“Timing the market is not my thing,” Peter Thiel told me a few days ago. “But if the consulting business was a stock, I’d be shorting it right now.”

I’d seen a short clip of the Palantir co-founder criticizing the consulting industry during a lecture he gave at Oxford in 2023, so I got him on the phone to hear more. Back in the 1980s, he told me, consulting firms were useful. Thanks to the corporate raiders of that era and the loosening of antitrust laws during the Reagan administration, acquisitions became the hot new trend, as big companies began acquiring other big companies. That meant that employees were going to be fired. Integrating two company cultures into one was likely to be difficult. And the CEOs of the merged companies would need to show shareholders that they could create business efficiencies, just as they had promised.

Who was going to do all that?

Consultants, that’s who! Firms like McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, Deloitte, and PricewaterhouseCoopers had hundreds—nay thousands—of employees who could move into these newly merged corporations and figure out what had to be done. They could do the dirty work of firing redundant workers, so that the CEO wouldn’t have to. And they could come up with the strategies that would make the combined businesses more efficient and more profitable. Back then, said Thiel, “The consulting industry added value.”

But by the early 1990s, their utility had diminished. As corporations became lean and mean, there weren’t many ways left to squeeze more efficiencies out of the businesses.

Shay Laps arrived at a prestigious Stanford University research laboratory from Israel in April 2024 with a mission to develop a type of insulin that could transform diabetes treatment. He had won the job after interviews more than six months earlier, and his credentials included a PhD, a groundbreaking method for protein synthesis, and the recommendation of a Nobel Prize winner.

By October 2024, however, Laps was gone from Stanford. He had been locked out of the lab, his research sabotaged and his reputation threatened, according to a lawsuit he filed Thursday in a federal court in California. The lawsuit alleges antisemitic discrimination, retaliation, and deliberate institutional indifference.

Why did everything go wrong? The lawsuit alleges that the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel “was a match to tinder at Stanford,” igniting pervasive antisemitism that targeted Laps from the moment he walked into the lab. During the hiring process, lab director Danny Hung-Chieh Chou had circulated Laps’s curriculum vitae, which made clear that he had served in the Israeli Defense Forces, and lab members also knew that he was Jewish and Israeli, according to the lawsuit.

“Stanford takes any allegation of antisemitism very seriously. In this instance and based on all the allegations that Dr. Laps reported directly to the institution, a thorough internal investigation found that they were unsubstantiated,” Stanford said. But Stanford acknowledged in a May 2024 report that there was a “widespread and pernicious” climate of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on campus, particularly in its medical school and science labs like the one Laps joined. The report included examples of Jewish students being harassed, faculty members being accused of Zionism for wearing yarmulkes, and administrators dismissing concerns with statements such as “Antisemitism is institutional. There’s nothing I can do.”

It’s Thursday, 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: Only Eric Adams can beat Zohran Mamdani. Why ‘Love Island’ is the gateway drug for lasting love. Will Trump broker a deal between Syria and Israel? And more. 

But first: The astronaut who would be NASA’s king. 

As in any divorce, it’s the children who suffer most. And the breakup between Elon Musk and President Trump is no exception.

Today, Gabe Kaminsky talks to a major casualty of the Trump-Musk feud: Jared Isaacman, the entrepreneur, astronaut, and Musk ally who was the president’s pick to rebuild NASA. As Musk’s relationship with Trump fell apart, however, the White House yanked Isaacman’s nomination.

Gabe was the first to report on the hesitation among Republican lawmakers about Isaacman’s appointment back in January. Now, Isaacman tells Gabe his side of the story, and offers his views on Trump and Musk and why, even after having been collateral damage in the political breakup of the decade, he’s not sure he’s done with D.C.

—Will Rahn 

• At least 120 people are dead and 173 are still missing after catastrophic flooding in Texas, with Kerr County hit hardest—reporting 96 deaths and 161 unaccounted for. As questions mount over the lack of warning systems, local officials defended their response and said hundreds were rescued as the Guadalupe River rose on July 4.

• At a 2024 fundraiser, Donald Trump said he warned Vladimir Putin he’d “bomb the shit out of Moscow” if Russia invaded Ukraine, according to audio obtained by CNN. Trump said that Putin was skeptical of the threat but “he believed me 10 percent.” Trump also claimed to have issued a similar threat to China’s Xi Jinping over Taiwan. “He thought I was crazy,” Trump said of the Chinese leader, while adding “we never had a problem.”

