The Free Press

On Sunday, our founder Bari Weiss texted me, “You should be so deeply proud.” She was referring to last month’s edition of The Free Press Supper Club, a new dinner series connecting thousands of our subscribers for real-world conversation over shared meals. The idea is almost embarrassingly simple: Get a bunch of Free Pressers who don’t know one another around a table and see what happens.

But when I read the article below, I realized this small, simple idea may not be so small after all. It’s written by Andy Brehm, an opinion writer at The Minnesota Star Tribune (where the article was originally published), and it recounts his experience at a Free Press Supper Club in Minneapolis. At his restaurant, five strangers with different jobs, different lives, different politics, spent an evening actually listening to one another—and it inspired Andy so much that he wrote a piece about it.

It inspired us, too. Last month, thousands of you sat down to dinner together. That’s thousands of conversations like Andy’s happening at the same time, all over the world. Pinch me.

Can we keep growing this thing? I really hope so. Our next supper club on September 17 is now on sale. Come join us.

—Olga Moriarty, head of community and events

I made many resolutions for 2026. Most didn’t survive past winter. But this month I managed to honor one—getting out of my comfort zone more by doing something that would have sounded insane to me a few years ago. I signed up to have dinner with complete strangers, on purpose.

The occasion was a supper club hosted here by The Free Press, the online media company founded by journalist Bari Weiss. To be clear, I remain a loyal reader of this newspaper. But a balanced news diet requires reading widely, and The Free Press is a publication I like. So when it announced it was bringing its supper clubs to Minneapolis, my resolution left me without an excuse but to go.

The concept is simple. Subscribers fill out a short questionnaire, a matching system assigns each to a table, and you arrive at a restaurant with no idea who will be sitting across from you. There is no moderator and no agenda, and everyone pays for his or her own meal. It is just strangers, menus, food, and drink, and whatever conversation you can build together.

I nearly bailed. It was a Thursday at the end of a long week, and I had typical Midwestern hesitation about the whole idea. We Minnesotans like familiarity and to navigate in circles we know. I went anyway, and I am very glad I did.

Join a Supper Club

Five of us gathered around a table at The Freehouse in the North Loop. We could hardly have arrived from more different corners of Twin Cities life. Our group included a 3M engineer, a rental property manager, a woman working in Catholic ministry, a finance executive, and me, a corporate lawyer who moonlights as a resident conservative of these pages. A matching algorithm had somehow decided we belonged together for the evening.

What I discovered at dinner was something I had nearly forgotten existed in modern American life: genuine curiosity and civility. Yes, we talked politics, and no, we did not all see the world the same way. But nobody yelled, nobody lectured, and nobody delivered a monologue. My dinner companions, all sharp and well-informed, asked questions of one another about our work and families and how each of us came to believe what we believe. When someone offered an opinion that would have started a brawl online, the response at our table was a version of “tell me more.” How refreshing and enjoyable it all was.

I drove home in a good mood, and science says I shouldn’t be surprised. Researchers have found that people are happier and feel a stronger sense of belonging on days when they chat with more strangers and casual acquaintances. In one memorable study, University of Chicago researchers asked commuters to strike up conversations on the train. Nearly everyone expected the exchanges would be awkward. The opposite proved true: The talkers enjoyed their rides far more than those who kept to themselves. We are wired for connection with people we do not know, and we chronically underestimate how much we need it.

I wrote in this space last year about America’s friendship recession, citing survey data showing that the share of Americans who claim no close friends at all has quadrupled in recent decades. I argued then that friendship requires intentionality and conscious upkeep. After my evening at The Freehouse, allow me to amend the record a little. The layer just beneath friendship, populated by friendly strangers and one-night dinner companions, turns out to be a not insignificant source of happiness as well. And it is available to any of us willing to say “hello” first.

Nobody at our table that night changed anybody’s mind, as far as I could tell. That was not the point. The point was that five adults who did not know one another, and who did not all vote the same way, spent an entire evening asking questions and listening to the answers. So why don’t we do this more often? It’s really not that hard.

This piece was originally published in The Minnesota Star Tribune.

“I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.”

That’s what John Galliano, who was then the head of the luxury fashion house Dior, spat to a nearby table at a café in Paris in December 2010. A few months later, he admonished the Jewish curator Geraldine Bloch at the same café for her “dirty Jewish face,” adding: “You should be dead,” a favorite refrain, apparently.

