The Free Press

It’s not every day that the diary of one of the most polarizing figures of a global pandemic gets released to the public. But that’s exactly what happened last month to Dr. Anthony Fauci.

In late July, Senator Rand Paul publicly released over 1,000 pages of notes that Fauci had kept—on a government server—during his time as Covid-19 czar, between 2019 an…

Anthony Fauci, the face of America’s pandemic response, has been back in the news lately. Last month, Senator Rand Paul released the personal diaries Fauci kept throughout the pandemic. Then, after Fauci pleaded the Fifth in a Senate hearing, he was held in contempt of Congress. All of this has reignited a conversation about Fauci and how the country handled the pandemic. It’s been an intense, and intensely personal, debate. But at stake is much more than the reputation of one former public official.

In our Big Read today, Sigrid Bratlie, a molecular biologist and author of The Mystery of Wuhan, argues that we are still just scratching the surface of the real pandemic scandal: the way in which the public health establishment, led by Fauci, invested in risky virus research then appears to have tried to cover its tracks. It’s a story about institutional failures in science, intelligence, and politics, and we’re pleased to share it with you today.

We also wanted to go deeper into Fauci’s diaries themselves. Dr. Vinay Prasad, one of the pandemic’s most prominent contrarian voices who later became the Food and Drug Administration’s head vaccine regulator, has read them in full. Today he sits down with Rafaela Siewert to discuss what he found. You can watch their conversation below. —The Editors

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that few American bureaucrats in recent years have been more polarizing than Anthony Fauci—best known as the leader of the U.S. pandemic response.

Now the debate is raging after he was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about the origins of the pandemic under oath. Republicans have made him almost solely responsible for everything that went wrong during the pandemic. Democrats call it a conspiratorial vendetta and an attack on science.

The rhetoric is disappointingly superficial on both sides—and so is the coverage in most media so far, which portrays the whole thing as vengeful Republicans against a somewhat inexplicably silent Fauci.

The matter is far more complex.

It’s Wednesday, August 19. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Who is to blame for Jason Arday’s tragic fate? P.G. Sittenfeld on the ex-convicts who the Supreme Court may send back to jail—unless Trump intervenes. Arthur Brooks on why Bumble ditched its women-message-first rule. And much more.

But first: With cliffs like these, who needs walls?

President Donald Trump’s plans to create a grand White House ballroom and his clumsy renovations of the reflecting pool have generated plenty of attention from the Washington media. But another, less closely watched fight over the president’s grand designs is shaping up in faraway West Texas.

Unlike in Washington, the people who live in the Big Bend region tend to be quite politically conservative. Yet they are infuriated by the administration’s determination to build a border wall in the area that they say is not only destructive but pointless—an expensive exercise in security theater in a place where natural barriers already make illegal border crossings exceedingly rare.

Those natural barriers are something to see, and the region depends in part on visitors looking to marvel at the 1,500-foot limestone cliffs in Big Bend National Park and the rugged, mountainous wilderness along the Rio Grande. And locals say this beautiful scenery is threatened by the project. But that hasn’t stopped the bulldozers from arriving at iconic landmarks like the Santa Elena Canyon.

The pressing issue for those who live in the Big Bend area is whether the wall can be stopped. This week, with the backlash growing, the administration paused part of the project. But can locals stop the federal government from tearing up some of America’s most breathtaking landscapes? Carrie McKean reports from Texas on this battle for us today. It’s a story about whether Trump will get his way on a signature issue. But it’s also a tale that illustrates the way politics can scramble when grand policy visions crash into local realities.

—The Editors

• Palm Beach International Airport is now officially Donald J. Trump International Airport, the first airport ever named for a sitting president. The new airport code, DJT, took effect yesterday, with the total rebrand cost topping out at $5.5 million, half of which came from Florida taxpayers.

• Opening statements in Meta’s blockbuster social media addiction trial began Tuesday, with the prosecution accusing the tech company of purposefully addicting children. Four state attorneys general are seeking a penalty that could theoretically be astronomical, and Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify.

• OpenAI announced ChatGPT for Teens on Tuesday, which will include parental controls, “responsible homework reminders” that detect AI-assisted cheating, and a ban on the chatbot expressing romantic feelings for its users. OpenAI is still facing a lawsuit from the family of a 16-year-old who killed himself following lengthy ChatGPT interactions.

• The Department of Justice unsealed a 14-count indictment Tuesday charging 17 Iranian cyber criminals with a massive hacking campaign on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—allegedly breaching 144 American universities and stealing 31 terabytes of research and intellectual property. The State Department is offering up to $10 million for information on five of the defendants.

