The Free Press

Dolly Parton was one of the last truly unifying pop culture figures in America. Equally beloved by Baptist church ladies and buxom drag queens, Dolly’s Southern charm drew everyone into her orbit. This is all the more remarkable because she remained so resolutely, unashamedly proud of her Tennessee roots.

To Appalachians like me, this is something like the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. Dolly was an icon, a figurehead, a spiritual grandmother. She lived up to the comparison, giving back to the community through initiatives like her Imagination Library charity, which has distributed millions of free books to children, or by partially funding the Moderna Covid vaccine.

The first concert I ever went to was at the San Rafael civic center, and the performer was Dolly Parton. This was the Bay Area, 1977, and the notion that Parton might have a wide, national appeal—let alone a San Francisco Bay Area appeal—was years away. But my friend Annie and I were two 16-year-old girls who weren’t following the herd. Or even the group, or the half dozen. When it came to taste, we were on our own. That same year, we’d gone to see professional wrestling at the Cow Palace. We were weirdos, and we knew what we liked.

Berkeley had many cults, but the Dolly Parton cult was a two-girl operation. This was before the movie 9 to 5 gave Parton some national recognition. In those days, the South and the rest of America were eager to ignore each other’s existence. There was a weekly variety show called Hee Haw, which was meant as a deep-South version of Laugh-In, except that Laugh-In was cool—it had go-go dancers and nightclub comics—and Hee Haw was beyond square. We were right that the comedy was cornpone. But some of the best music in the country was performed on that show every week: Tammy Wynette and Johnny Cash and Charley Pride and sometimes a young Dolly Parton.

The thing about Dolly—the reason Annie and I loved her so much, and from the very beginning—was that that woman could sing. She could really, really sing. If you don’t know what we fell in love with, stop everything and listen to her recording of “Mule Skinner Blues (Blue Yodel No. 8).” Any questions you might have about how she got so far in her life will be answered. At the root of that massive career that came to stand for so many things was a great voice and a childhood drenched in one of the great American art forms: bluegrass music.

Dolly Parton was born in 1946 in a Tennessee holler, the fourth of 12 children born to an illiterate sharecropper turned subsistence farmer, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River, a way of life so remote from the modern American one that it seems like something from a children’s book.

You’ve heard of the Punic Wars. Purely from the point of view of messaging, one is tempted to call the ongoing conflict with Iran the Tantric War. From “a whole civilization will die tonight” in April to “economic D-Day” this week, strategic climaxes are promised, but ever deferred. Scott Bessent’s depiction on Monday of Operation Economic Outcast, the new campaign targeting Iran, suggested something more targeted, intelligence-driven, and discreet than the president’s beach-storming imagery had teased us to believe.

That’s not to say that the briefing or the campaign lack substance. If “secondary sanctions” (sanctions on third parties doing business with Iran) are aggressively implemented, the new Bessent approach to the war could cause the regime in Iran great distress. But economic warfare takes time, and this new campaign will have to contend with a problematic asymmetry. For Iran to succeed, it needs to generate enough economic and political pressure in the United States for President Trump to decide he’s better off without this conflict. (Indeed, the weak June MOU shows that Iran could have walked away with this outcome but for its insistence on controlling the Strait of Hormuz and thus humiliating Trump.) But for America to succeed, we must directly endanger the power position of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) clique now controlling Iran, forcing them to negotiate or risk being displaced by others. Regime change from the sky was not so successful in March and April. Now we will try, in effect, regime change at the bank.

Bessent’s remarks were implicitly clear-eyed about what success would need to look like, and he asserted that the intelligence efforts had “mapped every node, every facilitator, and every network that Iran has used to smuggle oil and evade sanctions.” His remarks were accompanied by announcements from the Treasury Department and the State Department of a raft of specific sanctions targeting Iranian officials and facilitators for Iranian weapons procurement, malicious cyber activities, energy and petrochemical smuggling, and other categories of misbehavior.

