Wikipedia was founded on an idealistic mission to provide all the world’s information for free—and to do so democratically. But, as we’ve reported before in these pages, the site has been hijacked by ideologues.

Anonymous editors who are supposed to be committed to the truth instead edit articles to suit their ideological priors. And that has made the site harder to trust than ever—especially on some of the most controversial and important issues of the day.

Today, we’re honored to publish one of the site’s founders, Larry Sanger.

Larry has been a vocal critic of what the site he built has become. In his vital essay for us today, he offers a remedy, or as he calls it, “my Hail Mary proposal to reform Wikipedia.” He does so, he writes, in the spirit of Martin Luther, who posted his famous 95 theses “out of love for the truth and the desire to elucidate it.” His proposals have been edited and condensed for clarity. —The Editors

I launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, alongside Jimmy Wales, then the CEO of dot-com company Bomis. It was designed as a freewheeling public successor to the peer-reviewed Nupedia, which we’d founded the year prior.

For the next 14 months, my task was to transform a completely empty, blank wiki into what would soon become the largest written resource in the history of the world. I oversaw the establishment of several fundamental standards, including rules about neutrality and verifiability.

I left Wikipedia in 2002. In the 23 years since, and in the last few years in particular, the standards that inspired the company have been sacrificed in favor of ideology. The following nine theses are my Hail Mary proposal to reform Wikipedia. I do this, as Martin Luther said when he posted his famous 95 theses, “out of love for the truth and the desire to elucidate it.”

Kara Kennedy’s major investigation into the Free Birth Society shed light onto an organization that some former members are calling a “death cult.”

I spoke with Kara about the group, which encourages women to give birth entirely without medical assistance—which some free birthers say includes sonograms, blood tests, and pregnancy tests. She shared storie…

President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered nearly every general and admiral in the U.S. military to Quantico, Virginia, for a speech on Tuesday. The subject wasn’t a new strategy for countering China or a vision for AI integration into the force. The subject was “warrior culture.” According to Secretary Hegseth, warrior culture in the U.S. military will be revitalized by focusing on two things: height, weight, and grooming standards, and purging the ranks of “woke” politics.

Sure, it’s always great to recommit to fitness and individual performance, but given the dangerous world we live in—the war in Ukraine, Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, the war in Gaza—it was bizarre to hear the secretary say that the critical strategic challenges facing our nation would be “another speech for another day.” Instead, Secretary Hegseth called in all his senior leadership on short notice to give the equivalent of a TED Talk on “ending the war on warriors,” then noting “I heard someone wrote a book about that,” as he plugged his 2024 memoir.

There will be “massive amounts of digital,” Kathryn Nester, the lead attorney representing Tyler Robinson, the man accused of murdering Charlie Kirk, said Monday in court in Provo, Utah.

She meant all the online conversations, posts, memes, images, and so forth that make up the netherworld that Robinson, a 22-year-old apprentice electrician, appears to have inhabited.

Robinson, who surrendered September 11, did not appear in court. He was listening in from the Utah County Jail.

“To the jail, do we have Mr. Robinson present?” Fourth District Judge Tony Graf said into a video screen.

“Yes, Your Honor,” someone said.

Judge Graf, who was appointed in May by Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox, said: “Mr. Robinson, good morning to you as well.”

Ever since Kirk’s murder, the adults have been playing catch-up, trying to decode this netherworld that clashed so violently with the real world. The bullet casings with their mysterious engravings. The furries. The shitposts.

As Nester put it, Robinson’s defense attorneys have yet to “get our heads around exactly what we’re dealing with.”

Soon, we would know more.

I wasn’t raised to believe in the future, but I always secretly hoped it would come to pass. My family were Southern Baptists, though; the Rapture hung over our heads. Once, when I was 7, I heard a big boom on a Saturday morning that shook the pictures on our walls. Me and my brothers yelled. Mom told us this was the end. The Lord was coming back to get us, and I had just just gotten a Game Boy for Christmas. The timing was terrible, almost cruel, really. I started to cry. A few minutes later, Mom turned on the TV and declared a false alarm. What we’d heard was the sound of the space shuttle Columbia exploding upon reentry over East Texas and the debris falling everywhere.

The end was still near, of course. I knew that because of what people said in church and on the evangelical radio stations my mom listened to. It was 2003, and we were at war in places the Bible talked about. Earthquakes, floods, and famines plagued the Earth. The news said “no survivors” over footage of a big fireball in the sky—a sad story, but there was nothing in Revelation about crashing spaceships, which meant I wasn’t going to heaven today, and for that, I was very happy.

Suffice it to say, I was not surprised to learn last week that a lot of evangelicals were saying the world was about to end; it would be more surprising if they weren’t saying that. What’s new is that secular Americans—and the media, from The New York Times to Fox News—briefly paid attention. There’s one reason for that: The Rapture was trending on TikTok.

Yesterday at the White House President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that they had reached an agreement on a 20-point peace plan for Gaza put forth by the Trump administration. Hamas is now reviewing that plan. President Trump said today that he will give Hamas “three or four days” to put down its arms.

To discuss this deve…

It was raining when I met Jordan Castro at his office on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., so I opened my umbrella over us. As we walked to a nearby Chipotle, he shrank out from under it.

“Using an umbrella is not very masculine,” he told me.

This is exactly the kind of thing you might expect Castro, 32, to say. He is the author of the new novel Muscle Man, published earlier this month by Catapult, and he is obsessed with masculinity. Last year, Castro wrote a viral essay for Harper’s Magazine about weight lifting—an activity he does regularly and with great zeal—in which he wrote that strength is “seen cynically by many as the cousin of toxic masculinity.”

