The Free Press

A few months ago, we made a bet: Free Pressers didn’t just want to read our articles and listen to our podcasts. They wanted to meet up, wrestle with ideas together, and share a drink after.

Since then, thousands of you have sat down with strangers at Supper Club events around the world. More than 4,000 of you are reading East of Eden as part of our new Free Press book club. Every day in the Forum, readers exchange opinions, advice, recommendations, and occasionally phone numbers.

So we started to wonder: If a few hours around a dinner table can create that kind of connection, what might happen over four or five days?

We want to find out, so today we’re introducing Free Press Excursions: intimate journeys that bring readers together with Free Press writers and expert guides to explore history, culture, and consequential ideas in the places where they come alive.

Our first three trips grow directly from questions that animate our pages: What happens when a society loses touch with the faith that shaped its moral imagination? What can a great novel teach us about friendship, courage, and duty? And what does the history of D-Day and Dachau tell us about American power—and our role in the world today?

Now we’re taking those conversations around the world.

From D-Day to Dachau with Aaron MacLean
France and Germany | August 2–7, 2027

On June 6, 1944, thousands of young Americans landed under fire, climbed cliffs, liberated villages, and began the campaign that would help bring down Nazi Germany.

More than eight decades later, the generation that fought that war has nearly disappeared. Soon, the responsibility of remembering will belong entirely to us.

Led throughout by expert military historians, we’ll follow the Allied advance from Utah Beach, Pointe du Hoc, and Omaha Beach to Munich and Dachau. For part of the journey, Free Press contributor and School of War host Aaron MacLean will join the group for lectures and conversations about what this history requires of us now: When is war just? What obligations accompany American power? And what happens when a nation forgets the sacrifices that made its freedom possible?

Aaron’s father participated in the liberation of Dachau. For him, this is personal. For all of us, it is a chance to confront evil, sacrifice, and why America still matters to the world.

Explore D-Day and Dachau with Aaron MacLean

Faith, Power, and the Vatican with Will Rahn
Rome | November 10–14, 2027

Christianity began as a persecuted faith on the margins of the Roman Empire. It became one of the most powerful and enduring institutions in human history.

Join Free Press senior editor and writer Will Rahn, a practicing Catholic, to examine what the Church built and preserved, what it gained and compromised as it moved from persecution to power, and what it can still say to a secular world searching for meaning and belonging.

Through special access to the Vatican, encounters with its art and architecture, and private conversations with clergy, scholars, and leaders, we’ll consider the Church’s beauty and failures, its contradictions and endurance. And with Leo XIV—the first American pope—now at its helm, we’ll ask what comes next.

Explore Faith, Power, and the Vatican with Will Rahn

Enter the World of Lonesome Dove with Shilo Brooks
New Mexico | April 29–May 2, 2027

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is about a cattle drive. It is also about male friendship, courage, duty, death, and the American longing to find out what lies beyond the horizon.

Shilo Brooks believes great literature can teach us how to live. It’s the idea behind his Free Press podcast, Old School, and it will be at the heart of this long weekend at a retreat in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

We’ll revisit the novel with Shilo and fellow Free Pressers, then head outside for local history, traditional leatherworking, and a cowboy cookout beneath the open sky.

Explore Lonesome Dove with Shilo Brooks

Free Press Excursions are part of our larger commitment: to create more ways for our readers to engage deeply with the subjects in our pages—and with one another—whether in the Forum, over a great novel, around a neighborhood dinner table, at a live event, or halfway around the world.

We hope you’ll come with us.

Free Press Excursions are created with Indagare Travel and Essential History Expeditions, experienced travel partners specializing in extraordinary journeys and historical programming.

For travelers who prefer to plan their own adventures: As part of our partnership with Indagare, Free Press subscribers receive complimentary 30-day access to Indagare’s Self Planner Membership, which includes more than 390 expert destination guides, vetted hotel recommendations, booking tools, and access to VIP amenities at participating properties. Email [email protected] to redeem.

Questions or feedback for future trips? Please email [email protected]. Want to stay up to date on all Free Press live experiences? Bookmark our events page.

It’s Monday, September 14. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Coleman Hughes on converting Ku Klux Klan members. Chris Wright on how to win the energy race. Arthur Brooks on when tragedy brings us together—and when it doesn’t. All that and more.

