The Free Press

When news broke on Friday that the disgraced academic Jason Arday had been found dead at home in London, after being accused of plagiarizing much of his work and lying about all manner of biographical details in his recent memoir, there were those on the left who leapt to blame racism.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan immediately posted on X that “Jason Arday was the victim of a pernicious public shaming that other people in his position simply wouldn’t have faced.”

“If Jason Arday were a white middle-class academic,” wrote left-wing Member of Parliament Zarah Sultana, “he would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was.”

Most deranged of all was Ibram X. Kendi, the prolific purveyor of “antiracism” who rose to fame during the racial reckoning of 2020. “The attacks are wielded by racist propagandists, resenting you for shining a light on anti-Black racism,” he wrote, addressing the deceased professor directly, in an essay titled “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.”

This is manifestly, sinisterly untrue. Firstly, because there have been plenty of “white middle-class academics” who have been hounded from their jobs. Kathleen Stock was bullied out of the University of Sussex over her views about gender. Sir Tim Hunt was subject to the most brutal kind of online backlash, after making one perhaps off-color joke about women, prompting him to resign from his position as honorary professor at University College London. Neither received the kind of sympathy now being accorded to Arday.

Over the weekend, Hawaii was lashed by Hurricane Lala, which has washed away homes, left more than 125,000 people without power, shut down two of the state’s busiest airports, threatened dangerous flash flooding and, at time of writing, has killed one person.

What if we could’ve steered the storm away from Hawaii, into the vast expanse of the empty Pacific Ocean that lies all around the islands—where no one could get hurt?

This scenario might sound like the stuff of science fiction. But earlier this year, a peer-reviewed study published by the Public Library of Science found that it might be possible, and sooner than we think. The study was titled: “Weather Jiu-Jitsu: Prospects for Atmospheric Nudging to Defuse the Impact of Catastrophic Weather Extremes.”

According to the paper, the controversial practice of cloud seeding could enable human beings to make hurricanes change direction. The potential results could be astounding: The authors suggested that Hurricane Sandy, which in New York City alone killed 44 people and caused $19 billion of damage in 2012, could’ve been diverted by 200 miles, missing the metropolis entirely.

Cloud seeding, which first succeeded in the U.S. in 1946, is a practice whereby small particles—for example, dry ice, silver iodide, or salt—are dropped into clouds, causing moisture to condense into precipitation. In the 1960s, the U.S. government launched Project Stormfury, an experiment that saw Navy pilots flying into the heart of a hurricane, dodging winds over a hundred miles per hour, to cloud-seed inside it, in the hope of reducing the storm’s power. “The seeding,” the theory went, “would stimulate the formation of a new eyewall that would surround the existing eyewall. The new eyewall would contract, strangling the old eyewall and reducing the intensity of the hurricane.”

Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty in federal court on Friday, admitting that he shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of Manhattan on December 4, 2024. The murder was astonishingly brazen. In case anyone has forgotten, Mangione followed Thompson, shot him from behind at point-blank range, then fled the scene, only to be caught in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s five days later.

Technically, while Mangione admitted stalking resulting in the death of Thompson, he did not plead guilty to killing him, because that was not the charge he faced in federal court. (There were murder charges in the original federal indictment, but those charges were dismissed on technical grounds back in January.) Instead, Mangione pleaded guilty to “stalking” Thompson with the intent of killing him.

We don’t know yet what sentence Mangione will receive. What we do know is that Mangione’s New York state court murder trial is set to begin on September 8. The timing of the surprise federal guilty plea strongly suggests that Mangione’s lawyers intend to argue that the state trial is now barred by double jeopardy, and according to some reports, they have already filed motion papers on this basis seeking dismissal of the state charges. “One plus one is two,” Mangione told reporters last February. “This is double jeopardy by any common-sense definition.”

It’s a little complicated, but I think this argument is a loser. But first, let’s pause to consider what effect yesterday’s plea will have on Mangione’s fawning supporters.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss on the rise of “leg hair harassment.” Kat Rosenfield on a helicopter parent’s worst nightmare. Amanda Knox on a chatbot’s false confession. Rafaela Siewert sits down with a Brooklyn DJ who’s on Vladimir Putin’s most-wanted list. And more!

