The Free Press

Welcome back to The Honesty Project, a new series of opinion surveys from The Free Press. We’re asking Americans what they believe about the most important issues in public life, from political violence to the AI revolution. And we’re going deeper than a typical poll. We partnered with Populace, an opinion-research think tank, to design surveys that gauge respondents’ “private” opinions—the views they feel are too sensitive to share publicly. Our goal is to overcome the bias inherent in polls, which often elicit less-than-honest responses, and to understand what parts of American life people don’t feel they can speak about freely.

Our first edition last week asked questions related to the health of America’s civic life. And we discovered some disturbing trends. View the previous round of results here.

Today, many of our questions address fairness and equality in American life. That includes meritocracy in hiring, the value of hard work, the ethics of Donald Trump’s presidency, and more. We found that:

—Most Americans believe Trump’s inner circle is enriching itself at the public expense.

—A majority of Americans say publicly that race relations have gotten worse over the last five years. A minority of Republicans agree in public, but that figure rises to 59 percent for privately held views.

—Only 13 percent of blacks say in private that merit should trump representation in hiring, though a majority say so publicly.

—Among blacks, Generation Z, and the working-class, support for letting illegal immigrants who haven’t committed violent crimes remain in the U.S. drops significantly in private.

For a closer look at the methodology we use to capture people’s privately held views, watch our explainer video below, and view our full methodology here.

In the week since New York City’s primaries—when three democratic socialist, staunchly anti-Israel candidates swept to victory—we’ve published a series of stories examining what the results mean for the country, and in particular, for Democrats, some of whom say they don’t recognize their own party any more.

This weekend brought a visceral illustration of the new mood we’ve been trying to capture. On Friday evening, California state senator Scott Wiener was on his way to a trans-led Pride Shabbat service in San Francisco—an event he’s joined for 22 years. At the entrance, protesters surrounded him, screaming: “We fucking hate you.” “You do not belong here.” And: “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of shit.” Wiener is a Jewish, openly gay man.

His offense? His stance on Israel—specifically, his refusal at a campaign event to declare that “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” He later reversed course, but no matter. The damage was done.

If you haven’t seen the video, we encourage you to watch it. It’s a stark example of something increasingly difficult to deny on parts of the left: No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.

How, exactly, did we get here? According to John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, the DSA-style antisemitism now permeating large parts of the Democratic Party did not emerge overnight. Rather, it was cultivated over decades, tolerated and emboldened by leaders who declined to confront it. And if we ever hope to understand it, Podhoretz writes, we must go back to the very beginning. —The Editors

The political story of the year isn’t just the emergence of open and unabashed anti-Zionism among successful insurgent Democratic primary candidates for the House of Representatives in New York and New Jersey. It’s that the ideological prior they all have in common, the idea that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state, was not an impediment to their victories, but rather, their secret sauce. Over the next five weeks, two more states will host primaries that will show whether this attitude has the same kind of appeal to Democratic voters elsewhere in the nation.

Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary pits two relatively conventional Senate candidates (both mildly to severely critical of Israel) against the Muslim radical Abdul El-Sayed, a former public-health official in the state. Trained as a doctor, El-Sayed deployed his professional credential to excuse away the monstrous crime of the Hezbollah-inspired Lebanese immigrant who drove a truck into a Michigan synagogue last year. He released a video explaining that his time on a psychiatry rotation had taught El-Sayed how “hurt people hurt people.”

Asked about the difference between Hamas and Israel, El-Sayed told CNN, “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one: Hamas evil, Israeli government evil. You can say both.” He appeared alongside Hasan Piker, the social-media firebrand who has said Hamas is “a thousand times better than Israel,” and responded to criticism of his friendly and unchallenging posture toward Piker by declaring that “my understanding of America is, it’s a place where we have freedom of speech.”

El-Sayed is favored to win the primary on August 4.

“Bill Clinton operates by sonar,” observed Robert Reich, who knew the 42nd president as a friend and served for four years as his Secretary of Labor. “He emits a huge number of policies, ideas, and initiatives and he sees what kind of response he gets. And where he sees an opportunity to move, he moves.”

