The Free Press

This past year wasn’t easy—but it was certainly eventful. Donald Trump returned to the White House, issued a record number of executive orders, deployed the National Guard to American cities—like Los Angeles and D.C.—imposed sweeping tariffs on all our trading partners, gutted the government with DOGE, and unleashed a massive crackdown on immigration.

But that was only the beginning.

The administration also reached a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas—and all the living hostages came home from Gaza. Israel and the United States struck Iran’s nuclear sites. We got the first American pope. And I haven’t even started listing the pop-culture moments, like the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad, the Travis Kelce–Taylor Swift engagement, or when Lauren Sánchez Bezos and Katy Perry went to space. There was truly so much, and if I kept going we’d be here all day.

But this, after all, is a prediction episode. So what will 2026 bring?

It’s Wednesday, December 31. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Will Zohran Mamdani keep New York’s top antisemitism official? Is “Marty Supreme” a victim of its own success? Eli Lake on how Seymour Hersh lost his investigative mojo. And much more.

(And George Clooney, if you’re reading this, bonjour! You’re welcome to come check out the Free Press newsroom, too. The coffee machine broke, so bring your own. Or if you’d prefer to host, we’d love to do our next off-site in Lake Como!)

On to the stories, starting with predictions, resolutions, and New Year’s Eve parties.

We’ve spent a lot of this week looking in the rearview mirror. We’ve waved goodbye to 2025 by admitting what we got wrong, acknowledging what we learned, paying tribute to the heroes of the year, and revisiting some of its lighter moments.

Today, we’re shifting our gaze to the road ahead and asking: What will 2026 bring?

Yes, it’s the annual Honestly predictions podcast. Bari and I are in the hosts’ chairs today, and we call up friends of the pod and experts in their fields to get a sense of what’s coming down the pike on the big questions.

Questions like: Will the war in Ukraine come to an end? (We asked Niall Ferguson about that.) And: Will Donald Trump be as busy in his second year back as his first? (We got Sarah Isgur on the line for that one.) And: Have we passed peak big pant? (Leandra Medine Cohen answers that one and yes, like I said, we hit all the hot-button questions today.) We also have our very own Suzy Weiss on culture, our favorite linguist, John McWhorter, on the words of 2025 and 2026, and Dr. Mark Hyman on how to get healthier starting January 1.

So please, tune in, and buckle up for a whistle-stop tour through everything you need to know ahead of the new year. It’s the perfect thing to listen to as you mix the punch ahead of tonight’s festivities.

One person who takes New Year’s Eve celebrations very seriously is Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik. He’s expecting 22 for dinner at Casa Savodnik tonight. (I guess my invitation got lost in the post, Peter?) His wife will be serving beef stew. His daughter will be giving a violin concert. Peter will be . . . it’s not clear. Anyway, he has strong opinions about the how and the why of ringing in the new year. The formula includes champagne, laughter—and a good argument. Read all about it here:

And finally, have you set your resolutions yet? If you still need some inspiration, we asked our newsroom what they’ll be doing differently in 2026.

From the Free Press family to yours, Happy New Year.

—Oliver Wiseman

• Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental journalist and a granddaughter of the late President John F. Kennedy, died on Tuesday. In November, Schlossberg wrote an essay in The New Yorker announcing her terminal cancer diagnosis, acute myeloid leukemia, which she had been battling since May 2024. She was 35.

• Saudi Arabia bombed Yemen’s port city of Mukalla on Tuesday after a weapons shipment from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) arrived for separatist forces. Saudi state-run press announced the strikes, saying the weapons shipment to the UAE-backed forces “threatens peace and stability.” The UAE later announced it would remove its remaining military presence from the country.

• Meta has agreed to buy artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Manus for more than $2 billion, acquiring a fast-growing Singapore-based company known for its AI research tools and agent technology. The deal strengthens Meta’s push to compete in AI assistants, with Manus to be integrated into Meta’s products and its China operations discontinued.

• Cases of the flu are spiking across the country, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday. The CDC estimates there have been 7.5 million cases of the flu, resulting in 81,000 hospitalizations and 3,100 deaths. Over 30 states are experiencing “high” or “very high” levels of flu cases. New York recorded a record amount of flu cases during the week ending December 20.

• OpenAI is paying its employees more than any other major tech start-up in history prior to the company filing for an initial public offering. OpenAI’s approximately 4,000 employees received an average of $1.5 million in stock compensation, more than seven times what Google offered in 2003, a year before the company went public.

• Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is expected to appoint Kamar Samuels, a veteran leader in the city’s public education system, as his schools chancellor, before his inauguration tomorrow. Samuels is a local superintendent in upper Manhattan with a past of championing desegregation and has indicated a desire to replace the city’s gifted and talented programs.

• The U.S. stock market is closing out the year at a near-record high, with the S&P 500 up 17 percent and NASDAQ up 21 percent, respectively, marking the end of an impressive yearlong rally that began after tremors hit the market in the wake of President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs in April.

In less than 24 hours, Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as the new mayor of New York City. Yet Moshe Davis, the executive director of the city’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, does not know whether he will still have a job when that happens.

