It’s Monday, May 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large.

Today: “Great progress” in U.S.-China talks; the big Trump move that slipped under the radar; the pope’s first Sunday mass; is the India-Pakistan ceasefire built to last?; and the red flags the government ignored as it handed billions to environmental NGOs. All that and more coming up.

But first: A $400 million Qatari gift—and the Trump family business.

As journalists, we’re used to the idea that a scandal is something you uncover with months of painstaking work. Its exposure is supposed to be the satisfying payoff for a reporters’ late nights trawling documents, haranguing sources, and connecting the dots.

But hardly any digging was required to unearth the latest scandal in Washington.

We are referring to reports over the weekend that Donald Trump is set to accept a decked-out jumbo jet worth an estimated $400 million as a gift from Qatar. According to the agreement, it will serve as Air Force One and then be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation at the end of Trump’s term. If these reports are true, the acceptance of the gift will be the latest and most egregious example of a worrying trend in the second Trump administration. That’s the subject of our latest editorial; read it below.

—The Editors

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that the U.S. made “substantial progress” in trade talks with China over the weekend, promising more details on Monday. China’s state-run Xinhua New Agency said the two countries had agreed to an “economic and trade consultation mechanism” and that they would release a joint statement today.

• Leo XIV presided over his inaugural Mass as pope on Friday, vowing to stand with “ordinary people.” In a speech to cardinals on Saturday, he described developments in artificial intelligence as “challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.” And in a mass in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, he called for peace in Ukraine and Gaza. Read Matthew Walther in The Free Press on “The American Pope.”

• Edan Alexander, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen born in Tel Aviv and raised in New Jersey, is reportedly being released by Hamas after more than a year and seven months in captivity. Alexander was serving in the Israel Defense Forces when he was taken hostage on October 7, 2023. His release is part of “the steps being taken to achieve a ceasefire, open the crossings, and allow aid,” Khalil al-Hayya, head of Hamas’s negotiating team, said in a statement Sunday.

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has expressed willingness to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin in Istanbul on Thursday to discuss ending the war, following Trump’s call for Ukraine to accept Putin’s offer of direct talks.

• The U.S. and Iran wrapped up over three hours of talks in Oman on Sunday—the fourth round of negotiations since April 12. Tehran described the discussions as “difficult but useful” and agreed to keep talking. The U.S. said it was “encouraged” by the latest meeting.

• Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Tufts student held by ICE, was released after six weeks in a Louisiana immigration detention center. A federal judge in Vermont granted her bail, criticizing the government for offering nothing more than an anti-Israel op-ed penned by Öztürk as evidence in the case. Read The Free Press’s March editorial on the case: “No Deportations Without Due Process.”

• White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Friday the Trump administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus to address illegal immigration—a move that would mark a dramatic escalation of immigration policy. Miller argued the Constitution allows the move during times of “invasion.”

• On Sunday, nearly 80 flights were canceled and more than 60 were delayed in Newark’s most recent telecommunication failure. The culprit: a glitch at a Philadelphia-based control facility responsible for Newark’s airspace—the third disruption in just over two weeks. On Friday, Newark suffered a radar blackout. Before that, a major outage on April 28 grounded flights and left air traffic controllers so shaken that several took medical leave.

It feels like a lifetime ago when the Republican Party was in high dudgeon over President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. He had reportedly monetized his family name to drum up business in China and Ukraine, and for his own paintings. For a hot minute, many in the GOP wanted to impeach the 46th president over the whole affair. When the president pardoned his son Hunter in December, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that it was “an abuse and miscarriage of justice.”

The Hunter Biden affair really was a scandal. But these days, it seems like small potatoes.

Look no further than the latest “gift” from the Qatari government, which Trump is reportedly set to accept this week: a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet. This “palace in the sky,” offered to the president by the country that hosts the Muslim Brotherhood, will first be used as Air Force One. Then it will transfer to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation for ownership, according to the proposed arrangement. In other words: It will be a personal gift to the president worth $400 million.

