The Free Press

Reading—in particular, reading long books—is losing importance in Western culture, especially in the United States. It is being replaced by two main alternatives. On one hand, people read plenty on their smartphones, but usually it is snippets, such as texts, X and Facebook posts, newspaper articles, and other shorter items. On the other hand, audio and video outputs are rising in importance relative to full books.

When I visit the public library, most of the visitors are on internet terminals, and in San Antonio there is a public library without physical books at all. Anecdotally, I do not see people reading in public as much as I used to. Book sales are robust, but actual reading seems less culturally central. There is good evidence that a smaller percentage of Americans are reading books for pleasure. A New York Times survey indicates fewer whole books are being assigned as reading in high school classes. And within the publishing universe, audiobooks are where the growth lies.

The net result is that we are continuing to move from a literary culture to an oral culture. YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts are growing or robust. Texting is a major form of communication, but it is the written word conforming to the standards of oral communication. Abbreviations, incorrect grammar, short messages, and a conversation tone are paramount, and there are few rewards for longer, more carefully crafted sentences. The snippets we read on our smartphones, however useful or interesting, do not serve the functions of reading Tolstoy or a long, serious book on Roman history.

Sunday’s attack in Sydney, in which gunmen opened fire on a public Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach—killing at least 16 people and injuring dozens more—is the latest in a string of anti-Jewish attacks since October 7. These include the May murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in Washington, D.C., the terror attack at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, and numerous other assaults and threats, all of which have accompanied a wider anti-Jewish hysteria now normalized across many sectors of society.

Though no manifesto has yet been released, the attack on Bondi Beach follows a clear and escalating pattern: Jews being targeted as a result of the intensifying anti-Jewish environment since October 7.

This latest assault only reaffirms the ongoing reality of anti-Zionism as an essentially violent ideology—one that drives out Jewish communities wherever it takes hold, through exclusion, discrimination, and even murder.

As I write this, 16 people are dead on a beach in Sydney, Australia, that once stood for ease, sunlight, and ordinary life. Bondi Beach was never meant to be a killing ground. It was meant to be a place where families gathered, where children ran barefoot, where faith could be practiced openly without fear. On Sunday, that ended.

The victims were gathered to mark the first night of Hanukkah. It was a celebration of light. Of endurance. Of continuity. Families came with children. Elderly people came to pray. A rabbi came to lead the blessings and light the Hanukkah menorah. They stood in the open, trusting that Australia was still a country where Jews could live freely.

They were wrong.

Among the dead is a devoted rabbi, a man described by his community as gentle and selfless. Also killed was a Holocaust survivor, a man who had once escaped Europe’s extermination machine and who, in his final moments, shielded his wife and saved her life. He survived history’s worst hatred only to be murdered by its modern heirs, on a beach in the country he thought was safe.

“There is nothing new under the sun.” So writes Rachel Goldberg-Polin in an essay for The Free Press today.

Rachel’s son Hersh was murdered in captivity in Gaza last year. In this piece to mark the start of Hanukkah, Rachel writes about newly public footage of her son and his fellow captives lighting a menorah in the tunnels where they were held—and murdered—by Hamas. Even in hell on earth, they kept a more-than-2,000-year-old tradition alive. They used paper cups—all they had—to celebrate a holiday which memorializes the Jewish People’s triumph over Antiochus, who during his reign in 168 BCE persecuted Jews and tried to impose pagan worship on the Temple in Jerusalem.

As Rachel puts it, they were sending a message to their captors, and now the rest of the world: “We are Jews and this is what we do on this holiday.”

Rachel’s essay was already written and edited when, this morning, we awoke to the appalling news out of Sydney. In a terror attack targeting Australian Jews, two gunmen killed at least 11 people and injured many more at an event to celebrate the start of Hanukkah on Bondi Beach. (For more on this, read Brendan O’Neill’s “The Hunting of Jews at Bondi Beach.”)

There is nothing new under the sun.

