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It’s Monday, July 13. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Can AI really think? What do Maine Democrats do now? Why does Wikipedia think Lionel Messi is a Mossad agent? And much more.

But first: The death of Lindsey Graham.

In the 24 hours since Lindsey Graham’s sudden death was announced, the punditocracy has raced to define South Carolina’s senior senator. Even as he was being praised by President Donald Trump, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, his critics focused on his willingness to ally himself with a man he had once described as “a wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party.” In The New Yorker, Ruth Marcus said that in befriending Trump, Graham had abandoned most of his principles. On X, Steve Schmidt, a “Never Trumper” and former adviser to the late senator John McCain, called him “a simple, tragic man” who “lacked a moral core.”

Our Eli Lake has a less jaundiced and, we dare say, more dispassionate view. By making his peace with Trump’s victory—and becoming the president’s friend and adviser—Graham was able to “catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” Graham’s advice, writes Eli, “helped guide Trump to take military action against Iran, reconsider a premature and sudden withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, and perhaps avoid a full breakup with NATO.” Unlike so many other politicians who couldn’t countenance working with Trump, Graham got results.

“The republic lost a giant,” Eli writes. Read his appreciation to understand the full breadth of Graham’s influence.

—The Editors

Last week, Anthropic published a paper arguing that its Claude AI models have “developed a small collection of internal neural patterns,” and that the AI has private thoughts. It is the latest example of Silicon Valley claiming AI might be more than just a tool used by humans—and that it could have a consciousness all its own. Not so fast, says Spencer Klavan, who pushes back on the creeping movement to equate AI with humans, as if large language models that use mountains of data are reasoning the way humans do. Read Spencer’s column to understand why AI really is a machine—nothing less, but nothing more.

On the other hand, if there is one thing AI has become very good at, it’s helping students cheat on their exams. Brown University professor Roberto Serrano estimates that half his students are using AI to cheat. That would be bad enough. But then Serrano alerted the school—and was shocked to discover that administrators didn’t seem much interested in punishing the cheaters. “What happened in my class should be a lesson to all,” Serrano writes: “In our new AI era, if you do not expose and punish cheating, you will encourage it. We must all have the strength to choose otherwise.”

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• The United States conducted new strikes on Iranian targets throughout the weekend, according to United States Central Command. The strikes culminated in a Sunday barrage aimed at degrading Iranian ability to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

• A preliminary medical examination determined that Senator Lindsey Graham’s cause of death was aortic dissection, a tear along the inner layer of the main artery, due to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Emergency radio dispatch reported a “cardiac arrest” event from Graham’s Capitol Hill home.

• Jannik Sinner won his second straight Wimbledon championship on Sunday, defeating Alexander Zverev. It was also his fifth Grand Slam title overall. In the women’s final, Linda Noskova beat her fellow Czech Karolina Muchova. It was her first Grand Slam title.

• Toronto Police are still searching for a gunman who killed two people and injured four after opening fire Saturday at the city’s Salsa on St. Clair festival. At least 13,000 people attended the festivals.

• Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the former Emir of Qatar, died on Saturday, Qatar’s top governing body announced Sunday morning. Al-Thani assumed power in 1995, handing over the reins to his son, Tamim ‌bin Hamad Al-Thani, 18 years later. He was 74.

• Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell broke his monthlong silence to announce that his absence from the Senate was due to a fall the 84-year-old took—and that he suffered a case of pneumonia while in the hospital. The senator said he is not yet able to return to the Senate floor, but remains engaged with his staff from a rehabilitation center.

• The Trump administration issued subpoenas to several New York Times journalists after they reported that Trump was unable to use his new Qatari-donated Air Force One due to security concerns. The paper’s top lawyer called it a brazen attempt to “intimidate journalists from doing their jobs.”

• The long-awaited return of UFC’s Conor McGregor to the octagon ended just a minute into the fight after the UFC superstar reinjured his leg in the opening seconds. “This came out of nowhere. I am beyond dark here. I can only describe it as hell,” McGregor wrote in a post after the fight.

