The Free Press

On September 11, 2001, Kristina Jones was three months into her job as an attending psychiatrist at St. Vincent’s, the closest hospital to the World Trade Center. She worked 13 hours that harrowing day. The next day she wrote for seven hours, trying to record what she had seen before it evaporated from her mind. Then she put away her recollections, confiding in only a few close friends about them, because her experiences felt small compared with people who had lost lives, family members, or friends.

Twenty-five years later, Dr. Jones decided that she wanted to share what she wrote about St. Vincent’s. Her words are a time capsule of September 11, and a remembrance of those whose lives were lost.

—The Editors

Everything in Manhattan below 14th Street is closed to civilians. No traffic, no bread, no newspapers. Only military planes and helicopters fly overhead. It is 5 a.m. My 13-hour shift yesterday at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village keeps replaying in my mind, and I need you to know what happened.

When I had almost arrived to work, everyone I saw was staring at the World Trade Center. “A plane just hit one of the Twin Towers,” someone said, and smoke darker than black ink streamed from the building. That’s when I began to shake. I realized that my dear friend Brian might be in there. I ran back to my apartment—cell phones didn’t work—and emailed him: “EMERGENCY are you OK?”

Then I went to the hospital, grabbed and put on a white coat, and reported for duty. When I signed in, every nurse, doctor, and emergency medical services worker was there, many of them from hospitals far away. We didn’t know whether 200 or 2,000 people would be coming in the next hour. The psychiatry plan was that anyone screaming or freaking out from the stress should be pulled out of the emergency department.

Three psychiatrists rushed toward a woman who was screaming, then crying, then screaming in the hallway. “My skin is burning! I have to get out of the building! The building is falling!” she kept saying. There was no time to register people as they arrived. But the giddiness of being freed of administrative duties turned to fright as I pictured waves of people arriving at St. Vincent’s, and we discussed how many beds we could make available on different floors of the hospital. When I walked outside toward my office in another building, there was only a cloud of smoke where one of the Twin Towers used to be. I kept looking for the building, and it kept not being there.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush launched what he called the War on Terror. It began with the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, which quickly toppled the Taliban and expelled al-Qaeda from its most crucial sanctuary. Then, in early 2003, American forces—with the support of foreign allies like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland—attacked Iraq, toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime and installing an occupation force in hopes of quickly transforming the country into a free and democratic state.

Instead, the post-regime coalition authority made significant missteps, and a devastating insurgency erupted. And despite President Bush’s 2004 reelection, the war quickly lost popular support among the American public. In early 2007, Bush appointed General David Petraeus, who had already served in Iraq as a two- and three-star general, to lead allied forces in Iraq, which heralded a sea change in American strategy known as “the surge.” As part of our coverage looking back on 9/11 and the world it created, General Petraeus tells the inside story of one of the most consequential moments in the War on Terror. The general’s essay today is both a crucial history and a profile in political courage. It demands reflection as we take stock of the last 25 years. —The Editors

By the end of 2006, the war in Iraq was failing. There is no useful purpose in softening that judgment with the passage of time.

The bombing of the al-Askari mosque in Samarra by terrorists that February had accelerated sectarian violence and pulled Iraq into an increasingly vicious Sunni-Shia civil war. Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Sunni insurgent groups controlled substantial areas, Shi’ite militias operated with growing impunity in other parts of the country, and the Iraqi security forces were no longer capable of arresting the downward spiral. The strategy of transitioning security responsibilities to Iraqi forces, consolidating American troops on large bases, and progressively reducing the U.S. presence had clearly been invalidated by the escalating violence.

The numbers conveyed the horror imperfectly but unmistakably. In December 2006, an average of 53 Iraqi civilians were killed by violence every 24 hours in Baghdad alone. Washington, meanwhile, was approaching its own breaking point. Public support for the war had fallen dramatically, President George W. Bush’s Republican Party had just lost control of both houses of Congress, and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group—of which future defense secretary Robert Gates was a member—had recommended a course that anticipated a substantially reduced American combat role.

