The Free Press

It’s Monday, December 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: A new lawsuit paints social media firms as the new Big Tobacco. Maya Sulkin and Frannie Block have the shocking details. Plus: Trump warms up to legal weed, a history of tough Jews, Coleman Hughes’s end-of-year AMA, Free Pressers react to a viral essay about anti-white discrimination. And much more.

But first: the former president with some explaining to do.

The Justice Department on Friday released a large batch of its “Epstein files”: thousands of letters, receipts, and photos it gathered during years of investigations into the monstrous sex trafficker. The release, which was heavily redacted, didn’t confirm any of the wilder theories about Epstein. But the images leave plenty of powerful men with questions to answer, and none more than Bill Clinton.

One photo shows the former president on what appears to be a private jet with a blond woman sitting on the arm of his chair. Another shows him with Michael Jackson. In the most damning image in the release, Clinton is seen sinking into a hot tub with a young woman whose face is redacted.

Pressure is on the former president to explain what he was up to. But as Free Press columnist Eli Lake explains, the release of the photos broke a historic norm. The Justice Department generally doesn’t publicize information about people it hasn’t charged with crimes, but Congress forced the agency’s hand in this case. That means the scandal may spread with little justice to show for it. Don’t miss Eli’s latest on the former president who has some explaining to do, and the legal and political tangle surrounding Clinton, Donald Trump, and the Epstein files’ release.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

On Breaking History: A History of Tough Jews

Last week’s attack in Sydney was only the latest example that we’re once again living in an era when Jews cannot rely on Western governments to protect them. On the latest episode of Breaking History, Eli Lake takes us back to another period when that was true: 1930s America. As Nazi sympathizers rallied in the open and police often stood idly, Jewish gangsters led by Meyer Lansky took matters into their own hands, establishing a tradition of Jewish self-defense that is often forgotten today. Listen to this episode by hitting the play button below, and be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

• Thousands of mourners gathered at Bondi Beach Sunday night to honor the victims of last week’s attack that killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration. “This has to be the moment when light starts to eclipse the darkness,” Australian Jewish community leader David Ossip told the crowd, which exceeded over 10,000 attendees.

• The U.S. is pursuing another sanctioned oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, the third in the last two weeks. The tanker was “part of Venezuela’s illegal sanctions evasion,” a U.S. official said.

• Israeli officials will brief President Trump on options for new strikes on Iran’s ballistic missile program when Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet at Mar-a-Lago later this month. Israel believes Iran is expanding and rebuilding its capabilities after the U.S. and Israel bombed Iranian facilities in June.

• Rapper Nicki Minaj made a surprise appearance at Turning Points USA’s annual AmericaFest conference on Sunday. In a Q and A with Erika Kirk, she urged California governor Gavin Newsom not to run for president, and instead “get on the nearest Jet Ski and let that beautiful hair blow in the wind. It will make you happier than this race that you will not win.”

• Nine people died after a group of gunmen carried out a shooting at a South African pub during the early hours of Sunday. The shooting occurred in Bekkersdal, a town about 30 miles west of Johannesburg. Approximately 12 suspects, who opened fire from a van into the pub, still remain at large.

• The homeless man credited for cracking the Brown University shooting case “is being taken care of at the federal level . . . in a hotel, being fed.” The man, referred to as “John,” identified the alleged gunman’s car and posted the information on Reddit. Providence’s mayor urged the FBI to issue John the entirety of the $50,000 reward promised for informants in the case.

My producer Poppy Damon and I are back for another Ask Me Anything. In this bonus episode, I answer your questions on President Donald Trump and the attention economy, declining birth rates, psychedelics and mental health, AI and the future of work, social media and kids, religion, meritocracy, and more.

As 2025 wraps up, it felt like a good moment to st…

After October 7, 2023, Jews around the world were reminded of an old, unsettling truth: Governments do not always protect minorities when mobs turn violent. From Bondi Beach to New York synagogues, the promise of public order has looked increasingly fragile.

In this episode of Breaking History, Eli Lake revisits the last time Jews in America confronted t…

Sometimes a picture debunks a thousand words. So it is with the photographs of Bill Clinton included in the tranche of Jeffrey Epstein files that the Justice Department released Friday. The former president had minimized his relationship with the disgraced financier, but the snapshots tell a different story.

