The Free Press

As an expatriate in Barcelona during my mid-20s, I found many parts of life hard to understand—from eating supper at 11 p.m. to finding all the stores closed for three hours in the middle of every afternoon. But what baffled me the most was Spaniards’ sheer excellence at taking their vacation. Most of them abandoned any productive activity for the entire month of August, venturing off to the seaside or the mountains, and doing. . . well, nothing. And after this annual month of indolence, they returned victorious, radiating a deep peace. They were idleness grand masters, boredom virtuosos.

A very few years later, I would marry a Spaniard, learn both Spanish and Catalan, and adjust to the dietary routines and opening hours of my adopted country. But I never quite mastered the August vacation. Year after year, I tried to join with my wife either lounging on a Balearic beach or gazing at the mountains in a Pyrenean village. Inevitably, after about the first week, I wound up begging my wife to cut our monthlong vacation short—so that, for the love of God, I could do something.

Decades later, now living back in the U.S., I begrudgingly take brief annual vacations, but I assiduously avoid August trips to the Iberian vacation nothing-box. Lest you think I am weird (as she does), please note that I simply resemble most Americans, 55 percent of whom choose not even to use all their vacation days.

What explains this transatlantic cultural difference—both in general and in my marriage specifically? And who has the vacation thing right? Naturally, in answering those questions, I will seek to offer a completely impartial judgment.

It’s Monday, August 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The transformation of the Democratic Party. Russ Greene on the return of the suburban dream. Liz Wolfe on Montessori gone wrong. And much more.

But first: The celebrity-backed nonprofit facing scrutiny for terror ties.

For nearly 40 years, a Bay Area charity called the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) has been one of the most high-profile backers of the Palestinian cause. The charity itself has also had high-profile backers, including luminaries from Hollywood, academia, and beyond.

MECA says it spends its money solely on schools, scholarships, water projects, and medicine. But were the donations it sends from progressive Americans to the Middle East in fact channeled to terror-linked groups? And is the charity partnered with groups aligned with hostile actors?

Those are the questions being investigated by Washington, and the subject of Jay Solomon’s latest report for The Free Press.

—The Editors

The year 2026 is proving to be pivotal for the Democratic Party. In primary after primary, voters are picking candidates further and further to the left. Nearly a third of Democrats now identify as democratic socialists, backing policies like Medicare for All, free college, and ending U.S. military aid to Israel. The party is changing fast, and today, we have two conversations to help make sense of where it’s heading.

First, Coleman Hughes sits down with Rep. Ro Khanna on the latest episode of Conversations with Coleman. Khanna hails from the party’s progressive wing and has distinguished himself as one of the Democratic Party’s loudest critics of Israel, and last month went viral after claiming he was detained by Israeli settlers and the IDF in the West Bank. Coleman presses the Silicon Valley congressman on his claim that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, his theory of progressive capitalism, and whether Democrats can actually deliver for the working class they keep promising to fight for. This is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

Then, for a view from inside the DSA itself: Jake Altman joined the organization in 2013, when it was a coalition of middle-aged social democrats. By the time he left in 2022, it had become something unrecognizable. Altman wrote about his experience in our pages a few weeks ago, and today joins Maya Sulkin on the latest episode of Confessions to dive deeper, discussing what he saw from the inside and why the Democratic establishment still doesn’t understand what it’s up against.

• Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected on Sunday a U.S.-backed plan to disarm Hamas, saying Israel would not cede any territory until the militant group gave up its weapons. “We are talking about real disarmament,” he said. The move marks a significant break with President Donald Trump, who celebrated the agreement as a major breakthrough when it was announced. (For more on whether Hamas will ever really disarm, read Michael Oren’s analysis.)

• The Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general Saturday in a 50–49 vote, making Trump’s former personal defense lawyer the nation’s top law enforcement officer. Two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, crossed party lines to oppose Blanche over concerns about the Justice Department’s independence under his leadership.

• Former president Joe Biden’s prostate cancer has spread to his bones, his son Hunter Biden revealed late Friday in an interview, saying the condition is taking a serious toll. “I wish he would complain more, because it’s not good,” Hunter said, adding that despite the “very painful” and “very debilitating” consequences of his father’s cancer, the former president remains publicly engaged and “still doing his thing.”

