The Free Press

Some things never change. In 1973, when Israel was facing a war of annihilation waged upon it by all of its neighbors, the U.S. was supplying weapons to its beleaguered ally. But there was a hitch. No European country would allow American planes to even stop and refuel on European soil. When Israel won the 1973 war, it did so in spite of the European powers.

Throughout the current century, European nations have been united in their calls to stop the revolutionary government in Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. They have convened conferences, colloquiums, negotiations, and even issued some strongly worded statements. But they have never done anything practical to prevent the ayatollahs from going nuclear. This year, when American bombers joined the Israeli Air Force in pounding the Iranian nuclear program into the dust, they asked the UK, among other allies, whether they could use Royal Air Force (RAF) bases there to refuel. The Labour government of Keir Starmer bravely denied the U.S. request.

Eventually, and on the quiet, the UK did allow some American bombers to make pit stops on the way to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. But last week, those bombers took off for a final mission. Not toward Iran—but away from the UK.

This followed an incident that is still shrouded in fog.

At the end of September, a local woman who lived near the air base RAF Fairford alerted the authorities to suspicious behavior by a number of people in the vicinity. When the police finally arrived, they arrested five men in their 20s. Another man was arrested a few days later, and yet another was nabbed this week. President Donald Trump announced that a major terrorist attack had been foiled and that the U.S. and its ally had been following the terror cell for some time. UK authorities were quieter. They were quieter still within 24 hours of the arrests, when the suspects were all released on bail. The UK government seemed unwilling to say why a group of black-clad men—apparently foreign nationals—should have been heading toward a base housing American aircraft. The court media in the UK insisted—as they always do when an uncomfortable issue is at stake—that any speculation on the issue risked prejudicing any forthcoming trial.

And so there seems to be a glitch in the narrative. In the days since the Fairford incident, Trump and others have said that an Iranian cell appeared to be targeting U.S. military infrastructure in the UK. Meanwhile, the UK government initially tried to pretend that nothing happened before eventually suggesting that Iran may be involved. But this week, the Americans made their attitude clear in the plainest possible way: The U.S. aircraft left RAF Fairford.

If you live in New York City and spend any time on social media, there’s a chance Joe Sweeny’s videos have come across your feed. The John F. Kennedy Jr.–meets–Christian Bale look-alike delivers no-nonsense, 60-second takes from the streets of New York, expounding on the benefits of capitalism, the follies of the Democratic Socialists of America, or the…

Hi Abigail,

I was in my mid-20s when I started dating a man in his mid-40s. (His name is Simon.) He is one of the highest-quality men I’ve ever known, and we have been together almost five years now. However, one of the consistent challenges in our relationship has been the blended family dynamic: His ex-wife is a very difficult person (I had a restraining order against her for two years) and his child (now 14 and a half) has been a source of many disagreements for us.

Two years ago, I joined the Peace Corps to strengthen my Spanish skills and, to be honest, give Simon and his child (then 12) some much-needed time for one-on-one relationship building. Simon and I agreed to have an open relationship while I was in Peru. Well, tale as old as time, I met a guy in his late 20s (Giovanni) who flipped my world upside down when I was just a few months shy of completing my service. He is the inverse of Simon. Where Simon is steady and reliable, Giovanni is fiery and spontaneous. Where Simon wants peace, Giovanni is ambitious. Simon and I read books on the couch; Giovanni and I dance in the kitchen. Neither one of these is better or worse, just different.

I returned to the States and started my PhD program, and broke things off with Giovanni. Simon knows everything and wants us to recommit to each other and the relationship. However, I am now in the throes of uncertainty. Do I want to reenter the blended family dynamic and live as a cuckoo bird? Or leave a truly wonderful man in the hopes of building something wholly mine with someone in the same life phase as me?

— Erin, 29

Erin,

A friend once lost a bet and had to eat an entire 12 oz. box of Entenmann’s soft-baked chocolate chip cookies in one sitting. The cookies are delicious, arguably as close to just baked as one finds in shelf-stable goods, but a box contains 33 of them. When my friend reached the bitter end, he said, all he could taste was the salt.

That sensory overload, I think, is a reasonable stand-in for the sort of epistemological burden that an “open relationship” typically involves. You think you’re enjoying each partner without losing anybody. That’s the seductive proposition of “open.” But really, you’re blunting your ability to appreciate any one person. And wholly confusing yourself.

Sometime in the fall of 2020, shortly after she departed The New York Times, I had a brief conversation with Bari Weiss. She was in an entrepreneurial mood, making calls and soliciting opinions, and I told her that I thought there was a potential market for a new general-interest publication that was politically independent, competitive with The Atlantic and The New Yorker, free from the ideological strictures of wokeness and the loyalty tests of MAGA.

“Yes, yes,” she told me, as though this was already apparent to her. “But I’m going to start with a Substack.”

Hmmm, I thought. A Substack? Probably won’t hear much more about that.

