The Free Press

LEWISTON, Maine — They had been waiting for someone like Graham Platner. Someone who was angry and a little crass and knew exactly what had to happen: universal healthcare, an end to the “endless wars,” an end to the “oligarchy.” Someone who would crush Republican senator Susan Collins, who, to Platner’s supporters, was a stand-in for the establishment, the billionaires, Donald Trump—whoever or whatever you hated. Sure, it was an act—he was a prep-school dropout playing hardscrabble oysterman—but they all did that! They knew who was supposed to win. And this was a movie that was fun to watch. The stories about him—the ex-girlfriends, the Nazi tattoo—they helped. They made it easier to suspend their disbelief.

On June 9, more than 150,000 Mainers voted for Platner in the Democratic Senate primary—more than any Democrat had ever won in a Senate primary in the state.

Then came the final allegation—the only credible rape charge, to date—and on July 10, he was out.

But to Platner’s voters—to the disaffected, the livid—the fight had to go on. There were dragons to slay.

Americans didn’t use to have to wonder about which thinkers to turn to. We had institutions that selected, vetted, appointed, and elevated people we relied on as authoritative voices. They had processes around them, like editorial review and fact-checking at publications, to ensure they did not go off the rails. The professions had an ethical code that meant something. While this system was not without its faults, and not without errors, Americans felt confident relying on network TV anchors, writers at newspapers, college professors, pastors, doctors. It was an era of high institutional trust.

That world is gone today. The institutions that sustained it have lost public trust, not entirely without warrant. Not only are official voices not trusted, but being in a position of authority today often makes the skeptical trust you even less.

People today feel left to their own devices in picking the voices they should listen to. Influencers and outsider voices are now often the authorities of choice, whether that be on personal health, relationships, or media. Even when those people are part of a major legacy institution, it’s as individuals that people trust them.

“The slower we move, the faster we die. We are not swans. We’re sharks.”

These are the words of Ryan Bingham, the road warrior character played brilliantly by George Clooney in the 2009 film Up in the Air (which was adapted from Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel of the same name). It’s my favorite movie.

Bingham is a human-resources professional and part-time motivational speaker who travels continuously from city to city. An expert in airlines and business hotels, he is obsessed with the goal of attaining 10 million frequent-flier miles on American Airlines. The movie is a romantic comedy, but for me, the love interest is an annoying distraction from the profound psychological portrait of a man who travels to find himself and escape himself at the same time, while simultaneously dispensing advice on human flourishing.

It’s Monday, July 20. 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 nuns taking New York to court over its new assisted dying law. Is Canada to blame for wildfires that are spreading smoke across the U.S.? The forgotten history of left-wing political violence. And much more.

But first: Michael Doran on the expanding war with Iran.

Iranian ballistic missiles struck a U.S. air base in Jordan on Friday, killing two soldiers and leaving a third missing. (The remains believed to be the missing soldier’s have since been recovered.) Another American service member died Saturday during the disposal of a downed Iranian drone in Iraq. Tehran has since struck Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan again, targeting water desalination plants, power facilities, and military bases. The United States is sending additional F-16s and F-35s to the region and launched a new round of strikes on Iran over the weekend.

All signs point to the return of major combat operations. But is that really what is coming next? Michael Doran dissects the latest developments in his piece for us today, a must-read analysis of the war at a pivotal moment.

—The Editors

• Spain claimed the 2026 World Cup title Sunday at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, defeating Argentina 1-0 in extra time to deny Lionel Messi a second consecutive championship. Substitute Ferran Torres scored the winning goal after Argentina had a player ejected. It is Spain’s second World Cup trophy and its first since 2010.

• Influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested in Miami on Saturday as part of UK extradition proceedings on rape and sex trafficking charges. British prosecutors announced additional charges the same day, bringing the total number of alleged victims to seven.

• An American woman wrongfully held in Iran for nearly a year and a half on espionage charges touched down in San Francisco on Saturday. Earlier last week, President Trump called her release a “gesture of goodwill.”

• New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani said his administration is still weighing whether to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York for the UN General Assembly in September. “I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani said. City lawyers are exploring whether he has the authority to detain a sitting foreign leader, though legal experts say the move would face serious obstacles.

• A wave of severe weather killed at least eight people across the U.S. over the weekend, including a Utah fire captain, his wife, and three of their sons, all swept away by a flash flood during a family hike. The Northeast is recovering from Saturday flooding that left drivers stranded on highways and led to the cancellation of over 1,000 flights.

• Nine people were wounded in a shooting in downtown Tucson, Arizona, early Sunday morning, with police officers opening fire on the suspect. The suspect, whose identity has not been released, was hospitalized in critical condition.

• Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey debuted at No. 1 with $124.5 million domestically over the weekend, the biggest live-action movie opening of the year. Demand was so fierce for the film, which was shot entirely on 70-millimeter IMAX, that theaters added 2 a.m., 3 a.m., and 6 a.m. screenings to keep up, nearly all of which sold out. (For more on The Odyssey, read Spencer Klavan’s review.)

Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review and author of the new book Blood & Progress, which makes the case that left-wing political violence has a long and largely forgotten history in America. He joins Coleman Hughes to argue that the commonly held belief that political violence is largely a right-wing phenomenon is not just inaccurate but ac…

Do you feel suffocated by smoky, miasmic air? Is the sky amber and apocalyptic? For the past week, wildfire smoke has covered vast regions of the United States. President Donald Trump says Canada is to blame. “The United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air,” he wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday. He threatened to impose steeper tariffs on Canada to recover the “cost of this pollution.”

But is it really Canada’s fault?

Republican members of Congress from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and New York also demanded answers and action. “Michiganders shouldn’t have to breathe Canada’s negligence,” Representative Lisa McClain of Michigan wrote on X, claiming that “year after year the smoke crosses the border while Canada does nothing.”

On Thursday afternoon, Representative Tom Barrett of Michigan posted a murky photo taken from inside an airplane as he was flying into the state capital of Lansing. “Do you think we should delay the Gordie Howe Bridge opening until Canada takes responsibility and gets control of these fires?” Barrett asked about the bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, that is supposed to open on July 27. The lawmakers seemed eager to hold Canada accountable for making voters feel like they’d been dropped onto the set of Mad Max.

Is America ruled by an oligarchy—that is, a small group of tightly knit, self-serving, and very wealthy people? We hear this argument increasingly, most of all from the Democratic Party. Their fundraising emails have begun to stress this point over the last year, blaming “billionaires” for driving America into ruin. I call this “billionaire derangement syndrome.”

Let’s look at the facts. First, in people’s daily lives, they typically interact with their state and local governments more than with the feds. And if you look at what state and local governments do, most of it is driven by voter demand, and I do not mean billionaire or oligarchic voters.

Most state and local government spending goes toward schools, roads, and increasingly, Medicaid. None of those reflect the agendas of most billionaires. For example, Medicaid dollars flow particularly to lower-income recipients. Hospitals and doctors receive income from this program, but reimbursement rates are relatively low, and many of the best doctors do not accept Medicaid patients and don’t make a living from the program.

Now look at the federal budget. The major components of spending are Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid (joined with the states), defense, and interest on the national debt. Those programs are a mix of popular and necessary, and they were not put in place, and are not kept in place, by billionaires or oligarchs.

General Ahmad Vahidi has a talent for getting under Donald Trump’s skin. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore,” President Trump recently said of the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and his colleagues. “They’re scum. They’re sick people. . . .As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. It’s just a waste of time dealing with them.”

But of course it isn’t over. On Friday, Iranian ballistic missiles and drones slammed into Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, killing two American service members, leaving a third missing, and wounding four others. The IRGC claimed responsibility within hours.

Vahidi launched the attack not simply to answer Trump. He was also sending a message to Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the officials negotiating with Washington. You may sit across the table from the Americans, the strike in Jordan signaled to them, but I am the man really calling the shots.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Spencer Klavan reviews “The Odyssey.” Joseph Epstein marks the 75th anniversary of “The Catcher in the Rye.” Joe Nocera sits down with magazine writer Rachel Aviv, who isn’t so sure her new book can break through our screen-addled minds. And more!

But first: Is everything we’re telling our young people wrong?

We live in an age obsessed with minimizing risk. Our institutions reward caution, young people delay commitment, and too many of our brightest college graduates are steered toward consulting, banking, and other well-worn careers where stability and security take precedence.

The problem is, nothing truly great is built that way.

In 1994, Canadian entrepreneur Ronnen Harary was 23, fresh out of college, and living with his mother in Toronto. He knew he wanted to start a business; he just wasn’t sure how. Then he came across a magazine ad for a quirky toy about the size of a softball, made from pantyhose, stuffed with sawdust and grass seed, and painted with a face. Soak it in water for a few days, and grass would sprout from the top like hair. It was called the Grass Head, and it was flying off the shelves in Israel.

“The spark hit me right there,” he writes in an exclusive excerpt from his new book, No Experience Necessary. “I was going to start a company to manufacture and sell Grass Heads in Canada.”