• The father of a 14-year-old student who opened fire at a school outside Bangkok apologized on Sunday “to all the families.” At least eight people died from Friday’s attack, including the shooter’s grandparents, while 23 were wounded, most between the ages of 12 and 14. The shooter took his own life.

• Chicago Sky guard DiJonai Carrington was ejected from a WNBA game on Saturday after hitting the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham in the head during a layup. Carrington then posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” on social media and tagged the Fever. Cunningham called the foul intentional and said race had nothing to do with it. (Read Kat Rosenfield on why Cunningham’s refusal to back down from controversy this season represents a cultural turning point.)

• A woman and an infant were killed when a boat overturned in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty on Saturday night, and a dozen people were rescued from the water. The captain was arrested Sunday on charges of reckless endangerment.

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Russia plans to send up to 50,000 North Korean troops into the four-year war. He also said Ukrainian forces had recovered North Korean missiles on Ukrainian soil and urged South Korea to step up military cooperation, particularly on air defense.

• Italian divers discovered a 2,100-year-old Roman shipwreck off the coast of Sicily, packed with hundreds of remarkably preserved clay jars. Italy’s culture minister called it “one of the most important underwater archaeological discoveries of recent years.” The wreck was found after a tip from local fishermen who spotted something unusual on their sonar.

When Jake Altman joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 2013, it was, in his telling, a coalition of middle-aged social democrats. By the time he left in 2022, the DSA had transformed into a revolutionary organization. Now, it wields tremendous power in Democratic politics.

Part of that shift has to do with changing demographics. In 1991, t…

Every Democrat weighing a run for president in 2028 is going to claim they understand the working class. Ro Khanna’s pitch is that he actually grew up watching it disappear. He represents Silicon Valley in Congress, but the place he talks about most is his home state of Pennsylvania. That’s where the steel mills and auto plants shut down one by one whil…

In early March, around 300 people gathered at an artistic sanctuary in Berkeley, sang revolutionary songs and chants, and celebrated the life of a northern California legend and political activist, Barbara Lubin. For more than four decades, until her death at 84, the energetic Philadelphia native was a liberal firebrand who led the fight on rent control, championed climate issues, and rallied for the educational rights of disabled children, like her son, Charlie. Along the way, she enlisted a long list of luminaries from Hollywood, folk music, academia, and literature, including Edward Said, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker.

No issue, though, enraged Lubin more than the fate of the Palestinians. As a mother and a Jew, she would say, it was her responsibility to expose the crimes of the state of Israel. “Fuck Zionism,” she told an interviewer once. In 1988, she built a charity, the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), to send aid to the Palestinian territories.

MECA became a mainstay among other radical Bay Area groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which were founded in Berkeley in the 1990s. “These brave formations have shown the country that we can proudly stand up for an end to the genocide in Gaza and loudly call for a free Palestine,” Angela Davis, the communist philosopher and cultural icon, said at Lubin’s memorial. “So there’s not nearly enough time to praise Barbara and her organizing and her community building.”

Since MECA’s launch, the charity says it has channeled more than $50 million into schools, medical clinics, playgrounds, and libraries in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Lubin and her staff led regular delegations to the West Bank and Gaza and sponsored political rallies and cultural events to promote solidarity with Palestinians, including immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on southern Israel.

A few days ago, I set my 3.5-year-old son up with some cucumbers, an Opinel knife, some fish sauce, some vinegar, and a bowl. We had friends over, and I was searing Korean short ribs. Figure it out, buddy.

The cucumbers were not evenly sliced, and he was overzealous with the fish sauce, but it worked well enough as a side dish, saving me five minutes of time. It wasn’t busy work; I really needed my time freed up, and I judged him capable-ish of handling the responsibility. My hope was not that the task would be done perfectly but that the salad would not be dressed with blood. Success.