Richard Hanania is a political scientist, writer, and one of the more interesting and unpredictable thinkers working today. He first came to prominence as a critic of woke ideology and the legal architecture that enforces it, most thoroughly in his book The Origins of Woke. His new book, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, goes in what appears …

I am a professor of economics at Brown University, where I have taught for the past 34 years. During much of that time, I have taught Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics.

But this spring semester, I suspect that more than half of my students cheated their way through the course. And even after I reported it, it took Brown far too long to get involved.

Here’s how it happened: In part due to the tragic shooting that took place at Brown on December 13 during a review session for a final exam, I decided to move my course’s two exams—the midterm and the final—from an in-class exam to a take-home, closed-book format. I thought that would help students deal with exam anxiety. The exams would be made available to students through an online portal, and they would have 11 hours (for a two-hour test) to complete and submit each. Unsurprisingly, the course enrollment jumped to 86, far above 30, the highest maximum in previous semesters.

The results from the midterm were immediately suspicious. The average grade was 96, with 40 students obtaining a perfect score. That compared to a midterm average ranging between 65 and 80 in previous years. In addition, I detected irregularities in many exams, including passages that matched the answers I received when I provided the exam questions to ChatGPT. I told the class I was convinced there had been massive cheating, but I decided not to void the results of the midterm: If the grade distribution of the final exam looked roughly similar to that of the midterm, I would count the midterm; otherwise, I would declare the midterm void and reweight the final. But I also told the class that the final exam was going to be an in-person, closed-book, three-hour exam.

“F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the hearts.”

With those winsome words, Graham Platner surrendered his Senate nomination on Friday, after weeks of detachment and defiance in the face of accusations of sexual misconduct, infidelity, misogyny, a Nazi homage, and. . . I can’t even list it all here.

“People are desperate for change,” Platner wrote in his withdrawal letter to the Maine secretary of state. “For this broken system to be righted. For the American experiment to be furthered. Over the past eleven months, thousands and thousands of Mainers poured their hearts, time, and talent into a movement to deliver that vision. I will be forever grateful to them.”

Indeed, Platner’s woeful character deficiencies were not actually the most important element of his aborted campaign. Rather, it was the overwhelming support Maine Democrats showed for his policy aspirations.

There is a bright, undeniable through line from the issues raised in Platner’s now-forgotten viral announcement video and the 72 percent of the vote he earned in a landslide primary victory last month. He sustained that support throughout all of the controversy—among voters, left-leaning members of the mainstream media, and even reluctant party leaders.

The republic lost a giant when Lindsey Graham dropped dead on Saturday night at the age of 71. The four-term Republican senator from South Carolina was a throwback and an enigma: a Donald Trump loyalist who maintained friendships with the president’s Democratic opposition, an interventionist inside a party that had grown wary of foreign wars, and one of the Senate’s great orators, capable of summoning elegiac emotion and wry humor with his aw-shucks Southern drawl.

Just watch Graham’s 2018 eulogy for his close friend and fellow senator John McCain. “He was a difficult man. He could be tough,” Graham said as he held back tears. “But the joy that you received from being with him will sustain you for a lifetime. And I am so lucky to have been in his presence.”

Graham was also one of those politicians loathed by the passionate factions that have defined the Trump era. For the “Never Trump” former Republicans, Graham was a Judas. After running against Trump and bitterly opposing him during the 2016 Republican primary, Graham eventually bent the knee along with other unsuccessful candidates, even as McCain remained a thorn in the new president’s side. Former McCain adviser Steve Schmidt offered no eulogy for Graham, calling him “a simple, tragic man” in a post on X on Sunday. “He lacked a moral core.”

If I’d told you in 2015 that the focal point of antisemitic sentiment in the U.S. in 2026 would be inside the Democratic Party, you would have thought I was insane. Hell, I would have thought I was insane, and I’d spent decades warning about creeping anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment on the left.