“Muscles,” he continued, are seen by writer types “as representative of low-status worldviews.”

It’s Tuesday, September 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: Michael Oren and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib discuss Trump’s Gaza peace plan. Tyler Cowen on why America should recruit immigrants from its adversaries. Vinay Prasad on what’s working with America’s vaccine schedule—and what isn’t.

But first: Eric Adams throws in the towel.

“I had gotten burned so many times, I didn’t know it was real.”

That is how one billionaire replied when I asked him how he felt about the news on Sunday that Mayor Eric Adams was bowing out of the New York City mayor’s race—finally. It was clear to anyone with the slightest grasp of politics that his bid had long become untenable, but only now, with barely a month to go until election day, was Adams declaring the obvious: His current term will be his last.

The Cuomo campaign has been waiting for this moment, but will it be the boon that they think it is? I immediately called his major donors to ask if they would consider digging into their pockets again. I got wind of various fundraisers in the works, including one that happened Monday. Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist front-runner, began ripping into the former governor.

Even some of Cuomo’s staunchest allies have their doubts about whether his campaign will rise to the occasion. And then there is Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate who keeps insisting that he will stay in the race no matter what.

Read my piece to learn more about how Democratic insiders are sizing up the rest of the campaign. And read my colleague Will Rahn’s plea to Sliwa to reckon with reality, drop out, and make a huge sacrifice that Will says the city needs.

—Olivia Reingold

You might know Leland Vittert—one of America’s most recognizable TV correspondents—from his years of frontline reporting in places like Egypt, Libya, Israel, and Ukraine. What you might not know is that Leland is autistic—and he just wrote a book about it. Today on Honestly, Vittert discusses the relentless, nonstop work it took to overcome his diagnosis, Trump’s Tylenol episode, and the politicization of autism research today.

The Free Press is hosting two can’t-miss livestreams for paid subscribers on our site today.

In the first at noon ET, Rafaela Siewert talks to Michael Oren and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib about the peace plan agreed by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday. Click here to make sure you don’t miss it.

In the second, Suzy Weiss talks to Free Press contributing writer Kara Kennedy about her major investigation into the Free Birth Society, an organization that some former members are calling a “death cult.” Join Kennedy and Suzy at 2:30 p.m. ET for a live conversation about this not-to-be missed Free Press exposé. Click here to add the event to your calendar.

• Police in Michigan identified Thomas Jacob Sanford as the suspect in Sunday’s attack on a Latter-day Saints church. Sanford, 40, was a veteran of the Iraq War and served in the Marines from June 2004 to June 2008. (For more on this devastating attack, read Maxwell Meyer’s report in The Free Press.)

• Tyler Robinson, the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s assassination, appeared in court for the first time yesterday. During the hearing, Robinson and his legal team asked a judge for more time to review “voluminous” evidence before deciding whether or not to request a preliminary hearing.

• Entrepreneur Charlie Javice was sentenced to more than seven years in prison on Monday. Javice, 33, was found guilty of defrauding JPMorgan Chase in March after convincing the bank to buy her college financial aid start-up Frank for $175 million.

• President Trump met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House on Monday. During their talks, President Trump advocated for his new 21-point peace plan. (For more on the new plan, read Michael Oren’s excellent piece).

• Electronic Arts, a video game publishing company, announced Monday that it accepted a $55 billion buyout from private investors. The deal marks the biggest leveraged buyout of a publicly traded company ever, and includes Jared Kushner’s private equity firm and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund as some of its biggest investors.

• Missouri governor Mike Kehoe signed a new redistricting plan proposed by Republican lawmakers into law on Sunday. Missouri’s new congressional map, backed by President Trump, is the latest in a nationwide redistricting push in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections.

• The United Nations reimposed military and economic sanctions on Iran. The resolution came after the UN deemed that the Middle Eastern country had reneged on a 2015 nuclear deal, and it will likely have drastic effects on the Iranian economy.

• The United States revoked Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s visa this weekend. The decision came after Petro participated in a pro-Palestinian rally in New York City and called for National Guard troops in cities to disobey federal orders.

• The state of Oregon sued President Trump for his decision to send the National Guard into Portland. The suit, filed Sunday, alleges that Trump’s move was “patently unlawful,” adding that the “provocative and arbitrary actions threaten to undermine public safety by inciting a public outcry.”

We have a packed season of conversations, debates, and live events. Join us in person or catch the videos later as a benefit for paid subscribers. Here’s what’s coming up:

• Understanding Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan with Michael Oren and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
  Livestream • September 30, 12 p.m. • 📅 Add to Calendar

• Inside the Free Birth Society with Suzy Weiss and Kara Kennedy
  Livestream • September 30, 2:30 p.m. • 📅 Add to Calendar

• Anduril Founder Palmer Luckey Live with Bari Weiss
  Washington, D.C. • October 8, 7 p.m. • 🎟️ Tickets on sale here

• Reclaiming Childhood in an Online World with Jonathan Haidt
  New York, NY • October 22, 7 p.m. • 🎟️ Tickets on sale here

Full Schedule

Leland Vittert is one of America’s most recognizable television correspondents. You’ll know his face from years of frontline reporting in places like Egypt, Libya, Israel, and Ukraine.

You may have followed his tumultuous exit from Fox News in 2021, after clashing with the network over its coverage of Donald Trump—and then his redemption arc, becoming th…

This afternoon Mark Halperin, Joe Nocera, and I joined the Free Press livestream to chat about the latest in American politics.

Top of mind was electoral politics after the news yesterday that incumbent New York City mayor Eric Adams would be suspending his reelection campaign. We talked about what this means for the New York race and what’s happening in…