But first: Sounding the AI alarm.

Last year, I saw a chart that has been stuck in my head ever since. It was published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and it looked like this:

What it shows, in graphic form, is the bewilderingly wide range of ways AI could transform our lives: It could lead to never-before-seen prosperity (that’s the red line), it could give us something like the normal rate of economic growth (the orange and green lines), or it could end the human race (the purple line).

The chart stayed with me because it tells, in stark terms, not just an economic story, but the story of our time: the creation, by us, of something smarter than us, and the profound and unpredictable ways in which that could change what it means to be human.

For a week now, the headlines have been fixated on the single most alarming question in this conversation: Could AI kill us all?

Last week, a researcher resigned from Anthropic, warning that the top AI companies were advancing the technology at a dangerous speed. Over the weekend, something remarkable happened: The heads of those companies more or less conceded the point. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced his company’s plans to slow its development of cutting-edge AI. Then his rivals Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI said they agreed.

In a matter of hours, a new consensus among some of the most important people on the planet had revealed itself. It is a consensus about the most high-stakes question imaginable. It is worth taking seriously, and interrogating thoroughly. That is what Niall Ferguson and Tyler Cowen do in our lead stories today.

First, Niall Ferguson takes us through the latest unnerving AI developments, the forces driving the chances of catastrophe higher, and what, if anything, we can do about it. Don’t miss this deep dive into the most important issue in the world right now.

Tyler Cowen is not one to follow the herd. He has long been skeptical of the doomsaying around the new technology and, as he explains in his column today, the last few days have not changed that. Tyler argues that the slowdown announced by the AI titans is not what it seems. Read his latest to understand why.

—Oliver Wiseman

• An Iranian vessel was struck on the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday. State-run news agency INRA blamed a “terrorist attack,” which came just before Iran’s diplomatic meeting with several Gulf countries about reopening the strait. The meeting was postponed.

• A Russian drone struck a Ukrainian train shortly after former British prime minister Boris Johnson and retired U.S. general David Petraeus passed through on a different train. No casualties were reported, but Ukrainian Railways said that the earlier train could have been the drone’s target.

• House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that the “Trump dividend” announced by the president last week would require congressional approval. Trump promised “every adult American citizen” $5,000 if the Republicans win control of the House and Senate in November.

• Dude 44 Bravo, the U.S. Air Force officer shot down by Iran in April, told 60 Minutes that his survival was a “modern-day miracle.” The officer, who was identified only by his mission call sign, hid for two days despite a broken arm, back, and shoulder after free-falling to the ground.

• Preliminary results from Sweden’s elections showed the center-left party with a tiny advantage over the ascendant populist right. If those results hold, it would be a rare boon for the European left, as right-wing parties like Germany’s AfD win record numbers across the continent.

• American tennis player Ben Shelton lost to German Alexander Zverev in the U.S. Open men’s final on Sunday. No American man has won the tournament since Andy Roddick in 2003. On Saturday, Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan won the women’s title over Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus.

• Canadian pop star Céline Dion performed her comeback show in Paris on Saturday. A rare neurological condition sidelined her for six years.

Daryl Davis has been one of my most requested guests for years, and we finally got him on the show. We’d crossed paths once before, at a live event with Cornel West, but this was the first time I got to really dig into how he does what he does.

He’s spent over 40 years befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan, one at a time, until more than 200 of them le…

The moment when everyone begins talking about an issue is usually the moment when the probability of rational decision-making—call it p(RDM)—goes to zero.

Everyone is now talking about AI. Or writing about it. Or getting AI to write about it. The headline “Ex-Anthropic Insider Tells CNN How AI Could Kill All Humans by 2030” really got everyone’s attention, didn’t it? And within days we got the nonrational decision: Let’s hit pause. Or rather, let’s hit “pace.” Yes, it’s time to “Pace the Frontier.”

Here’s Dario Amodei of Anthropic: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” In other words, AI could find a cure for cancer, but it could also unleash cyberattacks and bioterrorism. So slow down, people! We need third-party “embedded evaluators” at all the frontier AI companies. We need companies within democratic countries to “establish common safety standards.” And we also need to “coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible.”

