The Free Press

Dear Abigail,

My husband and I have a 7-month-old daughter, and we’re thrilled. She is a joy in our lives. However, ever since I became pregnant, my husband has been increasingly showing signs of behavior that are typically associated with postpartum depressed mothers. Once a happy and thoughtful man, he has become self-absorbed, overly introspective, and constantly negative. His complaints are often that his needs and wants aren’t being met, and that he is unhappy. For example, he complained to me recently that “he is no one’s favorite anymore,” and he claims that all the focus in our household and amongst both sets of grandparents goes toward our daughter. I was bewildered and flummoxed. I thought, “Surely he’s not jealous of a baby?”

I have known him for eight years, and I never experienced him being overly needy or wielding “emotional swords” about what he believes I’m not giving him—this behavior began when the baby entered the picture. I make a point to thank him every day for ways that he has been helpful. I compliment him on what I think he does well. And I have also been clear that I am not going to lie to him or “validate” him for poor behavior. I have told him that I think his recent behavior is immature and selfish—and that I know the foundation of his character is strong, and that he is capable of growing in maturity.

I don’t believe I ask an excessive amount from him. I work full-time and earn a very strong salary in a career of which I’m proud. I handle almost all day care drop-offs and pickups. I wake our baby up in the morning, get her ready for school, and do bedtime. My parents regularly babysit so that my husband and I have some time off from childcare. I manage all the family’s finances and investments. I have provided a house for our family in a beautiful neighborhood in the state’s best public school district. We are so privileged and, frankly, lucky. I think to myself, “How can he be so negative?”

He’s no deadbeat. He also has a lucrative job. He walks the dog, cooks meals, and washes dishes while I care for the baby.

Overall, I find myself so confused. How can two people in the same household have such wildly different experiences? I feel so fulfilled and content post-baby. He feels pushed aside and overwhelmed. He seeks constant praise and gratitude, for what I feel is 25 percent of the load I carry for our family. For someone who seeks praise and thanks, he never offers praise or thanks to me. When I think about it in those terms, I feel so angry. It seems like, in his mind, it must be all about him. What about our family?

What is the path forward from here? How do I encourage him to move past the “me” mindset? How do I help him see the blessings in our life? The sun is SHINING, and he’s moving around with a rain cloud above his head.

—Rose, 33

Dear Rose,

Want to know the secret to a happy husband? Here is the advice my friend’s mom gives to each of her daughters. Wisdom so crystalline in its clarity, its transmission ought to be accompanied by ritual cleansing and animal sacrifice.

At no extra charge, I present: “The Three F’s.”

1. Feed him

2. Flatter him

3. You get the idea

That’s it. Maintaining a happy husband is typically that easy.

It’s Thursday, August 27. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Why Meta’s $18 billion social media settlement should be only the beginning. Was mass incarceration a myth? The woman behind the AI bot-turned-sorority star. And much more.

But first: Is America losing faith in capitalism?

As this year’s primary elections draw to a close, one question has loomed above all others: What is America’s ideal economic system? Over the past several weeks, members of the Democratic Socialists of America have scored victories from New York and Pennsylvania to Colorado and Florida, challenging the country’s long-standing faith in the capitalist system in a way rarely seen before.

But just how widespread are these sentiments? Is this socialist fervor reflective of a broader shift in Americans’ economic views—or something more limited to the fringe left?

That’s the big question we posed in the latest edition of The Honesty Project, our partnership with Populace, an opinion-research think tank that designs surveys to capture respondents’ “private” opinions—the views they may consider too sensitive to share publicly.

Today’s results suggest that while most Americans remain wary of full-blown socialism (with some notable exceptions), just one in three Americans have a positive view of capitalism.

That’s a striking finding in a country whose economic system has long been rooted in free enterprise—and it’s just the beginning of what the poll reveals. Today, Mene Ukueberuwa dives into these findings, and reports on where Americans are on one of the most consequential issues in politics.

—The Editors

• Flash floods hit the border regions of Nepal and China on Wednesday, killing at least 160 people. Authorities are still searching for over 660 missing people, 47 of whom are U.S. citizens.

• On Wednesday, a federal judge cleared the way for the U.S. Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting in future elections. The decision, coming just months before the midterm elections, vindicates the Trump administration’s efforts, which had previously been blocked by a court order.

