Would you vote for a candidate who cheated on their spouse?

Moral attitudes in the United States have shifted enormously over the past few decades, and on a whole range of issues: from same-sex marriage to abortion. But Americans have remained foursquare against adultery. A solid 90 percent of adults said in a survey last year that marital infidelity is morally wrong, whereas just 2 percent said it is morally acceptable. (The rest believed it is not a moral issue.)

This overwhelming condemnation transcends age, gender, religion, and political ideology. Given that 20 percent of married men and 13 percent of married women admitted in 2022 to having had an affair (and many more don’t fess up to it), this condemnatory consensus even includes a good many cheaters themselves.

It’s Monday, June 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Caitlin Flanagan on Jill Biden’s new memoir. John McWhorter on the state of wokeness. Plus: The college romance show millennial moms can’t stop watching. And much more.

But first: Two big questions about artificial intelligence.

The debate over artificial intelligence seems to be developing as quickly as the technology itself, with programmers, lawmakers, and everyday citizens all having their say. The latest turn was kicked off by Pope Leo, with his AI encyclical last month.

In his evenhanded take on the technology, there was one detail about which the pope was firm: There is no mind in the machines. “Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean,” he wrote.

The people building the machines aren’t so sure. Last week, we learned that Anthropic, Meta, and Alphabet have hired psychologists, philosophers, and other experts to probe whether there might be a spirit in their digital creations. So is AI conscious? It’s the latest in a series of questions we find ourselves facing that feel like they should be from a science-fiction novel.

Tyler Cowen tackles it in his piece for us today. Don’t miss his take:

In our second offering today, Senator Josh Hawley, the Republican from Missouri, grapples with more practical, but no less significant, questions about AI: Will it cause mass layoffs? How dangerous are chatbots with malicious designs? How will the spread of power-hungry data centers affect energy bills? And what can we do about all this?

Hawley offers a simple and absolute answer: Let the public set the rules about AI, not its creators. “The American economy will not automatically orient itself around the interests of American families,” he writes. “We must make that moral commitment ourselves.” Don’t miss this important contribution to perhaps the most important debate out there right now.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

In case you missed the news, we’re counting down Great Americans as we approach the big 250 next month.

Next up in the series: the Kennedys. Will Rahn writes about Jack and Bobby and the family that was never a dynasty. Instead, he says, they were a “flash of light”—eight years of real power followed by six decades of afterimage that America just can’t quit.

• Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel yesterday in retaliation for Israeli air strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, jeopardizing peace deal negotiations and the ceasefire between Tehran and Washington. No major damage or casualties were reported. “I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate,” President Trump told Axios. “We are very close to a final deal with Iran.”

• A standoff over the appointment of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence led to a warning from Senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “plan for a potential significant gap in foreign intelligence collection.” To protest Pulte, Senate Democrats have blocked the reauthorization of an important foreign surveillance program.

• President Trump walked out of an interview on Meet the Press, accusing NBC of being a “one-sided crooked network” during a heated exchange over what he claims are “rigged” elections. In the interview, Trump also denied promising “no new wars” during his presidential campaign. “I didn’t promise anything,” Trump said, adding that the Iran conflict “is not an endless war.”

• A report commissioned by the leaders of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis concluded that there has been a “deterioration in scholarly standards” in the social sciences and humanities. “Every field” reviewed by the report’s authors showed some signs of ideological distortion where “political criteria” substituted for “scholarly criteria,” the report said.

• The White House is considering a plan to buy the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean from the United Kingdom, which would snarl UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s plan to cede the territory to Mauritius, according to The Telegraph. U.S. leaders fear giving up control over the home of the joint U.S.-UK Diego Garcia military base to China-allied Mauritius. Starmer did not allow the U.S. to strike Iran from Diego Garcia at the beginning of the war.

• The Trump administration must restart asylum and immigration processing for people from 39 countries, a federal judge ruled on Friday. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services put a hold on all asylum claims and froze decisions on immigration applications from the 39 countries, largely in Africa and the Middle East.

• Nithya Raman edged past Spencer Pratt into second place as more votes were counted in the primary race for Los Angeles mayor. Election analysis firm Decision Desk HQ projected on Sunday that Raman will face off against incumbent Karen Bass in the November general election, while the Associated Press had not called a winner as of Sunday night. (Watch: Inside Spencer Pratt’s Viral Video Machine.)