And suddenly, almost overnight, nearly everyone agrees (another bad sign). Amodei’s archrival, Sam Altman of OpenAI, is so committed to pausing that he is selflessly postponing his company’s IPO until next year. Elon Musk, who hates Altman with a passion, says, “Dario is right.” Demis Hassabis of DeepMind is in, too.

To get a sense of why we’re hitting pause, or pacing the frontier, let’s ask AI itself a question.

Prompt: What is your p(Doom), i.e., probability that AI could kill all humans within the next decade? Please answer in no more than two sentences.

For the better part of a decade, when Americans thought about energy, they thought about climate change: how to lower carbon emissions and wean the country off fossil fuels. That mindset produced policies like the initiative under the Biden administration to shutter functional coal plants in the name of climate targets. But between the rise of artificial intelligence, spiking electricity prices, and a more dangerous geopolitical landscape, something has shifted. Reliability, affordability, and abundance are back in the conversation. Americans have started asking a more basic question: Will the power be there when I need it?

Chris Wright, the head of the Trump administration’s Department of Energy, has built his entire career around that question. As one of the godfathers of fracking, he watched the shale boom rewrite the global math on energy security. When he took over the Department of Energy under Trump, Wright brought the same instinct with him. Instead of chasing net-zero targets, he has pursued energy abundance, embracing every source of power— yes, even fossil fuels.

I got the chance to talk with Wright recently. During our conversation we talked about:

• Why he believes fighting energy poverty matters more than chasing net-zero goals

• How he had to reopen and save coal plants that the previous administration had scheduled for shutdown

• His “all-of-the-above” approach, and why he believes his decisions will stop electricity prices from continuing to climb, and will eventually bring them down.

Read an abridged transcript of our conversation below.

Lucy Biggers: For people who aren’t familiar with your worldview, how do you think about energy differently from the way it is often presented in the mainstream media?

When is a slowdown not a slowdown, or perhaps even an acceleration?

Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, commanded the headlines this weekend by issuing an online post, “We Must Pace the Frontier.” “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he proposed, suggesting other methods to improve AI safety, all of which Anthropic is beginning to implement. Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI have endorsed the proposals, which include embedding third-party monitors in the companies and placing stricter restraints on exports to China. But the so-called “slowdown” is the most discussed, and it could benefit or harm AI progress depending on how it’s handled. (I am a member of Anthropic’s economic advisory committee.)

The decision to slow down comes on the heels of a public warning issued last week by Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who resigned from Anthropic and declared that the company wasn’t doing enough to make sure AI functions in keeping with its designers’ intentions—a problem known as alignment. Coxon’s social media post, in which he accused Anthropic and OpenAI of “gambling with our lives,” has since commanded more than 169 million views. Evan Hubinger, who still works on alignment at Anthropic, put the probability of the world ending because of AI at more than 10 percent within the next decade. Senator Bernie Sanders announced he would seek a slowdown of further AI development and a ban on superintelligence.

As an avowed AI optimist, and skeptic of most proposals to forcibly restrict progress, I am nonetheless open to the changes major AI labs are now endorsing. Yet I think much of the public has radically misunderstood what Anthropic is proposing. It is not an actual slowdown at all; it is a momentary, apparent pause to be followed by a later acceleration. Allow me to explain.

One gorgeous Tuesday morning 25 years ago, I grabbed a cab from LaGuardia Airport into New York City. I was there for only a day to do a few meetings. From the Long Island Expressway, somewhere around Sunnyside, Queens, I looked out the window at the remarkable Lower Manhattan skyline. At which point, the side of the World Trade Center’s North Tower exploded.

Traffic snarled almost immediately, and within minutes, fire trucks began to race past us into the Queens–Midtown Tunnel toward Manhattan. In that tunnel about 15 minutes later, I learned via the taxi’s radio that an airplane had smashed into the North Tower, and that the South Tower had now been hit as well. I got out at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 37th Street, where I had a direct view of the towers, which were both engulfed in smoke. Over the next 90 minutes, it became clear that this was no accident. I watched as the towers crumbled to the ground.

Every Free Press reader over a certain age has a story about where they were when this terrorist atrocity occurred. Many, like me, witnessed it with their own eyes—or, far worse, lost friends and loved ones in the attack.