The recent exchange of fire between India and Pakistan following an Islamist massacre of Indian tourists in the disputed territory of Kashmir has had the world holding its breath. And for very good reason: The countries have been rivals since they both became independent in 1947. And both possess nuclear weapons.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced his administration had negotiated a “FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE.” But the truce remains fragile, with both India and Pakistan reporting drone attacks by the other in Kashmir. The two countries have pulled back from the brink of all-out war, although there’s no way of knowing when or if the conflict could resume.

This is a subject that feels far away but is critically important given that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons and a long history of conflict. So we decided to call two people who know the region and its dangers quite well. Matthew Rosenberg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who spent nearly a decade as a foreign correspondent in South Asia. Rupa Subramanya is originally from India and spent a decade in the country writing about it for various international publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy, and she’s currently a writer for The Free Press based in Ottawa. Together, they’ll dig in to how we arrived here and what’s next in this fast-moving story.

On what just happened:

Three weeks ago, Donald Trump struck another blow to the civil-rights regime. It was easy to miss, given he did so through an executive order aimed at a legal concept. But the president has taken another step toward uprooting the second constitution that has been in place since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Trump’s Executive Order 14281, aimed at “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” targets the judicial doctrine of “disparate impact,” which has stood since the 1970s.

You may not know the ins and outs of disparate impact, but you’ve surely seen its effects. Under disparate impact, a business owner can be found guilty of discrimination even if he did not intend to discriminate. An aptitude test that winds up narrowing the pool of eligible black candidates, height requirements that exclude women from a police force, a job application that asks about criminal records—any hiring process that produces a lower-than-random number of protected minorities is suspect. Such actions and institutions might carry no ill intent, but they can put an employer on the wrong side of civil-rights law.

Documents obtained by The Free Press from the Environmental Protection Agency reveal that, despite handing out $20 billion in grants to eight nonprofits just before President Donald Trump took office, the federal employees who reviewed grant applications had concerns about high salaries, conflicts of interest, and oversight of taxpayer money.

An earlier investigation by The Free Press into the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund award found that billions of dollars were rushed to eight nonprofit organizations after the November election. All eight had ties to either the Biden administration, prominent Democratic donors, or to one another via board positions. Some of the nonprofit groups, like the Climate United fund, which was set to receive $6.9 billion, and Justice Climate Fund, which was granted $940 million, were formed as coalitions of smaller organizations specifically to make a grab for the cash.

Shortly after taking office, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin—who, in a post on X, wrote that he had “zero tolerance for any waste and abuse” of taxpayer funds—called for a Department of Justice investigation and had the money, most of which resided in 129 Citibank accounts, frozen.

One of the reasons I think it’s so hard to write about parenting is that every cliché is true. Your heart lives outside of your body; you get to relive your childhood; you have no time for yourself; you always smell slightly of vomit, at least at first. And the minute you meet this tiny person, a desperate race against the clock begins: to make the world better before your kids launch into it without you.

What more is there to say?

As our brilliant contributors have shown us: a lot.

This Mother’s Day, we’re bringing you seven essays, old and new, about mothers and motherhood. Among them: Raina Raskin on realizing you don’t have to be special to be a mom; Liz Wolfe on realizing you don’t need to have your life “sorted,” either; Madeleine Kearns on the Americans trying to boost the birth rate; and Coleman Hughes on losing his mom at a young age. We start with a new essay by mother-to-be Keturah Hickman about her decision to raise children simply, away from the city and the trappings of modernity.

“I want to impart the traditions I grew up with to my child,” she writes. “To love the world, too, not for licentious pleasures but rather because it is a gift.”

Sometimes it seems we live in a culture that undervalues both children and the people who raise them. (I felt this acutely last weekend as I changed our 9-month-old on the tile floor of a restaurant without a changing table.) But I’m proud to say that, at The Free Press, we are doing our bit to solve the fertility crisis. My colleagues have birthed 10 babies since the company was born (two of those babies are my roommates). Right now, two reporters named Madeleine are pregnant.

