Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, as we commemorate Memorial Day, Free Press columnist and Marine Corps veteran Aaron MacLean reflects on Herman Wouk’s World War II masterpiece “War and Remembrance,” and its unbearably human depiction of a war now increasingly confined to the history books.

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Strange young man that I was, I first encountered Herman Wouk by way of Gore Vidal, whose collected essays I purchased from the Crown Books at Springfield Mall in Northern Virginia when I was about 15. The son of a retired Army officer and a public school administrator, I had no idea who Vidal was, but it had an arresting cover with Jasper Johns’ American flags, and the essay I happened to flip to (a review of Robert Graves’ translation of Suetonius) had lots of sex. Sold.

Back at home, I turned to a stunt-essay that had run in 1973 in The New York Review of Books, in which Vidal reviewed all top 10 New York Times fiction bestsellers. The utterly cynical and nasty (and frequently funny) polemicism, implicitly in defense of Art and Language, was thrilling. His attitude toward his authors was that of a Kriegsmarine captain conducting unrestricted U-boat warfare in the waters off Nova Scotia: no prisoners.

The journalist Sean Trende spends most of his time dissecting the details of American politics. As senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, he’s normally diving into vote counts, redistricting maps, and polling crosstabs. On Friday, however, he published a very different kind of story. It’s about his oldest son, Judson, who is 18 and has profound autism. It’s a beautiful account of fatherhood, family, and why a less than perfect life is still very much worth living. We’re grateful to Sean for letting us share it with you. —The Editors

Friday was a day I’ve dreaded for over a decade. At around 6:20 a.m., we got my oldest son, Judson, up, gave him a bath, put his safety harness on (don’t worry, we dressed him first), and then watched him amble down our driveway to the school bus, as we had almost every school day since fourth grade. He went through whatever class activities he had, came to the end of the day, and got ready to ride the bus home, as he had almost every school day since fourth grade. His teachers and aides wiped their eyes, put him on the bus, and off he went, just the same as he’d done almost every school day since fourth grade.

Judson was a senior in high school. He also has profound autism. He’s 18 years old, and while he blessedly has some capacity for speech, I’ve never had what you would call a conversation with him. And I assume (though I can’t really know) that he had no clue that Friday wasn’t just any old school day like he’s had since fourth grade. Two days ago, Judson Hancock Trende had his last day of class. He got off that bus, and he’ll never get back on. When his schedule-obsessed brain prompts him to seek reassurance by asking “School tomorrow?” today, the same way he has every Sunday for well over a decade, we will have to figure out a way to let him know that, no, there’s no school tomorrow, and not the next day or the next one. Not ever.

Thirty years ago, in February 1996, Cuban MiGs over international waters off Cuba ambushed and shot down two unarmed Cessnas operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an exile-led humanitarian group that flew small civilian planes over the Florida Straits to spot rafters fleeing Cuba during and after the post-Soviet economic collapse. Four men were killed. And they were killed doing life-saving work. For Cubans crossing on inner tubes and makeshift rafts, an airborne volunteer with binoculars could mean the difference between rescue and drowning. By Brothers to the Rescue’s own account, the group flew 32 missions a week at its height and helped locate more than 17,000 people at sea.

There has been no accountability for, and little public memory of, this heinous crime. In fact, in popular culture, the main representation of the incident has it factually and morally backward. In 2020, Netflix released Wasp Network, a dishonest film about a Cuban spy ring that helped enable the killing of the four men. The fictionalization turned Cuban intelligence agents into patriotic underdogs and treated the men they killed as an inconvenient subplot, which helped cement a misleading public memory of a murder, especially among viewers too young to remember the case.

This week, 30 years after the shoot-down, the U.S. government took an important step toward setting the record straight. The Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment charging Raúl Castro and five co-defendants with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder. This indictment has been interpreted by the press as a sort of presage to future military or diplomatic action by the Trump administration in Cuba, a pretext for whatever the next dramatic turn in Trumpian foreign policy may be. But the actual substance of the indictment should not be ignored.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Joe Nocera reviews the new Steve Jobs biography, 40 years after profiling him. Jill Kargman, who skewers the Upper East Side for a living, says: “I don’t need Bellinis to be uncensored.” Kat Rosenfield was wrong about The Sheep Detectives. Kara Kennedy defends the self-professed “slut,” and now mom-to-be, Alex Cooper. And much more!

But first: The builders of the Bay Area are finding God.

If you go to a party in the Bay Area, there’s a good chance you hear AI researchers making their favorite joke: that they’re “building God.”

Very few mean it literally. They just mean that this technology could become more powerful than anything we’ve ever known. But Avital Balwit, Chief of Staff at the AI firm Anthropic, sees the joke as a reminder that, even as it works to transcend humanity, Silicon Valley has a God-shaped hole in its heart.

