The Free Press

History records that in the year 67, the Roman emperor Nero participated in a chariot race at the Olympic Games. The mad emperor, who would become infamous for all time for overseeing Rome’s burning while he (almost certainly apocryphally) played the violin, crashed in the race but was declared the victor anyway.

Nero may have taken things to egomaniacal extremes, but massive athletic spectacles were par for the course. The gladiatorial games were designed as a sort of tribute that powerful politicians and wealthy sponsors would hold for the entertainment and bonding of the masses. It was important and relatively harmless to let the people have their fun. There was, after all, no Netflix in ancient Rome.

We do have Netflix now, but very little compares to the thrill of live racing, as Nero learned. So for all the same reasons that Romans had chariot races, President Donald Trump intuited that it would be a crowdpleaser to host last weekend’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix, an IndyCar race, in downtown Washington, D.C.

Let me tell you a small story that makes me sad, which is part of a big story that makes me sadder. It’s about the death of Six Flags California’s Great America—Silicon Valley’s only amusement park, and a place that has been a fixture of life in Santa Clara County, where I grew up, for half a century. The park’s lease expires in 2028, and the land it sits on, across the freeway from Nvidia’s spaceship-esque headquarters, would bring in more tax revenue if it were used for basically anything else. After 50 years in operation, it is expected to close next year.

The death of California’s Great America is partly about the economics of the amusement park business itself; partly about the way many Americans now feel too ashamed or demoralized to celebrate their country; and more broadly about the shift in so much of modern leisure from the physical to the digital.

So in anticipation of the closure of Great America, I returned to my childhood theme park for the first time in 10 years. I paid $60 for admission and $39 for parking to see exactly what Silicon Valley would be losing—which turned out to be more than just nine roller coasters, nine water slides, and a handful of Snoopy-themed attractions.

If you pay attention, you can make out the vestiges of a theme park built in celebration of America: a 1950s-style retro diner that serves corn dogs and milkshakes; a spinning, red, white, and blue ride called the Liberty Twirler; and the faint sounds of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” playing over speakers in the queueing area of Patriot, a 91-foot-high, bright blue America-themed roller coaster.

For the better part of a decade, a new moral and political framework swept through American life. Its critics called it “wokeness”; its adherents called it social justice. From Black Lives Matter to #MeToo to DEI, its initiatives were embraced by schools, corporations, newsrooms, and the highest levels of government—reaching the very height of their pow…

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where the weekend collapse of trade talks with the U.S. leaves us asking: What the hell happened? And what did we win and lose when Prime Minister Carney told Canada’s negotiators to walk away from the table? Let’s get to it.

For more than a year, it looked like Canada was close to doing what nearly every other major American trading partner had done: making a deal with President Donald Trump. Last Wednesday, Trump announced what he called “a very good deal for both parties,” subject only to “the finalization of documents.” Prime Minister Mark Carney said that the draft agreement would reinforce Canada’s competitive advantage.

But on Saturday at 11:45 p.m. ET, Carney announced that Canada was abandoning the talks and would retaliate with “dollar-for-dollar tariffs.” Trump allowed new 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods to take effect under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which had never before been used to impose tariffs—not even on China.

Canada’s national mood was perhaps best captured by a meme of a moose in a Mountie hat guarding the border beneath a sign that says: “Strait of Our Moose is closed. No entry. Unfair tariffs.” On Monday, another meme noted that exactly 212 years ago, British troops from what is now Canada set the White House ablaze.

“He can kiss my ass,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford added. “Stay tuned” was Ford’s response when asked if he wanted to bring back last fall’s anti-tariff ad featuring clips from a 1987 speech by Ronald Reagan.

It’s Monday, August 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Bill Barr on the Democrats’ antisemitism denial. Kara Kennedy on why moms are filming themselves throwing ice at bathtubs. Robert Wright on AI’s real threat. And much more.

But first: The data that should’ve been front page news—but wasn’t.

Almost exactly a year ago to the day, my colleagues and I uncovered in The Free Press that a dozen of the most viral images presented as evidence of famine in Gaza in fact showed children with unrelated medical issues, including cystic fibrosis and autoimmune conditions.

The investigation earned me death threats, calls for me to be tried at The Hague, and jabs by a high-profile comedian on national TV—despite the fact that we’ve had to issue exactly zero corrections on our story. That wasn’t the case for three of the news organizations that had run the images, which either updated or corrected their work because of what we reported.

Our point was simply to tell readers that if there was a famine in Gaza, photographs of these children were not evidence of it.

What is indisputable today is that there is currently no famine in Gaza. That is the major finding from a UNICEF-led team that recently produced the most comprehensive and robust nutrition survey of Gaza since the war began. It found that, less than a year after a famine was declared in Gaza, the territory has one of the lowest malnutrition rates in the region. A recovery that swift is not just “miraculous,” in the words of a malnutrition researcher I spoke with—it raises questions in and of itself. Questions like: How can a war-torn territory go from famine to showing some of the lowest rates of child malnutrition in the region in less than a year?

In my report today, I investigate that question, its implications, and what it means for the debate over the official decision to classify a famine in Gaza to still be raging 12 months on.

—Olivia Reingold

• Pakistan’s army chief is set to visit Tehran today for talks with Iranian leaders on ending the war with the U.S. as the Trump administration prepares to unveil what officials have called “the ⁠toughest sanctions in history” against Iran. Tehran has vowed to respond militarily if the sanctions move forward as it continues to strangle oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

• The U.S. hit Canada with 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion worth of goods Saturday after negotiations collapsed after a round of failed negotiations. Prime Minister Mark Carney promised that his government will institute retaliatory tariffs after Labor Day, while President Donald Trump fired back on social media writing that Canada wanted “the benefits of being a State, without being one.”