We do this with laundry: I sometimes ask him to load the washer. And with clothing: He has a child-size wardrobe and small hangers, and I throw his clean laundry on the bed, asking him to hang it up. It ends up looking less orderly than when I do it, but I don’t mind if it saves me time and teaches him responsibility. He sets the table (poorly!) and uses a small vacuum to attack clumps of dog hair before we host friends for dinner. Amazon packages are his magnum opus—he gets that Opinel knife out and stabs them as soon as they come.

Politicians these days cannot stop talking about “affordability,” especially for housing. And Americans’ cries for relief have grown loud enough to push lawmakers from babbling into action. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law last month with overwhelming bipartisan support within Congress. It’s encouraging to see members of both parties coming together around something other than just spending more money—and doing so in a way that helps the young more than the old.

In fact, young people are supplying most of the pressure behind this political movement. A Pew Research poll last month found that 89 percent believe buying a home will be harder for them than it was for their parents’ generation.

And it isn’t just the homes themselves. Americans still believe the American dream is worth striving for, yet less than half believe that every American has the opportunity to achieve it. Many young people are trying to find their way toward a lifestyle their parents had that they took for granted and now feel they cannot reach as adults. That includes owning a home, having a good-paying job with benefits, and being able to afford some added comforts in addition to the necessities. In a word, suburbia.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss on Ariana Grande’s disturbing turn. Liel Leibovitz on the trouble with “Ted Lasso.” Two Drinks with Al Roth, the Nobel laureate who thinks buying an organ is fine. The young man who quit finance to become a vagabond. And more!

But first: Caitlin Flanagan wants to tear down a Los Angeles museum.

Not all art is created equal. Human beings have understood this ever since a guy drew a woolly mammoth on the wall of a cave—and have argued, sometimes ferociously, about what deserves to be lauded, and what can be consigned to the dustbin of history.

When we do this, we’re really asking some of life’s big questions: What’s meaningful? What makes us feel something? What will still be true a century from now?

But then along came a theory that caused art history to eat itself from the inside out. It decreed that valuing some things more than others was problematic, actually. There should be no hierarchy. And the Western canon isn’t based on an objective sense of truth and beauty but on racism, colonialism, bigotry.

Critical theory, as it’s known, has become an orthodoxy of the art elite—and it has seeped into the institutions they run.

Which brings us to the newly renovated Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which was once the largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi—but now, according to our columnist Caitlin Flanagan, looks more like a sinister garage sale.

Michael Govan, the CEO of the museum, scoffs at that idea. To quote him: “We’re going to create knowledge by putting things in categories and distinguishing.” And so, writes Caitlin, in the new LACMA artworks from wildly different eras and areas are jumbled up together, for no discernible reason: “Sumerian relief structures next to black-and-white photographs and, depending on the day, a performance artist on a bicycle pedaling around.”

The message is this: “They’re all the same.”

“Would it be churlish,” asks Caitlin, “to point out that if people hadn’t been creating knowledge by ‘putting things in categories and distinguishing,’ Govan wouldn’t be able to preside over a museum that hangs in midair?”

The truth is, if more of our museums fall to this destructive philosophy, future generations will never benefit from the knowledge that allowed Govan to take a sledgehammer to categories: the knowledge of how artists are linked, how one era followed another, how new styles were born. A knowledge of art history, in other words.

And Caitlin, for one, doesn’t want that to happen.

”I visited the new LACMA three times over two weeks, and it radicalized me,” she writes in today’s essay. “Here was the first museum I’ve ever wanted to tear down.”

This week, a concerningly skeletal Ariana Grande released a music video in which she takes a chainsaw to some entertainment executives and ends up covered in their blood. Then, a couple of days later, she announced she was taking a step back from public life after the completion of her Eternal Sunshine tour. In the latest episode of Second Thought, Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot unpack what’s going on here, before diving into some other goings-on, like MAHA’s new favorite plastic-free water brand.

“They say there’s a whole credit card in your brain full of microplastics,” Suzy says. “I hope mine’s platinum.”

Click below to watch the video, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And for more of Suzy’s thoughts on the gory Grande story, don’t miss her newsletter!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet a California conservative, a recovering workaholic looking for love nearing retirement, or a man who built his own house and is now ready to build a relationship. 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].