Among the photos the FBI collected in its investigation into Epstein are several of Clinton looking chummy with him, steeped in the high life. One shows Epstein and Clinton beaming in exotic Indonesian silk batik shirts. There is a photo of Clinton on what appears to be Epstein’s private jet with a blond woman sitting on the arm of his chair. In one photo, Clinton poses with Michael Jackson. In another he is dining with Mick Jagger. Then there is one with him reaching for the shoulders of actor Kevin Spacey, flanked by Secret Service officers. Most damning is a photo of Clinton in a hot tub with a woman whose face is blacked out to protect her privacy. The New York Post featured that one on the cover of its Saturday edition under the headline: “Tubba Bubba.”

None of these photos show that Clinton engaged in sex with underage girls provided to him by Epstein or Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, as some have speculated about Clinton. But they do puncture Clinton’s own prior explanations about his relationship with Epstein.

In 2019, TikTok announced a “formal relationship” with the National Parent Teacher Association, which describes itself as the largest child advocacy group in America. They published a TikTok Guide for Parents packed with instructions on “digital safety” and how to “decide the best experience for your family.”

What TikTok did not say, lawsuits filed against the company allege, was that internal documents had begun to reveal that the company knew its technology was harming kids—the short-form video app’s target audience. Between 2018 and 2024, for example, the company allegedly heard from users and parents who described TikTok as “addictive,” “like crystal meth,” and “ruining” kids’ ability to pay attention or sleep.

In 2021, TikTok’s own Trust and Safety team concluded that “compulsive usage” of the app “correlates with a slew of negative mental effects” and worsens “preexisting mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety,” a court filing claims. The filing also says the team found the risk of users being driven into algorithmic silos involving suicide and self-harm material was “HIGH.”

Should we feel sorry for white men?

It’s a question that not so long ago would have been basically impossible to ask in American media—but it is the one that has been rattling around the internet for the past week. That’s because of a viral essay published in Compact magazine by Jacob Savage. In it, Savage describes anti-white discrimination in elite spaces, and calls the years between 2014 and 2024 a “lost generation” for white millennial men like himself, especially in the arts and media world.

Savage’s essay struck a chord. Vice President J.D. Vance was among its fans, describing it as an “incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences.” As the strong reactions to the essay, both positive and negative, suggest, Savage hit on something central to our politics. That’s why we wanted to probe the themes of the essay further—and so we asked a group of Free Press contributors for their thoughts.

Donald Trump does not drink or smoke. On this issue, the president is what Bill Clinton wanted everyone to believe when he claimed, as a presidential candidate in 1992, “I didn’t inhale.” Yet Trump signed an executive order on Thursday instructing his administration to quickly reschedule marijuana, a change sought by the cannabis industry for decades.

The abstainer in chief is an unlikely hero for the cannabis industry, which historically felt closer to the Democratic Party and more aligned with the drug-reform efforts of its progressive wing. The executive order rescheduling marijuana could potentially loosen restrictions, lift tax burdens for cannabis companies, and pave the path for eventual federal recognition of medical marijuana.

Trump proved once again that his positions do not align neatly with traditional sacred cows of the Republican Party. Even the “just say no” conservative opposition to drug use is no more.

Every Hanukkah, Jews retell the story of the Maccabees, the ancient heroes of the second century BCE, who wrested Jerusalem from the tyranny of the Greek empire.

This year was no different. But as Hanukkah draws to an end, we near ever closer to the 250th birthday of the United States—which gives us reason to tell the story of another set of Jewish heroes as well: those who helped wrest the other Promised Land, America, from the tyranny of the British Empire.

Three weeks after the Declaration of Independence was signed, a man named Jonas Phillips became the proud owner of one of the 200 copies of the Declaration that had been distributed throughout the colonies. Phillips, a devout patriot and the president of a synagogue in Philadelphia, sent his copy to an acquaintance in Amsterdam on the eve of the Revolutionary War, along with a letter in Yiddish expressing strong optimism for the patriot cause. “The Americans have already made themselves like the states of Holland,” he wrote, alluding to the Dutch separatist movement against their Spanish Empire that started two centuries earlier.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, days after legendary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz’s passing, Joe Nocera reflects on his most famous book, “Making It,” and how its portrait of naked ambition uncannily mirrors his own.

