For today’s installment of “Falling Back in Love with America,” Andy Hickman is handing the mic over to his wife, Keturah, who takes us on a tour though rural Missouri, where she grew up.

For her whole life Keturah has been, to borrow a phrase from Andy, an “internal exile” in this country. Her family moved around a lot. Keturah is the eldest of 12 siblings, and her family is religious and loyal to tradition; as such, she was born at home and doesn’t have a Social Security number. Still today, by and large, she rejects the trappings of modernity—things like makeup, jeans, a smartphone, and shoes, if she can help it—in favor of the old ways. When I met her in Montana, she was tatting lace with threads and a shuttle. Probably more than anyone I’ve ever met, Keturah embodies the contradictions, the domestic traditions, and the earthiness that I see as being both completely American and in desperately short supply today.

Keturah, now heavily pregnant, and Andy are installed in their home in the Adirondacks, but in this essay she takes us back to the early months of her pregnancy, when she was just imagining how her new life as a mother would look, and reflecting on her own history, back in the northern edge of the Ozarks. It’s a meditation on growing up, and transitioning from maiden to mother—and on the virtues of living a simple life. —Suzy Weiss

Andy and I stood in a snowy holler where the ghosts from my childhood roamed. As I looked over the land where my favorite home had been, I felt the first flutterings of our own child move inside my womb. For six months we’d been traveling the United States, in an effort to see if we could fall back in love with our country. Andy and I had each grown disillusioned with it over the years for our own reasons, but I’d never stopped loving this holler near Bland, Missouri.

We had just put an offer on a cheap house we found on Zillow, sight unseen, in the Adirondacks. The bank was waiting on our down payment, but before finalizing the sale, we went on a tour of my childhood homes in rural Missouri.

In order to love an American, one must know the rivers and forests that produced them.

We’d just been in a small hamlet called Freedom, to see the little red house where I was born. Our own child, too, would be birthed at home, in the house we hoped to buy. I was born and bred in the old ways, and our children would be, too. Showing Andy these parts of my life was a way of proving to him I wasn’t making it up as we went, being traditional wasn’t a trend for me.

Our children, taking after me, will be fifth-generation undocumented—Americans with no birth certificate or Social Security number. They will be homeschooled and taught the art of hospitality to strangers and friends alike, as I was, in Bland.

Welcome to TGIF, a news summary from a very unreliable narrator.

→ Pope Bob: A billow of white smoke, and we have a new pope! And he is an American! His name is Robert Prevost—now Pope Leo XIV—and he was born in Chicago before serving as a bishop in Peru. The Vatican chose an American to avoid tariffs, I presume. Prevost was known to be close to Pope Francis and seems likely to carry forth many of his philosophies and efforts, though it’s too soon to tell. His Twitter/X feed features church news updates, and also a scattering of political statements over the years in support of anti-racist activism and immigration. Also, this:

I feel like if you’re about to become pope and you have recently negged one particular Catholic, just delete it. Like, if the voice of G-d on Earth posted specifically, “Nellie Bowles is wrong,” I would struggle with that. Many, many people post that. But not specifically the voice of G-d. Or, not yet.

Jokes aside: Congratulations to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. TGIF will follow along for any new pope antics, but I promise it’s not blasphemy, it’s just fun.

→ This is how the Trump economy works: Let’s say you run Freight Technologies, Inc., a cross-border shipping logistics company. Heavy new tariffs seem like a risk to your business, right? Maybe not! All it takes is this one weird trick called Buying Trump’s Crypto Token, which is a scam “currency.” As the chief executive officer of Freight Technologies, Inc. put it in a recent press release: “We believe that the addition of the Official Trump tokens are an excellent way to diversify our crypto treasury, and also an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced, and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.” Buying $TRUMP tokens—$TRUMP is the official name of the corruption coin, not some mockery I’ve made up here—is how you advocate for yourself these days. Want to keep doing business in Indonesia? Buy some $TRUMP first, you globalist piggy. Pulled over for speeding? Go to CoinBase.com, get yourself a $TRUMP card, and we’ll see about the points on your license. Skip the IRS bill, and instead pay taxes directly in $TRUMP. It’s that easy! There was a song popular in my youth called “Gangsta’s Paradise,” and it’s been stuck in my head for weeks. Soon our only currency will be baseball cards with Eric and Don Jr.’s faces on them, and I’ll be the poor sucker with nothing but Tiffany’s.