But what I saw in 2015 was this: In the months following Donald Trump’s entry into politics, nationally known Jewish conservatives (like Ben Shapiro) and others known for their presence online (like Bethany Mandel) found themselves under mind-bending assault from the right. Right-wing social media accounts sent millions of threatening messages—often suggesting they be sent to concentration camps and shoved into ovens, accompanied by the most nightmarish images imaginable.

Two years later, a group of self-described “white nationalists” encouraged by Trump’s presidential victory marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “The Jews will not replace us.” The ultimate suggestion was that the emergence of Donald Trump had caused a very heavy and very deeply embedded rock on the right to shake itself free of the earth and let loose heretofore buried demonic forces.

The incredible World Cup match between Argentina and Egypt earlier this week will be remembered for ages: a stunning last-minute comeback that saw Lionel Messi extend his record as the competition’s all-time leading goal scorer and sent the defending champions into Saturday night’s quarterfinals against Switzerland.

But the thriller on the field was also a prelude to something much bigger—and much darker. Within hours of the final whistle, an antisemitic conspiracy theory was born. The idea that began galloping across the internet was that a cabal including Benjamin Netanyahu, Mossad, Lionel Messi, Argentine president Javier Milei, and FIFA conspired to rig the game for the Argentine team. The “evidence” consisted of nothing more than photos of Messi posing with Israeli officials and praying at the Western Wall more than a decade ago, plus a few pictures of Milei with Netanyahu.

Even among the conspiratorially minded, this was pretty thin stuff. What the theory lacked was a FIFA component, something that would link the nebulous Israel-Argentina connection to the game itself. So, just like that, one was invented: a baseless claim that the game’s referee, François Letexier, was Jewish.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, “Little House on the Prairie” passes the test of time with flying colors. Suzy Weiss calls Taylor Swift’s wedding “psychotic.” Two drinks with Joe Allen, messiah of the anti-AI MAGA-ites. And much more!

But first: What kind of story can still unite the world?

There was once a time when we all watched the same shows, read the same books, experienced the same stories. No longer. We live in an age of great abundance—it would take about four years of continuous viewing to watch everything on Netflix—and it’s left the culture fragmented.

But this summer, one of the world’s ultimate stories—one that launched a thousand adaptations, translations, tributes; one that’s been on curricula for centuries; one you’ll know even if you never read it—is coming to a theater near you. Christopher Nolan’s star-studded take on The Odyssey is out Friday. And when we were talking about who we wanted to write about this wildly ambitious, culturally unifying blockbuster, one name was top of the list.

Daniel Mendelsohn started teaching undergraduate seminars on The Odyssey in 2011 at Bard College, where his 81-year-old father decided to attend his course. Six years later, he published a memoir about the experience of reading the epic with a father whose interpretation was constantly at odds with his own. Then, last year, he released a translation of his own, to great acclaim. He, too, can’t get this story out of his head. And we’re delighted to have him in our pages to explain why this story has endured for millennia.

In his piece, he argues that we all see ourselves in its complicated, cunning hero—described, in the epic’s first line, by a word notoriously hard to translate: polytropos. Roughly: “Having many turns.” “Who among us does not dream of travel, exposure to new places and ideas,” writes Daniel, “while simultaneously craving the stability that comes with having a home and security?”

Whereas the conflicts of The Iliad feel foreign—with its brutally violent heroes and gods watching war as we now watch the World Cup—we see in Odysseus the great, eternal, and internal battles of being human. And once you’ve read Daniel’s essay, you’ll see why he’s the perfect protagonist for one of our greatest living moviemakers. —The Editors

Taylor Swift has confirmed absolutely nothing about her wedding, except that it happened. But when you invite more than 1,000 people, details are going to get leaked—and Suzy Weiss pounced on them in the latest episode of Second Thought. There was a raffle? One of the prizes was a Chevrolet? They invited the British TV chef Jamie Oliver? Why? Along with her co-host Dan Ahdoot, Suzy unpacks it all. They also discussed the Korean company bringing your dead relatives back to life, and Team USA’s exit from the World Cup, which Suzy doesn’t care for anyway: “The fields are too big and the people are too small.” Don’t miss this hilarious episode. You can watch it below or listen wherever you get your podcasts; and for more Suzy, don’t miss her newsletter.