This week, Larissa Phillips asked: Should I buy a gun? Read her essay on the dilemma, then read the comments, in which Free Press readers gave their advice. Also this week, Joe Nocera wrote about the man who just lost $35 billion, and River Page tried making the recipe featured in RFK Jr.’s new cooking show. . .

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our assistant editor Josh Code for his recommendations…

📚Read… Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri. I picked up this book because I loved its title, and because it won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2000—back when that sort of thing mattered. Ever the cynic when it comes to identity-centric literature, I was surprised to find myself incredibly moved by this short story collection themed around the Indian diaspora (yes, there were tears). The characters are desperate and unvarnished. The narrative twists and turns feel earned. The author’s prose is that rare sort where you find yourself wanting to reread each story to study it, to figure out how the hell she pulled that off. My favorite stories from the mix were “A Temporary Matter,” “Sexy,” and “The Third and Final Continent.”

📺 Watch… Madonna: Truth or Dare. Awed by the catchiness of Confessions II, Madonna’s 10th chart-topping album in her five-decade career, I recently dedicated myself to the study of Madge history (herstory?). This particular documentary, filmed during her 1990 Blonde Ambition world tour, captures the star’s life on the road. There are celebrity cameos, scandals, and diva moments, but the best part is seeing the family she forms with her backup dancers and singers, whom she leads in prayer before every show. Fans of the singer will no doubt enjoy the film. For the unacquainted, consider it a portrait of a woman living the American dream, warts and all. It’s definitely not the film Madonna would have made about herself. It’s a time capsule of what celebrity meant—and what it cost—in a pre-influencer world.

🌮Eat… Code’s EZ Tacos. If you missed this week’s inane drama on right-wing Twitter, what you need to know is: The burrito prices are too damn high. If you’re looking to save a buck, or the employees at your local Chipotle are starting to recognize you, try making this taco recipe at home. Cook one cubed potato in oil until it’s golden brown, then add half an onion and a few cloves of garlic, season with salt and pepper, and drop in a pound of ground beef. Mash up the beef, brown it, then add your favorite taco seasoning and a half cup of water. Mix it all together and cook for a couple more minutes, then serve with whatever toppings you like. Live más, for less!

Last but not least: Behold this stunning photo of Madonna, captured on her Blonde Ambition tour.

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

Watching the first episode of the new season of Ted Lasso, which dropped on Apple TV on Wednesday, is a little like running into your ex at the mall. There you are, minding your own business, when suddenly you see this person you haven’t thought of in years. First comes a burst of involuntary excitement—remember all those wonderful biscuits your ex used to bake? Remember all the gosh darn fun you used to have together? But then you take one close look at the person standing before you, and one thought alone prevails: Oh, NOW I remember why we broke up.

For the few who do not know: Ted Lasso centers on a whimsical American football coach—named, if it needs to be clarified, Ted Lasso—from Kansas City, who flies across the pond to take over an English soccer team. When we last saw Lasso (Jason Sudeikis), it was sometime in the spring of 2023, and he was reclining on board a flight back home. His team, AFC Richmond, had nearly won the championship, yet he turned down a lucrative contract extension to return and be with his son, Henry.

Because it’s been three years now, and because spoiler alerts have very short shelf lives these days, we can safely say that the previous season’s finale was, for us Lasso enthusiasts, a delight. Sure, it was thick with borderline idiotic set pieces—gruff players staging a perfect rendition of “So Long, Farewell” on the pitch, say, or a magical penalty kick that somehow tore through the net, curved upward, and ascended to the heavens—but only a dead-eyed cynic would mind the whimsy too much. And dead-eyed cynics, presumably, never made it very far with Ted Lasso, a show that, like its titular hero, wrestled you down to the ground and overwhelmed you with boundless kindness and folksy charm.

Hi, all! I’m working on a few stories right now—including about whether God loves AI, and the rise of face tattoos—but I did sneak away from my desk midweek to record an episode of Second Thought with Dan Ahdoot. There’s too much going on in the culture to stay silent.

The biggest story was this: A very thin Ariana Grande announced that she’d be “taking a step back from visibility” following her fans’ and the media’s growing concern about her shrinking frame. According to her reps, the singer is “taking a much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances, which has led to endless, ongoing public scrutiny.”