• New reporting from CBS News shows that CIA director John Ratcliffe met with Russian intelligence during his visit to Moscow on Tuesday. The meeting comes at a tense moment in the region, as Russia’s war with Ukraine rages on.

• The Treasury Office released a new list of NGOs designated as left-wing terrorist organizations. Two of the groups have worked with Calla Walsh, the Cambridge-raised progressive activist who has since become a propagandist for the Iranian regime. (For more on Walsh’s descent into extremism, read Jay Solomon’s “The Radicalization of Calla Walsh.”)

• Senator Josh Hawley is reportedly launching an investigation into the use of Flock cameras. In a letter to the company’s CEO, Senator Hawley wrote that Congress “never authorized the network your industry has built.” His move marks one of the first major crackdowns on the surveillance technology. (For more on this, read River Page’s “A City’s War on Surveillance Cameras” and Erick Erickson’s “Why No One Trusts Data Centers and Flock Cameras.”)

• Microsoft founder Bill Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on Wednesday warning the public about AI. The billionaire philanthropist wrote that there is “no plan” for the massive upheaval the technology will create, and highlighted the need for regulation.

• The FDA approved a blockbuster new drug for pancreatic cancer on Wednesday. The pill, called Rasonque, helped subjects in a late-stage study live more than 13 months longer than expected, marking a major breakthrough in the fight against one of the deadliest forms of cancer.

• Tim Curry passed away on Wednesday at age 80. The iconic actor is known for his roles in classic films including The Rocky Horror Picture Show, It, and more.

On Wednesday, Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, announced a landmark legal settlement in a trial spanning 48 states, Washington, D.C., and three U.S. territories. In addition to paying up to $18 billion to those states and territories, the company has agreed to make significant changes to its social-media platforms, including imposing two-hour time limits for teens, stopping notifications during the school day, removing “like” counts and cosmetic filters, and limiting teen usage between midnight and 6 a.m.

This is good news for children, and for their mental health. But today’s settlement marks the beginning, not the end, of long-sought changes from companies like Meta. For more than a decade, activists, parents, whistleblowers, and lawmakers have been fighting for regulations on the ability of social-media platforms to prey on the vulnerabilities of children’s underdeveloped brains. I myself have spent years researching and writing about this subject. We have relentlessly demanded accountability from companies like Meta, and we have been resisted at every turn.

So let’s be clear: Meta is no hero here. The company has spent decades pushing dangerous, algorithmically driven content into the feeds of young people and profiting from it. Even worse, according to internal files, Meta knew what they were doing was dangerous, and elected to do nothing about it. Even now, they are making these changes begrudgingly, and only because they see the growing backlash coming their way. Some skepticism is therefore warranted. You can’t pee in a well for 10 years and then expect people to believe the drinking water is clean.

Welcome back to The Honesty Project, a series of opinion surveys from The Free Press. We’re asking Americans what they believe about the most important issues in public life. And we’re going deeper than a typical poll.

We partnered with Populace, an opinion-research think tank, to design surveys that gauge respondents’ “private” opinions—the views they feel are too sensitive to share publicly. Our goal is to overcome the bias inherent in polls, which often elicit less-than-honest responses, and to understand what parts of American life people don’t feel they can speak about freely. (Learn more about the initiative and methodology here.)

A big question has dominated political debate in this year’s primary elections. With the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who have racked up victories from New York and Pennsylvania to Colorado and Florida, our elections have become a referendum on our economic system. So we decided to ask Americans what they’re thinking about capitalism versus socialism.

The results suggest that the public is feeling down about capitalism but is still wary of full-blown socialism. And many are deciding whether a few socialist candidates might help shake up the system. We found that:

Over the first two decades of the 21st century, the U.S. has been imprisoning people at a steadily declining rate. What’s more, annual new prison admissions for black people fell more than for white people during that period. The result is a prison population that is not only significantly smaller than it was in 2000 but also much less skewed by race.

Are you surprised by this good news? It is, after all, contrary to the conventional wisdom on the political left, which still reflects the “mass incarceration” narrative established in Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, which argues that prison has become a modern means to subjugate blacks. The DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), in particular, has called for eventual prison abolition as a key plank in its platform.