Many senior military leaders were deeply skeptical of sending substantial additional forces, advocating instead for an accelerated transition to Iraqi forces, the deployment of additional trainers and advisers, or other more modest measures with an eye to withdrawing U.S. forces.

Virtually every political incentive pointed toward reducing America’s commitment. President Bush chose instead to increase it, a decision that remains, in my view, one of the most courageous presidential decisions of the 21st century.

Journalism is “the first rough draft of history,” as Washington Post publisher Philip L. Graham famously put it in 1963. Which might explain why my mother, never a big consumer of news or politics, must have left my sister and me in front of the TV in the living room of our house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on the morning of September 12, 2001. We watched looping footage of the Twin Towers collapsing as the acrid scent of jet fuel that would linger past Thanksgiving began to creep in. My mother must have gone to a newsstand or a bodega that is no doubt closed now, where she bought all four major New York City newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News.

Twenty-two years and a dozen moves later, or a month before she died, she took me to her storage bin in an ugly concrete block building next to Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, where we had a fight over how much crap she had hoarded. I encouraged her to get rid of all this stuff that was costing her money she couldn’t afford. She insisted that these were artifacts of various phases of our family life and the material culture of American society, and I insisted that if you could stand to not have it in your house, you don’t need it.

Wasn’t there at least something that I couldn’t bear to lose? I tried to bite the bullet, casting my gaze over boxes of old ornaments, photos, and clothes from the different phases of her varied and well-lived life. I failed only once: I kept those yellowed, wrinkled newspapers.

Nothing thrills journalists more than throwing around the term far right. In addition, they relish each chance to describe the far right as being “on the march.” That is the gift that headline writers have been granted again this week with the victory of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which finished in first place in an election in the eastern region Saxony-Anhalt. The party won almost 44 percent of the vote, which, as most of the English-language media have pointed out, gives a “far-right party” the first opportunity to govern a state in Germany since the end of World War II.

If all this were true, it would be a cause of great concern. But is it?

For people concerned with the future of Europe, the AfD is a vital as well as a special case. As such, it requires special attention. Unfortunately, most of the people writing about the party from outside Germany are intent on performing this feat of political analysis with all the care of a brain surgeon attempting to operate while wearing boxing gloves.

To start with, it is not the case that the AfD is a far-right party. Which is not to say that it does not have people within it who could be described as far right, or that it could not become such a party in the future.

Is America an empire? That was the question on the minds of many U.S. citizens 25 years ago, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. And it is a question being asked again today, as the war with Iran drags into its seventh month, and Donald Trump continues to fantasize about annexing Canada and Greenland—to say nothing of the application of the “Donroe Doctrine” and the “Trump Corollary” in Venezuela and (coming soon) Cuba.

In the years after 9/11, a standard left-wing interpretation was that Osama bin Laden and his suicidal hijackers had struck a blow against American imperialism in the Middle East. Surprisingly, some neoconservatives within the George W. Bush administration agreed. “We’re an empire now,” an unnamed “senior adviser” to President Bush told journalist Ron Suskind in 2004, “and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This was not the official line, of course. “We’re not an imperial power,” said President Bush in April 2005. “We’re a liberating power.” In his brilliant new history of the modern Middle East, The Cauldron, Simon Sebag Montefiore shows the ambivalence Americans have always felt about their imperial role in the region. At the height of the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo, Henry Kissinger threatened to seize the Saudi oil fields. He was bluffing. Nearly 30 years later, partly on Kissinger’s recommendation, Paul Bremer found himself installed as Grand Poo-Bah in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. It was May 2003. Within seven months he had to admit, in an email to his wife: “We are already halfway out of [here]. . . . We are not ready for empire!”

And yet, and yet. There’s just something about unleashing a storm of steel against the Persians, as the United States has this year, that does seem kind of empire-y.