John McWhorter has been one of the clearest thinkers on race in America for decades, and one of the few willing to say what a lot of people quietly believe. He’s a linguistics professor at Columbia, a New York Times columnist, and one of my personal heroes. It’s good to have him back on the show.

The years between roughly 2014 and 2022 were defined by a …

The title of Jill Biden’s new memoir is View from the East Wing, but a more apt title might be Still Mad. Jill Biden is still mad, but unfortunately, Jill Biden is also still boring. She promises us a good time: “Only now can I stop to make sense of everything. It’s finally come time to sort through all that’s happened, for my own understanding, and for history”—lay it on me, sister—but just a page later: “And yet, I don’t want to spend too much energy looking back and asking how this could have happened.”

Isn’t that always the way with her? Industrious Jill Biden with her pastel knits, cheerleader enthusiasms, and endless grading of community college essays usually keeps a lid on things. Better to describe the table decorations at a White House Teacher Appreciation lunch in sadistic detail than let her hair down. She’s been a politician’s wife for almost half a century, and if her attention is no longer on the next campaign, it’s fixed on her husband’s legacy. Still, toward the end, the book provides a shimmer of what she thinks about the Democratic Party shanking her husband and the belief shared by many journalists that they were duped—by Jill Biden, among others—about the biggest story of the decade: President Biden’s obvious decline.

As we all remember, things happened very quickly after the June 2024 debate. The big revelation of the book is that when Jill saw Joe’s performance at the debate, she thought he was having a stroke. I didn’t experience it as catastrophic. I thought it was a representative example of how he regularly performed. At that point, fumbling answers, forgetting what he was talking about, and rallying with short-lived episodes of lucidity were regularly on display. Nothing was hidden from the public because you can’t hide that kind of thing. It had been clear long before the debate that he wasn’t fit for the biggest job in the world. He called the Ukrainians the Iranians, confused Angela Merkel with Helmut Kohl (dead since 2017), confused Emmanuel Macron with François Mitterrand (1996), and forgot the name of the prime minister of Australia and referred to him as “that fella down under.” He several times referred to Kamala Harris as “President Harris.” He said he’d campaigned in “54 states,” that “we have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean,” and that Nancy Pelosi had “helped rescue the economy in the Great Depression.”

Are AI models conscious? Do Claude and ChatGPT have an inner sentient life? At least three leading giant AI companies—Anthropic, Meta, and Alphabet—are taking those questions extremely seriously. The Financial Times reported last week that they have hired philosophers, psychologists, and ethicists to test their models’ sentience.

Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate in physics and one of the fathers of neural net research, believes AI already is conscious. Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, thinks the AIs might be conscious. As the models become more sophisticated, these believers are likely to become even more certain. On social media, I commonly see comments, including from very educated and sophisticated observers, that the most advanced AI models have internal life experiences of some kind.

I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious.

If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities. These kinds of beliefs persist today, not only in the folk religions of the world, but in human obsessions with fortune tellers, tarot cards, and the supernatural.

Earlier this year in Festus, Missouri, a municipal government meeting packed hundreds of local residents into a high school gymnasium. The council in this river city of about 14,000 convened to consider the approval of a $6 billion project to build an AI data center.

For hours, residents approached the microphone one by one, armed with simple questions. How would the data center affect their energy bills? How would this sprawling project impact land values and water usage?

The city council answered by gesturing toward the developer’s promises—and ultimately voted to approve the project. A few weeks later, voters provided their own answer. They threw out every single incumbent council member up for reelection.

As people debate the moral valence of artificial intelligence, many are asking the wrong questions. AI is not inherently a blessing or a curse; it is a tool that can be used for good or for ill. This means that whether the technology improves the lives of working people or not depends on the choices we make now.

We cannot afford to leave those choices to the venture capitalists and the engineers in Palo Alto. If we want to lead the world on technology while preserving our values—of individual dignity, of vocational work, of strong communities—we will listen to the people in Festus. We will listen to the people who feel like they are being handed the bill for Big Tech’s dystopian future.

One mom skipped her son’s all-day soccer tournament to watch it. Another sneaked in episodes between conference calls at her corporate desk job. Elisabeth, a 48-year-old mom of two who lives in Westport, Connecticut, told me she has a group chat dedicated to the show called “Elderly & Obsessed,” where they talk about how the show reignited their sex drives and how frying a turkey is always a bad idea (IYKYK).