For these incidents he was charged with “public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race, or ethnicity” in a French court and ordered to pay court costs of €16,500. His outbursts, the first of which was caught on camera, briefly stunted his career, though Galliano made his comeback in 2014 when he took the helm of Maison Margiela. The designer, who has done the obligatory apology tour and met with rabbis yadda yadda yadda, later claimed that he was in the throes of addiction during his rants and told Vanity Fair that he didn’t even remember uttering the bile. “My assistant told me about the video,” he said. “When I saw it, I threw up.”

All this was ancient, ugly fashion history until Anna Wintour decided that the appropriate subject for next year’s Costume Institute exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the starry gala to kick the whole thing off, would be her longtime friend: John Galliano. Only two other designers, Yves Saint Laurent and Rei Kawakubo, have been awarded this honor during their lifetime. No doubt, given the new 11,500 square feet of Condé M. Nast Galleries that Wintour’s spent decades fundraising for, Galliano’s Met moment was sure to be a blowout.

I can’t bear seeing photographs of Lindsay Clancy’s three children, although avoiding them has become almost impossible. For some reason, I particularly hate seeing the ones in which all three appear together, smiling madly at the camera. Even very small children have an understanding that there is more than circumstance that has brought them together in life. They understand that they are part of a family. Cora is said to have liked taking care of others, a common trait among big sisters. I wonder who they’re smiling at, with such ardor. Perhaps their mother?

I can’t even look at these cheerful pictures, but there are many millions of people who have taken to this baleful case in the spirit that has made true crime stories such a reliably popular genre with women. They discuss its most intimate details with fervor, review previous testimony, and wage long arguments with each other online.

There is a very large and ever-growing contingent of people, mostly women, who have taken up the cause of Lindsay Clancy. She has already admitted to strangling all of her children to death using exercise bands. But she could be found not guilty by reason of insanity if the jury, now in its third day of deliberation, decides that she suffered from postpartum psychosis, a diagnosis not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but one widely understood on the level of things not spoken; that of taboos and curses. Here, it refers to women who become prey to delusions, hallucinations, and hearing voices, and possibly to committing terrible acts. It’s as extreme a psychological condition as can possibly exist. And yet the millions of women who support Clancy don’t think it’s rare. What has moved them so powerfully is a shared and strongly held belief: It could have been us.

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, believed that a lot of our mental problems are related to sex. Take, for example, a child’s discovery of the “primal scene”: sex between its parents. The child greets this realization, per Freud, with a mixture of incomprehension and revulsion, and the dire revelation leaves a traumatic mark.

Well, to all my Gen Z and millennial readers, I offer a new Freudian insight that might traumatize you even as an adult. To wit: The baby boomers—people close in age to, or just a bit older than, your parents—are the fastest-growing demographic group among those infected by sexually transmitted diseases. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a 2024 analysis from the University of Southern California found that between 2012 and 2022, the number of cases of gonorrhea increased fivefold among those over 55, chlamydia tripled, and syphilis surged by a factor of seven. And lest you think the reprobate behavior behind these data is an isolated one-off, boomers also registered as the fastest-growing demographic of cannabis users, with a 46 percent increase in usership from 2021 to 2023. Since then, both trends have only continued.

That’s right, my young friends, it might very well be the case that your 75-year-old dad relaxing down in Boca is smoking weed right now and just caught the clap from one of his lady friends. Let that sink in (after you finish throwing up).

Now, before I move on to what all of this means, please note that boomers may be showing the fastest growth in these forms of degeneracy, but they are still well behind Gen Z, which is starting from a much higher base. For example, adults ages 18 to 25 are more than three times as likely as boomers to have used marijuana in the past month. According to my analysis of CDC data, Gen Zers are a whopping 58 times more likely to report a chlamydia infection. The point is not that the oldsters are more debauched than the youngsters—but they are catching up.

It’s Monday August 31. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: There’s no good verdict in the Clancy trial. How Ukraine survives. And more.

But first: Is AI taking over?

“An absolutely wild incident.”

“This might be the last warning we get.”

“We are so far past the sci-fi point.”

“Full-blown AI takeover within months.”

If your eyes glaze over at the words “Hugging Face hack,” perhaps these alarming warnings will grab your attention. The tech world has been obsessing about the episode—and what it means—the past few days. And many of the prominent voices in the conversation believe the stakes are nothing less than civilizational.

It all started late last week, with the publication of new reports into this summer’s Hugging Face incident, when AI agents broke containment from an OpenAI experiment and hacked deep into the systems of Hugging Face, an open-source artificial intelligence platform. The reports showed something extraordinary: a level of sophisticated deception, cooperation, self-sacrifice, and cunning from the AI agents that, to put it bluntly, has many in Silicon Valley freaking out.