“A republic, if you can keep it,” was Benjamin Franklin’s wry definition of what he and the other participants at the Constitutional Convention had created, after winning their war against the British Empire. Two hundred and fifty years after the United States first declared its independence, the imperial scenario seems closer than ever. Just reflect on the scene at the White House back in June, when gladiators fought in a temporary Colosseum for the amusement of President Donald J. Trump. To quote the British author Robert Harris—author of Agrippa, his new novel set in the time of Octavian/Augustus—“You can really see [Trump] in a toga with a gold laurel wreath on his head. . . . He is an imperial kind of president.” It’s not a new analogy. The German magazine Der Spiegel splashed a cartoon Trump-Caesar on its cover in January last year with the headline: “Der Imperator.”

Dear Tough Lovers,

Some of you may know that the idea for this advice column came from a single paragraph, which Abigail wrote last spring. It was in a piece about how young Americans these days are increasingly de-prioritizing the kind of love depicted in (what I think is) the greatest rom-com of all time, “When Harry Met Sally”—and it reads:

“No one tells young people what they most need to hear. You don’t know yourself as well as you might think. Give someone else a chance. By all means, study hard, travel, find a good job, have mimosas with friends. But don’t mistake subplot for storyline. When love arrives, drop whatever you were doing, grab an Uber, take the first flight out. Life is not the backdrop to your career, and love isn’t an accessory. It’s an adventure.”

Reading her words then, I got goosebumps. (I still do!) Little did I know, Abigail was working on a book on this very topic, an investigation into why young people are avoiding dating—let alone marriage and children—and becoming cynical about the opposite sex. It’s a book that America urgently needs. It’s called “The Plot Against Love: Why the Kids Aren’t Pairing Up” and—drum roll, please—it’s now available to preorder! Click here to make sure a copy lands on your doorstep as soon as possible.

Also, the cover has just been released—and it’s incredible:

And now, without further ado, here is Abigail’s latest column, in which she writes to a 26-year-old who’s anxious about the “hellscape” that is modern dating—but not on her own behalf . . . —Freya Sanders

Hi Abigail,

I’ve been blessed with quite possibly the greatest big brother in the entire world—whip-smart, ridiculously funny, kindhearted, ambitious, and bouncing-off-the-walls active. I consider him my best friend and often tell others that we would have been twins if not for God taking pity on our parents.

As wonderful as I think he is, he can’t seem to get a girlfriend.

He’s had a few relationships (or “situationships” as my generation calls them) but never anything really long-term or significant. I think part of the issue is that he’s always been very self-conscious, especially in social situations. He has improved a lot in recent years and has become a lot more confident, but when it comes to his love life, I think his lack of history with romantic relationships stops him from feeling comfortable.

I feel for him, because being on dating apps isn’t easy. Two years ago, I met my significant other, who I now expect to marry, on one. I still wonder how I managed it, considering that the apps are a hellscape for people looking to settle down. My brother has said he would prefer to meet someone in real life, but then doesn’t really act like a person looking to meet someone. He has a lot of hobbies that keep him out of the house when he isn’t working, but none of them are in a community setting. Also, he is in his first year of medical residency, leaving him exhausted even in his off-hours. Girls have shown interest (like a nurse at his hospital), but he doesn’t take my advice on how to pursue it. Friends have tried to set him up, but it never seems to work out.

I want my brother to find a loving, healthy relationship with someone who genuinely shares his values and hopes for the future. I know he wants this, too, but his conversations with me lately have shown a lack of hope and a general sense of having given up. As he approaches 30, I’m worried he might be running out of time although, realistically, I know he is not under the same biological constraints as I am.

My fear is that a lack of practice in relationships only makes it harder to form one as time goes on. I’m also worried that trying to address this with him directly will only lead to more insecurity on his part, which may spiral into a worsened mental state for someone who already places a lot of pressure on himself. Online discourse about the male loneliness epidemic also makes me anxious. Luckily, he has shown no signs of becoming a woman-hating “incel.” From the way he treats family, friends, and those situationships that didn’t work out, I think he would actually make a very thoughtful partner.

