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“Do you think the 9/11 fund will be the lead of your obituary?” I asked Ken Feinberg.

Feinberg didn’t hesitate. “Without a doubt,” he replied in a Boston accent thicker than Ben Affleck’s in Good Will Hunting. “It was a historic event, unique in American history, and I was the center of attention concerning that fund, which has not been replicated since.”

The center of attention he most certainly was, and we’ll get to that shortly. But first, let me set the scene. It was 6 p.m.—cocktail hour. I was in my New York office, and Feinberg, an esteemed attorney specializing in mediation, was wearing a polo shirt in his summer place on Martha’s Vineyard. We have known each other for 30-odd years, so he was perfectly willing to go along with my request that he abide by the Two Drinks protocol and bring some wine to our Zoom interview. He poured himself a glass of sauvignon blanc. I poured a glass of cabernet. We toasted to our long acquaintanceship—dare I say, friendship—and then, between sips, got down to business.

When I was growing up in the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century, the intelligentsia—in particular, the Jewish intelligentsia—had extensive home libraries. In my parents’ home, for example, there were more than a thousand books. Most of them were classic literature, for a simple reason: This was the least dangerous kind of book to possess. Modern literature was heavily censored and had to belong to the genre of socialist realism, in which the oppressed working class is always right and the capitalist oppressors are invariably doomed to defeat. But the older a book, the more likely it was to survive the official censors. To read classic literature, therefore, was a kind of escapism; it allowed us to enter a world free from the ever-looming presence of the KGB.

It is ironic, then, that the most notorious KGB prison, Lefortovo—where I spent 16 months between my arrest in March 1977 and my trial in July 1978, and where I underwent more than 100 interrogations—had the most extensive library of classic literature I encountered in the USSR. This was the twisted legacy of Joseph Stalin’s purges, when many members of Moscow’s intelligentsia were killed and their property seized. Confiscated books, after going through a rigorous redaction process to remove all “enemy” names, were then distributed to the various organs of the KGB.

And this is how, within the confines of Lefortovo, I had my second meeting with one of the world’s first philosophers: Socrates.

The first time I met Socrates—the great Athenian philosopher of the fifth century BCE, who was sentenced by his own city to death by poison for denying the gods and corrupting the youth—was when I was 15 and reading books from my home library. This meeting was quite formal, even distant. Socrates’s language, while well-translated, was confusing to me. His logic could be understood only by reading commentaries and learning about his historical background. At that point, I didn’t have the time or patience to study these texts carefully. I simply wanted, like every intelligent young Jewish boy, to know about Socrates’s fate and, at the appropriate moment, to use such popular phrases as, “We have to drink our cup to the end.”

This week, I find myself unexpectedly very sad. Gloria Steinem’s death on Wednesday marked the passing of our second-wave feminist generation. There are but a handful of us still standing, and ever fewer of us still working.

I knew Gloria very well back in the day. She originally came to my attention in 1963, soon after Betty Friedan published her legendary book The Feminine Mystique. That year, Gloria went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for a piece published in Show magazine—an exercise intended to expose the way in which women were treated as “sex objects.” I always found this an interesting contradiction. Gloria condemned the objectification, yet she also used it to her own advantage, and to the advantage of liberal feminism.

In early 1971, I attended the very first meeting that led to Gloria’s founding of Ms. magazine. I forget how I came to be there, but Gloria and I had already been meeting and talking for at least three years, maybe a bit more, because I wrote to her after her piece about the Playboy Club was published. Indeed, I never really “joined” the feminist movement. As someone who was very early aligned with its goals, I simply almost instantly, as did so many other radical feminists, became a leader. I attended National Organization for Women (NOW) meetings in New York City, including one in Ti-Grace Atkinson’s home. I remember that Kate Millett wore her hair in a neat little bun and spoke in a slightly British accent. But that was not as important as Kate’s 1970 book, Sexual Politics, or Shulie Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. I remember reading them both while standing up in a bookstore in Greenwich Village.

Earlier this summer, after I successfully defended my 350-page dissertation, my adviser shook my hand and said, “Congratulations, Dr. Mass.” Like my fellow philosophy graduate students at The New School for Social Research (NSSR), I had spent the previous half decade studying Aristotle and Hegel, writing about Spinoza and John Dewey, and learning Ancient Greek and Latin. However, unlike my fellow PhD recipients, all of whom were equally exhausted and exhilarated, I am 73 years old.

I was not at NSSR because I needed a credential or new career. Rather, after a successful life in both law and business—principally as a prosecutor for Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau and as a compliance officer and partner at Goldman Sachs—I had finally reached the point where I could devote myself to what I wanted all along: to learn for the sake of learning.

I admit, my precise path is not for everyone, but something like it may be for you. Aristotle famously begins his Metaphysics by stating that “All men by nature desire to know.” As I found, that desire does not diminish with age. If anything, once freed from the gnawing demands of career and personal ambition, it can become stronger. You too likely have that “desire to know.” Do not neglect it. Your mind needs exercise and care every bit as much as your body does. The strong temptation upon retiring from a demanding career is to breathe a sigh of relief, shut off your mind, and play. This urge may be especially powerful now that AI is increasingly able to do our thinking for us. Fight that temptation. Learning new things will satisfy the hunger to know that we all share, bring you pleasure, and keep your mind sharp.