Davis, who has led the office since its creation just eight months ago, told me that he has received no communication from the incoming Mamdani administration about his status—or the future of the office itself. Still, he plans to report to City Hall on Friday, the first official workday after Mamdani’s inauguration.

“I currently have the job until I hear otherwise,” said Davis, 28 and a native of Brooklyn’s Kensington neighborhood. “I’m ready to serve.”

The uncertainty raises a broader question: What will happen to the Office to Combat Antisemitism under Mamdani, who co-founded his college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state?

Something strange happens every time indie behemoth A24 announces a new film. The news ripples out, and all the culture vultures come crawling. First, chronically online Brooklyn men post breathlessly about whatever the project is—the casting, the financing, where it’s being shot—and then come the takes from the New York media types, including dissections of everything from costuming to set dressing to historical accuracy. Then the viral marketing begins. All of these phenomena have reached their peak in the circus that has become Marty Supreme.

Here are some of the things that happened during the film’s promotional run over the last few weeks (though honestly, it feels more like years). There was an “underground” Ping-Pong tournament hosted by Airbnb, and an orange blimp floating around Los Angeles. Timothée Chalamet has been running around the world—from New York to London to São Paulo—doing interviews in bright orange outfits, with a phalanx of men with massive Ping-Pong ball helmets behind him. He stood atop the Sphere in Las Vegas to shout about the movie. He played himself in a fake marketing meeting that was “leaked” on YouTube, and he even found the time to star in a British rapper’s music video. A star-spangled promotional windbreaker for the movie has been treated like the Shroud of Turin on the secondary market. There has been so much shtick that it’s been hard to keep up.

Pick up the weights. Floss every day. Finish reading that great American novel. Finish writing the great American novel. Whether or not you make one and stick to it or roll your eyes at the thought, New Year’s resolutions are a time-honored tradition for a reason: They’re a way to turn the page, and a shot at a slightly better version of yourself. So as 2025 turns to 2026, we asked the Free Press newsroom what they planned to do differently starting January 1. Here’s what they said. From all the people who make The Free Press run, Happy New Year. And what are your resolutions for 2026? Let us know in the comments. —The Editors

Olivia Reingold, staff writer: Write my heart out

Well folks, after two years of trying—and failing—to stop biting my nails, I’ve promoted that goal to my lifetime project. For 2026, I have my eyes on a new target: to write my heart out.

That may seem like a strange goal for a writer. But what they say is true: Whatever you do for a living, you usually avoid in your spare time. In the span of a decade, I’ve gone from fastidious—a girl never seen without a notebook—to someone who avoids the pen after hours. Eventually I shoved the habit to the end of the day, at which point it started to feel like a chore.

So in 2026 I aspire to get funky with it. We’re talking poems, diary entries, and even a movie script. And not a word of it will be about the news.

Joe Nocera, writer and editor: Stop buying books; read them instead

Remember back before Amazon began selling digital books, when people would have rows and rows of hardcover books beautifully arrayed on built-in bookshelves? Those bookshelves made quite a statement, didn’t they? About the importance of good books in the life of their owner, of course, but also—let’s be honest here—as a way of displaying one’s taste. But quite often if you asked said owner if he had read this or that book on the shelf, the answer was an abashed: “I haven’t gotten to it yet.” When the owner (i.e., me) bought the book, he had every intention of reading it, but for one reason or another, never quite got around to it.

For most of the 20th century, the reporters who covered the White House and Congress would rarely bite the hands of the lawmakers who fed them. That began to change in the early 1970s. This is the era when a few ink-stained wretches helped to end a war and bring down a president.

The best journalists now aspired to change the world that they observed. They were a throwback to the muckrakers of the early 20th century, who exposed the railroad trusts and the misery of tenements and factories and triggered enough public outrage to spur reform. Now the targets were the Army, the deep state, the police, and the White House. The journalists taking aim became household names.

None were more famous than the Washington Post team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who brought down President Richard Nixon as they followed the money behind a break-in at the Democratic National Committee. But for me, the man most responsible for making the journalist the star of American politics is Seymour Hersh. Between 1968 and 1975, Hersh proved that a man with a typewriter and a telephone could expose secrets that America’s spies and generals were determined to keep hidden.

It is the winter of 1944, in Paris, and the Nazis are in town. They’ve been here for four years now, occupying the city—which is to say, taking up space in it, living cheek by jowl with the objects of their oppression. They eat in the same restaurants. They drink in the same clubs. For the German occupiers, Paris is a playground; for the Parisian citizenry, it’s a place increasingly difficult to recognize as home. Some have learned to collaborate. Others risk their lives, in secret, to resist. But in February, the long, uneasy dance between compliance and defiance is interrupted by the debut of a different kind of performance, the hottest ticket in town: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone.

It took a great deal of nerve to stage this play, a reimagining of the 2,000-year-old tragedy of the same name by the Greek playwright Sophocles. Antigone tells the tale of a country torn by civil war and a doomed woman fighting its new, tyrannical leadership for the right to bury her brother. It’s a story of honor and duty, of resistance and rebellion—and, if the Nazis had been offended, a story that might well have caused the theater to be raided, the actors and playwright kidnapped, imprisoned, or even killed.