For all the horror of that day, however, most of us will also remember something very positive that happened in the immediate aftermath: America came together. This is not just a sentimental memory. According to the Pew Research Center, right before the attacks, 31 percent of Americans said that they trusted the federal government to do what was right “just about always” or “most of the time”; shortly after, that number had nearly doubled, to 60 percent, a 30-year high. New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was widely celebrated as “America’s Mayor,” and President George W. Bush’s favorability rating sat at 90 percent by late September 2001. Trust in government and leadership may not seem like an automatic proxy for national unity but, in fact, it does track closely with how positive and engaged citizens feel about their larger community. Volunteering rates skyrocketed, not just for 9/11-related charities, but for those unconnected with the tragedy as well.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Joe Nocera has two drinks with the man making San Francisco great again. The show that made former Marine Elliot Ackerman believe in heroes. Suzy Weiss on the end of Meghan Markle’s Montecito era. And much more!

But first: the founder who wants to make a literal unicorn . . .

In the middle of Texas, not far from Austin, you’ll find a scientist who wants to make you a fluorescent cat. She was planning on glowing rabbits, for a time, before the backlash got too intense. But her dreams won’t be dampened: One day soon, she wants to start experimenting to bioengineer some mythical creatures into reality. Imagine dragons flapping over Hill Country.

If these projects sound whimsical, they’re not the only ones Josie Zayner, CEO of The Embryo Corporation, has been cooking up. She’s also working on making a more robust kind of cow, which will be good for ranchers’ bottom lines. She’s sequencing—and making money from—some exceptionally speedy racehorses. And those fluorescent cats? They’ll also be hypoallergenic.

But cool as all this may sound, is it safe? After all, this is a company that was offering members of the public a “frog genetic engineering kit”—“you could inject in the frogs, and they would grow bigger,” explained Zayner. And, perhaps an even bigger question: Is what she’s doing ethical?

Reporter Jessica Lucas traveled to Texas to investigate. “Can the crazy bitch from the rural-poverty farm actually run a company with millions of dollars of investment?” asked Zayner, referring to none other than herself. “I guess we’ll find out!”

Don’t miss this glimpse into a new frontier of science—which isn’t getting as much attention as artificial intelligence, but could alter our reality just as significantly. Because although Zayner said she’s not interested in editing humans right now—because it would require too much bureaucracy—she’s playing with some kind of Promethean fire. Not that she sees it that way.

“I think the whole playing God thing is bullshit,” said Zayner. “Being a god is just being 100 years in the future.”

Read the full story here:

Is it okay for a 40-year-old to still be on her dad’s phone bill? For a 35-year-old to go on a mom-funded vacation? Millennials are infamous for relying on their parents’ credit cards—and some, like comedian Jared Freid, couldn’t be happier about it. “They can pay until the day they die,” Freid says in his new Netflix special, The Family Plan.

Freid joined Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot, on this week’s episode of Second Thought, to discuss his favorite generational beefs, plus the stories that have obsessed the internet this week: the deaths at Burning Man, Al Roker eating dog food on television, and Harry and Meghan’s sad return to England. “If you can’t make it in Montecito,” Suzy says, “you can’t make it anywhere.”

Click below to watch the video, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. (And you can watch Jared’s special here.)

This week, we ran an excerpt from Lindsay Crouse’s new book on knowing when to quit; an essay by Nick Clairmont about why he rereads the newspapers from September 12, 2001, every year; and a review by Kat Rosenfield of a book containing a story so bizarre, its author was terrified someone else might tell it first . . .

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a schoolteacher in Boston aspiring to drink more; a Rollerblading Christian in North Carolina; or a man in Virginia with a bichon frise named Cosmo. Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked Joe Nocera for his recommendations . . .

📚Read . . . If you’re still hungering for some tennis after the U.S. Open ends this weekend, pick up a copy of Matthew Futterman’s new book, The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis. For more than a decade, Futterman has been writing about the sport for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and now The Athletic. He knows all the players and their coaches, and they all know him, so they tell him things. Novak Djokovic on what it felt like to go from villain to hero. Madison Keys on making her husband her coach. Naomi Osaka’s fears about playing again after having a child. I gulped it down in two sittings. You will too.