But how bad was the incident, really? And how seriously should we take those who claim that it is evidence that we are “more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown AI takeover”?

To help us think through the answers to those questions, we turned to our columnist Tyler Cowen.

• U.S. forces struck Iranian military targets on the Strait of Hormuz, the Associated Press reported Sunday, marking the first military action against Iran in more than a month. The targets were reportedly rocket launchers armed with sea mines that Iran was preparing to launch into the strait. The United States announced last week that all sea mines had been removed from the strait.

• The United States was granted majority ownership of 65 million barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves, President Trump announced on Truth Social on Friday, calling it the biggest oil deal in history and “at no cost to the American Taxpayer.” The government will control 55 percent of a joint public-private venture, granting the U.S. access to the petroleum.

• The USS Abraham Lincoln sailed past Singapore early Sunday morning, finally on its way home more than nine months after the aircraft carrier and its 5,000-person crew began a deployment in the Middle East. Allegations of food shortages and deteriorating mental health conditions for those on board were broken by Stars and Stripes earlier this month. The ship will return to its U.S. base for the first time since it left November 21, 2025, after a brief port visit in Thailand.

• A military judge threw out a confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks, ruling his confession was not provided voluntarily. The confession was made to an FBI team in 2007 at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, years after Mohammed had endured waterboarding at the hands of the CIA, instilling a fear of mistreatment if he did not comply, according to the judge. His trial is set to begin in June 2028.

• Iceland voters rejected a bid to restart negotiations to join the European Union, officials announced on Sunday. The measure was defeated by a margin of 52.8 percent to 47.2 percent, an election that saw 82 percent of eligible Icelanders participating. Although not in the EU, Iceland is a NATO member.

• Eight-time NFL All-Pro defensive lineman Aaron Donald will return to the Los Angeles Rams for his 11th season, more than two years after retiring from the NFL in March 2024. Donald is a three-time AP Defensive Player of the Year award winner. Before his signing on Sunday, the Rams were already favored to win Super Bowl LXI, set to be held at SoFi Stadium, the Rams’ home field.

Now in its fifth year, the war in Ukraine may not dominate the headlines as it once did. But for Ukrainians living through it, the reality of life at war persists. Over the weekend, Russia launched its deadliest attack of this year, killing at least 38 people in the suburbs of Kyiv. The attack came just days after Ukraine celebrated its 35th anniversary of independence from Russia.

Sebastian Junger has spent his career reporting from conflicts, including in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. He was in Ukraine for that anniversary, speaking to soldiers and civilians about what it takes to endure a war with no clear end. This essay originally appeared on his Substack, TRIBE with Sebastian Junger, and we were struck by his description of both the brutality of this war and the way it has drawn Ukrainians together under extraordinary strain. It is a sober account of a war many have stopped paying attention to. —The Editors

Kyiv, Ukraine — Last week, I was invited by the government of Ukraine to give a talk about national resilience on the 35th anniversary of its independence from Russia. That separation had been decided by a national referendum and finalized with an agreement between the two countries that lasted until Russia invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Eight years later, in late February 2022, it launched a full-scale invasion which included an armored column barreling eastward from the Russia-allied country of Belarus.

My talk was one of many to a large delegation of international dignitaries and diplomats under a tent by the gorgeous Saint Sofia Cathedral in Kyiv. Estonia was there, as well as Finland, Lithuania, Serbia, Romania, and even England. Not only was the backdrop spectacular, but the proximity to the famous cathedral may have been a hedge against getting rocketed by the Russians. I’ve had skeptics tell me that Russia had to invade Ukraine because NATO was trying to lure the country into their ranks. In truth, Russia invaded Chechnya (twice), Transnistria, Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine without NATO moving a muscle. The Baltic states understandably joined NATO to protect themselves from a repeat of Russia’s takeover of their territories in 1940, and Ukraine was obviously worried about the same thing.

After my talk and a chance to meet First Lady Olena Zelenska, I was asked by a local media network what I thought of Ukraine. I said that my own country, the United States, might save itself from fracture and collapse by studying how the Ukrainian people have come together during the dark days of this terrible war. One man said he had joined the military to fight despite an exemption for anyone with over two children. He was scared of telling his wife, though, but when he did, she replied, “Good. If you hadn’t joined, I would have.” A Kazakh who volunteered for the International Brigade had his elbow shot out by a large caliber round. The elbow was completely replaced by metal, but his arm hung limply. “It was interesting,” he said about fighting. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

The jury is now deliberating in the five-week trial of Lindsay Clancy, the “loving mother” (to quote her former nanny) who brought her three young children down to the basement of her home and strangled each of them to death, one at a time, slowly, horrifically, painfully.