That quote, from Joe Klein’s profile of Clinton published by The New Yorker more than 25 years ago, came to mind recently when I was trying to think of how to capture Andy Burnham, the man who is near certain to become Britain’s next prime minister after Keir Starmer’s resignation. I run a start-up newspaper in Manchester and have been covering Burnham closely for six years now, in his role as the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, and yet I still struggle to define exactly what it is he believes in. The public sees him as a successful mayor, who is running on his record of improving Britain’s second city, but they know little else about what he stands for and what he’ll do in office.

Like Clinton, he emits his sonar waves to build a picture of what it is that he thinks voters and party activists want and then shapes his views accordingly. Since he emerged in British politics in the early 2000s as a high-flying adviser and then cabinet member in Tony Blair’s Clinton-inspired “New Labour” government, Burnham has been regarded with suspicion by many political commentators, not to mention members of his own party.

Stephen Sondheim was a master of the Broadway musical and one of its greatest innovators. The breadth of his subjects is dazzling: the French pointillist painter Georges Seurat (Sunday in the Park with George), the opening of 1850s Japan to Western commerce (Pacific Overtures), the killers and would-be killers of American presidents (Assassins). Even his adaptations had distinguished source material: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is based on the works of the Roman playwright Plautus, and A Little Night Music is a reworking of the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night. (The title is a translation of Mozart’s string serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik.)

Sondheim (1930–2021) has the reputation as the most highbrow of Broadway composers. His music is psychologically subtle and astute, and notoriously challenging to perform. It’s not hard to understand why a 1994 New York magazine article had the title “Is Sondheim God?” But if we glance under the hood to see how the machinery works, what we find is comedy. And he knew it. When Sondheim was awarded the 2013 MacDowell Medal, his acceptance speech began: “I take genuine pride in being the first to represent the former runt of the arts: musical comedy. Yes, I mean musical comedy, not musical theater.”

Born to upper-middle-class New Yorkers, Sondheim was a child of divorce and found a surrogate father in a neighbor, the famed Broadway lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. He pushed the budding young composer toward musical theater and devised a program of study that paid lifelong dividends. Sondheim wrote his first musical at 15. By his mid-20s, he was collaborating with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story. (His story is well told in Daniel Okrent’s recent biography: Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy.)

Welcome to The Weekend Press! Today, the woman who planned JFK Jr.’s wedding on how Taylor Swift could get married in secret. Two Drinks with the Republican senator who says Iran is running rings round our president. Sitcom star Mayim Bialik gets real about her “personal neuroses.” And more!

But first, Suzy Weiss introduces the origin story of a media empire. . . .

The beginnings of media empires are seldom smooth. The Free Press began on Substack, when Bari and Nellie created an account using crappy airplane Wi-Fi. But after that, it was like we were News Corp. Just kidding: There was endless confusion about everything from incorporating (hello, Delaware!) to office kitchen-cleaning politics (ceramic coffee cups are a privilege, people!) to office leases on both coasts. (Thank you, Craigslist!)

Dave Portnoy knows what I’m talking about. He started Barstool Sports—the bro-tainment juggernaut that pumps out sports articles, gambling picks, podcasts about getting girls, and fodder for internet drama at an industrial scale—with a loan from his dad that he used to buy 100 newsstands, which his mom helped him set up all over Boston.

He was just a recent Michigan grad (Go Blue!) with a deadening sales job and a hunch about what guys really wanted to read, and the gambling companies that might take an interest on the ad side. But he eventually sold a stake of his company for millions upon millions of dollars. These days, the brash-talking Boston kid is, somehow, the Rupert Murdoch of people who spend weekends shotgunning beer.

In today’s lead essay, Portnoy lays out exactly what the beginning of Barstool Sports looked like: broken-down vans, drunk contractors, Hooters ads, and all. The first edition of the paper introduced it as a publication by normal dudes, for normal dudes: “The people at Barstool Sports are a bunch of average Joes, who like most guys, love sports, gambling, golfing, and chasing short skirts.”

