The Free Press

When people envision New York, they’re usually picturing the state’s Twelfth Congressional District. This is the New York of the Lincoln Center, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Chrysler Building, the Guggenheim. This is where Woody Allen canoodled with Diane Keaton as they looked over the 59th Street Bridge in Manhattan. And this is where Donald Trump, a Queens native who fought and clawed his way across the East River, descended the golden escalator in 2015 and changed American politics forever.

It’s also perhaps the wealthiest district in the country, meaning the person who represents it in Congress is effectively destined to become a major power broker on Capitol Hill. If you’ve ever wondered why Democratic leaders so often hail from New York City or coastal California, it’s the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: Because that’s where the money is. All this wealth makes fundraising a lot easier. Plus, that cash can be spread around. Play it right, and you can ride this district to a position of serious power. Add the name Kennedy to the mix, and you’re talking about national celebrity.

We’ll get to that Kennedy in a little bit. Because for the first time in 34 years, the congressional seat is open, with longtime representative Jerry Nadler leaving at the end of his current term. This is the moment ambitious Manhattan Democrats—of which there are many—have long awaited. They’ve spent years glad-handing party bosses, community leaders, the old ward heelers who can deliver votes. They’re hacks, in other words, who have been climbing the greasy pole of New York Democratic politics their entire careers.

The moment Isabel Rosen heard cheers coming from the Bushwick bar, she knew history had been made. She raced inside to find her friends hugging in front of four TVs blaring variations of the same news: “Zohran Mamdani Wins New York City Mayoral Race.” As the first few notes of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” began to play, Isabel, a 24-year-old campaign volunteer, felt like she might cry.

“It was thrilling. I was like ‘Wow, I helped make this happen.’ ”

And in the back of her mind, a tickle of satisfaction crept in: A few hours from then, she knew her mom would wake up in London to find out that the man she called “dangerous” and an “antisemite” had just cinched control of America’s largest city.

“I was like, I won the argument,” said Isabel, an anti-Zionist raised in a mixed Catholic-Jewish household. “It’s fun to be right.”

Whisper it, but there’s a revolution happening in Iran. The Islamic Republic and the Ayatollah may both still be in place, but right now, away from the world’s attention, Iranian women are quietly rebelling.

On the streets of the nation’s major cities, where the regime murdered hundreds of protesters and imprisoned more than 20,000 Iranians in 2022, many girls and women are now walking without hijabs. You can see it for yourself in videos on social media: They are doing what almost anywhere else in the world is the most normal thing imaginable but in Iran is something revolutionary.

What makes this all the more surprising is that as recently as April 2024, the United Nations was warning that there was a “violent crackdown” on women and girls with mass arrests and harassment of anyone not adhering to the draconian laws. But now, something has changed. The once-menacing white vans of the morality police make far less frequent appearances. Some women are even doubling down on dissent: Swapping their headscarves for helmets, they ride motorcycles—a right and a pleasure long denied to Iranian women. What was once unthinkable has become ordinary in ways that no one could have predicted.

On Wednesday morning, we woke up to the news that legendary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz had died peacefully in Manhattan. He was 95. Podhoretz, who edited Commentary magazine between 1960 and 1995, was renowned as one of the great giants of neoconservatism—an irrepressible intellectual force in American public life.

Several months ago, I had the honor of meeting Norman, to interview him for a piece in The Free Press, which we’re reprinting below. For two and a half hours, we sat together in his apartment in Manhattan. Bookshelves lined the walls, crammed with hundreds upon hundreds of titles. In the entryway hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom given to him in 2004 by President George W. Bush.

Age had chipped away at his ease of movement and speaking, but he resisted it. On the coffee table sat a photograph of Norman at about 22 years old. “I think that’s what I look like,” he confessed to me. Coursing through his words was a fierce sense of loyalty to his character, to his family, and to his country. “I’m a rabid American patriot,” he told me. He took immense pride in his career and legacy—which now includes 13 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.

“I’ve lived a rich life, in every sense,” reads the following piece, drawn from our conversation. In it, he recounts his remarkable journey: One that began in the slums of Brownsville, Brooklyn, and ended in the heart of what he describes as the “glittering fortress of class and intellect” that is Manhattan.