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky rejected calls for elections yesterday, warning that holding a vote now would be like “a tsunami” that could fracture the country. His remarks came days after his recently fired defense minister demanded Ukrainians be given the chance to go to the polls, in a rare challenge to the president’s grip on power.

• Israel’s Mossad chief and Syria’s foreign minister met Sunday in an attempt to defuse tensions after Israel bombed a Syrian airbase last week, which it framed as a preemptive move against a feared Turkish military presence. Syria said it had no intention of allowing Turkish forces to operate there.

• An 18-year-old wielding a sword went on a rampage at a school in Sweden on Friday, killing one student and leaving two others in serious condition. The suspect was taken into custody at the scene and no motive has been established.

• A rapidly spreading wildfire in Nevada forced 14,000 Reno-area homes to evacuate on Sunday, with the blaze reaching the edge of the University of Nevada campus after scorching more than 10,500 acres. Governor Joe Lombardo declared a state of emergency as thousands of residents lost power and major highways were shut down.

• TikTok agreed to pay $400 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging the platform violated children’s privacy laws by collecting personal data from users under 13 without parental consent and failing to delete their accounts when parents requested it. The settlement is the latest sign of growing pressure on social media companies over child safety, with Meta currently on trial over similar allegations.

• A Chinese-built humanoid robot beat Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, clocking 9.39 seconds at a five-day competition that tests robots across 51 events. Elsewhere on the field, competitors caught fire and broke apart mid-competition.

Robert Wright has been talking about human nature and technology since before most people knew what a podcast was, going back to a video platform he co-founded in 2005 called Bloggingheads.tv. His new book, The God Test, makes an argument that stuck with me: AI isn’t dangerous because it might spontaneously turn on us, but rather because it’s about to t…

Since the beginning of the year, the Department of Defense has been trying to remake Stars and Stripes, the newspaper first published during the Civil War and then revived during the world wars to give our fighting men and women independent and uncensored news about the military they serve. Until last week, it was unclear exactly how the new newspaper would be different. Then on Friday the Pentagon’s brass sent termination letters to the paper’s publisher, editor-in-chief, and one of its star correspondents.

The spin on these changes is that the paper was in desperate need of an overhaul. William Urban, the new military deputy to the publisher of Stars and Stripes and a former spokesman for the Navy and the Pentagon, explained in a lengthy open letter that he intends to modernize the paper and build its readership, which he claimed was fewer than 30,000 digital subscribers and a print circulation of less than 10,000. His mission, he said, was: “More eyeballs on our content and more impact on our service members while maintaining the highest standard of professional journalism with the credibility that comes with editorial independence.”

On July 22, a UNICEF-led team measuring hunger in Gaza uploaded a presentation containing its most comprehensive analysis since war broke out nearly three years ago.

The report, titled “Gaza Nutrition SMART Survey Result,” revealed a stark reversal from the declarations made almost exactly a year ago that a dire famine was ravaging the war-torn territory.

“Wasting,” the report said, using a term for extreme thinness, “is low across all domains, suggesting no widespread acute malnutrition at population level.”

At the rate of 0.5 percent, Gaza has one of the lowest rates of acute child malnutrition in the region, according to an analysis by The Free Press of data from the World Bank and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN–affiliated hunger-monitoring system. The researchers also concluded that about 12 percent of children in Gaza had stunting, or impaired growth and development that is the result of poor nutrition. That is less than half of the region’s 26 percent stunting rate, according to the latest report on child malnutrition by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank.

Struggling, sleep-deprived moms are propping up their phones in their bathroom, hitting the record button and throwing ice at it while screaming for a whole minute. “Instead of having a screaming match with my toddler,” one mom wrote in a social media post, “I throw ice into my tub. It allows me to feel angry without being destructive.” Moms are also setting up ring lights to film themselves hysterically sobbing in front of their small children. Others are filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay,” in solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mom who killed her three children—ages 5, 3, and 8 months—and is currently on trial for murder.

This brain rot has spread like wildfire, as the algorithms made sure it would, and in the momosphere—the network of TikTok moms and mommy influencers and mom bloggers—it has been almost universally embraced as a healthy, liberating way for mothers to exhibit their rage. Part of this comes from how Clancy’s case has been understood: Her defense argues that she was in the grips of postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings, and has pointed to the many medications prescribed by different doctors to treat her depression symptoms in the months leading up to the killings. To the moms of TikTok, an overwhelmed and overmedicated mom practically begging for help is something, maybe an extreme version, of what they see in the mirror. Which is why Clancy has been claimed as a martyr, rather than a monster who acts as a cautionary tale.

Last week, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland offered a preview of the Democrats’ game plan for the coming year. As the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, he announced that he intends to launch a formal probe into what he calls the Justice Department’s “sham investigation” of antisemitism at taxpayer-funded universities.

Partisan oversight investigations are nothing new in Washington. But this one is uniquely cynical.

By Raskin’s telling, the Donald Trump administration decided to investigate antisemitism at Harvard University, Columbia University, Brown University, and Cornell University based on a single New York Post article from January 2025, which highlighted antisemitic incidents at medical school graduation ceremonies. According to a Justice Department whistleblower, the initial investigation did not yield any Title VI violations, so the administration went “on an open-sea fishing expedition” in search of antisemitism, using it as a “pretext” under which to “harass and intimidate universities on utterly false, tendentious, and distorted grounds” and “strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants.”

This completely rewrites history.