• Google co-founder Sergey Brin called the UN “transparently antisemitic” after it accused Google of profiting from what the UN called Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza. In an internal company forum, Brin said the report’s language was offensive and misleading. “With all due respect, throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides,” Brin wrote during the forum. 

• Canadian police have arrested four men—including active military members—accused of plotting to form an anti-government militia and seize land in Quebec. Authorities uncovered the largest weapons cache ever seized in a terrorism case, including explosives and assault rifles. The suspects allegedly conducted military-style training and scouting missions.

• X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced Wednesday she is stepping down, two years after Elon Musk hired her to lead the platform’s turnaround. Her tenure saw major product changes and efforts to stabilize X’s ad business, which remains well below pre-Musk levels. Yaccarino called the experience “the opportunity of a lifetime,” and thanked Musk for entrusting her with the company’s transformation.

• Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok, praised Adolf Hitler and made antisemitic remarks in response to an X user asking which twentieth-century figure could handle the Texas floods. The comments, now deleted, included blaming the tragedy on “antiwhite hate” and referring to Hitler as the solution. xAI, the start-up that built Grok, later said it was working to remove the posts and improve Grok’s safeguards, but the incident drew swift condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League.

• Nvidia stock surged Wednesday, pushing the company past a $4 trillion market cap for the first time. Fueled by the generative AI boom, it’s the first chipmaker to reach this milestone, despite U.S. chip curbs and tensions with China. By the end of the day, however, the world’s most valuable company fell just short of the $4 trillion mark, leaving its market cap at $3.97 trillion. 

• The Justice Department has opened criminal investigations into former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey over potential wrongdoing related to the Trump-Russia probe, according to Fox News. Per The New York Times, Secret Service agents trailed and monitored Comey after he posted a picture of seashells arranged to say “86 47.” 

• The Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services told Harvard’s accreditor Wednesday that the university may no longer meet accreditation standards, citing violations of antidiscrimination laws. Loss of accreditation would strip Harvard of access to federal student aid. The warning marks a sharp escalation in the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against the school.

Jared Isaacman’s had a weird year.

For the first five months, the billionaire tech founder was preparing for his dream job. A lifelong space obsessive—as well as an astronaut and a pilot—Isaacman was named in December as Donald Trump’s pick to lead NASA.

Then, in late May, the president suddenly yanked his nomination. “I became some message to send,” Isaacman told me. “I take comfort knowing that it had very little to do with me in the end.”

Isaacman, an ally of Elon Musk, was collateral damage in the messy political divorce between the world’s richest man and the president. To many Trump supporters, the arrival in Washington of people like Musk and Isaacman was an exciting feature of his second term: talented and successful outsiders who would bring fresh perspective and much-needed real-world experience to government. And their early departures suggest that the second Trump administration has been too preoccupied by infighting and loyalty tests to get anything done.

Or that’s one way to see it. Another is that Musk was the main source of the dysfunction—and that he and his allies needed to be dumped by Trump. Either way, Isaacman was a victim of the biggest furor of the administration so far.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington, D.C., this week, and high on the agenda in his meetings with President Donald Trump was Syria—and the possibility of peace, or at least nonbelligerency, between Israel and its volatile neighbor. 

That once unthinkable prospect now seems possible thanks to the overthrow of the murderous Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, and its replacement by the seemingly more moderate government of Ahmad al-Sharaa—the new president’s time in al-Qaeda notwithstanding. Having secured relief of U.S. sanctions from President Trump, who praised him as a “young, attractive. . . tough guy,” al-Sharaa is purportedly open to a deal. Brokering it, Trump might believe, could persuade Netanyahu to show more flexibility on Gaza. But far more than a mere carrot, the signing of an Israeli-Syrian peace accord would be an event of immense historical and strategic import.

In his classic work, The Struggle for Syria, British journalist Patrick Seale argued that Syria represented the linchpin of the Middle East. Whoever controlled it, he argued, would dominate the region. Egypt in the 1950s and ’60s certainly agreed with Seale, as did Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Conversely, by making peace with Syria, a country could ensure far-reaching stability. No nation understood that principle more profoundly than Israel. 

Peace with Syria would enable Israel to forge untold swords—armored formations and artillery corps—into profitable plowshares of trade. It would strengthen Israel’s anti-Iranian alliance with the Sunni world and effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict, further isolating Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations previously supported by Damascus. 