I’ll forever treasure the time I spent with Norman before his passing. Here’s what he told me about his extraordinary life. May his memory be a blessing. —Jillian Lederman

“One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.”

I wrote that line in 1967, and for better or worse, it has been quoted back to me ever since. I wrote it because it was true. Fifty-eight years later, it still is.

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan looks at the court-martial of Billy Mitchell, the history of the Gadsden flag, and much more. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

“So far as air power is concerned, we would be in the hands of foreigners,” the witness said when asked if the United States had the domestic industry to keep pace in the event of war. Those words do not come, as they might seem, from some recent hearing on America’s preparedness for the drone warfare taking shape in Ukraine but rather from the testimony that Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell gave in his own defense at a 1925 court-martial. One hundred years ago today, a jury of generals found Mitchell, now known as the “father” of the U.S. Air Force, guilty of insubordination and all but ended his military career.

With our America at 250 coverage this month focusing on religious liberty, it’s fitting to remember Mitchell given that his followers often spoke of him in almost religious terms.

It’s Wednesday, December 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The tech companies selling chatbots—but hiring writers. Jed Rubenfeld asks: Could Luigi Mangione walk free? Eli Lake on an adaptation of “Animal Farm” that misses the point. Nikki Haley and John Walters argue the war with China has already begun. And much more.

But first: Our man in Ukraine on the country’s race to save its missing children.

“How do you start looking for a missing child in the largest country on Earth?” I asked Viktoriia Novikova, a Ukrainian human rights investigator who has been tracking the thousands of children kidnapped by Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

It would be best, she said, to show me.

So, taking a days-long train from Kyiv, I met Novikova in Kryvyi Rih, some 70 miles from the front line, to visit the family of one of Ukraine’s thousands of missing children.

Seven-year-old Stanislav Smetana was taken by Russian authorities from a Ukrainian children’s home during the early days of the war. Novikova has used every tool available to her—internet searches, satellite photos, documents from Russian authorities—to track children brought to Russia in the hopes of reuniting them with their families.

For three years, Novikova has been regularly trekking to Kryvyi Rih to get any additional shred of information she can, and to give Stanislav’s older sister Dasha updates on the effort to bring him home. On this trip, though, Novikova had an unsettling development to share: The trail had gone cold.

In my latest dispatch from Ukraine, I report on the urgent effort to bring back Ukraine’s children. As peace talks allow some to contemplate the conclusion of the war, there’s no end in sight to the anguish of those trying to find children that were taken by the enemy.

Why,” Dasha asked me, “should Stanislav be living in Russia when he has family here who will care for him in Ukraine?” Read my full report.

—Aidan G. Stretch

• The manhunt for the Brown University shooter entered its fourth day on Wednesday morning. Police released several new images of the person of interest and a video timeline on Tuesday, but still have not announced any further leads on the identity of the shooter.

• Nuno Loureiro, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was shot and killed at his home in Brookline on Monday night. Loureiro was an expert in nuclear science and engineering, and his death is being investigated as a murder.

• The alleged father and son gunmen who killed at least 15 people in a mass shooting at Australia’s Bondi Beach this weekend seem to have been inspired by ISIS. In a statement to the press yesterday, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said, “It would appear that there is evidence that this was inspired by a terrorist organization, by ISIS,” and added that Islamic State flags and IEDs had been seized from their vehicle.

• Prosecutors in Los Angeles announced on Tuesday that Rob Reiner’s son, Nick Reiner, has been formally charged with the murder of his parents. If found guilty, Reiner could face life in prison, or the death penalty.

• New government data shows that unemployment rose in November. The new rate of 4.6 percent marks the highest number in over four years, raising significant concerns about the economy even as job gains continue to grow.

• The U.S. military struck three more alleged drug boats in the Pacific on Monday. The latest round of attacks killed eight, bringing the overall death toll in the boat strikes up to 95.

• Elon Musk has reportedly begun funding GOP House and Senate campaigns ahead of the 2026 midterms. The funding effort came as a surprise to some, who doubted his allegiance to the party after a public spar with President Trump.