So: Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms at The Free Press, especially my wife, and to all of you, too. —BW

Parenting today is a mess of judgment, guilt, and TikTok advice. Thankfully, economist and best-selling author Emily Oster is here to cut through the noise. In The Free Press’s series Raising Parents, she tackles the hardest parenting questions—from what to do about phones to how strict or soft you should be—with straight talk, smart data, and interviews with 50+ top experts. If you want help raising good kids—and staying sane doing it—listen to the first episode below, and follow Raising Parents wherever you get your podcasts:

Welcome to “Things Worth Remembering,” in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. Today, to mark Mother’s Day, Hadley Freeman reflects on the late, great Nora Ephron, who wrote an essay that perfectly captures how hard, yet hilarious, having kids can be.

When I was asked to write an article for Mother’s Day I thought, Sure. I thought, How hard can that be? I thought, I have three kids under 10, which absolutely makes me a mother. Even if all of my kids have informed me at various points that I’m the worst mother in the world because I wouldn’t let one of them eat a piece of old chewing gum he found on the bus; or I declined the 5-year-old’s request to have her own smartphone; or I forgot to buy an emperor costume for Roman Day at school, which all good mothers know is the most important holiday of the year.

Well, at the risk of pulling the curtain back on the magic-making here, I have been trying to write this article for three hours and failing, and here is an incomplete list of reasons why:

1. An email arrived informing me that two of my children will go on a field trip tomorrow and therefore need a packed lunch, necessitating a run out to Pret A Manger to spend about $37.19 on sandwiches and dried mango that the children will definitely not eat;

1. An argument erupted in the school parents’ WhatsApp about children and screen time, and let me tell you, those parents could teach Sun Tzu a thing or two about the art of war;

1. Another email arrived reminding me I had to buy a costume for Viking Day at the 5-year-old’s school, which even bad mothers know is the second most important holiday of the year.

Like a fish can’t describe water, parents can’t really describe parenting, mainly because they don’t have the time. And it’s very difficult for mothers who have got through the brunt of the experience to describe it in retrospect, because—like childbirth—they’ll have blocked a lot of it from their memory. Which is why I love the essay “Parenting in Three Stages,” by the late, great Nora Ephron, from her 2006 collection, I Feel Bad About My Neck.

Ephron wrote about parenting exactly the way she wrote about heartbreak, aging, friendship, and food: hilariously, wisely, originally, and honestly. Ephron’s sons were adults by the time this was published, but she remembers in teeth-clenching detail what it’s like to deal with, first, small children, who you’re constantly terrified of breaking, physically or emotionally, and then large adolescents who suddenly hate you for no obvious reason.

“Adolescence comes as a gigantic shock to the modern parent, in large part because it seems so much like the adolescence you yourself went through,” she writes:

Your adolescent is embarrassed by you and walks 10 steps ahead of you so that no one thinks you are remotely acquainted with each other. Your adolescent is ungrateful. You have a vague memory of having been accused by your parents of being ungrateful, but what did you have to be grateful for? Almost nothing. . .You’ve devoted years to making your children feel that you care about every single emotion they’ve ever felt. You’ve filled every waking second of their lives with cultural activities. The words “I’m bored” have never crossed their lips, because they haven’t had time to be bored. Your children have everything you could give—everything and more, if you count the sneakers. You love them wildly, way more than your parents loved you. And yet they seem to have turned out exactly the way adolescents have always turned out. Only worse. How did this happen? What did you do wrong?

Just as Ephron knew that no amount of expensive face cream can head off the aging process (not that it stopped her from buying lots of expensive face creams, a paradox she wrote about often), no amount of parenting can prevent your child from becoming a teenager.

This essay captures two more truths that I think have been forgotten in a lot of more recent writing about parenting: First, kids are changing all the time. And second, parenting is worth it.