🍷 Drink . . . Zinfandel is surely the most underrated of American wines, but I’ve always been a fan, especially once I discovered the Ridge Vineyards years ago. Its Lytton Springs red zinfandel ($56) was ranked third in Wine Spectator’s list of the top 100 wines of 2025. But the one I gravitate to is its Three Valleys zin, which you can get for as little as $25. It’s the perfect red wine, neither as subtle as a French Bordeaux or as insanely bold as some American cabernets. Also: Its vineyards are atop the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking Silicon Valley. Many years ago, so it is said, Steve Jobs looked down from that spot and said, “I made this.”

📧Subscribe . . . There are thousands of people writing Substacks, but to my mind, there is one Substacker who stands above the rest: Ted Gioia. He describes his Substack, The Honest Broker, as “a trustworthy guide to music, books, arts, media & culture,” and in my experience, that’s exactly what it is. Gioia regularly posts lists of new music he has discovered, or new YouTube videos worth watching—and they’re always a revelation. He is also a fierce critic of Amazon, Spotify, and any other technology that diminishes the ability to lead a purely human life. He writes in plain, unadorned English and isn’t trying to show off, unlike certain other Substackers. To put it another way, Gioia is as authentic as they come.

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.

Bebo’s, a roadside diner in Pilot Point, Texas, is a fever dream in which no surface has been left uncovered.

The walls are papered with vintage Texaco and Coca-Cola signs, alongside mounts of moose heads and eagles. There’s a stage in the corner where Elvis impersonators sometimes perform, and the tables are covered in stickers advertising pool cleaning, drywall repair, and gutter manufacturers. Large Donald Trump banners and American flags, some of which have been crocheted, fill any spare space.

Perched beneath a “Hippies use the back door” sign was Josie Zayner, sipping coffee in a crop top, jean shorts, and a patchwork of video game– and anime-themed tattoos. Zayner, a former NASA research fellow and world-famous biohacker turned gene-editing start-up CEO, relishes Bebo’s. She feels more at home here, laughing with the waitress about cheese sticks, than she ever did in the Bay Area.

“Nobody wants to be a San Franciscan except for the tech world,” said Zayner, 45, who’s called Austin, Texas, home since 2021. “These people show more warmth than you’d ever experience in San Francisco,” she continued, nodding at the dizzying decor. “This is the soul of America.”

Zayner gained infamy in the 2010s through a series of audacious gene-editing stunts and experiments conducted in California, during which she spliced jellyfish DNA into her own skin, injected herself onstage at a conference with a CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) solution designed to knock out the gene that limits muscle growth, performed her own fecal transplant to cure her chronic gut problems, and even livestreamed herself on YouTube self-injecting a Covid DNA vaccine.

The billionaire strolled into the three-star restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side wearing a wrinkled tan suit and loafers in desperate need of a shine. That was the first clue that Michael Moritz, 72, wasn’t your typical Silicon Valley rich guy. It wouldn’t be the last.

Of late, Moritz—the former chairman of Sequoia Capital, who is worth an estimated $7.6 billion—has been using some of that wealth to help revive San Francisco, the city he calls home. Last month, he announced a competition offering up to $50 million to as many as three organizations that have ideas to make the city better. But before we get to his noblesse oblige, an explanation of what came first—well, besides the fact that, after ordering tea (for him) and cabernet (for me), we both recalled the time I interviewed him early in his venture capital career for a story about Steve Jobs.

Moritz had also once been a journalist, a correspondent for Time magazine before joining the venture ranks in 1986, investing in companies such as Google, PayPal, and YouTube. You make bets like that, you get rich. And if you use some of that money on philanthropy and “promoting Britain’s economic interests,” you can get a knighthood, which Moritz achieved in 2013.

Anyway, Moritz was in town to promote his new book, Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile, which—clue No. 2—contains not a single word about technology, artificial intelligence, or how to become a successful venture capitalist. It is instead about the murder of his grandparents, and many of his other relatives, in the Nazi death camps, and the effect that had on his father especially, who, along with his brother, made it safely to England in his teens. It’s also a beautiful piece of writing. Clue No. 3.