• President Trump announced Monday that his son, Donald Trump Jr., is now engaged to Bettina Anderson. Trump Jr.’s relationship with Anderson, a Palm Beach socialite, has long been under the tabloids’ microscope; last winter, photos of the two holding hands went viral amid his previous engagement to Kimberly Guilfoyle.

• Vanity Fair published a sweeping two-part profile of President Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, in which she expresses controversial opinions about the president. “I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch,” Wiles said. “I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”

• Norman Podhoretz, one of the great intellectuals who helped define modern conservatism, has died aged 95. He edited Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995 and—as he told the Free Press just a few months ago—“never stopped living a double life,” between his birthplace of Brooklyn and the “glittering fortress of class and intellect” that is Manhattan. Read his story of a life well lived:

KRYVYI RIH, Ukraine — Eighteen-year-old Dasha Smetana lowers her baby sister into a high chair next to the kitchen counter to inspect the photograph of her 7-year-old brother, Stanislav, on the table. He has been missing since Russian authorities took him from a children’s home in southeastern Ukraine during the opening days of the Ukraine war. And, if what Dasha is hearing is true, he could be gone forever.

For the past three years, Viktoriia Novikova, a Ukrainian human rights investigator, has visited Dasha on a quiet street in Kryivyi Rih, Ukraine, some 150 miles from the front line, to give updates on the search for Stanislav.

At the beginning, Novikova had little to share, only the assurance that she was looking for him and 47 other children taken from Kherson Children’s Home in October 2022. Then, a year in, suddenly things looked up. Novikova had been scouring images and videos of children taken from Ukraine, painstakingly going through Russian propaganda videos to identify kids taken from the country, then matching them with information on Russia’s own adoption sites.

On May 1, American audiences will be able to experience the classic novella Animal Farm in 21st-century animation. That’s when the fourth screen adaptation of George Orwell’s masterpiece will be released in U.S. theaters. It’s loaded with A-listers. Woody Harrelson plays the loyal horse, Boxer. Kieran Culkin plays Squealer, the shifty pig who placates the animals with lies on behalf of the boar commissar, Napoleon. Think Toy Story meets Darkness at Noon, or an Ice Capades rendition of The Gulag Archipelago.

The original Animal Farm is a treasure of 20th-century literature. It’s a deceptively simple book, written in plain and concise prose meant for a precocious adolescent reader. But in its pages is a chilling warning about the false promise of socialist revolution. In short, farm animals launch a rebellion and after taking over the farm, the pigs adopt a new political philosophy, “Animalism,” which holds that “All animals are equal.” But over time, Napoleon the boar takes over and hoards the farm’s apples and milk for himself and the other pigs, and in a final act of cruelty he sends Boxer to a glue factory to be slaughtered. In the last scene of the novel, the animal workers peer into a card game between their pig bosses and the human farmers and cannot tell them apart.

The clear anti-Soviet message is the reason why the CIA commissioned John Halas and Joy Batchelor in 1954 to create the first screen adaptation, an animated affair that looks like the Disney films of the era. The visionary behind the new Animal Farm is Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies and more recently directed the 2021 superhero film, Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

When I graduated college in 2023, I was told by English professors that I should pursue writing only if I couldn’t see myself doing anything else. You’ll be broke, eating canned tuna, and writing listicles for BuzzFeed, I was warned. Meanwhile, within hours of graduating, the computer science majors were hopping flights to San Francisco for jobs at Google, where they’d go on to make more than their parents.

In other words: Not too long ago, the most powerful language in the world was code. Good writing—human writing, that is—was thought to be a relic.

But now, the start-up world is proclaiming on X that “storytelling is about to become the most valuable skill in business,” and that they’ve “never seen this many tech companies trying to hire in-house writers.”

Luigi Mangione might actually be acquitted.

Not because he’s going to succeed in suppressing the damning evidence found in his backpack when he was arrested a year ago at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

No, if he’s acquitted, it will be because he’s already succeeded in the carnival of American criminal justice. To many, Mangione is a hero. And a sex symbol.

But let’s start with the law. Mangione, who allegedly murdered Brian Thompson, chief executive of the health insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, is currently taking part in a pretrial suppression hearing. His high-powered lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, has invoked the “exclusionary rule,” under which evidence obtained in violation of the Constitution cannot be used at trial.