—The Editors

In July this year, my husband and I were contacted by the person from the Israeli intelligence services whose job it is to tell us bad news. That is his actual job. Each of the hostage families has such a person. It is an unfortunate role to be in charge of kicking people when they are still down from the last time they were kicked down. He has a nice face and seems like a decent person.

This piece was originally published in The Spectator.

This is not a time to mince words. Moral clarity is our sole duty on this dark day. What happened in Bondi in Sydney was an act of fascist barbarism. It was a pogrom on a beach. It was a massacre of Jews that brought to mind the horrors of the mid-20th century. If this pitiless atrocity doesn’t pry open the eyes of the West, nothing will.

The details are beyond grim. At least 11 people mercilessly slain in an attack targeted at Sydney’s Jewish community. More than a thousand Jews had gathered near a playground at Bondi to mark the first day of Hanukkah. Then two men opened fire. They marked the innocents for death. It was an act of savage racial hatred.

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, Mene Ukueberuwa reflects on ‘White Christmas,’ and how the song that debuted weeks after Pearl Harbor echoed the homesickness of a nation at war.

When you think of “White Christmas,” there’s a good chance you can recall every note of Bing Crosby’s crooning delivery, along with the cooing backup vocals of the Ken Darby Singers. After all, you’ve probably heard it hundreds of times: It’s the best-selling single in the history of the world.

For young and middle-aged folks, “White Christmas” is a quintessential secular Christmas song. The lyrics evoke a man staring out his window, pining for snow and a more innocent past while he writes Christmas cards to distant relatives and friends. The sentiment is beautiful and could be felt by anyone, in any time period.

Last week, I sat down with Erika Kirk for an hour-long town hall in front of a live audience on CBS.

It was an extremely powerful conversation. Erika and I spoke about a lot—rising political violence in this very divided country; the way some people justified or excused Charlie’s murder; what Erika thinks about some of the controversial things Charlie sa…

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! In which Elliot Ackerman tells you how to get engaged and Kat Rosenfield engages with a Netflix series long past its sell-by date, River Page has a ridiculous round of drinks with George Santos, and Abigail Shrier dishes out some tough love to a man thinking of leaving his wife. Plus: Our staff recommend their favorite kids’ books.

But first: What should we do with spare embryos?

In vitro fertilization has been a godsend for couples otherwise unable to conceive a child. It’s also been a boon for those who know they want children but aren’t yet ready. Yet it also raises thorny questions for these couples, such as what to do with the embryos they do not use.

Justine el-Khazen and her husband welcomed two children into the world via IVF. But they created 15 embryos in total, nine of which appeared viable. The question of what should happen to the ones they didn’t use got el-Khazen meditating on a host of uncomfortable questions: When does life begin? Are the embryos she created just “cells in a lab,” as one doctor assured her, or already tiny humans? And if they really are just an inert cluster of biological material, why are some tech companies so convinced they know what sort of humans they would turn out to be through a system called polygenic risk scoring? “In promising parents tall, strapping geniuses, technologists want cells in a lab to be people, and people to be cells in a lab,” she writes.

El-Khazen tackles all this and more in a remarkable essay. Along the way, she talked to women in Alabama who might soon lose the right to terminate an unwanted embryo—and while none of them wanted to surrender that privilege, they were all ambivalent about destroying them to begin with.

Regardless of how you feel about IVF, abortion, or when life starts, this is a must-read look at the questions we all need to grapple with as we race into a future where technologies like this get more advanced, and more common.

—The Editors

Before we get to our other stories, don’t forget to tune in tonight to see our own Bari Weiss talk life, faith, and loss with Erika Kirk; 8 p.m. ET on CBS. Meanwhile, Kat Rosenfield explains why the final season of Stranger Things doesn’t work; Eli Lake unpacks why Jews wrote some of the most famous Christmas songs; Tyler Cowen says: Let the kids go on social media; and Elena Bridgers writes about the downsides of playing with your kids.

