Peptide mania has struck. With so much public skepticism about overmedication and vaccines, this category of cutting-edge and in many cases untested drugs has been enthusiastically embraced by the people most mistrustful of mainstream medicine. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) who has spent decades denouncing vaccines, and has been involved in lawsuits against their manufacturers, says he’s “a fan” of peptides, which supporters say can do everything from rejuvenating skin and hair to accelerating the healing of injuries to reversing the aging process. Kennedy wants to make unapproved and mostly untested “wellness” peptides more available to the public.

The term “peptide” picks out a broad category. Peptides are small versions of proteins, or segments of proteins. Our bodies make a variety of peptides to send signals between cells, regulating everything from blood pressure to wound healing, and from sleep cycles to fat storage. Peptide drugs can interact directly with these signaling pathways. GLP-1s, the weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, are peptides that alter hunger signaling. Insulin is a peptide drug that duplicates a natural peptide needed to extract energy from food. Both, of course, are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Other promising drugs are slowly making their way through the pipeline.

These are not controversial, nor are the powdered collagen peptides sold in Whole Foods and other health food stores. The latter are regulated by the FDA as supplements—a category they fall into because they are derived from cattle and fish and are considered a component of food. They may not necessarily do anything, but they’re considered safe enough, as are peptides sold in skin creams and approved as cosmetics.

Ibram X. Kendi has been relatively quiet since 2025, when his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University closed its doors. The center, which raised over $50 million in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, was founded in order to “transform how racial research is done.”

If Kendi transformed “racial research” at all, then he transformed it from an already troubled enterprise into a complete dumpster fire. After a wave of layoffs in 2023, ex-employees began complaining of a “workplace culture that included fear of retaliation and discrimination.” The ultimate indictment of the center, however, was its lack of output. Given three years, several dozen staff members, and the budget of a midsize Hollywood action film, Kendi’s research center managed to produce just two research papers before collapsing under the weight of its own pointlessness.

One could have predicted this outcome based upon the dubious quality of Kendi’s previous work—in particular his best-selling 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist. In that book, Kendi argued that there is no such thing as a race-neutral public policy. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity,” he proclaimed. Even a policy as mundane as the capital gains tax, Kendi argued, must be either racist or anti-racist. The book was a bestseller.

Kendi’s new book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, is equally nuanced. But without the atmosphere of 2020’s racial reckoning to buoy the book, it appears to be falling flat. Even the left-leaning Guardian, which reviewed his last book positively, described Chain of Ideas as “Neither artful in prose nor powerful in statement.”

Ostensibly, Chain of Ideas takes aim at the “Great Replacement Theory” (GRT from here on out)—the far-right conspiracy theory that powerful (and often Jewish) elites are engineering mass immigration in order to replace white majorities with left-wing voters of color. This “theory,” if it even merits the word, can be traced back to a 2011 book by the French novelist Renaud Camus called Le Grand Remplacement; his way of framing mass migration—as a “replacement” of one people by another, or even “genocide by substitution”—has grown in popularity on the political right in the years since.

“I was such an insecure, warped creature that I needed that laughter to feel good about myself.”

This was the actor Rainn Wilson’s response to my question about why he’d always made jokes as a kid. He explains that when you are in a lot of pain but figure out that you are naturally funny, you start making jokes to distract yourself and others from your misery. It’s a kind of “emotional substitution,” he said.

Wilson’s childhood was completely unstable. The family’s economic situation was precarious at best. His mother abandoned the family when Rainn was 2 years old; he didn’t see her again until he was 14. Desperate and despondent, his father quickly entered into a tense, loveless second marriage and converted the family to the Baha’i faith. Wilson’s upbringing was, in his own words, characterized by “confusion, anxiety, and alienation.”

At 18, Wilson escaped to college in New York City and studied acting, resolving to be finished forever with his dysfunctional family and their weird religion. He could not outrun his demons, however. Depression, loneliness, and anxiety hunted him relentlessly. He drank heavily and used drugs throughout his 20s and 30s, a form of self-medication that led, inevitably, to addiction.

At 40, his luck seemed to change when he scored the role of Dwight Schrute in the television comedy The Office. Almost overnight, Wilson became internationally famous. You might think that having people shout “I love you” from passing cars would fix his depression and give him an incentive to kick his habits, right?