This narrative needs to catch up with the facts. A powerful new peer-reviewed study from sociologists at the universities of Wisconsin and Iowa—and published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour—makes the case that the criminal justice system was already moving toward less incarceration, and less incarceration of black offenders, when national concern over “mass incarceration” was peaking in the mid-2010s.

What’s more, the study, titled forthrightly “Why America’s Prisons Are Shrinking and Racial Gaps Are Closing,” by Jason Robey and Michael Light, shows that one of the main drivers of lower prison admissions is not more lenient treatment of violent offenders, but a lower violent crime rate. In other words, rather than an incurably racist and broken criminal justice system, the United States may be experiencing a virtuous cycle in which crime and incarceration decline in tandem.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the kinds of content we consume, from books and op-eds written with AI to films generated by it. But nowhere is this shift more visible than on social media, where it has become increasingly difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not. As AI becomes more ubiquitous on these platforms, what happens when people realize something they’re engaging with was made using it? Olivia Moore, a tech investor, set out to test that question by creating an AI-generated influencer and watching how people reacted. Read her piece to see what it reveals about how people engage with AI once they know it’s there. —The Editors

Earlier this month, a 19-year-old, curly-haired student named Janie went through Bama Rush, the University of Alabama’s annual sorority recruitment. Like many of the 2,500 prospective new members (PNMs), she posted “outfit of the day” videos, breathless recaps of house visits, and clips fumbling her way through trending dances on social media. Janie created a TikTok account just for rush, and within a week, she was averaging tens of thousands of views per video.

There was just one difference between her and all the other girls vying for a spot in the top-rated houses.

Janie wasn’t real.

She was born out of a single image generated by ChatGPT, and every one of her videos was prompted by me. Janie worked, in large part, because of RushTok, the annually occurring online spectacle surrounding Alabama’s sorority recruitment.

Every August, thousands of college women go through an arduous process to join one of the University of Alabama’s sororities, moving through a series of themed rounds of interviews with current members. The process culminates in “bid day,” when PNMs open offers of membership.

Ever since the news of Dolly Parton’s death on Tuesday, there’s one clip I can’t stop watching. It’s old footage featured in a 2020 documentary, and Dolly’s not singing in it; instead, she’s reading. “She pulled and she tugged. ‘I think I can! I think I can!’ she said”—and of course it’s The Little Engine That Could, the classic folktale made famous by Arnold “Watty Piper” Munk.

Then Dolly turns to the kids huddled around her and says, “Would you help me? All of you, help me!” and she chants with them: “I think I can! I think I can!”

Here is the thing about Dolly Parton: That woman understood the job she had been given to do, and she did it gladly. A lesser personality would have gotten buried under the piles of rhinestones and the 10-ton hair. Not Dolly. She could be hilariously self-aware about her gaudy showgirl style and the silicone under her skin. But she never turned up her nose at her own act or at the fans from her hometown who loved it unabashedly. She knew what she meant to people, and she showed up for them like it was a privilege.

The Little Engine That Could is the first gift you get when you sign up for Dolly’s Imagination Library, a charity program she founded that sends free books to children from birth to age 5. This is by design. The program began in 1995 as a literacy campaign for kids who grew up around where Dolly did. She was born in 1946 to an illiterate father in a one-bedroom log cabin in Locust Ridge, at the feet of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains.

“Daddy couldn’t read or write, but he was the smartest person that I’ve ever known,” she told the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden at a 2018 ceremony where she donated her 100 millionth book. Today, the charity gives away over three million books per month across all 50 states and several foreign countries, making it one of the largest projects of its kind in the world. It is the sheer embodiment of “I think I can!”

In a culture consumed by doomerism, it has become widely accepted that the world is running out of resources. Marian L. Tupy, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and co-author of Superabundance, offers a radically different vision of the world: that despite what the algorithms tell us, humanity is more prosperous than ever.

He is also the founder of Huma…

“I love Poe!” a teenage girl exclaimed, racing toward a shelf of Edgar Allan Poe volumes. I was sitting in BookMarx, a small independent bookstore in Ohio, when she burst through the door, a weathered-looking elderly woman trailing behind her.

“Go ahead, take a look,” the woman said as she glanced warily at the shelves. The older woman was clad in an old parka; the younger, in an oversize heavy-metal band sweatshirt.