• Riley English, a transgender Massachusetts woman who showed up to the U.S. Capitol in January 2025 with the intent to kill Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, was sentenced Tuesday to just over six years in prison. English, who claimed to be in a mental health crisis, told the judge, “I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

• ABC, along with its parent company Disney, sued the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday alleging the agency’s threat to ABC’s broadcast license during the president’s feud with Jimmy Kimmel in April violated the First Amendment. Disney said the pressure is warping its programming, citing the fact that The View hasn’t booked a political candidate since February.

• The alleged ringleader of a cocaine trafficking ring run out of two Penn State fraternity houses surrendered to police Tuesday after skipping his scheduled arraignment the day before. Prosecutors say Agostino Abbatiello, 24, sat at the “very top of the chain” of an operation that required some pledges to cut and package the product as part of a hazing ritual.

• Khymani James, the former Columbia University student who went viral in 2024 for saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” has had his lawsuit tossed by a New York state judge. The judge dismissed his complaint, ruling that he failed to adequately plead discrimination claims.

If you’re a participant in the modern dating market—or know anyone who is—you’re likely familiar with the complaints. Many of them revolve around dating apps, which have become an unavoidable part of contemporary courtship. Men usually complain, accurately, that matches are harder to come by for them than for women. Women, equally accurately, bemoan being inundated with overtures from aggressive men, and thus unable to find a kernel of good-guy wheat in a vast field of bad-guy chaff.

Back in 2014, a solution to this problem occurred to Whitney Wolfe Herd. So she created the app Bumble with a simple rule: Women message first. This contravened traditional dating norms, in which men make the first move, and was designed to mitigate harassment, give women more agency, and lower traditional sources of dating anxiety.

Donald Trump launched his political career by drawing a hard line on immigration, and the issue still dominates his presidency more than a decade later. In his second term he has largely secured the border with Mexico, and he sparked nationwide protests with an aggressive campaign of mass deportations.

Many of these fights have played out along predictable political lines. But other battles have created odd alliances. Today, West Texas native Carrie McKean reports on local resistance to a proposed border wall expansion that would cut through a beloved stretch of Southwestern landscape. The clash illustrates the way politics can scramble when grand policy visions crash into local realities. —The Editors

My daughter was 7 when she waded across the Rio Grande river from Texas into Mexico. At first, she’d been unsure about even touching the water; she knew the other side belonged to Mexico and that it’s illegal to enter another country without permission. She eyed a nearby park ranger, nervously wondering if he was going to reprimand her for getting too close to the water.

“Won’t I get in trouble, Mama?” she asked, glancing his way once more. I could see him smile as he watched this little girl consider her small act of rebellion.

“Go ahead and ask him,” I suggested. “Ask him if it’s okay for you to walk across the river to Mexico.”

She nervously shook her head, but he’d heard our conversation and answered anyway.

“Do you see how tall and steep those walls are?” he gestured to the massive grandeur of the Santa Elena Canyon’s walls. We were in one of Big Bend National Park’s most iconic locations, having a quintessential experience—feeling like little ants standing next to the towering, 1,500-foot rugged limestone cliffs.

“We don’t worry much about people crossing illegally here,” he went on. “There are big mountains behind those cliffs, and those cliffs are too steep and too dangerous for anyone to get over. So if someone is in the river here—even if they wade over to touch Mexico—it’s okay. We know they came from this side.”

Damian Smith couldn’t believe it when his lawyer told him last summer that he would be freed from federal prison after 16 and a half years, less than halfway through a 42-year sentence for two armed robberies he participated in as a teenager.

A judge had granted Smith’s petition for “compassionate release,” a process that gives inmates the possibility of a shorter sentence or freedom in “extraordinary and compelling” circumstances. In the past, compassionate release offered little more than false hope; the vast majority of prisoners’ requests never made it to court—and those that did were usually rejected by a judge.

That changed in 2018 after President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act, widely regarded as the most significant criminal justice reform in a generation. Among its many provisions, the law eliminated the use of “stacking”—that is, stringing together mandatory maximum sentences consecutively—for firearm possession during a violent crime. As a result, someone convicted today of exactly what put Smith behind bars in 2009 would receive a sentence less than half as long as his.

A son stabbing his mother and father to death. A young man killing his pregnant partner in their home. A nurse administering lethal injections to multiple infants. There are certain crimes, incomprehensible to the average person, that prompt the tangled moral question: Was this person insane or evil?