On March 2, 1848, Lewis Charles Levin, an irascible Pennsylvania congressman, took to the floor of the House of Representatives to warn his colleagues of an encroaching menace: the papacy. With a flair that would not have disgraced the pulpit of a frontier revivalist, he denounced “the paid agents of the Jesuits” and shuddered theatrically at the news that Pope Pius IX—then newly elected and, disconcertingly, liberal—had won the admiration of European reformers.

The pope, Levin feared, was a kind of robed Napoleon, plotting to conquer America with candles and holy water. “Has he cast off his claims to infallibility?” he thundered. “Has he flung aside his triple crown? Has he become a republican? Does he acknowledge the inherent equality of mankind?”

But Levin remained hopeful. “The Papal flag,” Levin boasted, “has never been known to wave in an American port. No American vessel has received the visit of a Pope.”

It is amusing to speculate about what Levin and his successors, from the antebellum Know-Nothing Party and Thomas Nast to Bob Jones Sr. and the Ku Klux Klan, would have made of the election of Robert Cardinal Prevost as Pope Leo XIV.

It’s Thursday, May 8, 2025. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: How will Pakistan respond to the strikes from India? Why is former president Biden suddenly on a press tour? And is the main side effect of weight-loss drugs. . . happiness? All that and more coming up.

But first: Chicago police officers are killing themselves at an alarming rate. We wanted to know why.

Here’s our Olivia Reingold with the story behind her investigation:

I’m always looking for an excuse to report a story in Chicago, grim as the news there often is. It’s the home of my longtime boyfriend, so I often find myself typing phrases like Chicago lawsuit or Chicago protest into search bars, to see what’s brewing in the Windy City.

That’s how I stumbled across local TV coverage about Malissa Torres, a 34-year-old police officer who killed herself inside her station bathroom on April 10, 2025. The more I read, the more I realized she was far from alone.

When I started picking up the phone, my go-to Chicago sources told me off the record that the police department’s suicide problem was “staggering.”

“It’s got to have been dozens of suicides at this point,” one said.

So I went digging. The best public estimates were mysteriously vague—“two dozen” or “more than 30” since 2018. I submitted four public records requests: two to the Chicago Police Department, one to the police pension board, and one to the Office of Emergency Management & Communications. Two were denied (I’m still fighting those).

But then the pension board called me back. Out of 187 police deaths on their books over the past decade, 39 had been ruled suicides. “That’s about one out of every five deaths,” the caller pointed out.

Their list ended in 2024, so I added four more cases I had tracked through a spreadsheet I built. That brought the toll to 43.

Then it got worse.

A few days later, I opened an unexpected email from Chicago Public Safety. Inside were the names, badge numbers, ranks, and duty statuses of every officer who had died. And in black and white, the toll was even higher than anyone had admitted: Over the past decade, 53 officers had died by suicide.

This is the story of how a mental-health crisis quietly took root inside the Chicago Police Department—and how it exploded in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens to officers when city officials turn against their own police force. More than that, though, it’s a story about how bad ideas embraced by political elites wind up hurting the everyday people they were supposed to help.

—Olivia Reingold

He helped Michael Jordan win—and he can help you too. George Raveling was born in segregated Washington, D.C. His father died when he was young, and his mother was subsequently sent to a mental institution. So how did he become one of the most revered basketball coaches of all time? He joins Bari on Honestly to discuss the most powerful lessons of his life, which he’s collected in a new book, What You’re Made For. Listen to it here.