When did people stop understanding that kids are not adults, and therefore subject to change on a daily basis? I noticed it during the rise of the gender debate, when parents were suddenly writing articles saying—and I swear I’m not even making this example up—that they always knew their daughter should have been a boy, because she told them she was a boy when she was “almost 2.” Let’s not get distracted with that craziness. The point is, whatever lunacy your child comes out with, whether they’re 2 or 12, don’t sweat it too much, because they’re programmed to try on things for size and then mutate, just as kids have always done. It’s hard not to catastrophize when your kid is wildly unhappy at age 14, as I was. But the worst thing you can do is affirm your child’s belief that they are uniquely, hopelessly doomed. Instead, reassure them—and yourself—that pretty much everything in childhood is a phase. Or just give them Ephron’s essay, which at least might make them laugh.

Secondly, parenting is worth it. I appreciate that a lot of parents fear coming across as smug, or making the child-free feel left out, but I think we’ve had enough of this tedious trend in which every article about parenting focuses on how stressful and horrible it is. Is it any wonder young women increasingly say they don’t want kids? By all means, don’t have kids when you’re young—I waited until pretty much the last chimes before midnight—but parenting is not miserable. Yes, it can be stressful, but the stress is often hilarious. Not even Larry David could write the kind of absurdist comedy scenes that parenting brings, such as when you’re debating with a 4-year-old about what color of plate is acceptable for his dinner.

Then one day, according to Ephron, you realize your children are delightful adults. It’s a miracle, all of it, in the truest sense of the word. Happy Roman or Viking or Mother’s Day.

“Things Worth Remembering” will be back in your inbox next Sunday. In case you missed it, last week Joseph Massey—who we’ve dubbed the unofficial poet laureate of Trump’s America—reflects on how, to be yourself, you need the help of someone else.

This week, I wrote about how I take Ozempic for the express purpose of being svelte, and a few hours later, WeightWatchers announced that it was filing for bankruptcy. You’re welcome. I’m happy to have lived to see the end of the program, which was like Alcoholics Anonymous for overweight people, in that there were weekly meetings to stay accountable, but with an inane points system that never seemed to deliver. Anyway, my piece about Ozempic is what we call in the business a talker: I’ve been interested in all of the comments about my decision, and what it means. It’s like free therapy. Please keep weighing in!

Here’s what else I’ve been chewing on, since, as you know, I don’t chew on much else:

There’s an entire genre in 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painting dedicated to “unequal lovers,” which shows gnarled older men holding sacks of gold, leering toward their young, pale maidens. It’s a tale as old as time: A cradle robber and a grave robber get together, and everyone else has something to say about it. We can never seem to decide: Who exactly is doing the exploiting? The older man clawing his way back in time via a partner who is half his age? Or the seductress who found a doddering old man to leverage for riches, or at least a designer bag?

Which brings us to the famous, and famously gruff, former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick and his much younger girlfriend, who has him wrapped around her manicured finger. Her name is Jordon Hudson, she’s a former cheerleader, and she is 24. Belichik is 73, which means he and his girlfriend are 49 years apart. He could be her dad, but he could also be her granddad.

In his new book—The Art of Winning, published Tuesday—Belichick calls Hudson his “creative muse”; on Instagram, she recently called him her “twin flame.” Observers of the relationship, which has existed for two years, have come up with a few more labels. He’s an old fool, and she’s a gold digger and also: controlling, a distraction, a runaway train, an amateur and a know-it-all.

Geez, can’t a girl get rich the old-fashioned way anymore?

The condemnation began late last month, when Tony Dokoupil interviewed Belichick on CBS Sunday Morning. Dokoupil later said Hudson was a “constant presence.” (To be fair, Hudson is Belichick’s de facto PR rep, and according to her email signature, the “chief operating officer of Belichick Productions”—a position she’s held since at least December.) When Dokoupil asked Belichick how he met his girlfriend, she was having none of it. “We’re not talking about this,” she shot back from her perch behind a desk, red lips pursed.

Belichick put out a statement after the segment aired saying Hudson was simply “doing her job.”