How should you spend your weekend? We asked Josh Code for recommendations. . .

📚 Read . . . Taking Manhattan, by Russell Shorto. New Yorkers will know from many a land acknowledgment that we are living on the unceded land of the Lenape tribe—taken by the Dutch in 1626. But the lesser-known—and arguably more important—“taking” of Manhattan actually happened 38 years later, when British colonel Richard Nicolls wrested control of America’s most famous island from its then-ruler, Dutch colonist Peter Stuyvesant. Historian Russell Shorto digs into the contest of wills between the two men that shaped America’s prerevolutionary history, drawing upon newly translated documents to reveal dozens of larger-than-life characters that turned my view of American colonial history upside-down: the Jewish butcher who fought for full citizenship, the Native American woman whose prescient warning of British conquest was ignored by the Dutch, and the enslaved African woman who petitioned for her freedom—and won.

📺 Watch . . . Rental Family. In my pick for the feel-good movie of the year, Brendan Fraser stars as Phillip, a down-on-his-luck expat actor in Tokyo who gets hired to play stand-in roles in the lives of lonely strangers—fiancé, father, best friend. When a Japanese woman hires him to play her daughter’s long-absent father, hijinks and hilarity ensue—and their newfound bond blurs the line between real and rehearsed. Fraser is a joy to watch. If you’ve ever wished for a more upbeat—but equally profound—alternative to Lost in Translation, look no further. I laughed, I cried, and I booked a plane ticket to Tokyo afterward.

🍳 Eat . . . Alison Roman’s Spiced Chickpea Stew with Coconut and Turmeric, aka “The Stew.” This recipe is famous for a reason. It is the coziest, tastiest stew that I can’t live without in the winter—I make it once every couple weeks from October through April. It’s delicious, easy to shop for, and keeps really well in the fridge for a few days of leftovers. Make it “Code-style” for extra protein: Air-fry some turmeric-seasoned chicken, chop it up, toss it in, and enjoy.

Last but not least: A lesson in dealing with profound grief through humor from Conan O’Brien and Will Arnett on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

It’s been another fantastic week here at The Free Press. Let’s get right to it.

“I pray it changes the world. But even if it changes just one person’s life, then I know that I did my job.”

That’s what Charlie Kirk told his wife, Erika, last August when he told her he had finished what would become his final book. And this week, we published an excerpt from it with an introduction from Erika. As she recounts, the book began when Charlie—at the urging of the writer Dennis Prager—began observing the Sabbath.

“Initially, he managed only an hour,” Erika writes. “But as he discovered that it unlocked a completely elevated version of himself, he began to expand the time, until he was offline from sundown Friday to mid-morning Saturday—and later, until as late as Sunday morning. My phone would be on in case of an emergency, but people knew not to contact me unless there was a catastrophe that couldn’t wait for 24 hours.”

The book that came out of that experience, Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life, is out this week. We excerpted it here:

This week I also sat down for a town hall with Erika. It will air Saturday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS. It’s a conversation about grief, forgiveness, political violence, and more. Please tune in.

I’m thrilled that the great historian Jonathan Horn will now be writing a weekly newsletter as part of our America at 250 project, which celebrates everything awesome about this country. And what better way to launch it than with a short essay on George Mason, who was born 300 years ago this week?

Mason isn’t nearly as well-remembered as his revolutionary brethren, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. But his draft of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights in 1776 greatly influenced the Declaration of Independence, notably by voicing the belief that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights . . .among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

The language got an upgrade from Jefferson and company that summer. But the sentiment was originally Mason’s. And while his famous refusal to sign on to the Constitution effectively ended Mason’s close friendship with Washington, his intransigence eventually brought forth what he was after: the Bill of Rights.

“Without those first 10 amendments, it’s all too easy to imagine an America today without a free press and the religious liberty that we at this Free Press look forward to celebrating this month,” Jonathan writes. “So raise a glass to the other Founding Father George.” Indeed. And while you’re at it, check out Jonathan’s most recent book: The Fate of the Generals, about General Jonathan Wainwright’s doomed last stand against the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, and his heroic example as America’s highest-ranking POW during World War II.