This comes on the heels of Grande’s new music video, “Petal,” where she appears skeletal in a few 1950s-looking outfits as she auditions for a panel of brutish men whom she eventually, after getting fed up with their brutal judgments, hacks to death with a chainsaw. “Tеll me who’s to blame, is it the people or myself?” she sings in the song. “This is not a cry for help.” Perhaps not, but the video backfired big. “The elephant in the room is impossible to ignore,” read one well-liked comment. “She is really sick.”

Grande’s decision to see out her tour and then take a breather from the limelight has kicked off a frenzy of speculation about Grande’s body, about whether she has an eating disorder, and about whether we should even be talking about it if she does. As Grande herself said when she addressed fans at a recent concert about her decision: A few things can be true at once. Like that she has been touring and promoting Wicked and performing her albums for years. She has also dealt with the dissolution of her marriage, the end of the relationship that followed, the death of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller, the breakup of another engagement, and a terrorist attack that killed 22 of her fans in Manchester, all within the last decade. The girl has taken a beating, and deserves a break. And while no one truly knows what’s going on with Grande’s health except her, and her doctors, looking at her, it isn’t that hard to guess.

Between the therapeutic mindset that insists we accept ourselves as we are, and the supersonic boom of weight loss drugs that allow us to whittle our proportions down to whatever we want, it’s easy to assume that eating disorders are a thing of the past. But anorexia, and the whole constellation of eating disorders around it, is an ancient scourge that we’ll be living with as long as there are young women. And it isn’t actually about looking good in clothes, or even necessarily losing weight—instead it’s about imposing order, and having rigid, punishing standards for oneself. It can be a twisted-up form of perfectionism, or in some cases, a misguided attempt to avoid growing up. It also isn’t about being heroin chic, or any one fashion trend or any one influencer. Hadley Freeman, who chronicled her own yearslong experience with severe anorexia in her book Good Girls, wrote in The Free Press: “I hadn’t even heard of Kate Moss.”

Besides, fame, as we learned in Lena Dunham’s new memoir, can make you sick.

I think Grande is indeed suffering, but I don’t think that she will suffer the same terrible fate as the women who wasted away in front of our eyes, like Whitney Houston, or Amy Winehouse, or, most famously, Karen Carpenter. I think that when she’s good and ready, she will come back with a vengeance.

Watch Dan and I talk about Grande, and a few more stories that caught our eye recently:

We are in an era of coaches for every aspect of life, whether for your fitness, diet, or career. Now, there’s a new crop of coaches for your marriage, specifically for the “recovering man-child,” as one coach puts it, who needs to be taught how to pick up after himself and pitch in around the house. Fellas: The laundry isn’t going to fold itself.

There’s an editor named Whitney Frick and she’s behind the most talked-about authors of the last few years: Belle Burden, Amy Griffin, Glennon Doyle. They’re memoirists, all women, all who went through some life-altering drama that they let their readers in on, which in turn took over the zeitgeist. Everyone has something to say about what they’ve written, even if it’s not very nice.

Charles Manson always seems to be having a moment. His granddaughter came out with a documentary about growing up in the shadow of his crimes, and another Manson documentary, featuring recordings of conversations with him in prison, is coming out this week. Nearly 60 years later, we’re still obsessed with how one failed musician became the face of American evil—and convinced otherwise normal all-American teenagers to do his bidding.

Speaking of, I can’t wait for when Annie Karni (The New York Times’ congressional correspondent) signs up to write her memoir with Frick. She wrote this week about her divorce, and how she received support in the unlikeliest of moments: before or after interviews with the subjects of her political reporting, including Chuck Schumer, Steve Bannon, and Nancy Mace. “Men are so stupid,” Schumer told her. “Just so stupid.”

I don’t envy parents who have to raise kids in 2026. It’s a minefield. But Liz Wolfe seems to have a good handle on it; she wrote about why she is bullish on chores, including tasking her 3.5-year-old with making a chopped cucumber salad. And when in doubt on how to be a good mom or dad, always trust Abigail Shrier to give it to you straight.