• India launched strikes on both Pakistan and in Pakistani Kashmir, to “avenge” the April 22 attack when gunmen killed 26 civilians, mostly tourists, in the Indian-controlled part of the region last month. Pakistan’s prime minister described the attack as an “act of war” and pledged to retaliate—a major escalation between the two countries. For more, check out this Washington Post explainer on how India and Pakistan wound up on the brink of war.

• For the second time in eight days, an F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet—worth more than $60 million—fell overboard the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, and is now lost in the Red Sea. Both pilots were safely recovered. The carrier group has been stationed in the Middle East to support strikes on Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen.

• Vice President J.D. Vance indicated that the Trump administration’s patience with Russian president Vladimir Putin is wearing thin as the White House tries to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine. “What I would say is, right now, the Russians are asking for a certain set of requirements, a certain set of concessions in order to end the conflict,” Vance said at a Munich Security Conference event in Washington, D.C. “We think they’re asking for too much.”

• The papal conclave is officially underway. The Catholic Church’s cardinal electors are now sequestered in the Sistine Chapel until they choose a new pope. One cleric told Politico that some cardinals watched the Oscar-winning film Conclave “in the cinema” to prepare for worst-case scenarios. The first unsuccessful vote happened yesterday, and black smoke billowed from the chimney, meaning they failed to reach a two-thirds agreement.

• President Trump nominated Dr. Casey Means, a Stanford-trained physician and Free Press contributor, as his pick for surgeon general, noting her “impeccable ‘MAHA’ credentials.” The news comes a day after the FDA named Free Press contributor Dr. Vinay Prasad as the next head of its Center for Biologics and Research. Listen to Casey’s Honestly episode, “Eating Ourselves to Death,” and read her Free Press article, “I’m a Doctor. You Shouldn’t Always Trust Us.”

• The Golden Globes are adding a Best Podcast category in 2026, a formal acknowledgment of the format’s cultural takeover and legitimacy as a creative medium.

• Data shows that more than half the top holders of Trump’s meme coin—who are competing for dinner with the president—used foreign exchanges that ban U.S. users, suggesting many purchasers are likely not based in the U.S.

• Rep. Don Bacon, a centrist Republican from Nebraska and frequent Trump critic, is warning that cuts to Medicaid to fund Trump’s new tax plan could cost the GOP its majority. His vote may prove pivotal.

• Bernie Sanders and eight Senate Democrats are urging Paramount not to settle Trump’s lawsuit against CBS over a minor edit to a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. In a letter to Paramount owner Shari Redstone, they called on the company to stand firm.

• Following raids in Britain over the weekend, seven Iranian nationals were arrested, mere hours before a suspected terror plot on the Israeli embassy was due to take place. One of the Iranian nationals arrested is reportedly “very well connected” to the Iranian regime, with close ties and major businesses in the Islamic republic.

• Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the future is AI friends, an AI therapist, and AI business agents (inching dangerously close to AI family). In an interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, the Meta CEO said, “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends.”

• Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller has come out as gay ahead of his new memoir Who Knew. “While there have been many good men in my life,” he wrote in New York magazine, “there has only ever been one woman,” referring to his “unique and complete love” with wife Diane von Furstenberg.

I want to tell you the story of a kid, born in 1937 into segregated Washington, D.C. He’s 9 when his father dies and 13 when his mother has a mental breakdown, disappears, and is institutionalized.

He’s effectively orphaned. This is how George Raveling’s story begins.

Despite being dealt one of the worst hands imaginable, George, now 87, went on to become the most revered basketball coach in the world.

He played against Jerry West, the man on the NBA logo. He became only the second black basketball player for Villanova University. And he was the first black coach at several American universities.

He’d go on to coach and mentor players like Michael Jordan. And chances are, you probably would’ve never worn—or even heard of—Air Jordan sneakers if it wasn’t for George.