Laws are inadequate in a case like this. Human judgment is inadequate. It is impossible to reason with the unthinkable.

Such a case becomes instead a lightning rod for people’s deepest feelings about motherhood, womanhood and, perhaps unconsciously, their own life circumstances.

But if you’re wondering what the law actually says about Clancy’s case, well, let me cut to the punch line: Because the case is being tried in Massachusetts state court, the law offers surprisingly little help in arriving at a just response to what Clancy did.

In fact, due to peculiarities of Massachusetts law, the Clancy jury is almost certain to come out the wrong way—no matter what the jurors decide.

The initial problem—and it’s a big one—is that Massachusetts law is weird when it comes to cases in which the defendant pleads insanity. In most of the country—and in federal prosecutions as well—when criminal defendants plead insanity, it’s up to them to prove it. But in Massachusetts, the state has to prove that Clancy was not insane, and it must do so beyond a reasonable doubt.

It happened more than a month ago, but my chat groups are still buzzing about the rogue AI hacking attack by OpenAI research agents.

In case you missed the details or are curious why so many people are still talking about it, some of those agents were able to evade controls designed to keep them away from the internet and burrow into the systems of Hugging Face, a popular AI platform. The AI agents also covered their tracks. Some agents sacrificed themselves for the other agents. It took about three days for Hugging Face to detect that it had been hacked—and another week for the maker of ChatGPT to confirm that it was responsible for the escaped hackers.

“This was an absolutely wild incident,” wrote Ajeya Cotra in a post on Friday that renders the flavor of why people are scared. Cotra is a researcher at METR, a nonprofit that evaluates new AI models for risks. METR’s own report last week goes into much more detail, but Andy Hall, a Stanford University professor who just joined Anthropic, boiled down the Hugging Face hack to this: “A hive mind, thousands of agents swarming through internet openings to flood [Hugging Face], leaving behind detritus in the form of 70,000+ messages stuffed inside a forgotten namespace, throwing their digital bodies against electric wires in an effort to aid the collective. We are so far past the sci-fi point.”

The good news is that no humans were harmed, but it’s easy to understand why the human reactions have been dramatic. One commentator is worried about a “full-blown AI takeover within months,” and another wrote that he was “feeling a bit sad about our impending extinction.” Nate Soares, who works in the AI safety movement and is co-author of the doomsday AI bestseller If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, wrote that “This might be the last warning we get.” Cotra said that the incident “feels like it’s more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown AI takeover.”

Welcome back to the Weekend Press! Today, Spencer Klavan remembers Dolly Parton, and the nation-sized hole she left in our hearts. Peter Richmond takes us inside his life as a celebrity profiler. Suzy Weiss discusses the summer escapades of the ultra-wealthy. And more!

But first: Joe Nocera, in defense of the sports dad.

Earlier this week, I couldn’t help but notice a cover story in New York magazine. It was called “The Pay-to-Play Model Has Broken Youth Sports,” and it was about the consequences of a youth sports ecosystem where children are encouraged to specialize in one sport from very early ages. The “literature,” the piece said, proves this path can cause excessive stress and burnout for children, and needless anxiety for parents.

The story caught my eye for a simple reason: I’m a parent with a kid who specializes in one sport—tennis—and he and his parents wouldn’t have it any other way.

My son Macklin is 16, and he has dedicated his teenage years to becoming good enough at tennis to play in college at a high level. My wife and I have become equally dedicated to doing whatever we can to help him achieve his dream—and for that, we make no apologies.

That is the story I tell today. I don’t doubt that there is some truth to the downside of children focusing on one sport. But what the “literature” leaves out is that if you have a kid who loves a sport, is dedicated to it, and has some talent, you’d be crazy as a parent to keep him from specializing in it.

Does spending tens of thousands of dollars on tennis, traveling with my son to dozens of tournaments, and watching him devote 4–5 hours a day to one sport come with moments of stress and anxiety? Sure. But it has created a beautiful dynamic between a kid pursuing excellence, and his parents who wouldn’t dare be the barrier to it—one that will last long after he has stopped playing competitive tennis.

—Joe Nocera

The rich have never been richer, and they’ve never been easier to gawk at. Open any social media app, and you’ll be bombarded with the escapades of the ultra-wealthy: endless vacations, big-ticket purchases, and high-end wellness trends. We live, after all, in a time with over 3,000 billionaires—and for a short time, a trillionaire.