But first: The truth about the plastic surgery backlash.

On social media, there’s a new trend: Women are talking about removing their breast implants, dissolving their filler, undoing their plastic surgery. They’re talking about what the pursuit of beauty cost them: One describes blood and pus “actually pouring out of a hole in my ass” after getting butt filler; another recalls her “nightmare” appointment getting chin filler. Meanwhile, capitalism is catching up: Clinics are advertising “buccal fat restoration” to reverse the procedure of sucking fat out of the cheeks—which, until recently, was all the rage.

When I texted our columnist Freya India about this trend, asking her to write about it, I thought she’d be over the moon. After all, earlier this year she published a book in which she argued that social media had made a generation of girls believe they had to inject their faces with toxins in order to look okay—and called on women to rebel against this idea.

Had the resistance begun?

But a couple of days into her reporting, Freya texted to say this wasn’t a story about women seeing the light and realizing they’re fine the way they are. It was something much darker. A lot of the women she spoke to, or watched online, said they’d had awful experiences with implants or injectables or unnecessary surgery—but they were still considering going back for more.

“There’s a part of me that is still interested in the idea of looking young and beautiful longer,” one 29-year-old told Freya, even though her face had swelled up so much after getting Botox that she could barely see, and was left “angry,” “scared,” and “extremely insecure.”

It disturbed Freya that all these women were anxious to sound nonjudgmental, saying things like “I’m not here to judge,” or, as one TikToker put it: “I think everybody is obviously entitled to do what they want with their bodies.” This is a woman who experienced digestive issues and breathing problems after getting breast implants. (Last week, an NYPD officer died in the Dominican Republic after suffering complications from her removal.)

“I met many young women brave enough to risk it all for beauty,” writes Freya, “but not one brave enough to say this to others: Don’t do it.” —Freya Sanders

Brad Pitt is drinking again—and Suzy Weiss is not surprised. “He has a movie coming out where his co-star is a German shepherd,” she points out. It’s enough to ruin anyone’s sobriety. In the latest episode of Second Thought, Suzy and her co-host Dan Ahdoot get into the actor’s apparent existential crisis, plus the rise of “leg hair harassment” in Japan, and a new movie about sex in which all the sex scenes were cut—because apparently Gen Z doesn’t like seeing actors in the nude. . .

Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch below. (And to keep up with everything Suzy does, don’t miss her newsletter!)

This week, Arthur Brooks admitted, “I’d literally rather electrocute myself” than take all of August off, like his Spanish wife is wont to do. Also, Christina Buttons wrote about why she went “no contact” with her parents, and Kara Kennedy spoke to the young people who think dating apps suck—but, instead of giving up, are trying something new:

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a youth circus rigger; a surfer bro in Sin City; or an Italian architect. Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our editor Rick Brooks for his recommendations…

📚Read . . . Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen. Whether you love or hate bicycles, Rosen’s book is a lively exploration of both extremes, plus everything in the middle, going all the way back to the invention of the first prototype more than 200 years ago. If you are a hater of Citi Bike and the people who use it, the “disgrace and odium of Dandyism” that spoiled the velocipede, as one writer put it in 1819, will sound familiar. What I enjoyed most are Rosen’s stories from places like Dhaka, Bangladesh, the three-wheeled, pedal-driven rickshaw capital of the world.

(Speaking of books: On August 24, we’re kicking off our new Free Press Book Club with East of Eden! Sign up for email updates here, and follow along on The Free Press Forum.)

🎵Listen . . . to the album How the West Was Swung by Tommy Morrell and the Time Warp Tophands. Shout-out to Natalie Weiner, whose Don’t Rock the Inbox online newsletter (which I have recommended before) recently mentioned the revival of the pedal steel guitar, which bends musical notes like a fun house mirror, and who gushes about Morrell, who played his pedal steel with everyone from the Texas Playboys to Talking Heads. Morrell died in 2007, but his Western swing lives on in How the West Was Swung. The album has 15 volumes! Choose one and press play.