Yet, in all his decades of coaching, the words Head Coach never appeared on his door. Instead, it always read: “George Raveling, Educator.”

George has had a bit of a Forrest Gump life, somehow showing up at the most important events in twentieth-century American history. He stood next to Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington. He met presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Harry S. Truman. And he traveled the world promoting basketball as an international sport.

This is a man who made his own breaks, continues to break glass ceilings, and embodies the American dream.

Today on Honestly, Bari Weiss sits down with George to discuss his extraordinary life and his new book, What You’re Made For: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports, which he wrote alongside Ryan Holiday.

You can listen to this episode below, and subscribe to Honestly wherever you get your podcasts:

Joe Biden is back, or at least out of the house, with a new interview that was the first from the 82-year-old former president since he left the White House. Strangely, given that Biden was an American president, it was on the BBC.

On mute, it looked like a normal interview with a former president. Turn the sound on and what you heard was a bizarre, unfortunate showcase of Biden’s age and precipitously declining cognitive abilities.

Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites. It’s not just tolerated—it’s venerated.

Mississippi is probably the top target. I don’t have to tell you why. You know about the poor health outcomes. The poverty. The corruption. The obesity. The Confederacy stuff.

Wikipedia has an entry dedicated to the phrase “Thank God for Mississippi,” because its horrible performance on so many metrics saves other states the embarrassment of finishing last. The term has been used since at least 1945.

This has made it awkward in recent years, as Mississippi has become the fastest-improving school system in the country.

You read that right. Mississippi is taking names.

Late last year I sat down to breakfast in Ottawa, Ontario, with Dr. Einat Wilf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She had come to Canada’s capital to speak about the war in Israel, what Palestinians really want, and the future of a possible two-state solution. Near the end of our chat, I asked if she had seen any of the “pro-Palestinian” rallies that had become a weekly occurrence in the city. “One of them went by my hotel last night,” Wilf said. “There’s a very dark energy to them. Serious pre-pogrom vibes.”

The word pogrom is the Yiddish word for “devastation” or “destruction.” What it refers to, historically, are the mob attacks that were a regular feature of life for Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries—attacks that most often were passively or openly supported by the state.

Wilf chose it deliberately.

In the roughly six months since we sat down together, the situation in Ottawa and across the country has only worsened. Canada has become one of the most antisemitic countries in the Western world.

If you doubt that assertion, it’s important to note that’s how others have described it, too.

People often ask me whether I have side effects from taking Wegovy and I tell them yes, and that they are no joke: If you’re thinking of taking a weight-loss drug, you need to be prepared. Whoever I’m chatting to will stare expectantly, curious about the dark side of the Faustian bargain I—and over 8 million other Americans—have agreed to.

“The side effects are different for everyone, but for me,” I say, “I’m prettier, happier, more confident, my clothes look better, and more men take notice of me.”

I was never obese, or approaching it. I didn’t have diabetes, or prediabetes. A healthy weight range for someone of my height—which is 5'2″—is between 104 and 131 pounds. Sometime about a year ago, I’d simply edged into the upper part of that range. Then I saw an ad on the subway for a telehealth service that provides the drugs. I signed up on my phone, right on the train, clicking through the prompts about whether I was allergic to any medication, or if I was breastfeeding, blah blah blah, and then a week or so later a small package arrived with some lancets so I could draw a blood sample, which I did, sending it back to the company sealed in cardboard box. A few weeks later, I was popping the top off a pre-filled pen containing, among other chemicals, semaglutide, which would curb my appetite and make me feel full for longer when I did eat.

As I pressed it to my stomach—I hate needles—and heard and felt a click, I thought, What the hell am I doing? and This is absolutely insane. Flipped out, I went to sleep with panicked thoughts about fast-growing stomach cancers and allergic reactions racing through my mind. Then, I woke up without any appetite. In the two weeks that followed, I lost those stubborn eight pounds. While it happened, I didn’t feel jittery or on edge, or weak and starved. I felt like myself, just shrinking.