Warning to children and needy husbands everywhere: If your mother or wife is missing this summer, she’s likely off watching Off Campus. The college romance series centered around an ice hockey team and the women who love them is the third most popular Prime Video debut ever (the show is based off Elle Kennedy’s young-adult romance novels). And it’s taken millennial moms by storm. This isn’t the first time that a bunch of 30- and 40-year-old women have gone wild for a teen romance tale—it was only last September that the final episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty aired and I spotted a grown woman in New York City sporting a “Team Conrad” T-shirt.

There’s a different sort of rabidness to Off Campus’s fan base, though. Yes, our hearts ached for the love triangle in The Summer I Turned Pretty (two brothers, Conrad and Jeremiah, pining for the same childhood friend—imagine the drama!). But the Summer I Turned Pretty boys were narrow-shouldered, effeminate Gen Zers with floppy hair. When their emotions got too heavy, they ran away.

The Off Campus actors are unabashedly men. There’s a feral quality to the show: The boobs are big and the abs are, well, hard. And while the script isn’t necessarily Emmy-worthy, that’s not the point. In one scene, the lead, star hockey player Garrett Graham, played by Belmont Cameli, finds out he’s playing against the guy who raped his girlfriend years ago, and he pummels him. Appropriate? No. But sort of hot.

Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Major Garrett wrote about John Steinbeck, whose novels echo in our memory “like a favorite family hymn, a true American hymn.” Today, Will Rahn reflects on Jack and Bobby Kennedy—their lives, their legacies, and the family America just can’t quit. —The Editors

Jack and Bobby. You see those bouncy, boyish nicknames and know exactly who I mean—you picture their faces, you hear the famous voices that went with them. I wonder, What keeps us turning back to them? The truth is, we never turned away.

Maybe it’s the drama of their deaths. John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the great formative moment of the Boomer generation. It gave birth to the myth of the ’60s, those few short years we compulsively revisit in our movies, our television shows, and our fashion. The notion that he would have avoided the Vietnam War had he lived, that we could have had the sunny part of that decade without the darkness, is one of the rare historical counterfactuals widely believed to be true.

Whether Bobby’s 1968 bid for the presidency would have succeeded is somewhat mythical too; he was winning primaries before they truly mattered. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, his main rival for the nomination, was seen as heroic by anyone who remembered his stand for civil rights when it divided the party in 1948. He also had more than enough support among the party bosses who would pick the nominee in the literally smoke-filled rooms. But his death shrouded him in permanent possibility.

Welcome back to the Weekend Press! Today, Kara Kennedy has two drinks with the mom who went viral for asking Trump if he’s going to help Americans pay for childcare. Former vice president Mike Pence reflects on why we’re all confused about what conservatism actually is. Joe Nocera on Rafael Nadal. Kat Rosenfield on a buzzy new horror film. And more!

But first: Maya Sulkin reports on the machines making people human again.

In October 2016, my family took a trip to Washington, D.C., with my mom’s best friend, who I call Aunt Lori—she was in the room when I was born, because my dad was so freaked out—and her husband Uncle Brian. We spent our days walking through Georgetown and taking pictures of cherry blossoms, but my always-athletic Uncle Brian started to complain that his shoulder was feeling weak.

We thought it was “tennis elbow,” or that he was being a diva. But then my aunt started to notice her husband was limping. In the months that followed, we learned Brian had ALS—a horrific disease that attacks the nerve cells that allow you to move your muscles, until you can no longer move, speak, swallow, or breathe. He was told he had five years to live, tops.

My aunt and uncle researched every medical trial, and traveled to see all the doctors and researchers who could give them any advice about treatment options. They helped launch I AM ALS, a patient-led advocacy organization that has since secured billions of dollars in research funding. I thank God every day that Uncle Brian’s deterioration, unlike most patients, has been slow. He can still walk and play with his grandchildren. He hasn’t lost his voice.

Earlier this year, I met two ALS patients who had: Brad Smith and Kenneth Shock. Or at least, they had lost their voices before they crossed paths with a company called Neuralink. Created by Elon Musk—who got the idea from a science fiction series—it makes devices that can be implanted into the brain and allow paralyzed people to control a computer with only their minds. And once they can do that, they can communicate—by rapidly typing words that can then be uttered by an AI that sounds just like them.

