The Free Press

I am 80 years old, this year of our 250th anniversary, and I find myself a cliché. My life has been a common political journey, from left to center. I recently took the Pew Research Center’s “political typology” test and found that I was a “pragmatic and polite conservative,” which seemed a rather abstruse basket:

A politically mixed (though Republican-tilting) group, they lean conservative on economics and the role of government, while tilting more liberal on issues related to race and foreign policy. They prize civility and cooperation in politics.

Well, that sounds pretty mushy—and I find it hard to square with the strong opinions I have on many issues. I’ve voted for Democrats in federal elections, but I grow more Republican the closer I get to local politics. Democrats, I’ve found, simply aren’t very good at running things, especially school systems, where they are in the thrall of the teachers unions. My friends joke about my obsession with the unions. They know all my lines. If industrial unions are organized against the power of capital, who are the public employees organized against? But enough of that. I’ve ranted that rant too often, and my political journey has been more complicated than that one issue. It has been empirical, based on actual experience—on a lifetime of reporting and a lot of reading.

An early example: I was a journalist with the underground press in Boston at the turn of the 1970s and considered myself a member of the antiwar and civil rights movements. The first big issue I covered was busing to achieve school integration. Yes, the white bigots were disgusting. But I couldn’t find any black parents who favored the plan to bus their children to schools outside their neighborhoods either. Black activists and politicians—and white liberals—were gung ho, but not actual parents of black kids in school. Busing was a form of social engineering imposed from on high, by a judge—W. Arthur Garrity—who lived in a wealthy liberal suburb. Wealthy liberal suburbs were not affected by his plan, of course. I began to see that there were limits to what government could do, especially when it came to changing a society’s culture.

“The songs are all we have to remember.” With these words, the hero Odysseus brings Christopher Nolan’s new, three-hour-long, star-studded, all-IMAX blockbuster adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey to an end. Given its own epic scale, this closing nod to Homer, whose twin epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey—or “songs,” as the ancients called them—are the foundation on which Western literature rests, is all the more touching. It’s as if Nolan is saying that, however “epic” his or anyone else’s work may be, and whatever new media or technologies we may deploy to retell those old tales, in the end, we owe it all to Homer and his poems.

As indeed we do. To be sure, the frenzy over Nolan’s new movie—which began at the end of 2023 when he announced the project, and has been mounting steadily ever since, as each tantalizing trailer has been released—owes something to the director’s own popularity. (His Dark Knight Batman trilogy alone has earned nearly two and a half billion dollars worldwide.) But Nolan’s film is, in fact, the second Odyssey movie to appear in the space of just a few years (The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, came out just weeks after Nolan announced his version). And those are just two of nearly 30 new adaptations and translations of the epic, including my own, that have appeared since 2000 alone.

That, together with the centuries-long list of literary adaptations, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Derek Walcott’s Afro-Caribbean riff Omeros to Margaret Atwood’s feminist Penelopiad, reminds you that, perhaps more than any other work of antiquity, the story of Odysseus has never stopped speaking to us.

Why?

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, as a new adaptation of the iconic series Little House on the Prairie is released on Netflix, we turn to poet Joseph Massey to reflect on the original television show—an ode to family and home that helped him reconnect with his estranged family seven years ago.

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In the spring of 2019, I reconnected with my mother and stepfather after a decade-long estrangement. My life was cracked and misshapen, nearly unrecognizable, after I was ejected from the world of mainstream arts and letters at the peak of the #MeToo movement for boorish behavior when I was a young man. I hoped to reclaim a sense of self that wasn’t fragmented—a sense of home I hadn’t known before but badly needed.

My mother and stepfather grew up in an industrial town outside Philadelphia, and they both worked off and on in factories that once thrived in that region. They came from broken homes, surrounded by other broken homes, and many of their friends and relatives were ravaged by drug and alcohol abuse. They were ravaged, too. Life in a gray refinery town, working in warehouses with constant earplug-piercing levels of noise, would drive anyone insane.

My stepfather loomed as a constant threat. The mood swings were volatile, and all the more so considering that he was six feet, eight inches tall. He didn’t talk; he screamed, and the apartment walls were full of holes from his fists. That’s the world I was raised in—my mother and father divorced when I was 3—and I left as soon as I could, in my late teens, to start a new life far from that place and those people.

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

This famous question was posed in the title of the Philip K. Dick novel that inspired the sci-fi movie classic Blade Runner. It is now at the heart of our real-life debates about artificial intelligence. The point of Dick’s question is this: If robots could dream, it would mean they had inner lives—not just mechanized patterns of behavior, but private ideas and feelings they might experience without ever putting them into words. And if that were true, what, if anything, would be left to separate us from them?

