The Free Press

Three years ago, sifting through boxes, I discovered a note that Walter Cronkite had sent me in 2002, thanking me for what had been a couple of very enjoyable lunches at his favorite Italian place and his club. He’d start each with a Maker’s Mark on the rocks, and me a Stoli martini with a twist, followed by pasta at the former, and Dover sole at the latter.

I had been researching a story about how to age gracefully for GQ magazine, and I figured he was the obvious person to interview. He was 86, and other than a bum knee that kept him from playing tennis, he’d seemed pretty much on top of the world.

“Dear Peter,” the note began. “An incredibly late acknowledgment of your exceedingly kind remarks in the excellent GQ piece. . . . Betsy and I are off to the Baltic and Russia next week with the return promised for mid-July. I hope to see you for another of our lunches shortly after that. Meanwhile, a pleasant summer to you, and please cling to the faith. Walter.”

“The faith,” if you’re wondering, was in nothing particularly noble. We were both passionate fans of the New York Giants. We’d quickly bonded upon discovering that neither of us ever watched a game with anyone else because, as he intoned in his Walter voice, “It’s way too personal an experience.”

Why hadn’t I framed his letter back then? Had I been so jaded that I somehow lumped it into a box with all the various remnants I’d gathered from the many, many stories I’d written over the years about celebrities? For the better part of a quarter of a century, that’s mostly how I made my living: writing about people who were way more famous than you and me. The legion of bold-faced names I hung with had way more money than I would ever have; they had personal assistants always at the ready; and they had (of course) their fame. But looking back, despite my excitement at getting the assignments, with the exception of Walter, a truly great man, I never wanted to be any of them.

It’s Friday, August 28. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Coleman Hughes sits down with Nathan Cofnas. Maya Sulkin interviews the sports columnist who refused to toe the party line on trans athletes. Noah Bernstein reports on the GOP’s plans to stop Abdul El-Sayed. And much more.

But first: The right way to fight vaccine skepticism.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health announced this week that two people in Lancaster County—home to America’s largest Amish community—had died of measles, and that both were unvaccinated. The news drew a familiar cadence of outcries along party lines—first, on the left that public health officials should shout louder about the lifesaving effects of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot, then on the right that no vaccine mandate should interfere with empowering parents to make the right choices for their children.

The challenge we face, writes Vinay Prasad, who served as the FDA’s vaccine chief until earlier this year, is that “the heavy-handed role of governments and public health during the Covid-19 pandemic” backfired, and we now live in an era of “fractured trust.” In his column for The Free Press today, he sorts fact from fiction about the Pennsylvania cases and argues that hand-wringing and coercive mechanisms will inevitably fail. “The thesis that rising measles cases are the fault of the current administration doesn’t fit the facts,” writes Vinay.

—The Editors

There’s a Dolly-shaped hole in everyone’s hearts following the passing of music legend Dolly Parton, who died this week at 80. Why, exactly, did America love Parton so? It wasn’t just her voice, her music, or her philanthropy, argues Hannah Long. Parton understood her own hypnotic power over people, and she knew how to use it for good.

And don’t miss Caitlin Flanagan’s ode to Parton, who lived the American dream in between the contradictions of her Southern roots and the Wild West of showbiz—and who united America like no other modern celebrity.

As summer fades and students settle back into campus this week, the state of academia is looking grimmer than usual. In an era where literacy is on the decline, and technology can do our thinking for us, University of Austin president Carlos Carvalho argues against the conventional wisdom of a world starved of meaning. Don’t try to “find yourself” in college, he urges. “Forget yourself and find something greater than you.”

The Free Press has a new survey series that takes you deeper than a typical poll. It’s called The Honesty Project, and it’s a series of opinion surveys that gauge respondents’ private opinions—the views they are too sensitive to share publicly.

Our latest survey asked about Americans’ faith in capitalism. The most surprising findings? Republicans are less confident in the system than they’ll publicly admit. Gen Z is privately much more ambivalent about socialism than they want their peers to know. And high earners are quietly warming up to voting for a socialist candidate—though they wouldn’t say it at the country club.

And don’t miss the biggest Free Press investigation of the week: Olivia Reingold on a new report on hunger in Gaza, which found some of the lowest rates of childhood malnutrition in the Middle East—and even noted that childhood obesity is on the rise in the territory. Read Olivia’s report on the data that should have been front-page news—but wasn’t.

Hello to the end of summer, and goodbye to the great Dolly Parton. All flags are at half-staff for America’s last sweetheart. Let’s get to all the other news.

→ Lake America: Our new foreign and trade policy is basically to rename things America, as punishment. That’s what Donald J. Trump is threatening to do to Canada if they don’t agree to our trade terms. You like your little Lake Ontario? You think that’s nice? Too bad!

The president announced on Truth Social: “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.” We punish other nations by calling their waters America. It’s like schoolyard bully colonialism. In late-breaking news, he went and did it:

I think we just bring back old-fashioned colonialism and take Canada, a failed state, and keep the name Ontario, or Muskoka, or whatever funny words they use up there as a courtesy. It’s not enough to call it America and overlay funny text when you can make it America. But Trump is too busy posting a ranking of past presidents with himself at the top as The Greatest.

Anyway, another reason to invade Canada: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has issued new guidelines for how to report on September 11th. Here’s from the internal memo:

“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks. The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Manhattan. The World Trade Center (WTC in second reference) was destroyed.” The memo was reportedly authored by Basem Boshra, senior director of journalistic standards and public trust at CBC News.

“The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes.” By next year it’ll be that it was just a total accident, a setback for passenger plane safety. After that, it’ll have never happened.