A lot of the people making this joke are about to become very rich—both Anthropic and OpenAI are set to go public at eye-watering valuations in the very near future—and have seen machines do things that seem miraculous. Materially, these tech workers could not be more satisfied. But spiritually, there’s an emptiness. And that’s a problem not just for them, but for all of us.

“You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied,” writes Avital. Having lived in San Francisco for four years, she found herself yearning for a religious practice. In her essay today, she explains why. Don’t miss it.

Whatever vulnerability a woman has, “there is a rabbit hole she can go down,” says Freya India, one of our new contributing writers and the author of the brand-new book Girls®, which is all about how her generation was robbed of their childhoods. Freya joined Suzy for the latest episode of Second Thought to talk about how Instagram makes girls hate themselves, how “femosphere” podcasts make women hate men, and how slowly but surely we’re all looking and sounding the same. . . .

Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the YouTube vid below. And if you want to keep up to date with everything Suzy does, don’t miss her newsletter!

Knock knock, it’s Cupid! A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet a former violinist in New York City who’s built an international career from Geneva to Hong Kong; a Shaolin kung fu blue-belt in Connecticut; or a pun-loving Angeleno who works in HR (but is more fun than Toby from The Office, he promises). 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, your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

Don’t miss Suzy Weiss’s latest investigation—into the weird, wonderful, and surprisingly controversial world of “cottage food”—and Noah Bernstein’s piece on the Enhanced Games, an Olympics-like competition taking place this weekend that allows athletes to dope. Plus: Novi Zhukovsky on whether AI just won a literary prize, and Liel Leibovitz on why the world of American podcasting is like North Korea:

Obviously, you should spend your weekend listening to The Lindbergh Conspiracies, a brand new true-crime podcast from The Free Press, about the mysterious kidnapping that has perplexed America for more than 90 years. But we also asked the host, our senior editor Joe Nocera, for some recommendations—for when you’ve finished binging his show:

📺 Watch . . . Do you miss the HBO satire Silicon Valley, which ended in 2019 after six hilarious seasons? I do—or at least I did until The Audacity popped up last month on AMC+. It is also very funny, but where Silicon Valley had a kind of sweetness at its core, The Audacity’s humor is rooted in a deep cynicism about the people who get rich peddling technology that both addicts us and strips us of our privacy. “Where’s our parade?” asks one of the show’s self-pitying billionaires. “All I see are pitchforks and ingratitude.” It’s the perfect show for us pitchfork carriers.

🎵Listen . . . The Portuguese word for mandolin is bandolim—and the greatest bandolim player in the world is a 50-year-old Brazilian musician and composer named Hamilton de Holanda. His trio’s latest album, Nova, came out earlier this week and it is a wonder: infectious, joyous, combining Brazilian rhythms with jazz-tinged improvisations. On one track, he plays with Anoushka Shankar, Ravi Shankar’s sitar-playing daughter. Also: If you live in New York, Holanda will be playing June 12 and 13 with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Not to be missed.

🎾 Sports . . . For the next two weeks, you can roll out of bed, make a cup of coffee, turn on the TV, and watch . . . tennis! The French Open starts Sunday, and I can hardly wait. Because it is played on red clay—the slowest tennis surface—it is easy to follow the ball on TV (unlike Wimbledon). And the rallies are often long and taxing, requiring a well-rounded game (again, unlike Wimbledon). Jannik Sinner, the world’s No. 1, who hasn’t lost a match since mid-February, is the favorite of course. But keep an eye out for Michael Zheng, who just graduated from Columbia University. He won his first-round match at the Australian Open, and he’s looking to better that in Paris.

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

Once upon a time, Steve Jobs told me that he didn’t like to think of himself as a businessman. Rather, he said, he thought of himself as a creative person—“a person who builds neat things.”

It was the fall of 1986, and he was reflecting on his self-identity as we were driving in his Mercedes coupe from Palo Alto to San Francisco. He was 31 years old at the time. The year before, he had lost a power struggle inside Apple and left the company. When I was assigned to profile him for Esquire magazine, he was in the process of building a new computer company, called NeXT.

I was never one of the small handful of tech reporters Jobs confided in, but for some unknown reason, he let me spend a week with him while NeXT was in start-up mode. I spoke to him late at night in his car, and in NeXT’s offices, with its $10,000 sofas and $2,200 chairs, not to mention an entrance staircase designed by I.M. Pei. I watched him brutally berate one of his executives in a meeting—and then lavish praise on that same person half an hour later. I saw him obsess over the color of the walls in the factory NeXT was building. I saw him refuse to listen to his team when they told him something he didn’t want to hear. This was the Steve Jobs I had read about when he’d been at Apple: a marketing genius who obsessed over the tiniest details, but also a brat and a bully who pushed people to the brink.