The girl grabbed a copy and began examining it before stumbling over the title “The Cask of Amontillado.” The shop’s owner, John Byron Kuhner, gently supplied the pronunciation before recommending a few more stories. Minutes later, the girl walked to the counter carrying three books.

As John rang them up, he asked the teenager if she’d like to join the frequent buyer program. She nodded vigorously.

“Oh, here we go again with those books,” the older woman sighed.

It’s Wednesday, August 26. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: What college freshmen need to hear. Aaron MacLean on Trump’s “D-Day” sanctions. Join The Free Press Book Club. And much more.

But first: Dolly Parton, RIP.

How does someone do all that? How did she go from a one-room cabin on Tennessee’s Little Pigeon River to the commanding heights of American celebrity? How did the daughter of an illiterate sharecropper become one of the world’s foremost lyricists, the woman who wrote more than 3,000 songs, including both “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” in the space of a single day?

The short answer is that Dolly Parton was a genius, a singular figure, someone who could do things that no one else could. But it’s so much more than that. She died yesterday at the age of 80 but had long ago achieved a kind of immortality, both through her artistry and her philanthropic efforts. She was one of the last universally beloved figures in our scattered, splintered, angry age.

Sometimes we look around at this dizzying country of ours and wonder what binds it all together. We should recognize that Dolly Parton was part of the glue.

So today, we celebrate this great American. First, Caitlin Flanagan—a lifelong fan—takes a heartfelt look at Parton, who headlined the first concert she ever went to as a girl growing up in the Bay Area. This was before Parton became a movie star, before Dollywood, before she amassed the great fortune she was so eager to share with others. But for Caitlin, it was love at first sight.

Next, Hannah Long explores Parton’s inextricable ties to the American South, which is key to understanding her. “To Appalachians like me, this is something like the passing of Queen Elizabeth,” Long writes. But how did Parton manage to be “equally beloved by Baptist church ladies and buxom drag queens” while remaining so purely herself, and so fixed to a particular place while becoming a worldwide phenomenon?

Again, how does anyone do that? Read these two pieces for answers to that question.

—Will Rahn

Fewer Americans are reading today than ever before, and even fewer are reading together. We want to change that. That’s why we’ve launched The Free Press Forum Book Club. For our first installment, writers, editors, and subscribers will all read and discuss East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Peter Savodnik will be part of the crew, and he wants you to join him over at The Free Press Forum to dive into what might very well be the Great American Novel.

Read Peter on what makes East of Eden great, and how the book club works:

And click here to join the book club today:

Join Now

• CIA director John Ratcliffe arrived in Moscow Tuesday to meet with Russian officials, the first known trip of a CIA director to the country since 2021. The unannounced visit came a day after Ukraine marked its 35th Independence Day—and as the U.S. reportedly asked Ukrainian officials not to strike Moscow with long-range missiles while Ratcliffe was there.

• Canada announced retaliatory tariffs up to 50 percent on hundreds of American goods, mirroring the tariffs the United States levied against Canada in recent days. Prime Minister Mark Carney also announced billions in spending to support Canadian workers and businesses, warning the tariffs “will raise costs and reduce choice for Canadians.”

• Darline Graham, the sister of late Republican senator Lindsey Graham, secured the Republican nomination for South Carolina Senate in Tuesday’s runoff election. Graham bested Rep. Ralph Norman, who unsuccessfully ran for governor earlier this cycle. President Trump endorsed Graham, campaigned for her last week, and provided over $800,000 from his PAC a day before the runoff election.

• Pennsylvania recorded its first two deaths connected to measles in 35 years, the state health department announced Tuesday. Neither deceased person had received the measles vaccine. Approximately 92.5 percent of kindergarten-age children received the measles vaccine this year, down from 95.2 percent at the beginning of the 2019–2020 school year.

• Diplomats from Oman and Iran met in Tehran on Tuesday to discuss how to manage maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. A joint statement announced a “joint temporary navigational corridor” in the region and an agreement to clear mines from the strait. President Trump said last week he would bomb Oman if it “gets in the way” of an American deal with Iran.

• At least one in four NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma, according to a study released yesterday. Researchers caution that the study could be underestimating the extent of CTE in professional football players. The NFL Players Association said the findings “should serve as a call to action across the entire football ecosystem.”