The Free Press

Between the writing of this column on a Sunday morning and the time most people read it the following day, more than 3,000 people will likely die in a car crash. Every one of those accidents is a tragedy, yet traffic deaths are so common that they usually get little news coverage.

During the same 24 hours, it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone will die from the actions of an AI agent. Unless you count military uses or suicides that may have become more likely after someone’s conversations with a chatbot, “death by AI” isn’t really a thing. But we are getting uncomfortably close to situations where an AI agent attempts to accomplish a task, finds a human in the way, eliminates him (or her!), and carries on with the job.

Last week OpenAI disclosed what it called “an unprecedented cyber incident” after one of its AI agents unexpectedly hacked into the systems of Hugging Face, an online AI platform. The maker of ChatGPT had been conducting a test aimed at measuring the capabilities of its latest models. The AI agent had been given a test within a sandboxed environment—that is, a closed area without internet access—but managed to escape, gain access to the internet, figure out which company’s server likely had the answers to the test, and hack into it.

Whatever happened to President Donald Trump’s “pro-union” agenda? Before returning to office last year, Trump presented himself as one of the most union-friendly Republican candidates in modern history, poised to win support not only from members—which he did—but also from union leaders. Trump skipped a presidential primary debate in 2023 to address striking auto workers, and invited Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention the following year.

It wasn’t only about winning elections. When the International Longshoremen’s Association threatened a strike in January 2025 that would have halted shipping along the entire East Coast, Trump backed the union, even though he no longer needed its megaphone and votes. American Compass, a conservative think tank formed in 2020, advocates for pro-worker policies and maintains ties in Congress and the White House.

Yet nearly halfway through Trump’s term, the pro-labor policy agenda has all but vanished. And the woman who Trump tapped to lead it is now sitting on the sidelines.

“On Tuesday, I voted for Donald Trump. It felt like the biggest middle finger I’ve ever raised to the party I’d supported for most of my adult life. When he won, I was utterly euphoric.”

These are the words of Evan Barker, writing for The Free Press on November 9, 2024. A lifelong Democratic operative from a working-class family in Kansas City, Missouri, she’d spent her career getting progressives elected. Then, as she put it, the Democratic Party “turned its back on me and my family.” At the time, Evan’s story captured a trend playing out across the country: The working class, once a cornerstone of the Democratic coalition, was drifting away from the party.

Now, with the progressive wing ascendant and the midterms approaching, that shift has only become more consequential. But how exactly did it happen? And what do Democrats need to do to win back the voters they lost? Evan is better positioned than most to answer those questions. That’s exactly what she does in her new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, which hits shelves Tuesday. In today’s exclusive excerpt, she pulls back the curtain on the transformation of the modern Democratic Party, from a rare vantage point: inside the belly of the beast. —The Editors

The night Barack Obama won his first presidential race was one of the happiest moments of my life.

I was a campaign intern. I hadn’t finished high school, but I canvassed outside concerts, inside laundromats, in gas stations, and on college campuses, working more than 40 hours a week. I’d stay at the office past 8 p.m. on school nights, leading phone banks and teaching volunteers three times my age how to talk to voters. It felt like there was no mission more critical than electing Obama. I was changing the world.

Like most of my generation, I was angry at the George W. Bush administration. I looked at Obama as a new hope, someone who would end the senseless violence in the Middle East, fix the economy, and bring us out of recession.

But one issue made me willing to crawl over glass for Obama: healthcare. I spent my childhood in and out of hospitals with a severe respiratory condition. For years, doctors told my parents I had bad asthma that I would someday outgrow. At 15, they finally made the correct diagnosis. I had a rare, life-threatening genetic disorder called primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD). My disease wasn’t curable, and it was poorly understood. Going in and out of the hospital would be the constant rhythm of my life.

Last week, America appeared on the verge of a major escalation in Iran. President Donald Trump told Axios on Thursday, “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before.” The Pentagon ordered more forces into the Persian Gulf. Trump appeared to have lost his temper and his patience.

Then, in a fateful meeting at noon on Friday at the Oval Office, the plans for what one U.S. defense official called “Epic Fury 2: Electric Boogaloo,” were paused. That war plan “would mean hitting more missile facilities, more infrastructure, more weapons factories,” this source said, emphasizing that the focus was on the regime’s arsenal near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s oil refineries and power plants were also possible targets, this source said.