Here are some of the lessons I have drawn from these recent years of intensive study that might be helpful to those of you considering a similar lifestyle during your retirement years.

The judge in the Lindsay Clancy trial declared a mistrial Friday after the jury could not agree whether the Massachusetts mother who strangled her three children in January 2023 was guilty of murder—or not guilty by reason of insanity. Few cases in recent memory have provoked such fierce debate about criminal responsibility or such a strange spectacle outside the courtroom and on social media, where sympathy for Clancy has curdled, for some, into something closer to celebration of a mother who admits she killed her children. We’ve covered the case from a number of angles. Caitlin Flanagan has examined why so many women have rallied to Clancy’s defense. Jed Rubenfeld has explained why the law left the jury with no good options. And Kat Rosenfield has asked why so many seem so desperate to avoid the conclusion that Clancy is criminally responsible.

If one side of the debate online has demonstrated a disturbing solidarity with Clancy, another has decided it’s a straightforward case, and that Clancy is self-evidently guilty. We asked Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine, to weigh the psychiatric evidence and tell us what she thought. She said she disagreed, and thought Clancy was driven by psychosis to kill her children. Whatever you think of the tragic case that has captivated the country, her essay is essential reading. —The Editors

The trial of Lindsay Marie Clancy is over, and unresolved. After 21 days of testimony and seven days of deliberation, a Massachusetts jury could not agree on whether the 36-year-old former nurse was criminally responsible for strangling her children—Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months—or not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge declared a mistrial.

I had been hoping for an acquittal and commitment to a mental facility because, in my clinical opinion as a psychiatrist, psychosis drove Clancy to kill.

The prosecution now has the option of bringing an entirely new trial, negotiating a plea deal, or dismissing the charges altogether.

Clancy continues to be charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Her lawyer and the prosecutors will consider next steps while she remains in a mental-health facility.

Whatever comes next, the case is a reminder about the hazards of addressing mental illness challenges in the courtroom, the need for legal and psychiatric reforms, and the urgency of educating doctors as well as patients about psychosis in general and postpartum psychosis in particular. If Clancy is retried, here is why I hope the next jury will find her not criminally responsible.

It’s Friday, September 4. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Should you “redshirt” your kids? Meta’s therapy misstep. And more.

But first: the big question hanging over politics.

When the story of the past decade in American public life is written, it will, for better or worse, center on one man. Since descending the golden escalator on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump has been an omnipresent force in American politics—an object of hatred as much as adoration, fear as much as faith.

Much of that story will turn on what happened in 2024: Trump’s remarkable political comeback, which made him only the second president in American history to win nonconsecutive terms. That is the story acclaimed historian Victor Davis Hanson tells in his new book, The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, out next week.

Hanson has been one of the best explainers of the Trump revolution since its inception. In the following exclusive excerpt, he takes on the questions now at the heart of the movement the president built: What happens to MAGA when its founder finally relinquishes leadership? Will Trumpism outlast Trump?

—The Editors

Next week will mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the deadliest attack on American soil in history. And while radical Islam continues to threaten the West two decades later, a new war has begun, “one over the origin and meaning of the 9/11 attacks,” writes Douglas Murray, as discredited conspiracies about that tragic day are recycled and regurgitated in our podcast age. Read his thoughts on the “9/11 truthers,” a group not searching for the truth but for another dose of the mental drug that is indulging disinformation.

The jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial is still deadlocked after days of intense deliberations. Supporters of the mother who strangled her children in January 2023 are sure she isn’t legally responsible. What began as compassion for a woman who potentially suffered from postpartum psychosis, according to Caitlin Flanagan, has turned into “an almost exultant, fanlike celebration of Lindsay Clancy.” What these clamoring supporters forget: the three innocent children who lost their lives. We shouldn’t forget them, either.

The big cultural headline this week was John Galliano pulling out of his show and gala at the Met. Anna Wintour’s pick for the next Costume Institute exhibition had been controversial ever since it was announced, thanks to a string of vulgar antisemitic remarks from Galliano more than a decade ago. Should the show have gone on? And who is to blame? Suzy Weiss dives into the controversy.

The publication of alarming details about the recent Hugging Face hack was the biggest news in the tech world over the last seven days. AI hacks may sound like a dry subject, but this one matters, because it has some of the experts in the field warning that a total AI takeover is far more likely than they previously realized. So we should be worried, right? Not necessarily, says Tyler Cowen. Read his impressively coolheaded argument to understand why.

AI security expert John-Clark Levin disagrees. An AI takeover really is possible, he says, and the stakes get higher with every advance of the new technology. If proper guardrails are not built to keep AI in check, it will be too late for humans to conduct a cost-benefit analysis. We should act now—before it is too late, Levin writes.