Of course, if the play had been pure pro-Hitler propaganda, its creators would have been deemed collaborators and suffered the consequences accordingly. Which is to say, a lot could have gone very badly! But nothing did: In the end, this morally complex and anti-authoritarian show went on under the watchful gaze of Hitler’s minions, who sat in the audience and clapped.

On New Year’s Eve, we’re expecting 22 people for dinner. A novelist, a choreographer, a real-estate developer, a political pollster with a deep knowledge of evolutionary biology. Plus girlfriends, partners, and my sister, who’s flying in from D.C. with her family. Among others.

My wife will prepare a vat of beef stew with a very nice 2023 cabernet sauvignon, plus a gluten-free lasagna (this is Los Angeles, folx!), and a few guests will bring beet salad and asparagus salad and a fennel-and-Gruyère salad, and my mother will provide a few desserts—probably something involving a mousse or meringue. My 11-year-old will play a Handel Bourrée on her violin, and her cousins may perform a piano sonata on our upright.

At some point after the dishes have been cleared and before we refill everyone’s champagne flutes in anticipation of 2026, we’ll whip out a notepad and ballpoint pens, and ask everyone to write down their five predictions for the next year—things like “GOP gets trounced in November” or “Hamnet wins Best Picture” or “I won’t be dating the person I’m sitting next to right now by this time next year” (which has happened more than once).

This is our tenth New Year’s Eve repast.

Last week, I had to deliver terrible news that is sadly not unique in my line of work: I had to tell a pregnant woman that her baby had died in the womb.

She screamed with the type of grief only a woman who lost her pregnancy can produce. At 45 years old, after multiple rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and miscarriages, and thinking she was finally “in the clear,” the fetal heartbeat had stopped in the second trimester.

In the midst of her lament she uttered over and over again: “Why did I wait so long? Why did I wait so long?”

I’ve been a maternal-fetal medicine doctor for more than two decades, and, unfortunately, I’m used to working with patients who are going through these sort of unimaginable losses. That’s partly because many of my patients are women over 35, when they are technically considered to be at “advanced maternal age.”

It’s Tuesday, December 30. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Tyler Cowen on a flashing warning light for the economy. Jed Rubenfeld on how Donald Trump’s recent loss in the Supreme Court could end up being a win for the president in the long term. Philanthropist Sigrid Rausing on why she pulled funding from some human rights organizations. And more.

But first: our 2025 heroes.

The problem with heroes is that they only appear when you have the misfortune of truly needing them. They are the people who show up when things have gone sideways. They save people, help people, or stand up for life and liberty despite sometimes terrible costs.

It should come as some relief that there are too many such people to count this year. But as 2025 comes to a close, we wanted to celebrate just a few that moved us.

So, without further ado, we bring you our non-exhaustive list of a few of this year’s heroes. Some are well known. Others are not. But they all did something great this year, and for that, we at The Free Press thank them.

Still, not every story we published this year deserves applause. Even the greats miss the mark from time to time, and that includes our roster of Free Press columnists.

As we take a long, hard look back at 2025, we’re publishing a brief exercise in accountability to keep ourselves honest, reflect on the times when we got it wrong, and even invite you to point and laugh as you see fit. Today, we admit to the takes we would like to take back. Read Niall Ferguson, Tyler Cowen, Nellie Bowles, Joe Nocera, Suzy Weiss, and other Free Press writers on what they got wrong this year.

—The Editors

• China launched military exercises around Taiwan, mobilizing naval, air, ground, and missile forces. The live-fire exercises come after the Trump administration proposed a $11 billion arms deal with Taiwan earlier this month.

• While meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump said if Iran tried to rebuild its nuclear capabilities, “we’ll knock the hell out of them.” Trump also said if Hamas did not disarm quickly to pave the way for the next phase of his peace plan, “there’ll be hell to pay for them.”

• The Justice Department is using a law meant to punish businesses that cheat the government to investigate companies like Google and Verizon that it believes are still using diversity initiatives in hiring and promotion. The department is asserting that holding a federal contract while maintaining diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs constitutes fraud.

• The U.S. will contribute $2 billion to United Nations humanitarian aid, the most of any country but down from $17 billion in 2022. “Individual UN agencies will need to adapt, shrink, or die,” the State Department said.

• After meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky said that the two presidents were “90 percent agreed” on a revised 20-point peace plan and “100 percent agreed” on security guarantees. Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin had a “positive call” on Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

• The U.S. conducted its first land strike against Venezuela in its counternarcotics efforts last week, President Trump confirmed. “They load the boats up with drugs, so we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area,” the president said Monday.

• Protests erupted across Tehran as Iran’s currency hit a record low against the dollar. The protests highlight how sanctions and soaring inflation have weighed down Iran’s economy, particularly since negotiations for sanctions relief ended after the U.S. and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June.

• Beyoncé is now a billionaire, Forbes reported. The 44-year-old pop megastar is the fifth musician to cross the three comma threshold, joining her husband, Jay-Z, as well as Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, and Rihanna.