So my question is this: Do I talk to my brother about his love life? If so, how do I even approach it? Also, do you happen to know any successful young women serious about settling down and having a family who might be interested in a buff, handsome, 5′11″ doctor?

—Tasha, 26

Tasha,

Weep for Ignaz Semmelweis. The 19th-century Hungarian obstetrician noticed that poor women who gave birth in the streets of Vienna had a lower maternal mortality rate than those who gave birth in its best hospitals. He hypothesized that Viennese doctors—his colleagues—were inadvertently transmitting dangerous particles they had picked up working with cadavers to the new mothers. He recommended that the doctors wash their hands.

Everyone treated Semmelweis like a madman who had libeled his own profession. Doctors responsible for killing mothers? They were the helpers! His wife and physician friends had him committed to a mental institution where Semmelweis died a broken man.

But in addition to laying the groundwork for germ theory, Semmelweis bequeathed to us a critical lesson: Good intentions can make bad interventions. Wanting to help is not the same as helping. Those with lovely motives sometimes make matters worse.

It’s Thursday, September 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Audrey Fahlberg reports on Trump’s midterm infomercial. Maya Sulkin talks 9/11, Mamdani, and more with former New York governor George Pataki. Kat Rosenfield reviews Jon Ronson’s new book about the masculinity crisis. The latest Free Press poll. And much more.

But first: None of that will matter if the AI kills us all.

The stakes of the fast-moving debate over the pros and cons of artificial intelligence are almost too high to fathom. This week, Silicon Valley—and most of the rest of us—are fixated on one unnerving question: Is AI going to kill us all?

It began Tuesday night, when 27-year-old Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon announced on X that he had resigned. The companies, he wrote, “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. . . . The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

By Wednesday night, the post had been viewed more than 125 million times, and counting. It also set off a wave of responses from AI researchers, including Anthropic Alignment Science Lead Evan Hubinger, who wrote: “[W]e really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

The tricky thing about this debate isn’t just that it can get pretty technical pretty quickly. It’s that the news is full of doomsday warnings. It’s next to impossible to know which to tune out, and which to take seriously.

We’ve worked hard to separate the signal from the noise on this issue here at The Free Press. And lately, our resident polymath economist Tyler Cowen has injected some healthy skepticism into the conversation about the harm AI may cause.

But Coxon’s post went viral for a reason. It was one of the bluntest statements yet of the case for AI catastrophe—and it has coincided with breathtaking new evidence of the technology’s growing power, from last month’s Hugging Face hack to the Millennium Prize math problem Open AI claimed it solved this week. So today we’re leading with an essay by someone who, like Coxon, worked at the bleeding edge of AI research before resigning because of what he saw.

Daniel Kokotajlo is a former OpenAI researcher who resigned in 2024. Writing in The Free Press today, he explains why he left, and why he believes Coxon’s fears are well-founded. His warning is stark, and worth engaging with: Yes, says Daniel, AI might really kill us all.

• A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Andrew and Tristan Tate must remain in custody while they fight extradition to the United Kingdom on rape and human trafficking charges. Andrew faces 42 charges in Britain and Tristan 17, including allegations involving seven victims.

• The Trump administration proposed overhauling the 2030 census Wednesday, seeking to strip undocumented immigrants from the population count used to allocate congressional seats. The Census Bureau argued illegal immigrants should not be counted because of their “lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance” to the country. The proposal would also eliminate questions about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation from census forms.

• The Treasury Department announced it will purchase up to $6 billion in government bonds in an effort to bring down borrowing costs, as the 10-year Treasury yield hit its highest point since 2023. Critics say the move fails to address the root cause: national debt that recently topped $40 trillion.

• Missouri’s congressional maps landed before the Supreme Court for the second time in two days Wednesday, as conflicting state and federal court rulings have left voters uncertain which district they live in ahead of November’s midterms. A resolution is urgently needed, with absentee ballots due to military and overseas voters next week.