As of January 2026, Neuralink has implanted brain-computer interfaces in 21 human patients. Brad was the third. When I asked Brad what it was like to hear himself speak again, he didn’t miss a beat. “The truth is,” Brad told me, “nobody really likes to hear their own voice.” Brad is happiest when he’s telling jokes. ALS robbed him of his ability to do that, but AI has restored it.

While I was reporting, I kept thinking about what it would mean for my Uncle Brian to lose his voice—to be talked over, to have people assume that because he couldn’t speak he couldn’t understand what was happening around him. I would miss his favorite line at dinner: “If it tastes good, it’s good for you.”

We talk endlessly about what cutting-edge technology like AI might cost us. But this story is a reminder that it can also give us something back.

—Maya Sulkin

This week, Suzy sat down with tech writer Joanna Stern—who, for one year, let artificial intelligence into every corner of her life. She tested robot assistants, commuted in autonomous vehicles, read AI bedtime stories to her children, and even went on a road trip with her AI boyfriend, Evan. Listen to the episode—which shines a light on the brave new world that lies ahead—wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube below:

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet a Don Quixote–loving bachelor in Tuscaloosa; an early riser in D.C. looking for true love; or a Chinese-Indian-Scottish cat-lover in Singapore. 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].

We’ve published plenty of other excellent culture pieces this week, including. . .

And don’t miss our new Great Americans series. So far we’ve had entries by Joseph Epstein on Sandy Koufax, Joe Nocera on Louis Armstrong, Major Garrett on John Steinbeck, and more.

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our publicist Catherine Morrissette for her recommendations.

🍋 Drink. . . an ice-cold Del’s Lemonade. For those lucky enough to live in the Ocean State, you know nothing beats the heat like a crisp lemonade slushy (with chunks of lemon peel) in a waxy paper cup. For the 99 percent of us not in Rhode Island on this hot Saturday, join me in blending up some ice, simple syrup, and lemon juice for a poor man’s copycat of this perfect beverage.

🦈 Listen. . . to “Fins,” by the one and only Jimmy Buffett. The keys, the steel drums, and the iconic guitar riff are the sounds of summer. The grill is hot, the coconut shrimp are crispy, and it’s five o’clock somewhere. ’Tis the season, folks.

📖 Read. . . this Free Press Forum thread where Free Press parents share their tips on raising good men. “I’m now acutely aware of the sedimented contradictions that run through the history of mothering advice,” one mom writes. “How do I excel at this?” The replies are heartening, and the advice is sage. (In case you haven’t been paying attention—it’s okay, it’s nearly summer!—we just launched the Forum, a new perk that gives subscribers a place to chat with other Free Pressers. We’ve already seen readers get job offers, life advice, and pitch stories that have made it to our editor’s room. It’s fun, and a perfect Sunday rabbit hole.)

Last but not least, in memory of the Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, who died this week aged 56, feast your eyes on an excerpt from Persepolis, the dramatization of the Iranian revolution that made her famous:

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

How much do you have to suffer to be a great athlete? Do you have to suffer like Johnny Unitas, the great quarterback of the 1960s, who was unable to lift a fork with his right arm after he retired? Do you have to suffer like Tiger Woods, whose otherworldly drives destroyed his body, resulting in seven back surgeries, five knee surgeries, and two ankle surgeries? Do you have to suffer like Larry Bird, who played basketball with such chronic back and leg pain that when he was taken out of a game to rest, he had to lie on the floor because it hurt too much to sit in a chair?

Or do you have to suffer like the Spanish tennis great Rafael Nadal, for whom pain was a constant companion throughout a professional career that began when he was 15 and ended a year and a half ago, at the age of 37?

During the course of that career Nadal won 22 Grand Slams, the second most of any player in history, and was ranked in the top 10 for 912 consecutive weeks—that’s 18 years straight, an astonishing feat. Along with Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, Nadal was one of the “Big Three” who dominated tennis for most of this century. He played in a handful of the greatest matches ever played. He won the French Open 14 times, a record that is unlikely to ever be broken.

He had, in other words, a career like few others.

Nadal was relentless on the court and a gentleman off it, and we fans loved him for both those qualities. What we didn’t see—because he tried to hide it from us—was how much suffering he endured to play at that level, and for that many years. And in Rafa, the new four-part Netflix documentary, it is his threshold for pain—his belief that suffering was required for him to achieve greatness—that writer and director Zach Heinzerling was most interested in exploring. To Heinzerling, the question wasn’t only why Nadal was willing to endure it but also: Was it worth it in the end?