If back-to-school season has you nostalgic for the days when you could dive into great literature without any pangs of guilt, then we have the place for you: The Free Press Forum Book Club.

Here’s why you need to join: Books, and especially great books, are antidotes to groupthink. They force us to imagine life beyond the narrow confines of whatever we’ve been encouraged to believe—by our peers, our news feeds, the algorithm. They remind us that human beings, like it or not, are masters of themselves.

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The great American novel does this better than any other novel, in no small part because the promise of America is freedom. And to sustain that freedom, we need to be confronted with the implications of it from time to time.

Which brings us to John Steinbeck’s greatest novel, East of Eden. It is exactly what all Americans need to read and talk about right now, because it’s a marvelous, sweeping, cross-generational story, and because it forces us to think about our agency.

It is the story of the Brothers Trask—Adam and Charles; and then, Adam’s sons, Cal and Aron—and it takes place in the Salinas Valley, just south of San Francisco, between the Civil War and World War I. But really, and not to give too much away, it’s the story of Cain and Abel. You may recall that Cain, after murdering his brother, Abel, is banished to the Land of Nod, about which we know very little except that nod is Hebrew for “wandering,” and that it is somewhere “east of Eden.”

California—and, more broadly, America—was supposed to be the new Eden. But, of course, it’s not: Freedom does not lead inevitably to happiness, because human beings are weak and self-interested. But we still celebrate our freedom even if we shy away from thinking seriously about the implications of it.

With that in mind, I hope you’ll join us as we plunge headlong into East of Eden. It will be a great deal of fun, and we’ll learn something, and we might—just might—help in some small way to save the republic. I’ll see you there. —Peter Savodnik

The Forum Book Club was sparked by conversations in our new digital forum by subscribers who wanted to read and discuss great books together. More than 800 Free Pressers have already signed up, and introductions are underway! The first reading prompts will be posted on August 30. You can find the discussion schedule and everything you need to know here.

Pick up your copy of East of Eden, get acquainted with the Forum if you haven’t already, and meet us in the Salinas Valley. Along the way, there will be ongoing Forum discussions and subscriber-led livestreams featuring Free Press writers and editors—including Peter for the final conversation.

The Free Press Forum Book Club is open to all paid subscribers.

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Not a paid subscriber? Upgrade today to participate in the Forum Book Club.

As students settle into campus this week, unpacking in dorms, meeting new roommates, and stepping into the familiar ritual of “finding themselves,” it’s worth reconsidering what college is actually for.

At a moment when most universities promise affirmation and self-discovery, Carlos Carvalho, president of the University of Austin—of which Bari is a trustee—offered his incoming freshmen a different message at convocation this week: “Forget yourself and discover the durable joy of being absorbed in something greater than you.” He argues for a return to the first principles of education, asking students to look outward rather than inward, and to measure growth not by how seen one feels but by how deeply one engages with what is true.

Whether you never went to college, graduated decades ago, or are about to start your first semester, President Carvalho’s speech is worth your time. It is a clear argument for a different way of thinking about learning, and a reminder that the discipline it describes does not end at graduation but carries into how we think and live long after. — The Editors

In the 1830s, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled across America and admired much of what he saw. But he observed a dangerous paradox in the American love of equality. As the old ties of class, tradition, and community dissolved, he predicted, each citizen would retreat into a small world of narrow concerns—until every American would end up “thrown back forever upon himself alone,” confined at last “in the solitude of his own heart.” A man with nothing above or beyond him has nothing important to strive for and becomes focused on himself alone.

Tocqueville called this danger individualism. Paradoxically, he worried that the more independent the citizen feels, the weaker and less independent he actually becomes. And weak men are more susceptible to being governed by others. They are dominated by the ideas and fashions of the majority and look to a government bureaucracy to take care of them. Tocqueville saw this individualism as a path to comfort in servitude.

America’s version of individualism led to something quite different.