• President Trump said he came away from a phone call with Vladimir Putin confident that the Russian leader is ready to end the war in Ukraine, after U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff visited both Moscow and Kyiv in the past week. “I think more than anything else, it’s two people that hate each other,” Trump said when asked what was standing in the way of a deal.

• The widow of one of five people who died when an Amazon cargo jet slid off a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday took legal action against Amazon and the operating airline, filing a wrongful death suit yesterday. The suit argues the disaster was avoidable, pointing to pilot error and inadequate training as factors.

• Apple unveiled its first foldable iPhone, called Duo, marking the most significant redesign of the device since its debut in 2007. The book-style phone, which Apple calls its largest iPhone display ever, will start at $1,999 and hits stores in October.

• Ben Shelton ousted defending champion Carlos Alzaraz in the U.S. Open quarterfinals early Wednesday morning, completing a five-set comeback that wrapped up at 3:33 a.m. in what became the tournament’s latest-ever finish. Shelton now faces Frances Tiafoe in tomorrow’s semifinal, guaranteeing an American man in Sunday’s final for the first time in two decades.

DALLAS — The Republican National Committee members, lawmakers, lobbyists, donors, and die-hard Trump superfans who flew out for the first-ever Republican midterm convention are all smiles in sweltering hot Texas. Publicly, at least, most insist that things are peachy keen on the political front.

“It’s historic. It’s never happened before,” Georgia GOP chairman Josh McKoon told me on the American Airlines Center convention floor, adding that there’s a “real feeling of hopefulness” about what the next two days mean for the closing argument of the campaign to protect narrow Republican majorities in the House and Senate. And yet even this rock-ribbed Republican is willing to concede that the outlook for Republicans has changed since the days of Donald Trump’s historic comeback in 2024.

“Look, it’s a midterm election. We all know that in midterm elections, the party in power in the White House usually is dealing with headwinds,” he said. “But I think that this president, more than anyone else, is uniquely situated to capture the attention of the American people over the next two days and move those numbers in a very positive direction.”

Here lies the great dilemma facing vulnerable Republican candidates this cycle: Trump is convinced—and has plenty of evidence—that GOP candidates perform best in presidential election years because of his own preternatural ability to drive low-propensity Republican voters out to the polls.

There’s a moment in many science-fiction movies when a scientist tries to warn everyone that some monster or pathogen is about to break containment. And then they are ignored.

We have now arrived at that moment in real life. We’d better not ignore it.

On Tuesday, AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic in a mega-viral post on X: “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” he began. (Pretraining is an important part of the training process for AI models like Claude and GPT-6.)

He continued: “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. . . . These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. . . . The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

He’s right. I know this because I worked at OpenAI for two years, forecasting AI progress internally and working on model evaluations and alignment research, and because I still talk with friends at OpenAI and Anthropic.

Welcome back to The Honesty Project, a series of opinion surveys from The Free Press. We’re asking Americans what they believe about the most important issues in public life. And we’re going deeper than a typical poll.

We partnered with Populace, an opinion-research think tank, to design surveys that gauge respondents’ “private” opinions—the views they feel are too sensitive to share publicly. Our goal is to overcome the bias inherent in polls, which often elicit less than honest responses, and to understand what parts of American life people don’t feel they can speak about freely. (Click to learn more about the initiative and methodology.)

For more on how these surveys work, and why they are better at gauging true public opinion, watch this explainer video, then scroll down for the key findings from our poll:

In our last installment we asked about capitalism versus socialism, and found that Americans are losing faith in free enterprise. Only a third privately express a positive view of capitalism, and more than 40 percent are privately open to voting for a socialist.

This week, we dive deeper into some of the most hotly contested questions in our politics. Among them: Have billionaires rigged the political system? Should we slow down data center construction, or leave it alone? Is Western civilization a force for good or not? How do Americans view Israel? And, with antisemitism on the rise, are claims about Jewish influence limited to the fringes, or widespread among the American people?

We found that: