself. Within days, security and riot police brutally quashed the protests. In 2022 alone, government forces arrested and imprisoned some 20,000 protesters, killed nearly 600, and hanged several others.

On the other hand, five major signs distinguish the current protests from the previous efforts.

1. The Spark. The protests began in Tehran’s old market, known as the Grand Bazaar. To Americans, a bazaar may conjure images of an outdoor mall. But Tehran’s Grand Bazaar is something else entirely: a powerful institution with a long tradition of political activism, and the seat of the country’s wealthier and more religiously conservative classes. In 1978, it was the Bazaar that bankrolled Ayatollah Khomeini and helped fuel the Islamic Revolution that overthrew Iran’s last monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. That the current protests originated in the same Bazaar is therefore telling. It signals that even the regime’s most dependable and historically loyal supporters have turned against it.

To the newcomers: Welcome! And to those who’ve been with me for years: a very warm welcome back. This is Arthur Brooks, and as you may have heard, I have a new home: The Free Press. (I’m not literally living here—they let me go home at night.)

If you’re new here, a quick primer. Every Monday, I’ll publish a column tackling a subject fundamental to happiness: New Year’s resolutions, dating, family dynamics, stress. Every Friday, my newsletter will hit your inboxes, delving just a bit deeper: Do hair transplants actually make us happier? (Asking for a friend.) What routines do I follow to remember things? How do we know when to call it quits on a relationship? It’ll also be a place for me to answer your questions, which I encourage you to submit in the comments section every week. (For full access to the comments section, and to my Monday column, subscribe here.)

Which brings me to my longtimers: The newsletter may look a little different going forward. That’s intentional. I want this to be more of a conversation between you and me, which means we may switch up the structure week to week: a deeper dive into a topic from my column; a bunch of reader questions; my recipe for bathtub gin. (Okay, not that last one.)

I couldn’t be more excited about this new phase of the newsletter. I hope you like it. If you do, let me know! If you don’t like it, tell me that, too. But be gentle—I am a delicate flower.

Let’s GO! —Arthur

Friends,

In my inaugural column for The Free Press on Monday, I talked about the fact that happiness comes hard for me—which is why I study it. But I also mentioned that over the past decade, my study and adoption of the science of happiness in my own life has measurably raised my well-being—by about 60 percent. Naturally, the big question I got after relaying this fact to readers was, “What have you changed about the way you live?”

The short answer is: a lot. But I also found that some changes in particular had noticeable positive effects. So I thought I’d devote this first newsletter to the five biggies that have arguably had the most impact in raising my well-being, either by increasing my happiness or reducing my unhappiness.

1. Routinize

If you followed my work before I came to The Free Press, you will already know that I am a bit of a discipline freak. This goes back to my French-horn-playing days, which were all about hardcore practice, day in, day out, from when I was 9 years old until I left the horn behind at 31. Start at the crack of dawn! No days off! This routine served me mightily in subsequent careers, making me a productivity machine. But it wasn’t until I started treating my health and well-being with the same rigorous attention that my happiness began to improve steadily.

Here’s the first protocol I adopted:

2. Get physical

Hard exercise is one of the very best ways to manage “negative affect,” or unpleasant emotions. I developed a 60-minute exercise routine (a mix of resistance training and Zone 2 cardio work) that I can maintain all year round, and which I undertake from 4:45 to 5:45 a.m. Nothing has helped me manage my naturally high negative affect better.

This is followed by . . .

3. Get metaphysical

The evidence is unassailable that practicing faith, spirituality, or meditation is enormously beneficial for well-being. My specific practice may not be right for you, but each morning I follow my workout by going to daily Catholic mass. When I am not traveling (about half the time), that’s at 6:30 a.m. with Mrs. B. When I’m on the road, I can always find a morning mass at a local church. (Catholicism, like Starbucks, has a very uniform product.)

By the way, if you want a more comprehensive look at my whole morning protocol for well-being and productivity, you can watch or listen to the Office Hours podcast episode that I devoted to it (where you’ll find a pdf guide as well).

4. I won’t be free for dinner

Many improvements in life come from adopting routines, but others appear when we stop doing things that no longer serve us. About five years ago, I did a cost-benefit inventory of the ordinary things that I always did but hated. What I had in mind were customary activities that seemed necessary in an unquestioned way. It turns out you can question them. At the top of my list was “leisurely dinners for work.” I don’t like staying up late, don’t drink, and frankly, don’t really like dinner food all that much. So, for the most part, I stopped accepting professional dinner invitations.