A running joke at Bay Area parties is that AI researchers are “building God.” This, of course, sounds wildly grandiose. No one I have met means it literally—nobody thinks they are making something supernatural or divine. To try to decode: The speaker is gesturing at how powerful this technology could become—even, eventually, functionally omniscient or omnipotent. They are trying to distinguish this invention from, say, social media, or even the internet. They do not mean the current model, but whatever comes after these systems start improving themselves and become far smarter than we are. They are reaching for a shorthand equal to what they expect, and I think that honesty is good for the world, whether or not the prediction holds.

From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.

AI workers tend to be less religious than the rest of the U.S. population. They are mostly lapsed in their faith, or were never religious to begin with. Perhaps they were circumcised or baptized; now they may occasionally meditate. This is, for the most part, a materialist lot—by which I mean people for whom the world is atoms and physical laws with nothing supernatural left over, and for whom morality is something worked out from intuition or from philosophy, rather than received from outside the world.

Their work is fascinating and all-consuming. Some are exhausted, and some do fear what they are making—loss of control, misuse, the economic disruption it may bring—but largely, their days are good and full. By any ordinary measure, there is little here to search for.

“One tragedy of social media is girls not seeing their unique beauty and all starting to look the same.” So says Freya India, one of our newest Free Press columnists, and the author of the brand-new book Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything. Freya has spent a lot of time thinking about what the internet, and social media, has done to girls. The answer, in short, is: nothing great. But it’s worth listening to the longer answer, which she elaborates upon in the conversation I had with her on my podcast this week.

We spoke a lot about the apps that allow you to modify your body to make it look better on the internet, as well as the endless stream of products we’re sold to make ourselves firmer, smoother, younger, and glowier. But Freya thinks it’s not just about physical upgrades—it’s our personalities too. We’re all “being dragged by that algorithm toward an eventual end product where we all become much more similar,” she said. In other words, the future is ruled by women who all, on some level, want to look like the Kardashians, who talk like the same few influencers, and who are trying to shop or medicate their way out of insecurity.

“Whatever vulnerability she has,” Freya told me about women like this, “there is a rabbit hole she can go down.”

Freya and I spoke about eating disorders, the benefit of stigmas, women’s fear of aging, men’s anxiety around their looks—and how various corners of the internet, from OnlyFans to podcasts about how men suck, have warped sex and intimacy. Somehow, she insisted that doing the research for her book didn’t make her depressed—quite the opposite. Listen below to find out why Freya, despite believing that Big Tech has hurt Gen Z women more so than the patriarchy, is hopeful:

Gabby Golden believes that God gave her the bakery, or at least the idea for it, so that she might bring in some extra income while still being able to stay home with her kids.

If so, she’s not the only one. There’s a quiet revolution sweeping America’s kitchens. Cottage foods—which is food, usually baked goods, prepared in private homes but sold to the public—have taken off. “It’s like everyone is posting ‘Hey, welcome to my home bakery,’ ” Golden told me.

Of course, producing and selling things like bread or jams from someone’s house has been around for thousands of years. But this latest cottage foods craze is animated by distinctly modern trends: side hustling to stave off inflation; skepticism of health guidelines handed down from the government; a worship of unprocessed, small-batch foods; and the on-camera appeal of removing steaming scones from the oven while toddlers and pets pad around nearby.

But lately the idyllic notion of selling chocolate chip cookies from your porch has been crashing into the reality of public health inspectors, commercial bakery owners, and legal liability. “We’re talking about food in people’s mouths,” Rachel Smith, a bakery owner in Wisconsin, told me. She told me she thinks it’s unfair for women like Golden to sell their fare with no oversight, while bakers with storefronts like her are subject to inspections, fees, and permits. Not to mention: In many states, cottage bakers don’t have to do any food-safety training. “If it’s in your kitchen, you should know how to handle it so that the end consumer is safe,” Smith added.

I spoke to cottage food producers, farmers, a public health official, and commercial bakers for my story about this trend. I learned that states have different regulations when it comes to cottage foods; there are differences in how each defines nonhazardous, for example, while various states have special carve outs for pickled foods, or tamales, or fudge. Many states have updated their books, or started doing so, to either loosen or tighten the rules around not just cottage foods but also raw milk and prepared meals. And that’s not to mention the cottage industry that’s sprung up around cottage foods: apps to keep tracks of sales and inventory, microbakery coaches, and conferences to learn about how to handle cheese safely.

On the surface, it might seem like a story about some moms selling bags of snickerdoodles to help bring in some extra cash—and in part, it is—but it gets at some of the most controversial topics in America right now. Like, who benefits from the gig economy, and who loses out? And who gets to decide what you do in your own home? This is a tale about the benefits and drawbacks, and the risk we take on, when we trade safety for more freedom.