Now here I am, six years later, about to start a column for a thriving general-interest magazine with a remarkable cast of writers and an independent perspective on the world. And it’s a privilege to be here.

When Bari and I had our conversation, I had just published a book entitled The Decadent Society, which argued that Western civilization had slipped into an age of repetition, drift, and uncomfortable stagnation.

Because God likes to amuse Himself at my expense, the book appeared just as the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world and the artificial intelligence revolution began in earnest. The decadent patterns I had described in that book haven’t disappeared: Human beings are still having ever-fewer children, political futility still grips the United States and Europe, superhero sequels still bestride the movie box office. But they coexist with more hopeful and more apocalyptic trends—with technological breakthroughs and signs of artistic and religious and political ferment, but also with growing extremism, mounting fears of human obsolescence, and dark post-human trends.

My hope is that my writing here will help make sense of all these developments, in a landscape where both cultural renaissance and total dystopia seem more plausible than they did when The Free Press was just an interesting media idea.

This is not my day job. I am a newly minted correspondent for 60 Minutes, where the goal is to ask probing questions, not sling political hot takes. If all goes well, this column will complement that work, staying a little bit above the partisan fray while giving readers useful frameworks (or, sometimes, truly eccentric frameworks) through which to understand our strange-and-getting-stranger century.

I think that aspiration is in keeping with the larger mission of The Free Press: an independent-minded vantage point on a world that defies simplistic categories, tidy ideological expectations, and easy certainty about what is normal and plausible and real.

I look forward to exploring all this complexity with you every week in these pages.

Ross Douthat’s weekly column in The Free Press will be available to paid subscribers only. Sign up today, and get notified every time he writes:

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It’s Thursday, October 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Josh Code hits the campaign trail with the long-shot Republican trying to unseat Letitia James. Patrick McGee on the problem with Jensen Huang’s AI optimism. Eli Lake on Zohran Mamdani’s sinister October 7 statement. Everything you need to know about the Russian plague story. And much more.

But first: The Cornell case and a culture in crisis.

The lawsuit accusing seven former members of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity of gang-raping a classmate, allegations they deny, will ultimately be decided in court. But for college students across the country, the consequences are happening in real time. Frannie Block and I talked to Chi Phi members at schools hundreds of miles from Ithaca who have never met the accused, yet find themselves deemed guilty by association.

Online trolls have attacked Chi Phi chapters, harassing members simply for wearing their letters in public. Meanwhile, pledges are walking away. One finance executive said he planned to blacklist any members of the fraternity in his hiring. The fraternity’s national headquarters has even become a target, with strangers flooding staffers’ inboxes and voicemails with death threats and violent messages. “I hope you and your loved ones get brutally raped and killed,” one caller told a female staffer. Read our piece on this latest example of mob justice.

Back in Ithaca, Cornell senior Jared Lederman thinks the debate over his school has overlooked something important: what it actually teaches students about sex. The same university that urges students to drink less and sleep more has embraced an approach to sex education that he says is shocking in its lewdness. See why he argues the school’s embrace of “sex positivity” may be hurting the very students it claims to protect.

—Madeleine Long

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the USS Abraham Lincoln ahead of its return to San Diego today, taking responsibility for his decision to twice extend the crew’s record deployment, saying “I plead guilty.” The carrier spent more than 260 straight days at sea without a port call, a stretch marked by sagging morale and eight suicide attempts across its strike group.

• A massive Russian barrage of roughly 70 missiles and dozens of drones killed at least 28 people across Ukraine on Wednesday, with 20 of the deaths in a single apartment building in the northern town of Pryluky. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack, which fell on Vladimir Putin’s birthday, was a gift the Russian leader gave himself: “the killing of children, the killing of people.”

• Christa Pike, believed to be the first person in the U.S. to survive after receiving lethal injection drugs, is awake and talking after Tennessee’s failed execution attempt last week, but she’s battling pneumonia and can’t move her arms or swallow, her lawyers said Wednesday.

• The FBI said yesterday they foiled a planned mass shooting at the Mall of America, arresting an 18-year-old after he paid an undercover agent posing as an ISIS member for an assault rifle. According to a criminal complaint, Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud told the informant he wanted to kill non-Muslims at the mall.

• Four astronauts who spent nearly eight months aboard the International Space Station are set to splash down off the California coast today, after their SpaceX capsule departed the station yesterday. The team circled Earth nearly 3,800 times during the 237-day mission, while a fresh crew arrived last week for a six-month stay.

• Russia said yesterday that it’s willing to set up a call between Trump and Putin about the death of a Siberian plague lab worker, as the U.S. and World Health Organization push Moscow for answers. Russian health officials, who still blame “pneumonia of an as-yet unestablished origin,” say there’s no risk of an epidemic.