With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

Donald Trump has issued a 24-hour extension, giving the Iranian regime until tomorrow at 8 p.m. ET to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The extension appears to be tied to the prospect of negotiations. According to sources familiar with the talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, the United States and Iran are discussing terms for a potential 45-day ceasefire that could lead to a permanent end to the war.

The mediators are discussing a two-stage framework:

• Stage 1: A 45-day ceasefire during which negotiations would take place to end the war.

• Stage 2: A final agreement to officially end the conflict.

This proposal strikes a somewhat dissonant tone. For the past two weeks, reports of negotiations have spanned from outright denial to thoroughly unenthusiastic. Apart from Trump’s triumphalist rhetoric claiming Iran is begging for peace, there has been very little indication that a deal is actually forthcoming. The sources familiar with the talks are largely in harmony with previous statements: According to them, the chances of reaching even a partial agreement in the next 48 hours are low.

It’s Monday, April 6. 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 American freelance journalist kidnapped in Iraq. Are we headed for a global recession? How some of the most prominent Catholic influencers are corrupting the church. And much more.

But first: America’s advantage in Iran, and can it last?

It was a remarkable weekend in the Iran conflict. On Friday, for the first time in more than 20 years, two U.S. aircraft were shot down in combat: an F-15E fighter jet and an A-10C Thunderbolt. The A-10C pilot ejected safely, and one of the two F-15 pilots was recovered later that day. Then, early Sunday, news broke of a special operations mission that secured the second airman.

The moment felt almost miraculous. For more than a day, it was uncertain whether the Iranian regime would capture what Zineb Riboua calls “the single most valuable propaganda asset of the entire war—a prisoner whose image alone could have rewritten the narrative of a campaign that has been catastrophic for the Islamic Republic from the first strike.”

But America got there first—a moment, Zineb writes, that underscores just how decisively U.S. military power has eclipsed Iran’s, and leads to the increasingly inescapable conclusion that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is approaching its “terminal phase.” Read her full piece to understand why she says so.

But can this military advantage last? Just hours after announcing the airman’s recovery, President Trump issued a threat on Truth Social:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.

As Eli Lake notes, it’s often difficult to tell when the president is bluffing. But bombing civilian infrastructure would harm “the very people whom Trump at first said he was hoping to liberate,” he argues. If America’s aim is to dismantle the regime, it should empower the Iranian people, not punish them.

Finally, Armin Rosen addresses the chorus of so-called expert voices pushing a very different note—that Iran is winning the war. His essay today unspools this narrative, why it has taken hold, and why Iran itself seems more aware of its precarious position than the “mandarins of American media and academia.”

—Jillian Lederman

• An Air Force officer whose jet was shot down by Iran was rescued by U.S. Special Operations forces on Saturday. The operation reportedly involved intelligence efforts from the Central Intelligence Agency. After extraction by Navy Seal Team 6, President Trump announced that the rescued officer “sustained injuries, but he will be just fine.”

• In an Easter Sunday speech yesterday, Pope Leo called on world leaders to choose negotiation over military might. “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace!” he said. The comments came as President Trump is applying increased pressure on the Iranians to reach an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

• The Cuban government began its release of more than 2,000 recently pardoned prisoners this weekend. Cuba’s embassy in the U.S. called the move a “humanitarian and sovereign gesture,” one that follows months of pressure and an oil blockade from the Trump administration.

• The Trump administration filed an emergency appeal Friday night after a federal court blocked construction of the White House ballroom. In addition to the motion, the administration announced a $10 billion plan designed to beautify the D.C. area beyond White House premises. (For more on the government’s ambitions, read Suzy Weiss’s profile of Joe Gebbia, the country’s first chief design officer.)

• On Friday, a federal judge blocked Trump’s order requiring colleges to provide data proving they aren’t considering race in admissions. The judge said the government likely has the authority to collect the data, but delayed the demand due to its “rushed and chaotic” rollout.

• President Trump issued a directive designed to “save” college sports on Friday. The rules would add new regulations around athlete compensation and the transfer portal, and calls for more funds for women’s sports. (For more on how paying college athletes changed the game, read Joe Nocera’s “Paying College Athletes Has Created a Mess. It Was Still the Right Thing to Do.”)