Read my piece on cottage foods:

If you know anything about the Amish, perhaps it’s that they live life the old-fashioned way: They avoid electricity, churn their own butter, and drive horse-drawn carriages. But their new obsession is something all too new: They’ve fallen in love with AI. New York magazine went deep into the communities where TV is banned, but ChatGPT is as common as straw hats.

For a brief moment in the 2010s, Tiger Moms ruled the world. After decades of gentle parenting, moms who obsessed over their kids’ chess classes, charity work, and early SAT prep were all the rage. Now, it seems the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction: “Beta moms” are in, and they’re shrugging their way through parenthood. The Wall Street Journal heard from one mom about her 13-year-old that “she usually won’t know precisely where in Los Angeles he is.”

Last week, Canadian rapper Drake dropped not one but three new albums. The new songs are filled with pettiness, and retribution—some have speculated that even the release itself is an attempt to get out of his record deal—but, more importantly, some of them are the fun, dancy kind you will be hearing nonstop. As my Gen Z colleague put it this week: You know it’s gonna be a good summer when it starts with a Drake album. Luckily for us, we have three.

Our favorite polymath Andrew Ross Sorkin sat down with Jeff Bezos for an interview at the Florida Rocket Park factory of Blue Origin, Bezos’s space company. The conversation is full of juicy takeaways about everything from data centers in space to the future of tax policy. Jeff’s views on the AI economy are beyond optimistic: “You’ve been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel. And somebody’s about to hand you a bulldozer. You should be so happy!” Here’s hoping!

Last week, University of Cambridge student Maeve Halligan delivered a speech at the Cambridge Union in support of the motion, “This House Believes Modern LGBTQ+ Activism Fails Its Community.” According to Maeve, a movement built to protect gay and lesbian people has not only abandoned them by shifting its focus toward trans ideology, but is now actively harming vulnerable children by pushing them toward irreversible medical procedures.

The subject is one of the most fraught of our time—and it is one we’ve covered extensively in our pages, from Jonni Skinner’s firsthand account of the permanent damage done to him by youth gender transition to Jamie Reed’s whistleblower account from inside a pediatric gender clinic. After years in which many institutions treated skepticism of gender medicine as heresy, more voices have gradually begun challenging that consensus. Maeve’s is one of them. Below is an edited version of her remarks. —The Editors

Somewhere along the way, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem. 

The original struggle for gay and lesbian rights was not misguided. Progress has been made. But the activist movement that was built to protect those same people has, in significant and measurable ways, abandoned them. And those paying the highest price for that abandonment are, increasingly, also, children. 

After founding the Cambridge University Society of Women—the only single-sex women’s organization at Cambridge, advocating women’s sex-based rights—I have been shouted at in the street, dubbed a fascist, spat at, insulted for my appearance, and contacted online with rape and death threats. You want to talk about hatred? I can tell you all about it: A woman trying to assert her sex-based rights gets abused for doing so. This is one of the many predictable consequences of LGBTQ+ activism—a movement that has lost its way.

“I’m sure I have bad bones. I’m sure I have, like, wafer bird bones. But I don’t like protein and I don’t lift weights,” Jill Kargman tells me. “My doctor literally called me skinny fat, and said if you trace me naked, on a paper, it would look healthy, but I have 26 BMI, which is bad.”

The 51-year-old writer and actress—who’s known for her Bravo scripted series Odd Mom Out and the dozen books she’s written—says she doesn’t “really give a shit” and just wants to look good in clothes. But she has to start caring, “or I’m gonna fall down the stairs and Ivana Trump myself—except she was murdered.”

Oh?

“Someone told me she died three months before her NDA expired,” she says, taking a sip from her Bellini.

Jill and I are at Amaranth, an Upper East Side staple just off Madison Avenue. It’s the type of place chock-full of the women Jill skewers in her new movie, Influenced: the over-Botoxed, overfilled, Ozempic-loving lunch bunch with Cartier stacks and Birkins dripping off their arms. (The $39 chicken paillard is five stars, though.)

Jill cowrote and stars in the movie as Dzanielle, a momfluencer chasing one million followers, whose son at one point asks, “Mom, how come we don’t have any poor friends?”

The year was 1985; the setting, a drive-in theater in upstate New York. The movie on the screen was Steven Spielberg’s E.T., and we had come to the moment—you know the one—where E.T. says goodbye. He places his glowing finger on Elliott’s heart; he croaks, “I’ll be right here”; he ascends to the vessel where his friends are waiting to welcome him home. The music swells, and the spaceship looks like a jewel as it soars away into the night sky, and I—three years old, wearing footed pajamas, high on sugar and the thrill of still being awake hours after my usual bedtime—had never seen anything so cool. The alien! The spaceship! The action! The adventure!

It was just too bad that my parents clearly hadn’t enjoyed the movie very much, seeing as they were both crying.

Such is the magic of the family film: It can move adults of all ages, while delighting any children they may or may not be chaperoning.