Here’s another . . .

5. Don’t visit the grandchildren

Wait—it’s not what you’re thinking!

Our kids got married young and started cranking out the babies right away. (Hey, raise ’em Catholic, and they go do Catholic stuff.) Very few things raise life satisfaction more than spending time with grandchildren, and grandparents can be very helpful to busy parents. That’s why we had a big family meeting a couple of years ago and decided that rather than traveling to visit one another, we would all move to the same area—even to the point of three generations living in one house (mine and Mrs. B’s).

So there you have it: the five big changes in life that have had the most pronounced positive effect on my well-being. And not in just a one-off way. The improvements have been continuous and cumulative.

I won’t pretend that everything is perfect, happiness-wise. I’m still a high-strung, anxious guy. And I still find it tricky to enjoy life fully. But these five practices, all backed by sound science, have really helped me. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll write in more depth about each one—and many others. In the meantime, please share some of your own happiness protocols by writing to me in the comments.

Until next week, and sorry I can’t make dinner,

Arthur

The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks will be back next week with a column on Monday. His newsletter returns next Friday. Sign up here to get both delivered straight to your inbox.

I just have to share: The gas in our building has been out for months (don’t ask). So I have to learn how to use a slow cooker to sustain my family. Turns out I’m very bad at it. The slow-cooked beef stew I unveiled this morning is truly my worst yet—and I promise that’s saying something. Certain members of my family who shall remain nameless have started calling my meals “divorced dad dinner.” At least I make a good gin and tonic, which is basically all Bar needs for dinner these days anyway. The kids, though, are still getting accustomed to them. I guess it’s an acquired taste. Speaking of domestic life, our advice columnist and my dear friend Abigail Shrier is looking for more Tough Love letters. If you’re brave enough, ask Abigail a question by clicking here.

Also: We’re hosting a comedy night Sunday, February 1 at the Comedy Cellar in NYC! Judy Gold is hosting. Colin Quinn is headlining. It’s part of America’s 250th birthday, which we’re marking by stress-testing the joke. Get your tickets here. Now let’s turn to the news.

→ ICE killing: On Wednesday in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in her SUV. Video shows agents approaching her car and ordering her to get out; she then accelerates forward, and an agent in front of her fires three times, ultimately killing her. The woman was identified as 37-year-old poet and mother of three Renee Nicole Good. Given that this was a protest in 2026, there’s video of it from multiple angles, and I’ve watched them all. She did refuse to get out of the car; she did accelerate toward the officer. And yet. You can easily imagine her panicking at that moment, with loud-voiced officers reaching through her window and grabbing her door. I don’t mean to be gendered, but the impulse either to hide (stay in the nest) or run (spin wheels and get out of the situation fast) is sort of hardwired in my female brain. There’s truly nothing more dangerous than a mom in her SUV—we’re the grizzlies with cubs. If a man in a uniform is reaching at me through the window, I’m flooring it. Whether there’s criminal liability on the officer’s end, I have no idea, but it’s a real tragedy. In our seesaw politics, our options are either Biden completely opening the border and gaslighting us about it—or Trumpo sending the military to rappel out of helicopters to tackle two guys in line at Home Depot. Our life is now just endlessly swinging between these extremes every four years.

→ Venezuela: This past Saturday, American forces blasted their way into Venezuela’s capital and grabbed President Nicolás Maduro, who was whisked away wearing a gray Nike Tech tracksuit and transported to the U.S., where he wished onlookers at the Manhattan DEA office a happy new year in heavily accented English. That’s just Saturday night in America now—tucking other country’s dictators into a cell downtown.

The authoritarian leader and his allegedly complicit wife were then taken to New York’s hottest club, the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, which has recently hosted Luigi Mangione, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Ghislaine Maxwell. Maduro and his wife pleaded not guilty to federal drug trafficking and weapons charges in a Manhattan courthouse on Monday.

President Trump has said the United States will “run” the country, offloading the job to Marco Rubio, whose stack of to-dos from his three other jobs is already grazing the ceiling. Apparently (and this is real), Maduro’s on-air imitation of Trump’s signature bendy-elbow dance—performed to a techno remix of “No War, Yes Peace”—was the final provocation. This mockery could not go unanswered; an equal and opposite retaliation was in order, which, for Trump, means sending in the troops and putting a blindfold and headphones on that man. Deprive his senses completely. “He gets up there and he tries to imitate my dance a little bit. But he’s a violent guy,” Trump said. Worse still, Maduro adds a Latin flavor—some salsa, some bouncing—whereas Trump’s version is all stiff knees and hinged elbows, like a rusty gate.