One reason Trump backed away was because America’s supply of interceptors, like the SM-3 and Patriot systems, have been significantly depleted, according to The New York Times. Already, the low stocks of interceptors have left American bases vulnerable. Earlier this month, an Iranian missile strike killed three U.S. service members at an American base in Jordan. Another round of intense fighting would deplete U.S. missile defense systems even further, potentially eating into the supply of interceptors in place to deter China from menacing Taiwan.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Maddy Kearns sits down with America’s most famous bishop—after the Pope, of course. Suzy Weiss on poisoned salads. Coleman Hughes on how to fix sports betting before it’s too late. And more!

But first: “Usha and the baby are happy and healthy.”

So announced the vice president on Sunday, upon the birth of his fourth child. The news was followed up yesterday by a few pictures, posted by his wife, captioned: “Enjoy these attempts at taking a decent family photo with four kids!” In them, Usha Vance is smiling widely, arms wrapped around two of her kids, while her husband holds the baby.

And yet: There are those who insist that Usha Vance can’t possibly be happy. For two years, progressives have claimed she is a hostage in her own marriage—that her smiles are cries for help and her every expression of affection is performance.

Meanwhile, the New York Times bestseller list continues to prominently feature Yesteryear—a novel about an outwardly happy but secretly miserable conservative wife, which Kat Rosenfield memorably described in these pages as “parasocial hate porn for millennial feminists.” As Freya India asks in her piece today: Why are some liberals so desperate to believe women who make traditional choices must be trapped by them?

Having read the vice president’s memoir, Freya has a radical theory: that J.D. Vance both adores his wife and respects her. “The Usha described in the book,” she writes, is not “some sort of doormat or background figure in her husband’s life.”

She also has a radical suggestion: Could the Vances help remind young Americans that a happy marriage isn’t a cage?

You could roll your eyes at the hypocrisy of the culture war raging about The Odyssey. (Why get het up about a black Helen if you’re going to accept a face-lifted Anne Hathaway?) But Suzy Weiss is loving it. “Suddenly, my feed is full of debates over the difference between kleos, the Greek concept of glory, and timé, which is honor,” she writes in her latest newsletter—arguing that this is a vast improvement from the movies that usually rule the summer months. “Do you remember the awe and anguish you experienced during Deadpool & Wolverine? Me neither.”

In the latest episode of Second Thought, you can listen to Suzy talk to her co-host, Dan Ahdoot, about loving The Odyssey, worrying about Tom Brady, and whether she’s tempted to buy parasite-infested lettuce for 50 percent off . . .

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet an Italian economics scholar in New York City, a Soviet-born Chicagoan, or a sauna-obsessed Free Press employee. Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, send us a paragraph about who you are, including your age, location, and what you’re looking for, to [email protected].

We’ve published plenty of stories worth catching up on this week. Do not miss Peter Savodnik’s gorgeous essay about sending his daughter to sleepaway camp for the first time. Meanwhile, happiness expert Arthur Brooks wrote about why he does something that makes him unhappy. . .

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our politics editor Mene Ukueberuwa for his recommendations. . .

👂Listen: You won’t regret a trek to Tanglewood—the Boston Symphony’s summer retreat in the Berkshires, which is tranquil and tree-covered, and always feels a little cooler than the day’s weather. For my money, the best upcoming concert is next Friday, headlined by Richard Wagner’s “Prelude and Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde, conducted by an eminent visitor in Esa-Pekka Salonen. Shed a tear, enjoy the breeze, and feel yourself fall in love.

📖Read: Freedom from Fear. If your America 250 reading list didn’t end on July 4, this is one of the best additions you can make. Historian David M. Kennedy tells the conjoined story of the Great Depression and the U.S. experience in World War II. And even though the title is drawn from Franklin Roosevelt’s famous speech, the book doesn’t focus solely on the White House that steered the country through these events. More attention is paid to the tinkerers and tycoons who restarted the economy and the sometimes brilliant, sometimes ordinary sailors and Marines who pushed back the Japanese from island to island.