🦐Eat . . . Calabash shrimp. Anyone who grew up in North Carolina or drove hundreds of miles for a week’s vacation at a beach house there can tell you about their favorite spot for catching this mainstay of summertime dining. Lightly battered and fried shrimp, crisp and hot, is piled on a Styrofoam plate next to hush puppies, and washed down with ice-cold beer, preferably cheap. This weekend, I’ll be back at the North Carolina beach for the first time in forever—and looking for Calabash shrimp. The next time this craving strikes while I’m far away, I’ll reach for this recipe from Our State magazine. Give it a try before summer ends.

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.

At the age of 26, Sierra spent weeks with a drooping eye, crying multiple times a day, unable to work or drive, ashamed to go out in public. One night, she walked through California’s Coachella Valley in 100-degree heat in a sweater; she was trying to sweat out the Botox that had been injected into her face. Her eyes were closing more and more every day, until she couldn’t keep them open anymore. Online, she would scroll through stories of women who had the same side effect, known as eyelid ptosis, which affects up to 5 percent of people who get this kind of treatment, and is temporary; some claimed that their faces never went back to normal. Sierra’s face eventually recovered, after two agonizing months of her feeling “angry,” “scared,” and “extremely insecure.”

But when I asked Sierra, now 29, if she would get Botox again someday, she didn’t rule it out. “There’s a part of me that is still interested in the idea of looking young and beautiful longer,” she said. “I compare myself to other women online who have great skin with no fine lines or wrinkles.” The problem, in her mind, wasn’t the Botox, but the context in which she got it. “If I ever did get it again, I would spend lots of time doing research on the best places to go.”

For the past two years, as research for my book GIRLS®, I’ve been looking into the onslaught of beauty routines, skin-care videos, and surgery ads young women see online, and the effect it has on them. But recently there have been signs that some women have had enough: They are removing their breast implants, dissolving their lip filler, and stopping Botox injections. There has been a spike in breast implant removal, and in dermal filler reversals. Influencers are beginning to undo their “Instagram face,” with some vlogging the process for their viewers. Now even the market seems to be responding: One clinic in San Diego advertises “buccal fat restoration” to reverse the once-trendy procedure of sucking fat out of the cheeks.

“If I ever did get it again, I would spend lots of time doing research on the best places to go,” Sierra, 29, said of her plastic surgery.

Some stories are horrifying. Online, women tell them calmly, casually, often while doing their makeup and getting ready for the day. In one TikTok, a woman describes developing sepsis after getting butt filler: She says she began vomiting blood, ended up in a hospital for two weeks, and, soon after being discharged, looked down to see blood and pus “actually pouring out of a hole in my ass.” Others describe their implants rupturing and leaking into their body, or giving them symptoms of what some call “Breast Implant Illness,” like chronic fatigue and hair loss.

But when I started researching this story, I was surprised to find that some of the women I watched on social media, or interviewed—women who had had experiences so painful and traumatic that their implants had to be removed, or their filler dissolved—were considering going back for more. They say they would risk these procedures again, or it’s obvious from their social media feeds that they continue to have work done. One woman describes her “nightmare” appointment getting Botox and chin filler—passing out immediately and suffering a drooping eye for a “long time”—before telling viewers that although she hasn’t had filler since, she has a “new injector” now.

Egor Cherniuk doesn’t always feel like a liberal—even though he’s so passionate about liberalism that he’s been to prison on its behalf.

“By Russian standards, I’m as lib as one can get,” says the 28-year-old. “I’m against the war. I’m pro-Western values.”

He was also the youngest campaign manager for the face of Russia’s democracy movement, Alexei Navalny, whose fight against Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship ended only when he died in a gulag in 2024.

But in the context of Brooklyn, where Cherniuk has lived since 2025, he doesn’t identify with the tear-it-all-down, fuck-America libs.

“Russian liberalism is a more classic liberalism; we care about building institutions that allow for freedom to thrive in a society,” he explains. “And so, as an activist, to bicker about pronouns when you don’t have a free press or when you don’t even have independent courts sounds so fucking ridiculous.”

