The Free Press

President Donald Trump early Saturday morning removed the greatest source of instability in the Western Hemisphere: Nicolás Maduro. In a dramatic raid, U.S. special forces snatched the Venezuelan strongman and his wife, Cilia Flores, and brought both to American soil.

By afternoon, Trump made clear that the intervention in Venezuela wouldn’t end there. “We are going to run the country,” he said in a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. “We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind.” And he promised an eventual transfer of power to the Venezuelan people, saying the U.S. would govern “until such a time as a proper transition can take place.”

First things first: The stunningly audacious raid that extracted Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Venezuela is a genuinely history-making victory for Donald Trump. At a cost of zero American lives, the United States captured a singularly destructive force: a dictator whose record of criminality and misrule blighted millions of Venezuelan lives and destabilized politics in the entire Western Hemisphere.

After clumsily stealing a presidential election he had plainly lost by a landslide 18 months ago, Maduro kept running the Venezuelan state as a sprawling criminal syndicate. Along with his power broker wife, Cilia Flores, he belongs in a prison cell as surely as anyone I can think of. Which is why you’ll be hard-pressed to find a Venezuelan who doesn’t, on some level, rejoice at last night’s news.

Welcome to the first Weekend Press of 2026! It’s a bumper edition. Two Drinks with the youngest female billionaire. Kat Rosenfield has a message for the artists who don’t want to perform at The Trump Kennedy Center. Abigail Shrier writes to a mom of three who’s fallen out of love with her husband. Kara Kennedy breaks down the hand-wringing obituaries of Brigitte Bardot. And much more.

But first. . .

Mainstream Christianity is having a tough time. Especially in the UK, where church attendance has dropped by 21 percent in the last decade. But on a remote Scottish island, a Romanian monk with a master’s in creative writing is trying something new.

As a young man, this Orthodox devotee, known as Father Seraphim, was engrossed by the story of an ancient order of monks who lived on the tiny rocky island of Iona, the original home of Celtic Christianity.

And so, he decided he wanted to revive it. To raise money, he traveled to the U.S. “People there asked me if we had a business plan or a vision,” he tells reporter Huw Paige in today’s wonderful piece. “And I had to be very blunt and say I have no idea what I’m doing.”

This is the story of how—with some thousand-year-old teachings, a YouTube channel, and a tiny wooden chapel—a handful of nuns and monks built something new in a place where everything is very old.

We’ve published plenty of other pieces this week that’ll help you procrastinate on your New Year’s resolutions:

As life returns after the holiday season, how should you spend the first week of 2026? We asked our reporter River Page for his suggestions…

📖 Read…Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh. It’s about a strange young woman who works at a boys’ prison and dreams of life in the big city. That is, when she’s not dealing with her paranoid alcoholic father or stalking one of the guards she has a crush on. When the prison hires a glamorous new counselor called Rebecca Saint John, Eileen thinks she’s finally made a friend. But things get very strange from there. Come for the freak factor, stay for the twist ending.

🎧 Listen…to Ethel Cain’s album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. It was my favorite record of 2025. A story runs through it that’s kind of a prequel to her considerably darker 2022 debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, which is about a teenage runaway who falls victim to a cannibalistic serial killer. Nobody ever really thought to make Southern Gothic pop before, and thank God someone finally has. If you’ve ever wondered what handing Flannery O’Connor a synthesizer might have resulted in, this is for you.

💵 Buy. . . a membership at a cheap gym. Here’s the thing: You may or may not keep your New Year’s resolution to get fit. You may think that spending more money will motivate you to work out more. It will not, and also, wandering around a gym that looks like a Russian oligarch’s dacha will only depress you. You need to be among the masses: There is nothing in this world more motivating than seeing hot people with no money.

The Weekend Press was saddened to learn of the death of Cecilia Giménez, a Spanish woman who went viral late in life for her efforts to restore a fresco of Jesus Christ in her small town in Spain—which gave the world “Monkey Christ.”

That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just tell us your New Year’s resolutions; we’re at [email protected].

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

Zohran Mamdani promised a “new era” for New York City during his inaugural address as mayor. But it began with the deletion of two social media posts about antisemitism from the mayor’s official X account that were posted on predecessor Eric Adams’s last day in office.

One of the deleted posts on X announced the publication Wednesday of an 80-page report by the city’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. The post described the “first-ever municipal report on our efforts to combat antisemitism” as “bold” and a “blueprint for 2026.”

The second deleted post called the establishment of the office an effort “to make fighting hate a policy priority.” It noted that the report included a detailed account of the history of Jewish New Yorkers and the city’s “long-standing and important ties with Israel.”

President Donald Trump shocked the world on Friday when he threatened to attack Iran’s regime if it sends its goons to fire on demonstrators who have filled streets across the country over the past week.

“If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” the president posted on Truth Social. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

The threat might prompt more than a little whiplash for anyone who’s followed recent Trump administration statements on foreign policy. An intervention in Iran would clash with the spirit of the National Security Strategy the administration released last month, which dismissed past U.S. efforts to challenge Middle Eastern governments as a “misguided experiment” and chided past presidents for trying to force countries in the region into “abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government.” The Strategy mentions Iran only three times: once to credit Trump with brokering a ceasefire to end the 12-day war in June, and twice more to proclaim that the Islamic Republic is considerably weaker as a result of Israel’s and America’s bombing of the country’s nuclear and defense architecture.