• France’s Henri Kagan, 95, and Japan’s Kenso Soai, 76, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for discovering how to make molecules come out in just one of their two mirror-image forms. Their work is key to making safe medicines, since one version of a drug can heal while its mirror twin can cause harm.

A young researcher in Siberia has died under mysterious circumstances, raising questions about a potential lab leak. Russia won’t say how it happened. Marshall Billingslea, former Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control, says Moscow has scrubbed news reports, had officials walk back talk of an outbreak, and kept the World Health Organization in the …

Ever since Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election nearly a year ago, many New Yorkers have chosen to give him a chance. Yes, this is the same guy who struggled to condemn the phrase globalize the intifada on the campaign trail. This is the same politician who led a rally outside Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s office just 13 days after October 7, 2023, demanding a ceasefire and accusing Israel of genocide. But the trash is getting picked up on time, crime rates have dropped, and around 60 percent of New Yorkers think he is doing a good job.

Don’t be fooled. Mamdani hasn’t changed. He is still a smiling wolf masquerading as a sheep. Just consider his statement marking the third anniversary of October 7 on Wednesday.

He starts by grieving the “horrific war crimes” of that awful day and recognizing how “profoundly painful” the atrocity was to New Yorkers.

Canada has spent five years trying to do something that many psychiatrists say is impossible: reliably determine when a person who is mentally ill will never get better. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government finally gave up.

Justice Minister Sean Fraser said that officials will introduce legislation this fall to indefinitely halt the expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAID) to people whose sole reason to end their lives is mental illness. Canada was about to become one of the few countries in the world to explicitly allow MAID for mental illness, but an advisory committee recommended in June that the government not go through with the expansion.

As I have documented in my reporting for The Free Press, for more than a decade access to Canada’s government-run MAID regime moved in one direction only: more assisted suicides. One out of every 20 deaths in Canada is triggered by MAID, among the highest rates of assisted suicide in the world, and it has become just another part of the healthcare system. Patients must show only that they have a condition that is “intolerable” and cannot “be relieved under conditions that the person considers acceptable,” not a terminal illness.

Wednesday’s announcement showed that even Canada has its limits. Fraser cited “very real concerns about people who live in communities with inadequate access to mental-health services” and a “lack of consensus over when mental illness is irremediable.”

You can’t open the news these days without seeing something about my school. I am a senior at Cornell, and my university has become ground zero for a series of difficult discussions about sex, rape, assault, and consent. Missing from the conversation is this: Cornell has a sex-education problem. For years, the school has promoted the perception that it is deeply invested in students’ welfare, even as it feeds them a constant stream of guidance on sexual activities that are fundamentally at odds with that goal. Cornell’s health service is shocking in its lewdness, offering students instructions for exploring bondage and supplying a checklist for identifying interest in various forms of group sex. Cornell has also hosted sex-toy raffles complete with demonstrations.

In 2019, the university’s official health authority, Cornell Health, authored a guide titled Sexual Pleasure: Finding the “Sweet Spot.” It opens by declaring that sex can make for a “terrific study break.” Students are encouraged to explore sexual fantasies and consider fetish gear. Exposure to pornography, Cornell assures us, is “totally normal,” and the guide directs students toward “ethical porn” and the “Feminist Porn Awards.” Today, this report is available inside a sexual-health resource library that has been “hand-picked by our staff.”

That same year, Cornell Health published Self-Exploration, a document that tells students they are “entitled to experience all the pleasure” their bodies can provide and instructs them to set aside private time in pursuit of that goal. Another guide, Sensate Focus, meticulously describes touching exercises between partners and states that “nudity is optimal.”

Hayden Kelner, a senior at Ohio Wesleyan University, was giving a campus tour last month when his group reached fraternity circle, the epicenter of the school’s Greek life.

A chaperone asked which fraternity was Kelner’s. He hesitated, and then told them he was the president of Chi Phi.

The eight high school girls in his tour group took a step back and grimaced. Chi Phi’s Cornell University chapter, hundreds of miles away in Ithaca, New York, is at the center of a lawsuit alleging seven of its members drugged and gang-raped a female student, Jane Doe, in 2024.

“I felt disgusting—not about myself, but about what that name carries now,” Kelner told The Free Press. “It’s hard seeing an organization that I care about so much get tainted by something like that.”

Kelner, 22, has nothing to do with Chi Phi’s Cornell chapter and doesn’t know any of its members. When he first heard about the case, he was at work in the admissions office. His heart sank, he said, thinking of what Doe says she endured and what it took to report it. “It’s terrible what happened,” Kelner said about the allegations. “It’s horrible, but that’s not our chapter.”

But in the weeks since, the case has followed him anyway. A professor stopped him to ask whether his fraternity was the one she had seen on the news, he said. Kelner made his Instagram account private, so his family and partner wouldn’t be targeted. He worries about wearing his Chi Phi letters off campus, where strangers only know the name from the news. “I’m worried about my own safety,” Kelner said.