🥩Eat: Cherry beef bourguignon. My wife and I returned from our honeymoon in France with only a few keepsakes: a mug engraved with an image of Mont-Saint-Michel, and a French-language picture book for the future child we were hoping for. In the end, the most-prized souvenir was a recipe we haven’t stopped making two years after we returned. It was a simple beef bourguignon that we tried at a little restaurant in Paris that was only slightly touristy. Replicate it with a middle-of-the shelf pinot noir that’s fit to expend on cooking and some tart cherries thrown in to cut the savoriness of the meal. Best in cold weather, unfortunately, but irresistible enough that you’ll crave it year round.

3 lbs of cubed stew meat, browned in oil.

1 cup pitted tart cherries to balance the savory sauce

Dry red wine, beef stock, sliced onions, carrots, garlic, and thyme

Sautéed mushrooms and pearl onions

Last but not least, we asked our creative director Clara Grusq to tell us about a beautiful thing she’s been thinking about this week. Her answer: the Boléro. Maurice Ravel’s piece is currently onstage as a ballet at New York City Center, and it sent her back to the moment she first fell in love with it—watching Argentinian dancer Jorge Donn perform Maurice Béjart’s iconic choreography in the 1981 film Les Uns et les Autres. “There is nothing I don’t love about this ballet,” she writes. “The red circle as a stage, the solitary dancer who slowly becomes one with the collective. The relentless, almost militaristic rhythm that builds into a kind of hypnosis. It is one of those rare works of art that truly feels transcendent.”

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

Gambling scandals are as old as professional sports itself—from the Black Sox Scandal, in which the Chicago White Sox intentionally lost the 1919 World Series in exchange for $80,000 ($1.5 million in today’s dollars), to Pete Rose, the legendary baseball star-turned-manager who was caught betting on his own games.

Infamous as these offenses are, they became so because they were rare. For most of American history, it has been difficult and risky for a professional athlete to place a major bet on his own games.

But with the legalization of sports betting in most U.S. states—touched off by the Supreme Court’s overturning of a federal ban in 2018—we are now entering a darker era. With online betting legal and frictionless, athletes need only a few seconds on their smartphones in order to place a bet (or better yet, get a friend or family member to do the same). And they need not do anything as noticeable as throw a game. A professional basketball player, for instance, can simply bet on individual elements of their personal statistics line (called a “player prop” bet), and then subtly alter their play without drawing unwanted attention.

The scandals are now coming so frequently that it is hard to keep track of them. Just last Friday, the NFL suspended Arizona Cardinals executive Ryan Gold for allegedly betting on his team’s games. A few weeks prior, former NBA player Malik Beasley was indicted for allegedly manipulating his play in at least four 2024 NBA games in coordination with a group of bettors.

Welcome to the Second Thought newsletter, where I take another look at whatever’s bubbling up in the middle and the margins of the culture. This week I saw The Odyssey—or, since I got tickets late and had to sit in the front row, mere feet from the massive IMAX screen it was shown on: I saw the bottom left corner of The Odyssey, and if I really craned my neck, most of the middle of it. This was apparently one of the smaller huge screens in New York, at a width of around 60 feet, but I’m still vibrating from the endless drumming of the score. One of the trailers, for a horror film starring Jessica Chastain, made me feel like I was under live fire. If my great-grandparents had been seated in this theater and caught even one of the mellower moments of this movie—like when Calypso, played by Charlize Theron, cradles Matt Damon’s beaten-down Odysseus on her beach—I think that their hearts would have exploded.

But luckily for us all, the nearly three hours of sweeping shots of beaches and ocean, brutal battle scenes, and dazzling special effects that make up Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic poem are available to us for about 20 bucks. The cast is stacked—though some performances pop more than others, sorry Tom Holland—and it comes at a time where the themes, about the cost of war, the limits of hospitality, and institutional collapse, are apt as ever. Nolan is a virtuoso; at this point, if he directed oncoming traffic, it would make hundreds of millions of dollars.

So why is everyone so worked up?

Even before the title card on Nolan’s latest film flashed with the words “A time of apparent magic . . .”, pooh-poohers were looking to gum up The Odyssey’s groove. Elon Musk, who owns X, posted that Nolan “desecrated Homer” and “groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” Nolan’s crime was enlisting colorblind casting; Helen of Troy is played by Lupita Nyong’o, who is black, alongside actors who are Indian (Himesh Patel plays Odysseus’s second-in-command, Eurylochus) and Columbian American in the case of John Leguizamo, who plays Eumaeus, Odysseus’s blind, loyal servant. “In defiance of all common sense and logistics, a bunch of South Asians apparently managed to travel thousands of miles to Greece, where they joined Odysseus’s crew,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh pointed out in his post-game. “The casting by itself contradicts the internal logic of the story.”