Since the Sunday Morning meltdown, it’s come out that Hudson tanked Belichick’s appearance on a documentary series called Hard Knocks, which would have shown Belichick coaching the University of North Carolina football team, by allegedly meddling in its production. She has also bought $8 million in Massachusetts real estate since she started dating him and appeared in a Dunkin’ Super Bowl commercial off his coattails. And this week, there are reports that she’s been banned from the UNC football team’s facilities. Most disturbing, and telling, of all is the fact that she keeps coaxing him into beach photo shoots—like one where he pretends to be a fisherman and she’s a mermaid, or another where the couple are “doing Billates.”

This is not the image of a man who is using his infinitely superior status, influence, and money to coerce his much younger girlfriend. But is this, in fact, a case of #HeToo? Well, not quite.

Belichick might be old, but he’s not senile. He chose to let Hudson into his life, and if he thought she was wrecking it, he could show her the door at any time. Clearly, she offers him something. Or probably, a constellation of somethings: sex, relevance, proximity to youth, companionship, a layer of protection in a media landscape he doesn’t quite understand (though she doesn’t seem to understand it either). So why, even as we’ve become less prudish about the idea of unorthodox pairings, have we become more judgmental of the people entering into them?

What’s upsetting here, I think, isn’t that Belichick was born before there was color TV or that his girlfriend can’t yet rent a car without a surcharge. It’s that Belichick won six Super Bowls, but now seems feeble. It’s unclear how much control he has over the situation—and he’s Bill freaking Belichick; he ran a football team like the Navy SEALS. Meanwhile, Hudson couldn’t win Miss Maine USA (she got first runner-up) but is treating everyone around her like she’s the big boss. She’s confident, but shouldn’t be; he’s insecure but shouldn’t be. It’s off-putting and needles our own fears around whether we’ve been the victim or the villain in relationships.

Also: They don’t seem to be having any fun at all. Which, if you’re going to flout propriety, isn’t that the whole point? In one image from her Instagram, Hudson is eating dessert with Belichick: vanilla ice cream and strawberries arranged in the shape of a lobster. Belichick is off on the other side of the expansive kitchen island, hunched in his tattered sweatshirt and an Oura Ring: the picture of NFL retirement. She probably hoped to project the idea that love knows no bounds, or age. Instead, the picture screams, “Bill! Don’t forget to take your heart pills.”

Or worse: “Honey, the wire transfer still hasn’t come through!”

When I saw that Shia LaBeouf is playing a supporting role in a boxing movie that takes place in Wales, I hurried to the theater. It’s called Salvable, about an aging English boxer named Sal, but it was not, in the end, salvable.

I love the city of Boston, and I love underdogs, so naturally I also love movies about boxing, not least because they all seem to feature the same reliable cast of characters. There’s the fighter who showed promise early on, but wasted his potential. He’s stubborn but with a tender side. These things usually take place in Southie, and the boxer has a “daw-tah” whom he loves, even though he has screwed up with her, and her mother, and so doesn’t have custody anymore. There’s the gym owner, who trains the boxer, and who likes to do things the old-fashioned way. And then there’s the agent of chaos: a cousin, or a friend, who is funny but troubled, who comes back to town—he was away in the can, or recovering from some breakdown—and wants to get the fighter back in the game, big guy!

Salvable had all those elements, but never brought them together for anything but pain.

Sal, played by Toby Kebbell, is the frustrated athlete. He works at a care home and is tender with the elderly patients; those are the only moments we see him at ease in the whole movie. The scenes, and there are plenty of them, where he’s fighting with his daughter Molly, fighting with his ex, fighting with his girlfriend, or punching the bag in frustration at the gym, start out bleak and get bleaker. Then, his old buddy Vince, played by LeBeouf, comes into the picture and things go from bad to worse. Vince gets Sal involved in a street fight with a £15,000-purse—Sal refuses to finish the job, terrified he might kill his opponent—and eventually in more serious crimes. LaBeouf is convincing as the best friend turned bad influence, and delivers lines that cut through the slog of this movie, like: “We all want blood whether we want to admit it or not,” and “We don’t change. People like us don’t change, Sal. We used to run this fucking town.”