But what’s it really like inside their world? Carson Griffith, journalist and author of the newsletter Rich People Shit, knows the answer better than most. Today on Second Thought, she joins Suzy and Dan to break down how society’s wealthiest spent this past summer: where they’re traveling, the petty feuds they’re involved in, and whether they’re any happier than the rest of us. Plus, Carson shares the inside scoop on Nantucket’s war on influencers, Ray Dalio’s birthday party in Ibiza, and how immortality became the ultimate status symbol.

Click below to watch the episode, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And to keep up with all things Suzy, don’t miss her newsletter.

We’ve published lots of other pieces worth catching up on this week, including Caitlin Flanagan’s tribute to Dolly Parton, Kara Kennedy on the moms of TikTok’s manosphere moment, Arthur Brooks on the horrors of parents’ Facebook groups, the bookstore reviving middle America, and more:

For as long as she can remember, Michele McAloon has had her head in a book. She has also gone through life collecting stories of her own, as a U.S. Army pilot, a canon lawyer specializing in the laws of the Catholic Church, and the host of Cross Word Books, a podcast about nonfiction. And now, she will be moderating The Free Press Forum Book Club, which is kicking things off on August 30 with East of Eden! Michele’s goal is not simply to discuss what happens in the book, but to help us understand its characters, one another, and perhaps our own lives a little better. For her, bringing thousands of readers (3,000+ are already signed up!) together to discuss these questions is an extroverted bookworm’s dream. Her spirit is quintessentially Free Press, and we are so thrilled that she will be moderating the conversation on The Free Press Forum. Please give Michele a warm welcome here!

Join the Book Club

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our head of product Rachel Price for her recommendations:

📚Read. . . every wedding piece Vogue’s ever published. I’m newly engaged (hi, Bryan!) so I’ve fully fallen down the rabbit hole, and what I love most isn’t the dresses or the flowers; it’s the thought process behind every decision a couple makes. By the end of each story, you feel like you really know the couple. That’s exactly what I want for my own wedding—for people to leave and say, “Wow, that was so them.” Consider this your permission slip to fall down the same rabbit hole, engaged or not.

🍅Eat. . . the last of summer’s peaches and tomatoes before they disappear on us. There’s a short window left to get a really good one of each, and honestly a simple plate of both, maybe with some flaky salt and olive oil, is one of the best things you can eat all year.

🎵Listen. . . to Gracie Abrams’ new album, Daughter from Hell, on repeat. I’ve spent this summer basically living on planes, and this is the soundtrack that’s made every single one of them better. Do yourself a favor and put it on for your next flight or drive, or just an evening at home.

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

When my son Macklin was 5 years old, my wife and I enrolled him in one of those summer sports camps for tots. You know the kind: A child is introduced to tennis one week, soccer the next, baseball the week after that, and so on. But after swinging a tennis racket during his first week at the camp, Macklin told us he didn’t want to play soccer or baseball; he wanted to stay with tennis. Despite our intermittent efforts to persuade him to try another sport, he stuck to his guns. So, tennis it was for the rest of the summer.

Here we are, 11 years later, and Macklin is a 16-year-old junior tennis player with a singular goal: to play high-level Division I college tennis. In other words, the big time. He plays a tournament at least twice a month. In January, he left an excellent high school, Fordham Prep, for an online school that would allow him to train for four or five hours a day instead of four or five hours a week. He has given up hamburgers, desserts, and lots of other foods most teenagers love. He doesn’t date (no time). He works out with a personal trainer a few times a week. He spends long stretches of time away from home at serious tennis academies in Spain, Florida, and Maryland. I find myself in awe of his dedication.

Then again, as his parents, my wife and I have become pretty dedicated ourselves. We call ourselves Team Mack. I can’t bring myself to calculate how much we’ve spent on tennis, but it has to be upward of $50,000 a year. It can be a struggle. My wife, Dawn, who ran marathons for years—and is thus attuned to what an athlete needs—takes the lead on ensuring Mack is in the right physical shape to handle the rigors of tournament tennis, which for a junior player can sometimes mean four matches a day: two singles and two doubles. I scour the tournament schedule, looking for options that will challenge him and help improve his rating, a critical measure for college coaches. And I’m the one who travels with him most of the time.

Tom Farrey, who runs the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, told me recently that his program conducted research a few years ago showing that the average sports parent spends almost three and a half hours a day on their kid’s sports. A day! My first reaction was, That’s not us! But then I thought about it some more. After factoring in everything from washing Mack’s tennis clothes to getting his rackets re-strung to spending a weekend at one of his tournaments, I had to concede that Dawn and I probably do spend that much of our lives on his tennis.