The death penalty is an issue that should be discussed with awe. More than perhaps any other subject it demands to be treated so, because it is an issue which even its advocates recognize to be solemn and severe.

It is one reason why the provocations and trollings by Itamar Ben-Gvir on the matter provoke such revulsion. To date, the Israeli minister of national security has advocated mass executions of terrorists in Israeli jails by such means as wearing a golden noose lapel pin and celebrating his 50th birthday with execution-themed birthday cakes with nooses in the center. Last week he took his voluble enthusiasm for executions to another level, posting a video online in which he gloated about building a gallows for public executions, complete with viewing rooms for the families of victims.

Not for the first time Ben-Gvir is a man who harms any cause to which he fixes himself. Yet aside from his stunts, Israelis must soon make serious decisions about the issue. Though Israel prohibits the death penalty for most offenses, the Knesset voted unanimously in May to allow it for terrorists who participated in the October 7, 2023, attacks. Now the Israeli justice system must determine whether capital punishment will go forward, and exactly who it will be allowed to ensnare.

It’s Tuesday, August 25. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Arthur Brooks on the Facebook groups enabling a new, more extreme era of helicopter parenting. Why Trump would make a great mayor of D.C. Aaron MacLean on how the U.S. military can build the drones it needs—without China’s help. And much more.

But first: Will America ever trust AI?

So much of what we do at The Free Press is try to make sense of a world where trust is broken. What many see as a crisis of trust we think is, first and foremost, a crisis of trustworthiness. From government and the media to education and medicine, institutions that fought hard to earn the public’s trust have squandered it.

That change is the story of our time, and once you understand it, you recognize it everywhere—including in two of the most contentious debates out there right now: over data centers and Flock surveillance cameras.

We’ve covered both of these fights, and at root, they point toward a question even more existential than how we view AI, crime, and privacy. Once that trust is lost, can it ever be earned back?

Today, Erick Erickson traces the collapse in trust back to March of 2020 and the months that followed. His essay is unsparing in its assessment of who, on both sides of the aisle, is responsible for the crisis, and clear-eyed about what it will take to win the public back.

Who should we trust to write the rules for a technology transforming our world at such a rapid pace that the government can’t keep up? That’s the question Tyler Cowen tackles in his column today. He sketches a proposal that he says strikes a balance between overregulation and an AI Wild West: a private, not-for-profit regulatory body for AI companies. “The concrete truth,” Tyler argues, “is that there is far more expertise within the companies for judging AI safety than we can expect to find in the federal government anytime soon.”

Read his column on how this regulatory body would work, and why we need it.

—The Editors

• The Supreme Court handed Trump a win on Tuesday in his effort to restrict mail-in voting in this fall’s midterm elections. The decision will allow Trump to continue implementing a March executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to create and monitor lists of U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote.

• The State Department announced plans to revoke the visas of up to 200,000 asylum seekers, the Associated Press reported on Monday. The move would be the largest single visa revocation in U.S. history and will target B1 and B2 visas issued within the last decade for people who claimed to be short-term visitors, but then applied to stay permanently.

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued a sanctions warning to countries still doing business with Iran: They will soon be cut off from the U.S. dollar, a death sentence for most foreign banks. The warning, however, offered few concrete actions and a clarification that there would be a “cure period” before the sanctions are imposed.

• Former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah will return to the paper after an arbitrator found that the Post “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate her employment over posts about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Attiah told The New York Times she is “willing to go back” to the Post.

• A coalition of grocery store and deli owners sued New York City on Monday in an attempt to block Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s five planned city-run grocery stores. The complaint argues the city skipped certain legally required reviews, and the group’s president said that the subsidized stores would constitute harm to minority businesses.

• Jed York, owner of the San Francisco 49ers, was arrested Sunday in a prostitution sting at an Ohio trailer park where he allegedly answered an online ad and arranged to pay $140 for sex. On Monday, he pleaded no contest to reduced charges of disorderly conduct and possessing “criminal tools”—his phone—and agreed to pay $1,150 in fines.