“Three years ago, premarital sex was outlawed in the United States except for one night a year.”

The premise of the new rom-com One Night Only could not be clearer—it flashes on-screen at the beginning of the movie—and yet, it begs about a million questions, none of which are answered. If you ignore this, plus most of the acting and the gratuitous product placement, it’s actually not a bad film. It’s the perfect plane movie.

Set in New York City, One Night Only, follows Owen—an unreasonably handsome pizza maker played by Dua Lipa’s new husband, also known as Callum Turner—and Allie, a stage-shy singer played by Monica Barbaro (who was the Joan Baez to Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown). Two people you might want to see naked, but apparently, they took out all the sex scenes in post-production because focus groups kept insisting that young people these days do not want to see too much bare skin—unlike millennial moms, who can’t get enough of all the horny hockey shows coming out.

Anyway, Owen is planning on proposing to his girlfriend, who reveals to him, over an omakase dinner, with couples practically copulating at tables all around them, that she’s planning on sleeping with their neighbor that night instead of him. Allie finds herself once again single on this fateful evening, shimmying into a silky dress to meet a friend at a bar with a hope of getting lucky. The random no-sex law may sound dystopian, but it dawned on me: They didn’t need to invent a weird transhumanist holiday! This is just New Year’s Eve for single people!

Allie and Owen keep meeting, as the night devolves, as they both hunt for The One: at the police station, his pizza shop, a lighthouse. This is a New York City in which one might travel to The Bronx, deep Brooklyn, the West Village, Chinatown, and the Hudson River, all in one night—also dubious.

“I know I just met the guy, but I actually think he could be someone special,” Allie reports to Owen, as they fight over the last condom in a bodega. (Part of the rules of the one-night-only is that, legally, you must use protection.) “What does he get on his pizza?” Owen shoots back. “If you have a real connection with someone, you know what kind of pizza they like.”

This is what counts for witty back-and-forth dialogue in a rom-com nowadays. But at least these two have chemistry (don’t compare this to the Mount Rushmore of rom-coms—Pretty Woman, When Harry Met Sally . . ., Notting Hill, and Annie Hall) while trying to connect.

What’s this movie trying to say? Is it that having an oppressive government that curtails carnal pleasure might actually help people find true love? Is it a warning about what might happen if we allow a full transhumanist surveillance state to take over, since the sex prohibition is monitored through biological trackers implanted in everyone’s skin? Who knows?! The movie isn’t political, and isn’t trying to make a point about the culture wars. But my theater was full of laughs, gasps, and a few approving “yups!”

I’m all for fun films about hot people, of which there have been very few in the last few years. One Night Only was like a much dumber version of Valentine’s Day, or He’s Just Not That Into You, movies from 2010 and 2009 respectively, which were stuffed full of beautiful people, cheap jokes, and the kind of storylines it’s best not to think too hard about. This was a pale shade of a great genre that should not be left to wither. At the very least, I left the theater with a smile.

Nearly half of Americans ages 30 to 49 have at least one tattoo. Kids’ names on biceps, religious iconography on a pec, a flower on a shoulder blade, and if you’re in Denver, a geometric design on a calf: All these have become socially acceptable. But there’s one category that still inspires double takes, and that’s face tattoos.

Often called “job stoppers,” face tattoos are one of the last taboos; in a world where you can wear whatever you like, dye your hair weird colors, and proudly discuss your kinks, a face tattoo still inspires strangers to ask, “What the hell were you thinking?”

That’s according to the tattoo enthusiasts and artists who I spoke to for a story about face ink in South Carolina, the only state where they’re illegal—a status quo that’s being challenged by a new lawsuit that argues the prohibition is a violation of the First Amendment.

But even if they win the right to get a face tattoo, should the good people of South Carolina exercise it? Tyler Hall, a religious tattoo artist with “seven or eight” face tattoos tells me: Yes, if you pray to God first. Another South Carolinian, Sampson Stanko, describes the process of getting his face tattoos removed like “a scary movie,” and wants to kick his younger self.