So naturally, many people were alarmed when the AI company Anthropic announced this week that its large language model, Claude, could “silently perform reasoning steps in its head.” That made it sound an awful lot like the machine was alive.

What Anthropic’s research team actually discovered was something a lot less sensational, though still completely fascinating. They published a paper showing that Claude has code it can target and deploy to answer prompts, without putting that particular code into words that its human users can see. For example, if you ask Claude’s chatbot, “What color is the fourth planet from the sun?” it might respond “red” without ever naming the planet in question as “Mars.” But Claude has a chunk of numbers that corresponds to the concept we call “Mars,” and that same chunk of numbers might also get used if you ask which planet is named after the Roman god of war.

It’s Friday, July 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: River Page goes cold turkey on tech with the modern-day Luddites. Why the Michigan Senate race matters. Michael Shermer on why the Charlie Kirk conspiracies are immune to facts. Olivia Reingold explains why Clavicular just popped up in Israel.

But first: Frannie Block reports on a dark tale of a teenage boy accused of sexual assault, and the tragedy that came next.

Your child has been accused of terrible wrongdoing, the school you trusted presumes him guilty, and you can’t find any way to defend him.

I’ve spoken to so many families who have been through this.

There was the 12-year-old in Illinois who saw his friend tying a jump rope into a noose in the schoolyard—and asked if he was okay—only to be accused of a “hate crime.” And the 17-year-old in California whose life was derailed when someone found a picture of him wearing a dark acne mask—and claimed it was “blackface.”

But this is one of the hardest stories I’ve ever told.

“I didn’t do this,” 15-year-old Owen Poirier told his parents when they picked him up from school for the last time.

They didn’t know what he was talking about. They just knew that he had been suspended that morning and that he was facing a criminal investigation.

Later, they learned that a girl had claimed Owen touched her crotch on the school bus. Eventually, they discovered that there was scant evidence to support this allegation. The school’s principal admitted months later in an email: “There was no sexual assault.”

But by then, it was too late. Owen had killed himself.

If he was still alive today, he would be 18, working at the family business, and preparing to take over one day. Instead, his parents are locked in a legal battle over who is to blame for Owen’s death. The truth is starting to emerge in court, where a disturbing picture is being painted, of due process trampled, and a rush to judgment that cost a boy his life.

—Frannie Block

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The biggest story in politics this week was the dramatic fall of Graham Platner. Who could have seen this one coming? Anyone with two eyes, according to Caitlin Flanagan. In case you missed our coverage, read Caitlin, as well as Eli Lake and Kat Rosenfield, on the story of how the most controversial Senate candidate this cycle finally crashed out. And check out our editorial on the “Believe Women” double standard that allowed Platner to last this long.

For a prognosis on whether the Democratic Party can survive the far-left faction that promoted Platner, and has seen primary victories from New York to Colorado in recent weeks, we turned to Evan Barker. She was a Democratic operative from 2018 to 2023, which meant working for some of the people behind the victories by New York City’s Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Colorado’s Melat Kiros. Because she saw the coming earthquake from the inside, you should read her playbook for Democrats worried about this trend.

“Imagine being terminally ill, slowly losing your functions, your faculties, your dignity, your bladder control—and there at your bedside, fluffing your pillow and slipping ice chips through your pale, parched lips, is the star of Eyes Wide Shut.” This week, Kat Rosenfield took us into the world of death doulas, who are reintroducing some humanity into a process made sterile by corporate influence. They can absorb the burdens that a dying person and their loved ones don’t want to put on each other. Kat also wrestles with a giant question: Who can we trust to be beside us as we approach the threshold?

Now what do we do? President Donald Trump’s declaration on Wednesday that the ceasefire with Iran was over, along with calling the regime’s leaders “sick people” and “scum,” left many Americans wondering what our country’s options are. Aaron MacLean’s piece this week soberly assesses them, arguing that nothing will be easy or without risk, but there is no going back.

Ezra Jin, the pastor of one of China’s largest underground churches, spent 266 days in Chinese prison for the crime of practicing and preaching his faith. On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, he came home and was reunited with family members in Los Angeles. This week, Frannie Block broke the news of Jin’s release, how it happened, and what it might mean for other Christians who are still behind bars in China.

This week, the preliminary hearing finally began in the case that sent shock waves around the world: the assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025.