Brigitte Bardot has a neckline named after her, an off-the-shoulder cut that exposes your shoulders and collarbones and that signals a kind of sun-warmed carefreeness, a look that screams sex without strain. The silhouette is still sold every summer by designers who use Bardot’s name and image as cultural shorthand for relaxed, unapologetic sensuality, whether or not they care to acknowledge the woman herself. When she died this week, it was a reminder that certain people with certain beliefs must be disposed of carefully.

True, it’s hard to sum up Bardot’s legacy. There’s so much of it. In the early 1960s, Bardot ranked among the highest paid actresses in France, an international box-office draw whose films reshaped Europe’s understanding of female sexuality. As a singer, her collaborations, most famously “Bonnie and Clyde” with Serge Gainsbourg, defined a particular strain of French pop. Then, in the second half of her life, she turned away from the arts and devoted herself almost exclusively to animal-rights activism, founding the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986 and insisting repeatedly that this—not her films, her lovers, or her looks—was how she wished to be remembered.

Nevertheless, in the wake of her death, she was mostly remembered for something else—as a quick scroll through the headlines can attest. From The Guardian: “Brigitte Bardot’s image complicated by her controversial politics.” And The New York Times: “Brigitte Bardot’s Legacy of Racist Rhetoric.” Here’s France’s most popular newspaper, Le Monde: “Brigitte Bardot’s 30 years of sympathy for the far right.” And finally Euronews: “Should France honour Brigitte Bardot? And if so, how? A nation divided.”

WHITESTONE, New York — Vickie Paladino chased the mayor away.

The year was 2017, and Paladino, a 63-year-old with no political experience, saw then-mayor Bill de Blasio touring her neighborhood here in Northeastern Queens. De Blasio had just returned from protesting President Donald Trump at that year’s G20 summit in Germany. He had decided to make the t…

Welcome back to A Man Should Know, a weekly column from Elliot Ackerman about how today’s lost boys can become tomorrow’s good men. This week, Elliot is joined by Old School host Shilo Brooks to reflect on reading, and how the right books can change our lives.

I wasn’t much of a reader as a boy. On the weekends, my father insisted that my brother and I read for at least one hour on both Saturday and Sunday. He would send us up to our shared room, where my older brother, who was more academic than I was, would pore over Encyclopedia Brown novels, while I would only pretend to read, paging through The Boy’s King Arthur because it had cool illustrations.

This pattern persisted until I was 11, when I had what I consider my first great reading experience.

My father had assigned me a book, Ender’s Game, the science-fiction classic by Orson Scott Card. Every Saturday and Sunday, he’d send me up to my room to make progress on the novel, which is the story of a 6-year-old boy, Ender, who is recruited into an intergalactic war. At an excruciatingly slow pace, I dragged my way through the first hundred or so pages, spending most of that hour staring out the window or secretly surfing the web on our 56K dial-up modem. I wasn’t really giving the book a chance.

After a few weeks—a pace at which any reasonable person would’ve made it through the book—my father asked me how it was going. I fibbed, telling him I was almost done and would likely finish that day. When the hour was up, and I came out of my room, my father was waiting for me.

When Luana Lopes Lara saw a few weeks ago that Forbes had named her the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire—ahead of Taylor Swift!—she thought it was some kind of a joke.

“People come up with so much shit now that I assumed it was false,” Lopes Lara told me as she sipped sauvignon blanc in a wine bar in the West Village. “I’m a big Taylor fan, so any headline with my name and Taylor’s is like the craziest thing I’ve seen in my life.”

It was 5:30 p.m., an early hour to end the workday—except that Lopes Lara was planning to return to work after our meeting and not finish until 10, her usual schedule. That Lopes Lara would, at age 29, be in the exalted company of Taylor Swift was not exactly something that she had predicted. But as I listened to her explain her childhood, her current success made perfect sense. As a young girl in Brazil, she placed next to her bed a list of some of the people she hoped to emulate, including Winston Churchill, Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf, and Alexander the Great. “Since I was very little,” Lopes Lara said, “I was weirdly obsessive and ambitious.”

This piece was originally published in Dispatch, a British magazine for long-form storytelling.

The service is nearing its third hour, but no one shows any sign of tiring. In a small chapel on a rocky island off of the west coast of Scotland, the hymns rise and fall, steady as a tide.

Eventually, the priest beckons me forward, holding out a bowl of bread. He is tall, with round glasses and a beard that droops down his torso. His name is Father Seraphim-Oran—and he is leading an Orthodox revival in the ancient home of Celtic Christianity.

“Come here, creature,” Father Seraphim says. “I give this to the ducks and geese, so I can give it to you. You’re almost as worthy as a goose.”

I cup my hands, take the bread, and place it directly in my mouth, careful not to drop a crumb. It’s good to be back.