→ The two Dan Sullivans: In the Alaska Senate race, a curious contender has arrived to defeat the incumbent Republican Dan S. Sullivan. His name is Dan J. Sullivan, also a Republican. The mainstream media is pretending the whole thing is totally legit, just a funny, quirky thing. Well, to quote the excellent Election Law Blog: “When Dan J. filed his notice of candidacy, he claimed his name was ‘Dan S. Sullivan.’ ‘S.’ is not Dan J.’s middle initial, but the middle initial of the incumbent. No explanation is given as to this ‘error,’ and the trial court characterized this as an ’understandable concern’ that was ‘quickly corrected.’ ” So it looks like Dan J. initially tried to fake even having the same middle initial as the incumbent, seemingly with the intent to confuse voters. That obvious bit of trickery is rarely mentioned in the mainstream coverage, not on CNN or by the Associated Press, who like to pretend it’s just a curious coincidence of two well-meaning candidates with the same name. Cute and funny, not election fraud! You can’t throw a rock in Alaska without hitting a dozen Dan Sullivans these days! (To be fair, in 2014, there were also two different Dan Sullivans on the Alaska ballot, but in two different races.) Anyway, you have to trust these outlets when they tell you that our elections are completely secure, and produce results that represent the will of the people. Oh yeah, the fake Dan Sullivan has donated to Democrats in the last two election cycles, and he’s been working on this campaign with a Dem strategist.

The goal here seems to be to steal a few confused points away from the real Dan so that his challenger, the Democrat Mary Peltola, wins. I’ve got a wild idea: If Mary Peltola is good, then you don’t need to cheat! I’ve literally never met an interesting Dan Sullivan in my life, let alone two. I bet Mary can do it without fraud!

The rich have never been richer—and we normal people simply can’t look away.

From influencers posting about their vacations, to the cottage industries that pop up to help with everything from private school admissions to naming a yacht, there’s never been a better time to gawk at the decisions of the moneybags among us. At the dawn of the AI age, we’re l…

More than 75 years after the Korean War, its lessons endure—and divisions over isolationism and American power continue to shape the discourse around modern global conflicts. Dane J. Cash, historian and author of The Forgotten Debate: The Korean War and the Roots of America’s Ideological Divisions, joins School of War to explain how the left’s hawk-dove…

Can Abdul El-Sayed be beaten? The answer to that question might determine which party controls the Senate and reveal a winning strategy in the 2028 presidential battleground state.

As the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat sticks to his progressive populist platform and rides rising antiestablishment fervor, El-Sayed’s opponents still struggle to slow him down.

The public got another look at why when he joined Fox News host Jesse Watters for a lengthy interview on Monday. He dodged a question about transgender surgeries for minors, instead asking Watters if he is circumcised. He deflected another about sharia law, pointing out that no one dreads the spread of Catholic canon law. And when asked about his support for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), he answered that voters are more worried about the price of gas and groceries—a line he deployed deftly time and again.

With responses as sharp-tongued as these, it is easy to see how El-Sayed fought his party’s establishment on his way to a narrow victory in Michigan’s August 4 primary. Many of the state’s prominent Democrats, including Governor Gretchen Whitmer, threw their support behind El-Sayed’s opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, in the final days of the race. Outside money also flooded in, as AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spent upward of $30 million against his candidacy. But none of it was enough.

Two deaths this week in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County have reinvigorated the growing partisan debate about how best to promote measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination, as has President Donald Trump’s August 10 executive order recommending that the vaccine be divided into three separate shots, one for each disease. On the one hand, the mainstream media position appears to be that all leaders should shout louder that the MMR shot is lifesaving, the childhood immunization schedule is perfect and cannot be improved, and that we need more mandates and coercion to vaccinate, not less. On the other, you have conservative voices stressing the need for autonomy and empowering parents to make the right choice for their kid.

I have five thoughts on this matter:

First, I am concerned that public health officials in Pennsylvania selectively released one fact only about the two individuals who died—that they were unvaccinated. We don’t know their ages, whether they come from the Amish or Mennonite communities, how long they had measles without seeking medical care, the nature and quality of the medical care they received, or whether they had chronic medical problems. All of these are needed to properly understand the context. Some claimed these details were withheld for reasons of privacy—but if that is the case, then why was the vaccination status made public?

Nathan Cofnas has had a strange couple of years. He’s been mobbed by both the right and left, pushed out of a research job at the University of Cambridge, and suspended from his current position at Ghent University in Belgium, a suspension that was lifted shortly after this interview. Somewhat unexpectedly, he’s also become one of the more talked-about …

This week, “The Wall Street Journal” ran an op-ed written with the help of artificial intelligence. Its editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, defended the author’s work, calling the use of AI “a fact of modern life.” But when, if at all, does this cross a line?

Given our line of work here at “The Free Press,” this story caught our attention. That’s because it’s not only about a single essay at a major newspaper: AI is reshaping how people from all walks of life make decisions and do their work, introducing profound benefits and trade-offs—ones most of us never anticipated.

So, we decided to ask the people themselves—teachers and religious leaders, AI enthusiasts and skeptics—to tell us how they’re actually using the technology (or choosing not to) in their daily lives. Here’s what they had to say. —The Editors

I haven’t figured out how to use AI for work yet, and I know that makes me a dinosaur, but I just like what I do and how I do it. It’s fine. It works.

Matt Calkins spent 11 years as a sports columnist for The Seattle Times. Last week he resigned after the paper refused to publish a column with a pretty basic thesis: that supporting the separation of biological males and females doesn’t make you transphobic.

Calkins says the final column wasn’t a one-off, but the breaking point in a pattern of silencing…