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a cradle Catholic in Brooklyn, a pop culture savant in Manhattan, or an “accidental professional fundraiser” who likes the outside part of Oreos. 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].

We’ve published a lot of stories worth catching up on this week, including Kat Rosenfield’s moving report on the death doula industry and River Page’s wry observations from an anti-tech conference in Brooklyn. Also, Arthur Brooks raised his eyebrows at reports of a Taylor Swift prenup . . .

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our community manager Ryan Engelhardt for her recommendations . . .

🍦Make . . . Popsicles. Simple, timeless, underrated. Who doesn’t love a cold Popsicle on a hot summer day? Just grab your favorite juice, pour it into a Popsicle mold, freeze, and voilà. If you’re feeling adventurous, mix a few juices together and throw in some fresh fruit. If you need a mold, here’s my favorite on Amazon. Let’s bring back the lost art of the homemade Popsicle.

🎵 Listen . . . to “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. I’ll forever think this is one of the coolest and most mysterious songs ever written. On the surface, it’s an irresistible groove. But listen closely and you’ll hear a story about history, human nature, and the darkness ordinary people are capable of. The line “I shouted out who killed the Kennedys? / When after all, it was you and me” is pure genius.

📖 Read . . . the Free Press Forum. The Forum has quickly become one of my favorite corners of the internet. Join thousands of other Free Pressers to dig deeper into articles, share ideas, and discover wisdom and unexpected reasons to smile. Don’t know where to begin? Start by introducing yourself, then add your own recommendations here.

Last but not least: While we wait for Taylor Swift’s wedding photos, behold the fans who were having a party of their own outside the arena.

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

What happens when you throw a pop star, a football player, 1,000 celebrity guests, and a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle into Madison Square Garden during a heat wave and shake it all up? Evidently, the wedding of the decade.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were married in Midtown last weekend, and while most of the details have been kept under wraps—guests were made to sign ironclad NDAs preventing them from spilling any beans—what has slipped out is rather odd. To me, the whole affair sounds like a hot mess, and a bit like The Hunger Games.

For starters, comedian Adam Sandler officiated the ceremony. George Stephanopoulos and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver made the guest list. There was a ticketed raffle to win a Chanel handbag, watches, and the same model of convertible that Taylor and Travis rode around in on their first date. The dinner was buffet-style, and included sushi, pasta, chicken, and “a mix of Chinese, Italian, and American favorites,” according to TMZ. And that’s before the fact that all of this took place above New York City’s Penn Station.

I think weddings have gotten completely out of hand; they’re often three-day-long mini festivals in exotic locations. I’ll go on record advocating that bachelorette parties be abolished. But you can’t begrudge a regular girl for wanting to feel like the most important person in the room for a day (or a weekend). But Kelce and Swift have been applauded more often than any two humans on Earth during their mega-successful careers. Why would they turn their wedding into a three-ring circus for celebrities?

I’m sure the method to Taylor’s madness will be revealed—the bride wore custom Dior, and apparently had videographers everywhere—in the form of a documentary, or music video to coincide with her next album. And to be fair: The couple donated $26 million to various charitable causes in the lead-up to the nuptials. That’s a classy move, and earns them license to be as tacky as they want. But the whole thing has surfaced the eternal debate: When does a wedding tip from luxe to Looney Tunes, and is there even such a thing as the perfectly elegant wedding?

