The Free Press

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week, we hear from Jack Raines, a 29-year-old writer and investor whose new book, Young Money, blends memoir and self-help to explore how people in their 20s can build both wealth and purpose. Today, in an adapted excerpt, Raines reflects on the book that made him drop everything at 24 to buy a one-way ticket to Barcelona—and why that remains the best decision he’s ever made.

To receive Things Worth Remembering directly to your inbox, sign up here.

There are a few books in my life that have made me feel something. There is only one that has ever made me do something.

To explain, I have to turn back the clock five years to May 2021.

I was 24 years old, and it was 8:18 p.m. on a Friday in Atlanta, Georgia. I was supposed to meet friends for dinner in 12 minutes at a tapas restaurant 20 minutes away, and I was going to be lucky if I made it there by 9. The reason for my delay? Work, obviously.

If you’ve ever worked in a job where your responsibilities, schedule, and expectations appeared to defy the laws of logic and sensibility, this story might hit close to home. I was a financial analyst for America’s largest logistics company, and for the third Friday in a row, my eyes were glazing over as I worked well into the night to update a deck reflecting some trivial change in UPS’s hypothetical financial situation seven months out.

Seven hundred million dollars’ worth of critical theory has landed on a mid-city block of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, and it’s a pity, because the largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi used to be there.

At first glance—if such a behemoth can be taken in with something as mere and pitiably human as a glance—the recently opened David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art suggest a link to one of the great periods of the city’s history. From the 1950s through the early 1970s it seemed like America could do anything, and Southern California was the place to do it. It had the biggest aerospace industry in the world, and an architecture of the fantastic to go with it—glass walls, sweeping angles, everything on the up, up, up. The new Geffen Galleries, hanging 30 feet in the air, look like a spaceship. It does not answer to the laws of nature: It pulses across LACMA’s huge campus, and when it gets to the hard stop of Wilshire Boulevard, it soars right over it.

Get a bit closer and you realize this isn’t Tomorrowland—or at least it’s not our Tomorrowland. In the renderings, the building was the clean white of an Apollo mission, and it looked beautiful and exciting, like Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal in what became JFK Airport. In reality, it’s Soviet gray, all of it raw concrete. Did I miss a meeting? I sent my sister a picture of me inside the gallery, dwarfed by the elevators (I really just wanted to show her my pants), and she texted back: “Where are you? Leningrad?”

Welcome to Two Drinks, the column where The Free Press catches up with a newsmaker, trendsetter, or power broker. This week, Peter Coy speaks to Al Roth, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose latest book asks all of the most provocative moral questions: Why is it easy to buy drugs but hard to hire a hit man? Who decides it’s wrong to eat horses? Why is Iran the world’s only country where selling your kidney is legal? “I use ‘repugnance’ as a technical term,” he said.

I first spoke with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth two years ago. He had invented a lifesaving algorithm for matching unrelated kidney donors and recipients, and I was writing about it. We bantered a bit—I found out that he never graduated from high school and that he has an honorary seventh-degree black belt from the Japan Karate Association—but mostly he talked about market design, his favorite topic, in the respectful way a civil engineer talks about a particularly fine bridge.

So I was a little surprised to find out that Roth has a wide streak of provocation in his personality. It comes across in his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal about How Markets Work, published in May. In a mild, just-asking-questions tone, Roth digs into one prohibited or controversial activity after another: buying sex, eating horses, selling organs, assisting suicide, carrying a stranger’s baby. He asks why many of these activities are prohibited or restricted even though some people clearly want them. And he thinks about whether it’s possible to design markets for them in a way that preserves people’s freedom to transact while protecting those who don’t want to.

It’s Friday, August 7. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: River Page on RFK Jr.’s tragic salmon cakes. Jed Rubenfeld explains why pleading the Fifth won’t keep Fauci safe. Democratic lawmaker Josh Gottheimer on what is happening to his party. And much more.

But first: the problem with publishing.

If you think it’s overstating it to say that American publishing is governed by an insidious double standard, consider recent events at one of America’s biggest publishers. Last week, Simon & Schuster doubled down on its relationship with Palestinian American novelist Susan Abulhawa, despite her praise for a terrorist, her revival of Nazi-era antisemitic tropes, and her dark characterization of Jews as “ghouls,” “cockroaches,” and “demons.” At the same time, Jewish writers such as Alyssa Rosenheck and Meg Keene say they’ve had their events canceled, faced pressure to downplay Jewish identity, and had to deal with a publishing industry increasingly unwilling to stand behind them.

Today, the author Gerald Posner, whose books have been published by Simon & Schuster, makes an argument for consistency. If publishers insist they’re defending free expression rather than endorsing every author they publish, that principle has to apply evenly. It hasn’t at S&S, which is why Gerald says he may be taking his next book elsewhere.