When I learned on Wednesday that Norman Podhoretz, the longtime and legendary editor in chief of Commentary magazine, had died at the age of 95, I immediately downloaded Making It, the autobiography he published in 1967, when he was all of 37. I wanted to recall why it had had such a powerful impact on me when I read it as a young man. It didn’t take long to remember.

“Judging by the embarrassment that a frank discussion of one’s feelings about one’s own success, or the lack of it, invariably causes in polite company today,” he wrote in the preface, “ambition . . . seems to be replacing erotic lust as the prime dirty little secret of the well-educated American soul.”

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss roasts the new “Avatar” film. Bill Maher explains why he’d rather have Zohran Mamdani for president than Donald Trump. Abigail Shrier offers Tough Love to a mom who doesn’t want her 22-year-old daughter to get married.

But first: a jaw-dropping personal story from Michael J. Fanuele about what it’s like to discover a family you never knew existed.

Some adopted kids long to know their biological parents. My brother Danny was one of them. He once told me he’d never be at peace until he met his “real” mother.

I didn’t have the same hole in my heart. Besides, as someone born in New York in the 1970s, my adoption records were sealed.

But then, in 2019 then-governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that radically loosened the state’s adoption privacy laws, and suddenly, information I never thought I cared about was only an online form away. And after years of looking forwards, I fell backwards—into a rabbit hole of fact and fiction.

Stories about adopted kids finding their birth parents so often end with either heartbreak or pure joy. Mine isn’t one of those stories.—Michael J. Fanuele

America’s celebrating a big birthday next year! And to mark the occasion, we’ve got a brand-new newsletter all about our nation’s remarkable 250 years of life. Every week, historian Jonathan Horn will dive into America’s past—and bring it to life in our pages. You can sign up here and catch up on the second edition below.

This week, we also ran two beautiful tributes: Hadley Freeman remembered Rob Reiner, and Rachel Goldberg-Polin remembered her son, who died as a hostage of Hamas:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our editor Rick Brooks for some recommendations . . .

📚 Read . . . Virginia Hanusik’s Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana. Louisiana is disappearing by the day, its land slipping beneath the water. That precarity is as old as the coexistence of man and nature, but Hurricane Katrina laid bare the consequences of our decisions to carve and contain the landscape to suit our selfish interests. Katrina shattered my faith in government. What endures are the people of Louisiana, and Hanusik illuminates their connections to the land and the water, from the bayous to the Mississippi River Delta. You will not forget Hanusik’s haunting black-and-white photos, which include not one living soul yet are about them all.

🎵 Listen . . . Jason Isbell has shiny new teeth and a beautiful new love, but his first solo album in 10 years, titled Foxes in the Snow, is filled with the same layered lyrics, halting storytelling, and sad-sack sensibility that put him on the musical map. Isbell never sounds like he is trying to outsmart you with his metaphors or rhymes. His voice is what it is. So is life. “I love her well, and I love her sick,” Isbell sings in the album’s title song. “I love the carrot, but I really like the stick.”

🍳 Cook . . . I am not Jewish, but my daughter announced on Wednesday that her stuffed animal is Jewish, celebrating Hanukkah, and expecting to eat homemade latkes. (These notions apparently took root at either her New York City public elementary school or her Spanish immersion after-school program.) Luckily, I was looking for a reason to try Carolina Gelen’s recipe for pickle latkes. The twist is julienned kosher dill pickles that are folded in with the potatoes, breadcrumbs, and all the rest. The collision of brininess, crispiness, and saltiness are a hit. The stuffed animal is now asking to visit Santa, but I plan to bring out this recipe again next Hanukkah.

Last but not least, we want to pay tribute again to Rob Reiner, who made one of the greatest movies of all time, “When Harry Met Sally. . .” If you’ve never read Abigail Shrier’s appreciation of it, you must. And here’s Rob (center) on set with Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan):

That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just tell us what movies you’ll be watching over the holidays; we’re at [email protected].

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