But it’s been a long time since one of them captured the internet’s attention in the way that Lindsay Clancy’s actions have in recent days. Three years ago, she strangled her three children to death. She does not deny it. In her trial, which began a few weeks ago and is being watched live by hundreds of thousands of people, her defense team asserts that she was so incapacitated by postpartum depression that she cannot be held accountable for murder.

Online, there has been an outpouring of support for her. Women are claiming “I could have been Lindsay Clancy,” presenting her as the innocent victim of a medical system that failed. A GoFundMe, set up by Clancy’s parents, has raised $800,000—and counting. And then there are those who claim that Clancy’s ex-husband framed her for the murders; TikTok is replete with women pointing to random details from the trial and saying it’s evidence he’s abusive, as well as videos of him doing ordinary things, overlaid with spooky music, that supposedly prove he is a psychopath. These have tens of thousands of likes.

At the same time, there has been an outpouring of disgust. Clancy has been called a “monster,” and influential people have said she “deserves to die.”

In her essay today, Kat Rosenfield argues that all these people are trying “to box up and file away an act so incomprehensibly evil that it’s virtually intolerable to look at directly, unshrouded by either the veil of compassion or the excitement of a mystery to be solved.”

But the truth here is something far, far more complicated. —The Editors

In the matter of Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, the following facts are not in dispute: that it was the evening of January 24, 2023, when she was found on the frozen ground outside her home, back broken, bleeding from wounds on her wrists and neck, which she had inflicted on herself with a knife before jumping from a second-story window. That on this same night, her children Cora, Dawson, and Callan—ages 5, 3, and 8 months, respectively—were found in the basement, strangled with exercise bands. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead at the scene; Callan died three days later after a brief hospitalization. That Clancy confessed to the killings and has been on trial since late last month, now confined to the wheelchair in which she will likely spend the rest of her life, paralyzed from her chest down by the fall.

The question before the jury is not whether she did it, but whether she was sane enough at the time to be held accountable. Prosecutors, who have argued that the killings were premeditated and coolly executed, are seeking life in prison without parole; Clancy’s defense team says that she was incapacitated by postpartum psychosis, and hence not criminally responsible.

What is in dispute, at least according to the internet, is just about everything else.

When the subject of massive media attention takes their own life, should journalists take the blame? On Friday, Jason Arday apparently died by suicide. In 2023, he gained worldwide recognition as the youngest black professor to be appointed in Cambridge’s history, having overcome, by his account, nonverbal autism as a child. Earlier this month, Arday resigned after a plagiarism scandal engulfed his career, leading to widespread coverage in both the British and international press. And according to many on social media, that reporting was directly responsible for his death.

One Instagram account named 26 journalists and columnists who had contributed to the “insanely revolting” scrutiny of Arday and to “collectively making that man feel like there is no place for him on earth.” The accompanying post requested “any information on these people, personal or professional.” There was a clear intimation of retribution, but for what? These journalists had been doing their jobs: reporting or commenting on an active story about a senior figure at an elite university who had reportedly plagiarized work and fabricated elements of his life story.

By Arday’s own account, he experienced a lot of bad luck in his life. He had tumors (some in his brain, according to his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, which I reviewed for The Times of London, and one in his testicle, according to the proposal for that book). He was randomly beaten up by four youths, leaving him with epilepsy (I could find no contemporary reports to corroborate this). He was hit by a car, and comatose for months (another story that was in the proposal but not the final text).

Unpicking the truth, or otherwise, of these claims has become a national sport over the last four weeks. Arday’s biggest piece of bad luck, though, is unquestionable. It was a gigantic misfortune for the questions about his life and career to come to prominence in the summer, when Parliament is closed in the UK and the news agenda is a vacuum. The Substack post by Nathan Cofnas that initiated Arday’s fall was published on July 21—that’s one day after a new prime minister arrived in Westminster, and two days after the World Cup final. As a country, we were desperate for something to talk about.

August 19 is just one day away. And it could be a doozy in the long history of trade disputes. At 12:01 a.m. ET on Wednesday, President Donald Trump will impose tariffs of 50 percent on nearly $20 billion (CAD$27.7 billion) of imports from Canada, unless negotiators come up with some sort of compromise before then.

Wine, dairy products, cement, swimming pools, clothing, fishing rods, and (because no Canada-U.S. trade war would be complete without them) hockey sticks are all on the tariff hit list. And unlike many of the earlier tariffs imposed by the U.S. president, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) offers no shelter. Even duty-free products under USMCA, which Trump pronounced “the best agreement we’ve ever made” when it was signed in 2020, would face the new 50 percent tariffs.