Read my piece on the legality and history of inking your own face in the Bible Belt:

Brad Pitt is drinking again, and to him I say: Go for it! But for the female celebrities, like Reese Witherspoon, who are dating finance bros, I have a question: If even the junior analysts are dating supermodels and pop stars, who’s left for the rest of us?

I talk about all this, and more, in the latest episode of Second Thought, with my co-host Dan Ahdoot. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the video here:

The Japanese government announced that men will now be allowed to wear shorts in the office for the first time. The decision was targeted at making office life more appealing, while also cutting down on air-conditioning to preserve energy. They say it’s part of Japan’s “Cool Biz” initiative, but apparently a lot of women have complained about being able to see their male co-workers’ hairy legs. I was sympathetic, until I found out the average thermostat in Tokyo is set to 80 degrees.

My colleague Maya Sulkin dug into how Gen Z employees are taking advantage of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to disappear for weeks on end—often with pay. For some people she spoke to, it was a lifesaver—one person was able to care for their sick parents—but for others, it meant skipping off to Bali and becoming an influencer. Is FMLA just another modern-day benefit, or a sign that Gen Z can’t hack work?

If you’ve looked at a red carpet lately, you’ll know that celebrities are skinnier than ever. A couple years ago, that might’ve been just because of Ozempic—but today, there’s a whole new class of drugs that celebs and other elites are shooting up to look and feel their best. They’re called peptides, and they’re getting more and more popular. This week, Tablet’s Adam Lehrer explains which ones might change your life.

This has been Second Thought, my weekly newsletter about popular—and unpopular—culture. You can sign up here!

Three adolescent boys are gathered in a ramshackle tree house—the kind you might have built yourself as a kid, if you were born before 1990, using scrap wood and a bucket of nails; the kind that would get you an unpleasant visit from your homeowners association were your own kids to attempt the same thing today.

This, the opening scene of Rob Reiner’s film Stand by Me, is the first indication that this story takes place in a very different time; the second, in case you missed the first, is that the boys are smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and listening to Bobby Day on a transistor radio. But this is only the setup for a punch line that arrives moments later, as another boy bursts into the tree house with a breathless question that will alter the trajectory of the rest of their lives:

“You guys want to go see a dead body?”

The answer, obviously, is yes.

It’s Friday, August 14. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Suzy Weiss on the First Amendment war over face tattoos. Tyler Cowen on how Donald Trump’s immigration stance puts conservative values at risk. And much more.

But first: how Caitlin Clark became a culture war piñata.

I’ve been watching the WNBA for a couple of decades now, going back to Rebecca Lobo and Lisa Leslie, to the more recent era of Tamika Catchings and Diana Taurasi. They were all great players, but there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard of them, even if you’re a sports fan. Only die-hard women’s basketball fans watched the WNBA, and there weren’t very many of us.

But three years ago Caitlin Clark, with her amazing long-range shots and gorgeous blind passes, joined the league and became its first breakout superstar. On the one hand, her astonishing popularity has done wonders for the WNBA, bringing with it higher player salaries, a $200 million TV deal, and a status quo in which teams fly on private jets instead of commercial flights.

On the other hand, her popularity has had a dark side. The heightened scrutiny of Clark, her team, and the league has led to culture war after culture war in the WNBA—an organization that was woke before people used the term woke.

Clark’s popularity, in a majority-black sport, has led to accusations of racism. Her teammate Sophie Cunningham has been dragged for saying it’s “common sense” to exclude trans women from the league. Two former NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, have declared that they’ve decided they are women and plan to offer themselves up in the draft—a stunt apparently designed to expose the WNBA’s hypocrisy on the trans issue. Though a WNBA task force met this week to come up with a definition for woman, the meeting ended, astonishingly, with no decision.

I spent some time this week trying to learn whether the WNBA would be able to get past its culture war controversies—or whether the controversies would do it serious damage. Read my story to see where I came out.