Early last month, in a courtroom in New Mexico, a judge ordered Meta—owner of Facebook and Instagram—to pay a $567 million penalty for the addiction and mental health issues its platforms have caused teens. Of that amount, some $420 million will be directed toward “treatment services” for kids who have been harmed owing to their use of Facebook and Instagram—in other words, therapy. (Meta is appealing the ruling.)

Three weeks later, Meta reached an enormous settlement with 47 states and the District of Columbia in which it agreed to pay up to $18 billion to resolve similar charges. The attorneys general who brought the case are framing it as historic relief for a generation in crisis. While the settlement calls on Meta to build safeguards for teens and gives parents more control over how their kids use the company’s social media platforms, it too will direct large amounts of money toward counseling—i.e., therapy.

But is therapy really the best way to deploy some of the settlement money? As the co-founder and senior fellow, respectively, at the Center for Teen Flourishing (CTF), our answer is blunt: no.

Hello, and welcome back to our weekly news roundup. One announcement: The Free Press Book Club is thriving! It’s the hottest space in town. And it’s not too late to sign up for email updates here, or join 3,500+ other Free Pressers already reading and discussing East of Eden in the forum. Also: We have some job listings at the bottom of the column, for superfans only. Now, let’s get to the fresh hell of our summer doldrums.

→ Lindsay Clancy jury deadlocked: I know the Lindsay Clancy trial is not technically the most consequential story of the week, but in my circles (moms) it is The Only Conversation, so bear with me. The jurors are deadlocked. Twice they have gone to the judge to say the jury cannot come to a decision. If they cannot reach a verdict, the judge could declare a mistrial. There are some clues as to what may be happening. For example, at least three of the female jurors were spotted curiously wearing pink, the color worn by Clancy supporters who think she is the victim of pharmacology and maternal stress and believe that—after a stint in a healthcare facility where she will be declared no longer a danger, which, by the way she has already been declared—she should go free. The deeper idea being proposed here seems to be that moms should kind of be able to kill their kids. Like, if they’re really, really stressed. In Canada, that’s the law already. If a parent kills a kid under the age of 1, it’s a maximum five-year sentence. We’re now going to see a movement to bring that to the U.S., and also to expand it to older kids. Death cults will death cult.

Here’s the CBC this week. They called up criminal law expert Isabel Grant, a professor at the University of British Columbia, to say how this is a perfect example of how the infanticide law should expand to older kids.

Technically, in Canada, Clancy could have raised infanticide as a defense for the murder of Callan, who was eight months old, said Grant, the criminal law professor at UBC. But the killing of Clancy’s older children could not be defended as infanticide even if she hadn’t recovered from the birth of the youngest child when she killed them, she added. “That is a shortcoming in the Canadian law.”

A shortcoming in the law, says the law professor, is that a mom might be in jail longer than five years if she kills a bunch of kindergartners since the postpartum might not carry over to each killing. Maybe postpartum should last until the kid’s 18, right? Maybe moms—if they’re under a lot of pressure and like, super, super stressed and changing Zoloft dosages and can’t figure out the Snoo—should be able to kill her offspring at any age? It’s pro-choice taken to the nth degree. My moderate take on “pro-choice until the second trimester” will soon be seen as the radical right position. New battle lines: Are you pro-choice till 1, 5, or 18 years old? The new moderate is saying you draw the line at a 5-year-old. A psychologist will be like, after 5, the children have too many neurons and are, in fact, not fair game.

On Thursday afternoon the jury were again sent home without having reached a verdict. The judge reminded the jurors about the definition of reasonable doubt. Clancy’s defense attorney blamed a single juror he said was holding things up, saying “there’s one juror that refuses to listen to the law.” Oh, Clancy is definitely walking free after all this.

→ Trump coin going live: We have a president obsessed with cash and shiny things, which is probably why you can now buy a roll of Trump coins.

There’s something off about the design. Something odd. Bulwark editor Catherine Rampell put it best: “I like that this design appears to show the birth date of liberty as 1776, and its death as 2026.” Yes, that’s it.

My personal favorite part is that the government is so dysfunctional that the webpage to learn about the coin kept getting overwhelmed. Someone call in the Airbnb guy to fix this!

When was the last time you saw a notice like this? Anytime you encounter a government product, it’s 2004. Just let me buy my Trump coins, okay.gov? I need them to convert into FreedomBucks so I can transfer them to my $LIBERTY.fi wallet to pay for a meeting in the Oval Office.

When it comes to world superpowers, Cambridge historian Brendan Simms argues there are only four that matter—and two of them are fading. Today, Simms joins Aaron MacLean to argue that Britain still belongs among the world’s leading powers; why its place among them is “by no means guaranteed”; and why Hitler is no longer the absolute evil against which p…

Is cancel culture making a comeback?

This week, fashion designer John Galliano stepped down from his post as 2027 Met Gala honoree after public backlash over his history of antisemitism. Today on Second Thought, Suzy and Dan break down the merits of his punishment—and why the real villain of this story is hiding in plain sight.

Then, Suzy and Dan cover th…