In the same press conference, the president said—trying out some Dangerfield-esque stand-up—“My wife hates when I do this.” He continued: “She said, it’s so unpresidential. I said, ‘But I did become president.’ She hates when I dance! I said, ‘Everybody wants me to dance.’ . . . She actually said, ‘Could you imagine FDR dancing?’ ” It’s unclear whether Melania knows FDR was wheelchair-bound, but the message stands: All wives in this country want all husbands to please stop doing their little routine in front of the guests.

America turns 250 this year. Which feels like a good time to check in on one of our most fragile national institutions: the joke. For our yearlong celebration of America’s birthday, we’re toasting Lady Liberty—and roasting her too.

Join The Free Press and the legendary Comedy Cellar for an afternoon of stand-up from comedians who still believe in saying the wrong thing out loud.

Hosted and curated by fearless veteran comic Judy Gold, the February 1 lineup includes iconic Colin Quinn alongside other sharp, hilarious voices taking on America—its ideals, its contradictions, and whether comedy will survive in our censorious era.

After that, we’ll close out the night with a candid roundtable led by Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman, where comics will unpack free speech, cancel culture, and why comedy clubs have quietly become one of the last places in American life where disagreement is not only tolerated, but funny.

This New York City event will sell out quickly. Don’t delay!

Paid Free Press subscribers get exclusive presale access until Sunday at 9 a.m. ET, when tickets go live to the general public. To get early access, become a paid subscriber now.

This event is a part of The Free Press’s yearlong celebration of America at 250, where we examine where we’ve come from, where we are, and where we’re going.

Get your tickets here

For the first time in my medical lifetime, the U.S. government has told the truth about highly processed food.

The 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans mark the most consequential shift in federal nutrition policy in decades. After decades of rising obesity, fatty liver disease, and diet-driven chronic illness, the federal government has finally acknowledged a basic reality: What we eat matters more than how many calories we count.

That may sound obvious. But for generations, federal nutrition policy promoted low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets, subsidized highly-processed food, and treated chronic disease as inevitable rather than preventable. The result is a population in which more than 70 percent of adults are overweight or obese, nearly one in three adolescents has prediabetes, and close to 90 percent of healthcare spending goes toward chronic or mental disease management rather than prevention.

The new guidelines represent a genuine course correction. They are not perfect. But they are historically important—and politically revealing.

The most important shift in the new guidelines is their explicit rejection of highly processed foods (which most people historically understand as junk food). For the first time, federal nutrition policy names highly processed products—those laden with refined, industrially produced carbohydrates, added sugars, chemical additives, emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners, and industrial dyes—as a central driver of chronic disease.

Dear Abigail,

My 18-year-old daughter has been intimate with her first-ever boyfriend, during her first semester of college, despite our family’s recent conversion and catechesis in Catholic doctrine regarding sex before marriage. She’s been growing in faith for over two years, knows the reasons why waiting is important, goes to daily Mass and Reconciliation as much as possible, but threw it all out the window at the first test. She also hid that she even had a boyfriend from us and lied to our face about the sex. (Her brother confirmed it for us.) She doesn’t know that we know, so now that she is away from him for a month, my wife and I are trying to persuade her to slow down her courtship. She is not on the pill. She seems to have some understanding of the peril of this situation, but I’m afraid she will go right back to making this mistake once the semester starts again. I should add that only three years ago she thought she was gay and was dating her girlfriend, didn’t want children, was filled with anxiety and fear, going so far as to cut herself among other things. It was only through the most difficult effort that my wife and I brought her through that time. She is actually excited to be a mother one day, but I’m afraid she’s making terrible mistakes and is choosing infatuation and sin over love of God, and the chance of a truly great spouse. What should I do?

—Andrew

Andrew,

Three years ago, your family wasn’t Catholic. Maybe your family wasn’t anything at all, religion-wise. Your 15-year-old-daughter was spiraling: practicing popular methods of self-harm, rejecting the idea of forming a family, trying on a sexual orientation that enraged you. You threw a Hail Mary, and the Catholic Church came down with the ball.

You and your wife converted the whole family, prodding the kids through catechesis. How you persuaded a 15-year-old to embrace such a change, I cannot imagine. In any case, mirabile dictu—it worked! Maybe your daughter’s soul yearned for this new life.

She now goes to daily Mass, stopped cutting herself, and stopped arranging her life around a desire to thumb her nose at you.

Andrew, this is an almost unreasonable amount of success.

I say this without hesitation, because I spent years studying and writing about girls very much like your daughter. Girls who battled anxiety and depression, engaged in cutting, and cycled through identities in quick succession: first announcing they were gay, then “pansexual,” and then the real doozy of self-harm—“trans.”

It’s Thursday, January 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Marty Makary, Ezekiel Emanuel, and others on to the new food pyramid. Olivia Reingold on Mayor Mamdani’s wild first week. Ken Rogoff on the Donroe Doctrine. Tyler Cowen on why, and how, the U.S. should acquire Greenland. “Middlemarch changed my life.” And much more.

But first: A shooting in Minneapolis—and our politicians’ irresponsible reaction.

On Wednesday morning in Minneapolis, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen who had intentionally blocked a group of officers.

Almost the instant this awful news broke, two sharply different narratives didn’t just take hold—but were actively pushed by politicians on both sides of the aisle. To the Trump administration the story was clear: a “domestic terrorist” had been taken out by an ICE agent acting in self-defense. Democratic politicians, meanwhile, labeled it “murder,” the mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to “get the fuck out” of Minneapolis, and Minnesota governor Tim Walz blamed the administration’s “dangerous, sensationalized operations.”

After video of the incident became available, the parallel rushes to judgment only accelerated. Almost entirely absent in the hours after the shooting was the kind of restraint and responsibility that public officials used to show in combustible situations such as this. That’s the subject of our editorial. Read it here:

The Trump administration flipped the food pyramid upside down on Wednesday with the announcement of new dietary guidelines. The news is a huge moment for MAHA, the campaign to Make America Healthy Again, as it casts aside old ways and entrenched interests that proponents blame for allowing America to get sicker and sicker.

But is the new advice any good?

Marty Makary, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and his deputy Kyle Diamantas, lay out the case for the new pyramid in an essay for The Free Press. Read their argument that they have officially ended the era of bad dietary advice from the government:

But what do the outside experts think? We asked Ezekiel Emanuel, Lucy McBride, Vani Hari, and Nina Teicholz for their takes. Here’s what they told us:

In today’s episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with Dominican friar Father Jonah Teller to discuss what makes George Eliot’s masterpiece worth reading. In a wide-ranging conversation, the two discuss Eliot’s conviction that one small, virtuous life can change the world—plus the political upheaval around reform, the promises and limits of scientific progress, and so much more. Listen to their conversation wherever you get your podcasts, or by clicking the play button below.

• U.S. forces captured a tanker flying the Russian flag that had escaped the naval blockade around Venezuela. The U.S. mission succeeded without any Russian interference, but will likely raise tensions between the two nations.

• Energy secretary Chris Wright announced Wednesday that the U.S. plans to control Venezuelan oil sales “indefinitely.” “We need to have that leverage and that control of those oil sales to drive the changes that simply must happen in Venezuela,” Wright said.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that President Trump plans to buy Greenland, rather than taking control of the Arctic nation through military action. Rubio’s clarification came shortly after President Trump signaled increased interest in seizing Greenland last weekend.

• The man identified as the shooter at Brown University left behind multiple videos before killing himself inside a storage unit last month. The Department of Justice said that the videos reveal he had planned the attack for years, but do not reveal a motive.

• A Texas teachers union filed a lawsuit against the state’s department of education on Tuesday, alleging that officials engaged in a “wave of retaliation” against public school teachers who posted on social media about Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September. “It was in fact a witch hunt,” said Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers.

• The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it plans to withhold social safety net funds from five Democratic-led states over fraud concerns. The decision is the latest in a sweeping crackdown following the Minnesota fraud scandal.

• Britain and France pledged to send troops into Ukraine if it reaches a peace deal with Russia. The commitment came after delegations from 35 countries gathered in Paris for another round of peace talks on Tuesday, and signals an increasing global effort to end the conflict.

• Nick Reiner’s arraignment, originally set for Wednesday, was delayed until February after his lawyer abruptly withdrew from the case. Reiner had been represented by Alan Jackson, who previously defended Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein; he will now receive a public defender. (For more on the case, read Jonathan Rosen’s essay: “The Reiners’ Tragedy Without End.”)

Middlemarch is George Eliot’s (real name Mary Ann Evans) masterpiece. The 900-page Victorian novel is about the people living in a fictional English town in a time of enormous changes.

In this episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with Dominican friar Father Jonah Teller to discuss what makes the book worth reading. Their conversation tackles the novel’s major…