Walsh’s bizarre logic begs the question: If this is all supposed to take place in ancient Greece, how the hell did Anne Hathaway, with her deep-plane facial, get there? And come to think of it, why are they all speaking English?

It seems that with The Odyssey, some are forgetting that movies are pretend—there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the accuracy of the helmets on the Spartan warriors and how the ship was a Viking one, not a Greek one—and that directors can do whatever they want with whatever source material they choose. Colorblind casting works here, like it did in Hamilton, and like it would in a movie depicting stories from the Bible, because these are foundational texts full of universal ideas. Anyone can opt in. Besides, the point of a movie isn’t to make you feel like you’re part of an impeccably re-created moment in time; that’s EPCOT, not AMC. But leaving aside silly casting quibbles and meltdowns over helmet plumes, I don’t see the culture war coming for the Trojan War as a bad thing.

Suddenly, my feed is full of debates over the difference between kleos, the Greek concept of glory, and timé, which is honor. There’s analysis over which translation Nolan was relying on; the more florid Robert Fagles or the more plainspoken Emily Wilson, who gave her own read to an interviewer at the 92nd Street Y: “I think this is a film that has some interest in shame, but I don’t think it has any interest in glory.” That the movie of the summer has any interest in shame or glory or revenge at all is a win. Let me remind you of the last few films that owned the summer months: Barbie, Top Gun: Maverick, and a bunch of superhero movies. Do you remember the awe and anguish you experienced during Deadpool & Wolverine? Me neither.

Instead of romantic love, war, or evil, or whether Barbie was a feminist project, Nolan chose to make the centripetal force in his Odyssey “Zeus’s law,” or xenia, the Greek hospitality code that says you should always welcome a stranger in your midst, since they might be gods in disguise. He explores xenia on the island of Aeaea, where the witch Circe turns Odysseus’s men into pigs after welcoming them in and feeding them. Ditto on the island of Thrinacia, where Odysseus’s crew slaughters sacred cows, even though he warned them not to. And on Ithaca, where Penelope waits for years for Odysseus, forced to host the brutish suitors who are vying to become the next king. Some hosts are seductive; like the sirens, whose song Odysseus describes as “all the things you wanted it to be, then all the things you wish you never wished for.”

It’s a stunning movie—with food for thought about when guests become invaders, and when hosts become hostage keepers. Damon’s Odysseus is beset by guilt and haunted by the soldiers who died under his command. But if you think that makes him an anti-war activist who’d campaign for decolonization, you’ve been online too long.

Go see The Odyssey without worrying about whether it’s woke or not, and report back your thoughts. And if you want to hear more of my thoughts—about The Odyssey, but also the World Cup, and that viral raccoon in Seattle—catch this week’s episode of Second Thought:

Many companies refer to their workforce “like one big family,” but it seems that many mothers are trying to make their homes more like a company. “Every hour I spend folding laundry or scheduling a repair person is an hour I’m not present with my kids,” one so-called CEO parent told The Wall Street Journal. CEO parents hire nannies, assistants, maids, drivers, and chefs to help outsource parenting so that they can drop in for the “high-impact, core memories” as one put it. I’ll give this trend a few decades to see how these moms do on their performance reviews and, for now, I’ll rely on Liz Wolfe, who celebrates the “blessed drudgery” of mothering.

A childhood friend sent me a picture from the camp we used to go to together—and the memories came rushing back. I was wild for summer camp; for my friends, for Color War, the lake, all of it. Peter Savodnik’s latest essay didn’t just make me miss those summers—he brought me right back to them. It’s a story about homesickness, and growing up, how there’s “brief, itsy-bitsy samplings of death” along the way. It’ll make you cry, but I promise some of the tears will be happy ones!

At this point, if I’m Natalie Portman, and a high-brow novelist wants to be my friend, I’d politely decline. First there was the minor scandal of her emails with Jonathan Safran Foer 10 years ago (an editor thought it would be a good idea to publish their pretentious exchanges, and it was rumored Foer left his wife for Portman, who didn’t love him back). And now: Rachel Cusk’s new novel, called Life of M, is apparently a roman à clef about Portman. Second Thought guarantees a review. And Natalie: Stick to movie-star friends; they won’t write about you!