But first, sign up for the America at 250 newsletter here.

Each week, Rupa Subramanya covers Canada like nobody else, and while you’re signing up for newsletters, you should certainly make sure her This Week in Canada arrives in your inbox every week.

This week, however, Rupa zeroes in on the must-read story of Bal Batth, an Indian immigrant who has lived in the same British Columbia home since 1974, when he was just 8 years old. He raised a family of his own in the house and planned on passing it down to his children.

In August, however, a Canadian judge ruled that the indigenous Cowichan Nation holds “Aboriginal title” over 800 acres of land that happens to include Batth’s home. Now Batth and his neighbors are in a bizarre legal limbo where they cannot say for certain who owns the land beneath their feet.

“Nothing like this has ever happened in Canada,” Rupa writes. “Because of the judge’s ruling, all those land acknowledgments that are only half-listened-to at school assemblies and hockey games actually have extremely complicated consequences, at least in British Columbia—and perhaps all across the country someday.”

It turns out words have consequences. Read Rupa’s full dispatch on this extraordinary story.

Does a medical doctor’s obligation to “do no harm” extend to ending the lives of people who want to die? And is assisted suicide—or MAID, for Medical Aid in Dying—compassionate or barbaric?

It’s a contentious question, one being debated all across the West. Canada’s MAID program, for example, now accounts for roughly one in 20 deaths in the country each year. The policy has already made major inroads in the U.S., with a MAID program having just become legal in Illinois.

This week, Rafaela Siewert dove right into this incredibly sensitive topic with two experts—healthcare attorney David Hoffman and Dr. Lydia Dugdale—who disagree on this incredibly sensitive topic.

Regardless of where you stand on the issue—or if you’re still making your mind up—this is an Honestly conversation you do not want to miss, because this debate isn’t going away.

That’s it for me this week. Check out tomorrow’s Weekend Press for Abigail Shrier’s Tough Love for a man thinking about leaving his wife, Elliot Ackerman’s marriage proposal advice, River Page’s wild Two Drinks with former congressman George Santos, our list of recommendations for the books you should buy your kids for the holidays this year, and much, much more!

See you next week.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

Ask most adults to name a favorite childhood book, and they’ll likely have an answer at the ready. Maybe it’s the bedtime story their parents read them on repeat. Or the picture book they can still recite by heart. Or the first chapter book they ever finished on their own. Or the story that kick-started a lifelong love of reading.

But is that still true for children growing up today—given the distractions of social media, video games, and infinite instant gratifications contained within a screen? It’s easy to imagine that this holiday season, most children won’t think to put a book on their wish lists.

All the more reason to give the gift of a book this year. Learning to love reading unlocks whole worlds of imagination, challenging our brains in ways screens simply cannot replicate—even more so when that love is sparked early on.

We asked our staff to share the children’s books that changed their lives—and might make the perfect gifts. —The Editors

Mene Ukueberuwa, politics editor: Holes

One magic moment in a young reader’s life comes when he discovers how deep a narrative can run. At a certain age, he’ll burrow into a story that doesn’t unfold step-by-step like a fairy tale or an episode of a sitcom.

For me, that book was Holes, by Louis Sachar. On the surface, it tells the story of a few unfortunate boys stuck in a desert detention camp, doomed to dig sandpits each day as a cruel and pointless form of punishment. Then it deepens into a story of sacrifice and love across generations, with subtle symbols that recur at key moments. Big payoffs hang on little items—a thrown pair of shoes, a recovered lipstick tube. It gives young readers a sense of how nimbly fate turns.

I read Holes at age 10 and then eagerly shared it with my 7-year-old brother, who was precocious enough to grasp its deep meaning. I loved it on the first read, but it stuck for life once we read it together.

Suzy Weiss, co-founder and reporter: Archie Comics