And for more on the dangerous worldview that has come to dominate publishing, read Matti Friedman’s essay “Introduction to Gazaology.”

—The Editors

This week, the nation had its eyes on one story: the result in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. The two candidates, progressive Abdul El-Sayed and moderate Haley Stevens, hail from starkly different wings of the party—and El-Sayed’s victory sent a clear message about where the party is headed. Olivia Reingold was on the ground in Michigan on election night; read her dispatch on how El-Sayed took the state by storm, and what his victory may mean for 2028.

El-Sayed’s electrifying rhetoric and off-the-cuff charm have drawn comparisons to Barack Obama. But Eli Lake sees a crucial difference. While Obama took pains to distance himself from controversial anti-American figures such as Jeremiah Wright, El-Sayed campaigned side by side with radical leftist Hasan Piker. Read Eli’s piece on shady alliances, and how big tent politics went awry.

It’s not just the left that has a radicalism problem. Tucker Carlson often proclaims that he is not antisemitic—but his behavior on his podcast this week told the opposite story. Read Rod Dreher on the danger of Carlson’s subtle bigotry.

Karla Solheim challenged the orthodoxy of pediatric gender medicine and paid a steep price, including professional isolation, public attacks, and the threat of losing her career. But now, as governments and medical authorities around the world reassess the evidence behind youth gender transition, the questions she raised no longer look so fringe. Read her account of the latest turns in a debate over medicine, ideology, and free inquiry.

If you’re looking to relax this weekend, the odds suggest it may not be with a drink. According to new data, more Americans use marijuana daily than smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, and states are taking ever more steps to deregulate it. Is weed taking over, or is the marijuana surge a big bubble that’s about to pop? Read Charles Fain Lehman’s piece to find out.

Larissa Phillips never thought she’d own a gun. As a former resident of deep-blue Brooklyn, the idea of owning a firearm had always struck her as dangerous and retrograde. But her perspectives have changed in many ways since she moved to a red patch of upstate New York, and that includes a new awareness of the need for self-defense. Read her essay mulling over a decision she never expected to face.

This week, Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. He didn’t do so by focusing on lower costs for families. Instead, he did so by making the U.S.-Israel relationship the villain of his campaign, repeatedly questioning Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He spent his last days on the campaign trail with Hasan Piker, an online streamer who has praised Hamas, referred to Orthodox Jews as “inbred,” and blamed America for 9/11.

Hate is being normalized in plain sight, and not just online. It has now manifested not only in elections, but also outside synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. This shouldn’t scare only the Jews. These sentiments are anti-American.

From Piker on the socialist left to Tucker Carlson on the native-populist right, influencers with millions of followers now repackage age-old antisemitic conspiracies and tropes as edgy commentary. Add to that a Democratic Senate nominee in Maine with a Nazi tattoo, who dropped out of his race for other reasons, and it’s clear we have a crisis on our hands.

Simon & Schuster published my last three books, Miami Babylon, God’s Bankers, and Pharma. Tracing the Vatican’s hidden finances and exposing the pharmaceutical industry’s capture of American medicine were particularly large, expensive, yearslong investigative projects. Jonathan Karp, then Simon & Schuster’s publisher, and my editor, Ben Loehnen, commissioned both without knowing where the reporting would land. That is no small thing in publishing, and I’ve said so publicly before. I say it again now because it’s relevant to what follows: This is not a grudge piece from an author Simon & Schuster wronged. It’s the opposite. It’s a piece from an author who has had the exact experience Simon & Schuster likes to say it offers about editorial risk-taking. But I am writing now about a case where I believe the company’s stated principle broke down.

Washington Square Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books, sent out a press release last week announcing it would republish two novels by the Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa next month. Washington Square Press is not some obscure corner of the Simon & Schuster empire. It has published Jean-Paul Sartre, Pearl S. Buck, and Alice Walker over the decades, and Atria relaunched it recently as a curated imprint for serious literary fiction and nonfiction.

Simon & Schuster’s decision to expand its relationship with Abulhawa is troubling to me, not because she is a Palestinian writer, but because of what she has said in her own voice. Atria originally signed her in 2020—long before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. By the time of the recent decision to reissue her novels, Abulhawa’s inflammatory public record was not obscure. Five days after the attack, in a celebratory op-ed for The Electronic Intifada, a radical pro-Palestinian online publication, she praised the attackers as “brave Palestinian fighters” and “freedom fighters” and never once mentioned the Israeli dead. Then, through the second half of 2025, she called Israelis “rootless, soulless ghouls”; described Israel as a “cultureless, rootless human aberration” run by “Jewish supremacist demons”; described a pro-Israel commentator as a “lying Jewish supremacist cockroach”; and referred to Israelis as “demonic parasite[s].” Most of it was on her X feed, under her own name, available to anyone who looked. Either Simon & Schuster never checked her public posts, which would be gross negligence, or it knew and did not care.