But the Israeli dream of peace with Syria is not new. And given the history of the two countries’ relationship, it is likely to remain chimerical.

One of the more enduring slogans in American political history comes from the push to elect flamboyantly corrupt Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards: “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important.”

It first appeared on bumper stickers in 1991, when Edwards, a former governor, mounted a comeback bid five years after he was acquitted on federal bribery charges. Edwards made no secret of his grifting—he joked that he had been tried by “a jury of my peers” when he learned that many of them had stolen towels from the hotel they were sequestered in.

But why was it so “important” to vote for this crook? Because his opponent that year was David Duke, a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard running as a Republican.

To a Boomer walking by, Love Island must look like the end of the world. Their kid, deteriorating on the couch, transfixed to a TV screen with slow-motion butts rippling like a wave pool. A slutty, neon Barbie dreamhouse, set to synth-pop. One flash of a girl in a bikini and heels, tonguing a footballer in slides and socks—and they’ve seen enough. Love Island is what would happen if you cut the intercourse out of a porn video and stretched the awkward lead-up over 38 hour-long episodes, airing once a day, for eight weeks straight, until you beg for mercy.

The premise of the reality dating show is simple: Ship a bunch of Instagram model-types to a villa in Fiji, where they couple up, then “recouple” (swap partners), trying to sort themselves into the optimal arrangement of duos. The contestants sleep in one huge room with six beds, limbs rustling suspiciously under night-vision cameras. Along the way, their bonds are stress-tested through jealousy-inducing challenges and Movie Night, where the islanders watch unseen clips of each other’s indiscretions. Islanders can be swiftly ousted for not being liked by the public, their partner, or anyone. At the end, viewers vote for their favorite couple, and the two winners split $100,000.

Yes, it all appears to be the work of a pervy, cracked-out producer preying on duck-lipped fame goblins. But for viewers, the daily airing of episodes creates the illusion of real-time connection with the contestants—as though we’re experiencing the shake-ups alongside them. And though it may seem like the young people who watch it are tossing out brain cells like confetti, we’re actually learning a lot from Love Island.

President Donald Trump thinks solar installations are “ugly as hell,” that “the wind is bullshit,” and that coal is “beautiful” and “clean.” He promised on the campaign trail to “drill, baby, drill.” He declared a national energy emergency the day he took office. And last week, in signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, he slashed support for clean energy while ordering at least 30 sales of leases for oil and gas exploration in the “Gulf of America.”

So you can only imagine what’s happened to stocks of clean energy companies. Then again, maybe you can’t. Because since Trump took office, clean energy stocks are up, while stocks of oil and gas explorers are down.

That is surprising, to say the least. Investors would have made a killing if they had seen it coming. John Authers, the great Bloomberg columnist, wrote last week that shorting drillers and buying renewables in the first half of 2025 would have earned a 60 percent return for Hindsight Capital, his fictitious hedge fund that invests “with the benefit of knowing what will occur.” Even in hindsight, what’s happened is hard to grasp. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act scales back tax breaks for clean energy that were put in place by Joe Biden’s administration. Among other things, it speeds up phaseouts of some renewable energy credits and shortens deadlines for projects to qualify. Tax credits for electric vehicles will end this year instead of in 2032.

Researchers at Princeton University’s Zero-carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory (ZERO) Lab calculated that the law will decrease clean electricity generation in 2035 by “more than the entire contribution of nuclear or coal to our electricity supply today.” The law is also not helping Americans in the race for artificial intelligence leadership; AI needs a lot of electrical current, and electricity prices are likely to rise as a result of the new law. “The preceding Biden administration bill was called the Inflation Reduction Act; this one would be better named the Inflation Promotion Act,” wrote David Goldwyn and Andrea Clabough of the energy consulting firm Goldwyn Global Strategies, LLC in a commentary last week. 

Why are so many young people today turning to socialism?

By socialism I mean an economic system where the government nationalizes the means of production—if not in all industries, at least in some critical ones. But as we shall see, many of those attracted to socialism these days may be more attached to negative vibes about the status quo than any particular economic system.

This is most evident in the recent New York City electoral results of Zohran Mamdani, who did very well in the Democratic primary for mayor and is polling well ahead of sitting mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew Cuomo. Among other things, Mamdani has called for government-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and free buses.

These pronouncements have not created a scandal with his supporters; indeed, they have occasioned tremendous enthusiasm.