—Joe Nocera

As the whole internet now knows, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at the age of 36, is freezing her eggs. She shared her decision on social media in the hope that it would “normalize” the process. But Caitlin Flanagan, in her latest essay, argues that if we’re raising awareness of egg freezing, we should raise awareness of its success rates. “The truth is that many, many times, egg freezing can lead to heartbreak because it’s hardly foolproof, or even a likely way to get pregnant.”

Critics accused AOC of putting career ahead of starting a family—the latest pile-on to prove that the cultural tide has turned against the girlboss. To make sense of the backlash, Rafaela Siewert interviewed sex researcher Dr. Debra Soh. Don’t miss their conversation on AOC’s gambit to have it all, why more women are choosing to become single moms, and why America just can’t quit its trad wife obsession.

Meanwhile, Zoomers who leave their love lives to the optimizing forces of the algorithm are finding themselves worse off. This week, Kara Kennedy reported on the young people who are fed up with dating apps—and the dreamers reinventing romance for a post-app world. Meet the AI matchmakers, the “dating doc” writers, and the people stapling personal ads to telephone poles.

A blockbuster from Rupa Subramanya dropped this week: her investigation into the Virginia high school where antisemitic bullying, allegedly mostly by Muslim boys, went unpunished by administrators—until the state attorney general’s office stepped in. Rupa’s story caught the attention of Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, who posted on X, “This is concerning. We are looking into it.”

Finally, New York magazine’s most recent cover story christened the Big Apple “Habibi City,” celebrating a community of Middle Easterners “flexing their cultural clout.” Not so fast, writes Liel Leibovitz—himself a Middle Eastern immigrant—who sees something darker afoot than vapid ethno-narcissism. Habibi City, he argues, sees itself as an “oppositional force, here to fight against all of America’s many transgressions, with the goal being the remaking of America in their own image.”

When Tyler Hall finished his tattoo artist apprenticeship in 2012, he got a massive torch inked onto the side of his face. It was his way of “giving thanks to the tattoo industry,” Hall, 34, told me. “It was my dedication. This is where I’m staying, and this is what I love. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

It was not Hall’s first face tattoo. That would be the umbrella under his right eye, which he got a few months before the torch, to “symbolize protection against obstacles in life.” There’s also the script Never Again, over his brow, lyrics borrowed from a song he loved as a teen. Also: a crescent moon, the word restless on his cheek, for his children and wife, and a long-stemmed rose under it, in honor of his youngest daughter, whose middle name is Rose.

All told, “I’ve got about seven or eight face tattoos right now,” he said. Does he have plans to get more face tattoos? “Not necessarily,” he said. “But you never know.”

Hall tells me his face tattoos act as a “bold statement of individual expression,” and that he enjoys the big reactions they get; sometimes it’s judgment by strangers turned off by them—and by extension by him—and sometimes it’s people who “are shocked to realize behind the rough exterior is a kind, God-fearing soul.”

But because Hall works in Clover, South Carolina—he’s a contractor at The Local Tattoo Studio—he may never know the satisfaction of inking another man’s forehead. That’s because he is subject to his state’s very strict and specific laws concerning where (geographically and dermatologically) you can get a tattoo. South Carolina officially legalized tattoos in 2004, but the law stipulates that a tattoo shop can’t be within 1,000 feet of a playground, a church, or a school—and bars tattoo artists anywhere in the state from inking anything above a client’s shoulders. The penalty for breaking the law, which falls on the artist, goes up to a $2,500 fine or one year in prison, or both.

Hall tells me he has to turn down clients “all the time” who come in requesting a tattoo on their head, face, or neck. “We’re turning money away.” He advises these clients to drive the few miles to nearby North Carolina to get the job done—which is exactly what he did to procure his beloved face tattoos. “There’s a clientele that has to go across state lines just for them to be able to express their First Amendment.”

Now, South Carolina’s draconian tattoo restrictions are being challenged, on constitutional grounds, by a lawsuit filed last month. The plaintiffs are two South Carolina residents who say they’d like to get more tattoos, plus a New York City-based tattoo shop, Tiny Zaps, which wants to do business in the state, and says its laws prevent them from doing so.