Dan Ahdoot, my Second Thought co-host, and I got into all of the wedding scuttlebutt in this week’s podcast episode. We also talked about a new South Korean company that makes holograms of your dead relatives, and Paris Hilton’s win against a notorious Utah boarding school where she said she was abused. Watch Second Thought for our takes on popular—and unpopular—culture:

The specter of the Jackass haunted my adolescence. First as an MTV series in the early aughts, then as a movie franchise—and then in real life, because in 2005, boys loved nothing more than imitating the ridiculous and dangerous stunts performed by the Jackass cast. At the time, the crew of Jackass was derided as bad influences. They were harmful—physically, to themselves, and spiritually, to everyone else. Steve-O, a mainstay of the crew, whose signature thing was being on drugs and lighting himself on fire, proudly declared that he wanted to “make the world a dumber place.”

The new, final Jackass movie came out last month, and half the footage in it is a look back on their most notorious stunts. In hindsight (I wrote in my piece this week), you can see the value of their chaos. The Jackass guys weren’t efficient, or healthy, or effective; unless you count the effectiveness of relentlessly hitting each other in the groin, causing trauma to their testicles, but they were committed to their craft. They took being extremely stupid very seriously, and they were, unlike so many young men today, having fun in the real world with each other.

Joe Allen is a Trump-supporting anti-tech activist, the “transhumanism editor” for Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, and a former concert rigger. When we met for a few glasses of red wine at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, to talk about what AI is going to do to us all, he was wearing a hoodie from a Rihanna tour he worked on. He’s a little disappointed that the president is cozying up to tech bros, but as a true conservative, he doesn’t think it’s entirely the government’s job to protect us from the robots; he’s all about personal responsibility.

“If people aren’t really careful and really intentional, then they’re just going to become slavish vessels for corporate algorithms,” Allen told me.

We talked about aliens, growing up Southern Baptist, where Lady Gaga went wrong, and why Allen thinks the Satanic Panic was “directionally right.” Read all about it:

There’s been a lot of buzz about how Americans aren’t reading anymore. But one New Yorker named ​​Mendel Uminer is trying to make up for everyone else. After collecting about 10,000 books in his studio apartment—“Every book I own, I need,” he told The New York Times—his landlord deemed the volume of books a hazard. Read the full story of his righteous biblio-battle here.

Liquor stocks are taking a massive hit, and are on pace for a crash that resembles the reckoning with Big Tobacco. I’m all for drinking responsibly—but the country’s about to get a whole lot less fun if no one’s drinking at all. Readers, for the Republic, share your favorite cocktail recipe in the comments below.

Many American women, including Nicole Kidman, are training to become “death doulas”—that is, they’re sitting by strangers’ deathbeds to support them into the beyond. Kat Rosenfield reported on the macabre trend this week, but the story runs far deeper than a wacky career, and asks whether we should be rethinking how we treat death—and who we should be inviting into the room for the most momentous, and sacred, last days of our life.

I’m not one for sporting events, but sports documentaries? I am in. I just started the new Netflix series on the tennis great Rafael Nadal, and it’s beautifully done. It’s almost enough to inspire me to sign up for tennis lessons—I’ve only ever embarrassed myself on a court, whether grass or clay—but only almost.

Why must women always invent a new way to torture themselves? I’ve been seeing way too many videos of women working out in weighted vests, for vague reasons related to bone health, or maybe weight loss. I say: Stop shouldering weight that is not your own. Take off the vest this summer, and be free.

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Over a plate of spaghetti Bolognese and a carafe of the house red, Joe Allen tells me what might happen when artificial intelligence surpasses the capabilities of humanity.

“Someone—Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders—ends up taking the fucking longevity injection,” says Allen, 46, an anti-AI activist who’s railed against the technology for years, most prominently as the “transhumanist editor” for Steve Bannon’s popular War Room podcast. “He lives forever, but he becomes a Luddite, and he just completely shuts down the entire economy . . . and then China takes over, and we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.”

Allen adds, “I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” but hey—anything can happen.

Another option, he muses between sips of wine, is that we will end up in a Matrix-style hellscape, where humans are made subservient not to the Chinese Communist Party but to a class of sentient computers who survey and control our every move.