The proceedings, which began Monday in Utah and are expected to conclude on Friday, have surfaced overwhelming evidence against accused killer Tyler Robinson. For example: He confessed the crime by text to his transgender roommate Lance Twiggs (“you werent the one who did it right???” “I am, I’m sorry.”); his own parents recognized him from released images, and said that the rifle he used matched that of his grandfather; Robinson’s DNA was found on the rifle’s trigger, a spent cartridge casing, two unspent cartridges, and the towel used to wrap the rifle; surveillance footage showed Robinson jumping down from the rooftop where the fatal shot appeared to be taken; and bullet cartridges recovered at the scene featured engravings (“Hey fascist! Catch!” and “OwO what’s this?”) made with a tool found in Robinson’s bedroom, alongside a shell casing engraved “test shot.”

This is not an exhaustive list.

You might assume, given all this, that the vicious conspiracy theories sparked by Kirk’s assassination, which have infected our society ever since, would have faded.

You would be wrong.

I had to register for the Luddite Conference online. It was just one of many events that made up the first-ever Summer of Ludd, a weeklong anti-tech festival put on in New York that took place last week. Other festival offerings included: a class on how to mend your own clothes, tutorials on how to flirt offline, and guided meditations. The organizers are anonymous, but the goal of the whole thing, according to a pamphlet I was given, was “to get people off big tech, into Public Space.” When I arrived last Tuesday at The New School in Manhattan for the Luddite Conference, I glanced across the lobby and saw a group of people leaning against the wall on their phones. Clearly, this was a work in progress.

Not that I was judging. I was there because I know that my phone makes me jealous, depressed, overstimulated, and anxious—and yet I keep using it, virtually every waking moment of my life. And I am not alone. Forty-six percent of Americans say they’re addicted to their phones, according to a study published earlier this year. We’ve known for years that the devices can increase our anxiety, and that social media makes people unhappy. More recently, we’ve been bombarded with stories about how artificial intelligence—an industry global capitalism is betting everything on—is causing “existential anxiety” and “chatbot psychosis,” and could potentially cause massive job displacement.

All of this is to say that the Luddites I met aren’t radical in their belief that too much technology is bad for you. They’re just radical in their optimism that something can and should be done about it. But, as I’d soon learn, nobody seemed exactly sure what exactly that something should be.

Hello, and welcome back. Reporting to you from Sun Valley, where I am diving under shrubs to avoid Dylan Byers but then finding him there in the shrubs saying, “Hi, it’s Dylan Byers, got a minute?” Honestly, I love it here. When we first came several years ago, Bar was like, “Can you believe our lives led us here?” and all I could say was, actually, yeah. As the smartest person I know (me, not Bar), this is exactly how I expected things to unfold for me. The market is efficient. I was made for Sun Valley.

In announcements: Our July Supper Club is next Wednesday, July 15, in 38 cities across four countries, because apparently “meeting strangers from the internet for dinner” is now one of our most successful ventures. Last month, thousands of you did it and the overwhelming feedback was, “Can we do this again immediately?” Make your reservations today! And this, from some of the supper club organizers, looks cool: a two-day frontier tech conference in New Hampshire, known to me as the thinking man’s Vermont.

→ The oyster of my eye: Graham Platner—the king of the Dirtbag Left, the boarding-school kid who talked all gruff so everyone could pretend he was working class—has suspended his hugely viral and popular campaign for Senate in Maine after being accused of rape. I have to spend a little time on this since it really tells you a lot about where our politics are at. First, the accusation, reported by Politico in an explosive new piece: Platner’s ex-girlfriend says he broke into her house and raped her. Or, as the media is phrasing it, “he entered her rural Maine home uninvited” and “forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop.” Hmm. There’s a word for that!

Now, here’s the odd thing. That very same accuser, Jenny Racicot, had earlier spoken to The New York Times. Weeks ago they published their own Platner sex scandal story. But it was soft. It didn’t include the rape. What NYT supporters say is that she didn’t want to go on the record with it. The other way to see it—my way, the bad way—is that it looks like that the story was a sort of catch-and-kill, in which they got the facts and downplayed them to protect Platner. Because they did know everything. They had been told about that sexual assault.

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

They dissect Taylor Swift’s unhinged Madison Square Garden wedding, from the “schizophrenic” buffet menu and Chanel bag raffle to the bizarre guest list (why was George Stephanopoulos there?)—p…

Edward Fishman, senior fellow and director of the Greenberg Center for Geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins School of War to discuss his New York Times best-selling book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare. How has the United States turned the global economy into a strategic weapon? What are the strengths and l…