There’s a few more great boxing-movie moments—like in the street fight where the villain tells Vince: “Shut your little fucking cakehole. It’s hard to hear myself think over that fucking hairstyle.” But what’s missing is any real redemption. The climax of the film is a big boxing match in the center of town—“one last dance,” as the trainer calls it—but Sal never makes it there. Instead, he’s busy, you guessed it, screwing up and disappointing everyone around him. There is no montage where Sal gets strong again by getting up early, and jogging the steps of a museum, nor a moment of silence when someone gets knocked out, then the sounds of ringing, then the crowd erupts. The best part of boxing movies is when the fighter emerges, bloodied and battleworn, to win it all back. In Salvable, there’s only losing, and pulled punches. Verdict: Just rewatch “The Fighter.”

In 2013, Google tried to convince the world that, soon, we’d all be wearing Google Glass, a ridiculous headpiece that allowed you to take pictures and access the internet, which is what your smartphone already did. Then, in February 2024 Apple came out with its Apple Vision Pro, which offered slightly more interesting features, except you basically had to wear a Honda on your head to enjoy them. There were also wires coming out of it, which made the wearer look like they were on dialysis. Again, there was much hype around the product, but no one actually adopted it. Now, there’s another pair of ridiculously technical eye-gear that no one asked for, courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg. They are called Meta glasses, they’re made by Ray-Ban, and if you were paying attention at this week’s Met Gala, you would have seen a few pairs on the carpet, like on the model Amelia Gray, who paired hers with a red-lace Valentino ensemble.

The features of Meta’s AI specs, which Zuckerberg has been rocking on recent podcast appearances, include translation services, a chatbot you can ask questions to out loud, and livestreaming capabilities through cameras embedded in the glasses’ frames. We already see what’s happening at every moment in people’s lives; any closer and we’d be riding along on their colonoscopy. So why does Big Tech keep trying to make tech glasses a thing?

It’s reflective of a wish, born of sci-fi movies and spy thrillers, that we might be able to boost our own senses—sight, hearing—with computers. Think: looking at a piece of art and being able to read about its provenance on your personal screen, or getting your Ray-Ban Metas to whisper the name of a song that’s playing at a restaurant. But it’s been proven over and over: We don’t want to put technology directly on our eyeballs—unless it’s LASIK. Even though many of us have smartphones, and smart rings that track things like your daily exercise and REM sleep, smart glasses feel like a step too far. Not least because it turns everyone wearing them into a one-man surveillance state. The Meta glasses may soon include facial-recognition software, raising questions around users’ privacy—and that of anyone they’re looking at. Big Tech already owns our palms and our attention; and they’ve been vying for our faces for years. My wish for Silicon Valley: Get a new dream.

• On Monday, I watched pretty people ascend the steps of the Met Museum in clothes tailored within an inch of their life. I rated some of their outfits along with the very fashionable Elliot Ackerman, who had thoughts on brooches, sashes, and whatever the hell Al Sharpton had on.

• It’s rare that I like a Saturday Night Live sketch these days, but this one nailed the millennial mood. It’s a fake ad for a store called “Forever 31” for women who dress “in every color of the bummer rainbow” and are “probably bisexual, but it’s like a little too late.” It’s so on the nose, I wondered where I could get the turtleneck Quinta Brunson was wearing.

• Brock Colyar has never written a cover story that hasn’t ignited. The New York magazine writer’s latest, “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl,” had everyone in convulsions. It was about how Gen-Z girls are draining the once-queer enclave of its charm by turning it into a backdrop for their “best lives.” Cities change. If you can’t beat them, get a blowout and join them.

• In The New Yorker this week, photographer Gillian Laub released a series of notable New Yorkers lounging in their living rooms, showcasing their soft power. The subjects included Chloë Sevigny, Alex Soros and Huma Abedin, and Martin Scorsese. The photos are gorgeous, but overall, they make clear how far we’ve come since Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for getting an aerial picture of her Malibu mansion.