As of late Monday the negotiations were continuing, and no one outside the room (or perhaps even inside it) could discern the difference between the bluster and substance of the talks. Deal or no deal, Canada has already achieved one distinction in Trump’s global trade war: His July 20 proclamation of the tariffs made Canada the first country to be targeted by a trade weapon that had gone unused through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the rise of China, and nearly a century of trade disputes. That weapon is Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which empowers the president to declare and retaliate against “discriminations against the commerce of the United States.”

It’s Tuesday, August 18. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Aaron MacLean on the two ticking clocks that will decide the Iran war. Jacob Siegel says the U.S. and Israel are drifting apart—and that’s good. Coleman Hughes on Jason Arday and who gets anointed a black intellectual. And much more.

But first: One town’s war over America’s most-hated surveillance camera.

Move over, data centers. There’s a new third rail uniting the populist left and the don’t-tread-on-me right. It’s called the Flock camera, and it’s reading your license plate to assist with local law enforcement efforts.

Depending on your politics, the cameras are either making streets safer, or building a high-tech surveillance apparatus whose growing power is ripe for abuse. There is evidence to support both of these claims. Flock cameras have already stopped or helped solve more than 700 crimes—including 79 homicides. But the tool is not without its dangers. Police officers have been charged with or accused of illegally using Flock cameras to stalk their ex-girlfriends. And in 2023, two New Mexico women were arrested at gunpoint after a Flock camera mistook a 2 on their vehicle’s license plate for a 7.

To make sense of the war over Flock, River Page traveled to Troy, New York, a town of about 50,000 residents, where locals are fighting over a law that would restrict how Flock’s camera data can be stored and used. The mayor, who opposes the bill, sees it as a thinly veiled “pro-crime” effort to defund the police. Other residents claim they’re being spied on and have resolved to “get rid of Flock through policy or force.”

Flock, River writes, has become a totem of what these residents—and many other Americans—view as “a ruthless, anti-democratic tech industry dead set on remaking the world for its benefit by forcing AI and mass surveillance down everyone’s throats.”

In his dispatch today, River delivers the full picture. It’s a complicated story about trust and the tug of war between a politics that won’t tolerate injustice and one that won’t tolerate disorder. How much crime are we willing to endure in the name of privacy? Or, put differently, how much freedom are we willing to give up in the name of safety?

—Josh Code

For all the ink spilled over the Iran war, only two numbers truly matter, says Aaron MacLean. For one, there’s the outflow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz—which may actually be greater than we think, allowing gas prices to stabilize while Trump turns up the heat on Iran. But the second number is a countdown to January 3, 2027, when a new U.S. Congress takes office—likely a much more Democratic one—and begins to make it much harder for Trump to keep fighting. Read Aaron’s latest column on the crucial numbers squeezing Trump, and whether or not he can bring Iran to its knees before time runs out.

And don’t miss Aaron’s podcast today, School of War, with Pennsylvania senator Dave McCormick on why the right needs a better answer to socialism, lessons in modern warfare from his recent closed-door meeting with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, and why he regrets his 2002 LA Times op-ed supporting the Iraq War: “I was completely wrong.”

• Heroes actress Hayden Panettiere died Sunday at 36 after she was found unresponsive at a South Carolina apartment where she was temporarily staying. Authorities found no signs of foul play, though her cause of death is still under investigation.

• The Supreme Court declined a second time to take up Donald Trump’s bid to toss a $5 million verdict finding he sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll, rendering the judgment final. His lawyers are still fighting a separate $83.3 million he owes Carroll in a defamation case on the grounds of presidential immunity.

• Jared Kushner spent four hours on Monday urging a skeptical Benjamin Netanyahu to test whether Hamas will actually disarm per Trump’s Board of Peace plan. As the two met, the President told Fox News he wants Israel to halt its air strikes on Gaza.

• Luigi Mangione’s trial in New York state court, set for September 8, was effectively postponed by a New York judge yesterday to allow time for the prosecution to respond to Mangione’s motion to dismiss the case on double jeopardy grounds. On Friday, Mangione pleaded guilty to fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

• The House Ethics Committee announced Monday it is investigating Rep. Jimmy Gomez, a California Democrat, over allegations of sexual misconduct. Gomez admitted to “personal mistakes outside my marriage,” but maintained that all acts were consensual.

• Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 33 percent, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll—the lowest so far in his second term. Animating the disapproval is soaring gas prices caused by the Iran war, which only one in five Americans think has been worth it.

• Opening statements in the trial for the murder of Tupac Shakur began Monday, nearly 30 years after the rapper was gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip. Prosecutors called the drive-by an “act of revenge” by defendant Duane “Keffe D” Davis, claiming he incriminated himself in his own memoir.