• UCLA defeated the University of South Carolina in the women’s college basketball championship Sunday. The Michigan Wolverines will take on the UConn Huskies in the men’s final tonight.

Linda Chavez once held the highest-ranking position of any woman in Ronald Reagan’s White House, serving as director of the Office of Public Liaison. But when she was nominated to be secretary of labor under George W. Bush, her candidacy unraveled when it emerged that she had been sheltering an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala in her home. She hadn…

This weekend, somewhere in the mountains of southwestern Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was hunting an American. They were chasing the most intoxicating image: a soldier of the “Great Satan,” bloodied and captured, paraded before the cameras on the very soil his country had come to destroy, the living fulfillment of every chant of vengeance that had echoed through Iranian streets since 1979. The IRGC held all the advantages a force could ask for: home terrain, local informant networks, and within its grasp the single most valuable propaganda asset of the entire war—a prisoner whose image alone could have rewritten the narrative of a campaign that has been catastrophic for the Islamic Republic from the first strike.

But American special operations forces got there first. And when Donald Trump announced the rescue on Truth Social in three words—“WE GOT HIM!”—the IRGC walked away with nothing but the abandoned underwear of a man they never caught.

The episode revealed three things: complete American military superiority over the Islamic Republic on its own soil; the catastrophic failure of a surveillance architecture that Beijing had spent years and billions of dollars constructing; and the increasingly inescapable conclusion that the IRGC’s viability as a military institution is approaching its terminal phase.

This article was originally published on April 5, two days before American journalist Shelly Kittleson was released from captivity by an Iran-aligned militia after being held for one week.

Her name was on a list. That single detail anchors everything that unfolded last Tuesday afternoon on Saadoun Street in Baghdad, when several men in civilian clothes forced American freelance journalist Shelly Kittleson into a silver car and drove southwest of the city. She is 49 and has spent more than a decade tenaciously covering some of the most dangerous regions of the world, refusing to quit the only work she has ever loved.

The warnings had come repeatedly, and they had come with specifics. In the days before her abduction, Shelly was told it was too dangerous and was barred from re-entering Iraq through standard channels after a trip to Syria. So, she found another route, entering through Jordan, where there appeared to be a breakdown in communications, and she was waved through. The warnings continued after that. A CIA source told me the frustration inside the intelligence community runs deep.

The previous Iraqi government had extended Shelly a degree of protection, the agency source stressed, given her routine trips to the front line in the fight against the Islamic State. The new government did not offer the same. Shelly’s name, the source said, was on a list of targets held by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed paramilitary group and one of the most powerful militias in the region.

For those wondering whether America is winning in Iran, most current assessments pale in relevance to William Shakespeare’s Henry V. Toward the end of the play, the English king tallies the mind-boggling French losses at the 1415 Battle of Agincourt. In the end, they number more than 10,000, a “royal fellowship of death”—with the English losing a mere 29. While these numbers are a literary exaggeration, the historical record confirms that the English won big at Agincourt. And they won because very few of their soldiers were killed, in sharp contrast to the enemy. “Was ever known so great and little loss?” asks Henry.

Today, if you were to consult much of the media, you would get the impression that Iran is handing America a humiliating defeat. “America Lost. Iran Won. Trump Shat the Bed,” moaned Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark on April 2. “Advantage Iran,” blared the cover of The Economist on March 26. Iran is “winning the war,” said Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts on Friday, shortly after Iranian forces shot down two U.S. planes.

Until very recently, I had no moral qualms about defending the American-Israeli war on Iran’s wicked regime. This is because the war—despite unintended but inevitable civilian casualties—was directed at the fanatics who have oppressed Iran’s people and waged war against America and the Middle East for decades.

But if Donald Trump makes good on his latest threats, a just war could lose its moral standing. On Easter Sunday the president promised on Truth Social that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” unless the “crazy bastards” in charge of Iran’s regime “open the Fuckin’ Strait.” He was talking about the Strait of Hormuz, and his threat was specifically to begin bombing the civilian infrastructure of Iran to compel the surviving leaders to open up the vital choke hold to international shipping in the Persian Gulf.