Fergie Chambers, who I profiled a few years ago, is in the news this week after being arrested in Spain on a U.S. extradition request over allegations that he provided material support to Hamas. I met Fergie right after he’d extracted $250 million from his family’s massive empire—they own media outlets, car auction sites, and many, many car lots—but before he’d set his sights on the Jewish state as his ur-enemy. Fergie is a committed communist, a problem child, a recently converted Muslim, and so much more. Read my profile of him from 2023 here, and Jay Solomon on what’s happened since.

Sign up here to get the Second Thought newsletter!

On Sunday evening, Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha, announced the arrival of their fourth child, baby boy Alec Neel Vance. “Usha and the baby are happy and healthy, and our kids are overjoyed to meet their little brother,” the announcement said.

But for the past two years, “happy” is not the impression of Usha you would get from certain corners of the internet. Since her husband took office, progressives have insisted that the Second Lady is actually miserable, held hostage in her own marriage.

Online, their relationship is always doomed. Anytime the Vances post a picture of themselves together, #FreeUsha comments follow. Divorce rumors never stop, sparked by everything from Usha being photographed without her wedding ring last November to the way J.D. hugged Erika Kirk on stage at a Turning Point USA event fewer than two months after the assassination of her husband, Charlie. “He’s throwing his wife under the bus. Poor Usha,” Joy Reid said at the time, wondering if the vice president would ditch his “brown Hindu” wife for a “white queen.”

In 2024, The Cut asked in a headline, “What Is Usha Vance Thinking?” while Slate wondered what goes through her mind “when her idiot husband says he loves his wife,” then concluded that progressives ultimately need to accept her fate, even if “we just don’t like it, and we want to give her more chances to escape.” Even MSNBC host Jen Psaki said in 2025 that Usha is afraid of her husband. “I always wonder what’s going on in the mind of his wife. Like, are you okay? Please blink four times. We’ll come over here. We’ll save you.”

Welcome to Two Drinks, the column where The Free Press catches up with a newsmaker, trendsetter, or power broker. This week, Madeleine Kearns sits down with America’s second most famous bishop (after the Pope, of course)—Bishop Robert Barron—to discuss his work with the White House, his media empire, why trad Caths think he’s a liberal squish, his impressions of the Pope, J.D. Vance’s memoir, and much, much more!

Bishop Robert Barron did not expect the success he’s had.

“Everywhere I go in English-speaking lands, I’m mobbed by people, and it’s amazing,” he tells me over dinner.

He began his Catholic media empire, Word on Fire, with the simple conviction that the Church should be more involved in mass media. As a priest in Chicago, he broke into radio in the late 1990s, TV in the early 2000s, and was on the ground floor of YouTube in 2007.

Today, Word on Fire has over two million subscribers on the latter platform, plus 3.1 million Facebook followers and many more on Instagram and X. More than 500,000 people subscribe to receive Barron’s Daily Gospel reflection by email, where he writes about the lives of saints, unpacks scripture, and explains how Jesus’ message resonates today. Plus, he regularly appears everywhere from NBC to The Daily Wire.

“The English language and the internet means you have this huge range, and I never saw that coming,” he says modestly.

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, Gary Saul Morson revisits The God That Failed, a Cold War classic that explained the appeal of communism to generations of readers—and whose warnings, he argues, have become timely once again.

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

A zombie is haunting America, the zombie of communism. Pronounced dead and discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is back. Former Senate candidate Graham Platner and influencer Hasan Piker did not lose, and probably gained, adherents by having called themselves communists. Meanwhile, as Stu Smith recently wrote in The Free Press, a majority of the Democratic Socialists of America governing board “openly identifies with communist ideology.”

As a Russian specialist, I cannot help wondering: How is this possible? Do these people really have no problem with the history of the ideology they’re claiming? With Joseph Stalin’s Gulag that took the lives of millions, his artificially induced famine that deliberately starved several million peasants, and the secret police’s form of interrogation that routinely included torture? Do they actually want to revive Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror that claimed the lives of a quarter of Cambodia’s population?

Three quarters of a century ago, questions like these led to one of the most important volumes to emerge during the Cold War. Now largely forgotten, The God That Failed (1949) was once so widely read that the volume’s title became a catchphrase for any movement that attracted intellectuals to a quasi-religious ideology claiming infallibility.