• Speaking of New York, Lena Dunham is done with it. She wrote about growing up in the big city but never quite fitting in, then decamping to London, which is much more her speed. In a few years, NY mag will do a cover story, “It Must Be Nice to Be a New Yorker in London,” and the cycle will continue, as Dunham decamps to the Balkans.

• Barry Diller penned a long essay about how, despite being married to Diane von Fürstenberg for 24 years, he is gay. In it, he maintains that he and DVF are passionate lovers. “I’ve lived for decades reading about Diane and me: about us being best friends rather than lovers. We weren’t just friends. We aren’t just friends.” I loved this essay, and I smell a bisexual male renaissance coming down the pike.

To get caught up on all you need to know in the culture, read Suzy Weiss’s previous column:

Zosha Lyons is not an impulsive person. But just over a year ago, in April 2024, the 25-year-old made an offer on a house just 20 minutes after seeing it for the first time—even though it was 2,000 miles away from the city where she’d planned to spend her twenties.

In college, Zosha’s goal had always been to move to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter, with her high school sweetheart, Whitaker, in tow. Instead, the young couple were buying a three-acre plot in Perry County, Indiana—the place where they both grew up.

“This sounds bad,” she told me sheepishly, “but we thought we were better than this. We wanted to move away and prove ourselves.”

Zosha had worked hard to get her MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, about 50 miles outside of Los Angeles, and she spent her final year strategizing about how to move to the city and break into the film industry. But when she graduated in the summer of 2023, Hollywood was in the middle of the writers strike, and Lyons realized: No matter how hard she tried, it might be impossible to find a job that allowed her to support herself, let alone one that fulfilled her.

“We would have been poor,” Zosha said. “It would have been me probably taking production-assistant jobs and trying to work from the bottom.”

She and Whitaker started having the kind of conversations couples might once have saved for their late 20s. “We want four kids, and I want to be done having kids by the time we’re 30,” Lyons said. “I’m doing all this math in my head constantly.” Faced with the choice between their work and family, they realized: “What was important to us was not really our careers.”

Then Zosha came across an offer she couldn’t refuse.

When we began The Free Press, back in the censorious early days of this decade, there were plenty of reasonable things people were simply forbidden from saying. Perhaps that was never truer than during Covid.

As we’ve learned more about the origins of the pandemic and about the harm caused by public health authorities who refused to allow dissent, plenty of people want to memory-hole that time—and the role they played in shutting down reasonable debate. But we can’t forget it.

That’s because—and allow me to be immodest for a moment—The Free Press put together an extraordinary group of expert contributors who broke with the going consensus. These people put their reputations and their careers on the line to ask questions that needed to be asked.

Now they are getting a chance to put their ideas into practice.

This week, the Food and Drug Administration announced that Dr. Vinay Prasad is going to head up its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. That means Prasad, a Free Press contributor, will be in charge of (among other things) overseeing America’s vaccines. (Here’s where you can find his work for us, including his op-ed on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)

Prasad’s boss is another Free Press contributor, FDA chief Dr. Marty Makary, one of our first writers. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a recent Honestly guest and the new head of the National Institutes of Health, has likewise been published several times in these pages. And the nominee for surgeon general of the United States is Dr. Casey Means, whose essay for us, “I’m a Doctor. You Shouldn’t Always Trust Us,” was one of the most-read pieces we published last year. (You can also listen to her on Honestly discussing the obesity crisis.)

We’re going to continue covering this administration without fear or favor. (ICYMI: Please read Gabe Kaminsky’s story from this week on how MAGA lobbyists are getting rich in the still-undrained swamp.) In Trump World, the smart money is on the bet that these scientists and doctors will be stymied. But in a Washington full of charlatans and hucksters, they are a rare breed: serious people.

Now let’s get to some of my favorite Free Press stories from this week.