Hello, and welcome back. Writing to you from California, where I’m working on indoctrinating the children with the West Coast Agenda. When they ask me why New York doesn’t have Waymos, I explain it’s because the East Coast hates innovation and would rather suffer. In New York, there is no such thing as cookies. Sugar is a San Francisco thing. We do tons of land acknowledgments when we’re here, like, “I want to recognize Kern County as ancestral Bowles farmland that should have stayed in the family.”

In Free Press news, please vote on our first Forum Book Club pick! Right now the debate is between East of Eden, Lonesome Dove, and A Gentleman in Moscow. Too classy for me. The link is here.

→ He’s gilding everything: The aging and patinated statues of D.C. are getting regilded. This pair of statues hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, and now they glow, which my Gen-Z translators tell me means shine. Seeing the results here, I’m actually surprised this wasn’t a term-one priority for Trump. By the time the man leaves office the Lincoln Memorial is going to be bedazzled. He is President Liberace, the first gay leader of this nation.

And in the scam of the week, we have the team at Truth Social selling early access to market-moving White House announcements, calling it Truth API. See, Trump often makes presidential announcements on Truth Social, his social media platform, and now you can buy government announcements a tiny bit early to trade on it. If this sounds at all sketchy, then you probably don’t get what an API is, and that’s fine. This is what real men do for work, and you shouldn’t worry your little head about it, kitten.

The statement from Trump Media and Technology Group interim CEO Kevin McGurn: “Markets already move on Truth Social posts. Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.” The idea is to give algorithmic trading tools a few milliseconds of advantage to trade on whatever the latest Trump announcement is. And they’re spelling that out! Martha Stewart went to jail for a minor trade based on some tidbit her broker had allegedly gleaned (the original James Comey villain story), but anyway. Here we are. Explicitly selling presidential trading tips. Major banks are hesitant to subscribe right now, which means a new type of man is about to get really rich. Men who aren’t scared of a little political crime. I think they’ll have ponytails.

→ Trump on the state of U.S.-Japanese affairs: Quote of the week (said on Sunday but we’ll count it):

Reporter: Mr. President, why is the U.S. intervening to support the Japan yen at this time?

Trump: To support who?

Reporter: To support the Japanese currency.

Trump: Because we have a good relationship with Japan. We’re very strong, very, very strong financially, and they are, you know, they have a weakening yen, and they wanted a little bit of help. And we’re always there for Japan. Japan’s been very good to us, with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor. They were not good.

The man never lets go of a grudge, and frankly, that’s not the worst quality in a president!

→ Elite political discourse:

When Trump is mean, even nasty, it’s sort of vaguely funny. J.D. here just comes across as a schoolyard bully. Calling it now: The 2028 debate stage will feature more than one insult of another person’s mother.

→ Why does Trump hate women: I thought he was our friend. I thought he understood our economic demands. Instead, we get things like this latest horror:

That’s right, he’s enslaving women. He’s freezing their eggs himself with his cold heart. He’s saying, get back in there, girls, and type on those computers till those French manicures chip off. First he says no Tylenol during pregnancy, now this? And men, those layabouts. No wonder they love him.

As the American right and left are increasingly pulled toward their ideological extremes, many politicians have chosen to appease the loudest voices in their coalitions even when those voices flirt with or openly embrace antisemitism. Senator Ted Cruz says he’s done playing nice. “If we do not defeat this poison,” he warns, “I believe it will consume th…

In this episode, Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot unpack this week’s very important culture news and spotlight the bizarre stories you probably missed.

They break down the sexual misconduct allegations against Jared Leto, Ariana Grande’s decision to step back from public life amid growing concern over the pop star’s health, and whether modern culture has forgot…

Wednesday, 3 p.m. I was wandering aimlessly around a dingy South Bronx grocery store, desperately trying to find “nutritional yeast,” whatever that is. I looked down at the YouTube video that had been playing on my phone since I got here.

“And there had been a war on saturated fats for almost 70 years,” Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. croaked through my AirPods. “The government had been lying to us and telling us that protein caused heart attacks.”

Emblazoned onto Kennedy’s apron—and the apron of the man awkwardly standing beside him, celebrity chef Andrew Gruel—was the title of our government’s new cooking series, The Real Food Show. This was the inaugural episode, which came out last week.

The aim of The Real Food Show, according to the HHS website, is “to make healthy eating practical, approachable, and affordable.” Every recipe is based on the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which were released last year, turning the food pyramid upside down. HHS says these recipes are meant to be “easy,” and “budget friendly” at less than $5 per serving “whenever possible.”

The debut recipe? Crispy salmon cakes with an apple, white bean, and greens salad. All that for less than $5 a serving? In this economy?