• In Alaska, Dan Sullivan has endorsed Dan Sullivan against Dan Sullivan. Last week, former Anchorage mayor Dan A. Sullivan backed incumbent GOP senator Dan S. Sullivan over retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan—whom Republicans accuse of being a Democratic plant to confuse voters. The primary winner will face Democrat Mary Peltola in November in a toss-up race that could decide Senate control.

A few weeks ago, we rolled out Bundles, a new way to customize exactly which stories and how much email you get from The Free Press.

We want to know how it’s going. Please answer the poll below, and if you have specific feedback for us, please share it in the subscriber Forum. Your feedback is important to us, and we will use it to shape your experience—so don’t hold back.

The U.S. military needs more drones, and it needs to build them without Chinese parts. Today, Defense Innovation Unit Deputy Director Travis Metz joins School of War to discuss how America can build drones quickly, cheaply, and on U.S. soil; what America can learn from Ukraine’s drone war; and the Pentagon’s new billion-dollar effort to upgrade its agin…

For how much longer will the fate of American artificial intelligence be steered from Silicon Valley rather than Washington? To watch the pace of AI progress, one might imagine that the answer to that question is rapidly shortening. Each milestone in the capability of AI increases the desire among lawmakers and much of the public to rein in the technology. That includes positive breakthroughs, such as the declaration last week by payments company Stripe that AI has achieved the long-awaited “singularity”: the ability to improve itself beyond what humans can contribute. It also includes worrying episodes, like the breach of the AI database Hugging Face last month by a powerful model gone rogue.

Yet for all of the risks that AI brings, the harm caused by overregulating it would likely be much worse for the public. That is why AI developers and experts are devising proposals to promote AI safety without putting too much control in the hands of the federal government.

I have some definite recommendations, which are drawn in part from ideas put forward earlier by Dean Ball, now head of strategic futures at OpenAI but formerly a senior White House policy adviser for the Trump administration. (I have also done work for major AI labs.)

So much of what we do at The Free Press is try to make sense of a world where trust is broken. What many see as a crisis of trust we think is, first and foremost, a crisis of trustworthiness. From government and the media to education and medicine, institutions that fought hard to earn the public’s trust have squandered it.

That change is arguably the story of our time, and once you understand it, you see it everywhere—including in two of the most contentious debates of this moment: over data centers and Flock surveillance cameras. We’ve covered both of these fights here at The Free Press. At root, they get at something much deeper than the technology itself. What’s really at stake is whether trust, once spent, can be earned back at all.

That’s why, when we read Erick Erickson’s essay tracing this breakdown back to the pandemic, we decided to reprint it in our pages. His analysis is unsparing in identifying who’s responsible on both sides of the aisle, and clear-eyed about what it will take to win the public back. We are pleased to bring it to you today. —The Editors

In April of 2020, San Clemente, California, dumped 37 tons of sand into a skate park to keep teenagers out of it. Other California cities followed suit. Up the coast, sheriff’s deputies arrested a man for paddleboarding by himself in the Pacific Ocean. Cities unbolted basketball rims. The mayor of Los Angeles told people that “snitches get rewards” and, God help us, people snitched, calling the tip lines on the neighbors whose grandkids came over. Months later, Gavin Newsom violated his own Covid-19 protocols and enjoyed a dinner at The French Laundry.

The sand, the arrest, the missing basketball rims, the rewarded snitches, and the elite hypocrisy explain a lot about where we are as a nation, including things that look like they have nothing to do with Covid, like data centers and Flock cameras.

In March 2020, Americans did as they were told. People closed businesses, local governments closed schools, and families canceled funerals. They waited for instructions from their elected leaders and public health officials because those officials said we needed two weeks to stop the spread. People generally trusted their institutions. Civic trust is a limited resource in a free nation. The press, politicians, bureaucrats, experts, and elite violated that trust until it was gone.