Three decades later, the company Harary co-founded, Spin Master, is worth about $2 billion and is behind some of the world’s most beloved children’s brands and toys, including PAW Patrol and Bakugan.

And the key to it all, he writes today, was starting the company when he was young.

“We didn’t have much money, and we had no real experience to speak of. What we did have was the promise of a road yet to be traveled, and the wide-eyed eagerness of three guys too young to be cynical about the world.”

“That turned out to be the best thing to ever happen to us.”

Read Harary’s case for betting on yourself in your 20s—and why every thriving civilization depends on young people willing to leap into the unknown.

(For more on “The Odyssey,” read Daniel Mendelsohn’s masterful essay from last week about why the epic poem has endured and enchanted us for millenia.)

This week on Second Thought, Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot sit down with writer Allie Rowbottom to dig into her new novel, Lovers XXX, set in the cocaine-fueled “golden age” of Los Angeles’s adult film industry. They discuss the evolution of pornography, from VHS tapes to OnlyFans—and why feminists remain deeply divided over whether porn liberates women or exploits them. Click below to watch the video, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And to keep up with all things Suzy, don’t miss her newsletter!

We’ve published a lot of stories worth catching up on this week, including Kat Rosenfield on what Olivia Wilde’s new movie says about polyamory, and Arthur Brooks on why artificial intelligence has no chance against the self-help industry. Plus, Nicholas Wyman tells the extraordinary story of how he discovered his grandfather was a hero of World War II . . .

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our senior writer and editor Joe Nocera for his recommendations . . .

📺​​Watch: Star City, which just completed its first eight-episode season on Apple TV, is superb; it’s a dark imagining of life in a compound (Star City) that revolves not just around space flight and cosmonauts, but spies, backstabbing, and treachery. The show comes from the same producers behind For All Mankind, a series that has run for five seasons and takes as its premise that the Soviets have beaten the U.S. in the space race, and NASA is desperately trying to catch up. I would describe For All Mankind as “meh.” Yet when its producers decided to tell a similar story from the Soviet point of view, they caught fire. Here’s hoping Star City gets five seasons too.

📖Read: You will not read a more infuriating book this year than Catch the Devil, by the great criminal justice writer Pamela Colloff. It’s a shocking tale of a snitch named Paul Skalnik, whose vivid, and usually last-minute, testimony helped convict more than a dozen men who he claimed “confessed” to him before their trials began—despite their protestations that they had never met him. The book has a lot to say about what’s wrong with the criminal justice system, with one story in particular—about a man, likely innocent, who has been on death row for over three decades thanks to Skalnik—that is heartbreaking. Colloff’s confrontation with Skalnik as he nears death is itself worth the price of admission.

👂Listen: The finest audio storyteller in America is Dan Taberski. (Sorry, Serial.) Over the years, he has produced such classics as Missing Richard Simmons, The Line, and Hysterical. His latest, produced by Audible, is called Manifesto, and it’s about, well, manifestos. Long manifestos (the Unabomber’s), short manifestos (Luigi Mangione’s), political manifestos (Karl Marx’s), and angry manifestos (tons of them). Its guiding light is the famous phrase shouted by Howard Beale in the movie Network: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” How do you make a binge-worthy podcast about manifestos? That is Taberski’s gift.

Last but not least: As the World Cup comes to a close, feast your eyes on something beautiful: the Argentinian national team celebrating their second straight World Cup final.

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

Is it possible to gush so much over the person you’re interviewing that you embarrass yourself? I believe it is. In fact, I believe that’s what I did earlier this week when I spoke with Rachel Aviv. And there wasn’t even any booze involved.

As someone who has spent much of his career writing for magazines, I pay a lot of attention to magazine bylines; there are certain writers I’ll drop everything to read. When I was a young pup, trying to learn from the best, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Nora Ephron were at the top of my list. Today, it’s Rachel Aviv. There’s not even a close second.

Aviv, who is 44, has been writing magazine articles for The New Yorker for the past 16 years, and I regularly find myself gobsmacked when I read one of her stories. The clarity and simplicity of her prose reminds me of Susan Sheehan, whose 1982 book about a woman with schizophrenia, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, is considered a nonfiction classic. And the psychological acuity of her work calls to mind the great Janet Malcolm, who wrote memorable works about Sylvia Plath’s husband, the writer Joe McGinniss, and, indeed, a feud over the value of psychiatry itself (In the Freud Archives).

Did I toss away my professional cred within the first five minutes of the interview and tell Aviv I had her on the same pedestal as Sheehan and Malcolm? I did. “Thank you,” she said, blushing slightly while waiting for me to say something a bit less breathless.