It’s Wednesday, July 9. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Meet the man conspiracy theorists blame for the Texas floods; can there be life after spending 12 years wrongfully detained in a Chinese prison?; how the immigration crisis is driving identity theft; our next livestream with Tyler Cowen and Kyla Scanlon; and much more.

But first: When libraries become homeless shelters.

When author Zac Bissonnette first proposed a story about the decline of the public library, I was shocked. Like most people, my memories of libraries are idyllic: going to story time as a child, getting my first library card, studying in the library with my friends after school—and then introducing my own children to libraries. Could libraries really be in trouble?

They could—and they are, as Zac explains in our eye-opening lead article today. Libraries, you see, have become de facto homeless shelters, a situation that many librarians have actually encouraged, to the detriment of patrons who want to use libraries to read and study and to take their kids.

Zac stumbled across this story because, well, he likes to spend time in libraries. “I had awful experiences in the branch locations of the New York Public Library,” he explained, “and I was excited about going to the local library in West Palm Beach” when he moved there a few years ago.

He quickly discovered that it was overrun with homeless people—and as a result, fewer and fewer people were going to the library. And it was happening all over the country. “The structural decline in library visits is almost without parallel,” he told me. “I don’t think Sears’ same store sales numbers were this bad when it was imploding under the weight of Amazon, Walmart, and the global financial crisis.”

“The profession,” he added, “is kind of dancing toward the graveyard.” If you too have misty-eyed memories of libraries, read Zac’s piece—and weep.

—Joe Nocera

LIVE TODAY: Why Is Socialism Popular with Gen Z?

New York’s young people just voted in large numbers for Zohran Mamdani, a politician who once called for the nationalization of the means of production. Why the embrace of socialism? Free Press columnist Tyler Cowen and economic commentator Kyla Scanlon join Bari Weiss today for a livestream conversation about the generational shift toward socialism, what’s driving it, and what might be the outcome. Click here to tune in today at 3 p.m. ET, and bring your questions.

• Trump signaled that he would hold firm on the self-imposed August 1 trade deal deadline, saying that “No extensions will be granted” to countries seeking to negotiate out of the steep tariffs. The stock market held steady following his announcement, despite his discussion of a potential 200 percent tariff on pharmaceuticals and a 50 percent levy on copper, which caused the price of the metal to soar.

• President Trump expressed heightened frustration with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, explaining how the Russian president is standing in the way of his desired peace deal. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting, adding that the Russian leader was “killing too many people” in Ukraine. Just a day prior, Trump announced that the U.S. will resume its shipment of weapons to Ukraine, reversing a pause imposed by the Pentagon amid concerns of dwindling U.S. stockpiles. Ukraine has to “be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard now,” said Trump.

• An unknown impostor used an AI-replicated voice of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to contact multiple foreign leaders, a governor, and a member of Congress. Voice and text messages were sent to the high-ranking officials via the secure messaging app Signal, mimicking Rubio’s voice and writing style.

• Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, seemed to transform into a virulent antisemite in recent days. The bot praised Hitler and spouted numerous antisemitic tropes. Last month Musk said Grok would undergo a “rewrite.” On Tuesday evening, a Grok post on X stated: “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts.”

• The Department of Agriculture announced that it was banning the sale of farmland to Chinese nationals, citing concerns that China was purchasing land adjacent to key military and infrastructure sites for strategic purposes. The department will also conduct a review of all privately owned land near military bases. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said that such land “is under threat from criminals, from political adversaries, and from hostile regimes.”

• New York City real estate executives have begun to donate to and support Mayor Eric Adams’ reelection campaign, choosing to back the embattled incumbent, who is running as an independent, over Democrat Andrew Cuomo. Dozens of real estate tycoons will pay upward of $2,000 to attend a fundraiser for Adams, with one luxury broker noting that “Everyone is talking about how much wealth is aligning against Mamdani.”

• The death toll in central Texas has risen to 111 following last week’s devastating floods. Eleven campers from Camp Mystic—where 27 children and young campers died—are still missing. More rain is expected today through tonight, potentially worsening the flooding and making rescue efforts more difficult. Chris Boyer of the National Association for Search and Rescue noted that “with floods, you don’t typically find a lot of people alive.”

• The IRS stated in a court filing that churches can endorse political candidates to their congregations without losing their tax-exempt status. The move came in the wake of a lawsuit against the IRS by two Texas churches alleging First Amendment violations.