And that, says Portnoy, is the secret to his success. Long live the bro. —Suzy Weiss

She’s an anti-diaper mom of two, an award-winning sitcom star, a neuroscience PhD, a former Jeopardy! host, and a certified lactation educator. Meet Mayim Bialik, who sat down with Suzy Weiss for the latest episode of Second Thought, to talk about it all. “I wouldn’t consider myself normal by a lot of [Hollywood] standards,” she said. But she does think of herself as “normal” in other, more relatable ways: “personal neuroses, fears, anxiety, insecurity.” Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the YouTube video below. And to hear Suzy’s thoughts on the episode, check out her newsletter.

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site! Click here to meet an intellectual fitness trainer in Brazil; a pickleball-loving gay woman in New Jersey; or a new Washingtonian looking for a love to last a lifetime. Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance on 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 Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger’s reaction to being banned from the site, and Madeleine Kearns’s deep dive into the controversial practice of letting babies cry themselves to sleep. . . .

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? This week, we only have one recommendation: our latest true-crime podcast, The Lindbergh Conspiracies, which we released last month.

Joe Nocera spent years digging into one of history’s oddest cases: the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. For nearly a century, people have questioned if the man blamed really did it, with no major leads, hints, or clues since—but 2026 could finally be the year that changes. Kurt Perhach, a lawyer in New Jersey, is trying to get the court to unseal new evidence, and the state government is fighting him every step of the way.

The full series is now out and available for all to listen to. Plus, in a new bonus episode, Joe sits down with Perhach to find out what he knows, and why the authorities are trying to stop him. You can find the episode—along with the rest of the series—here, or wherever you get your podcasts. It’s the perfect binge-listen for a long drive.

Last but not least: While it may not be our national pastime, the Team USA soccer team dominated its group stage at the World Cup and will be advancing to play Bosnia and Herzegovina in the round of 32 next week. Our country salutes you! Here’s the team celebrating victory.

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

Sitting inside his Senate office late Wednesday afternoon, Montana senator Tim Sheehy holds up his arm to show me the silver memorial bracelets he wears as a daily reminder of the friends he lost in Iraq, killed by radical Shiite forces that are funded and directed by the Iranian regime.

“This guy was cut in half” by an Iranian explosively formed penetrator, he tells me, pointing to a bracelet commemorating fallen soldier Benjamin Tiffner, an Army Special Forces captain killed in action in Baghdad in 2007. Sheehy was one of the service members who carried Tiffner’s body off of a plane at Dover Air Force Base. “I buried him in Arlington.”

This is Sheehy’s reaction to my question on the administration’s suggestion that Iran’s leaders have turned over a new leaf and are less radical than their predecessors—who were killed in the war by Israel and the U.S. At the G7 summit earlier this month, Donald Trump said, “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with. . . . They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

“I hope they’re correct,” Sheehy tells me in an interview on Wednesday afternoon in his Senate office while drinking his beer of choice, a Coors Banquet. But he wants to remind the administration that the Iranian regime hasn’t crossed an ideological Rubicon simply because its former leaders were whacked. This is a regime that wants us to “die in brutal, disgusting ways” and wants “to videotape us being raped and burned alive.”

We at The Free Press have been consumed by Taylor Swift wedding rumors for weeks. Is it happening at Madison Square Garden next weekend? Is it a decoy? Is Travis Kelce’s entire team really booked at the Marriott Marquis? But there’s one question we keep coming back to: How does the most famous woman in the world actually pull off a secret wedding? We asked RoseMarie Terenzio, the woman who helped JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette pull off their famously secret ceremony 30 years ago this fall. —The Editors

When you’ve helped plan the most secret celebrity wedding in history, you watch the Taylor Swift circus a little differently. First the wedding was in Rhode Island—until it wasn’t. Now it’s rumored to be in Madison Square Garden on July 3: The permits are filed, Travis’s teammates are said to be booked at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani has publicly welcomed the wedding in the same breath as the Fourth of July and the FIFA World Cup.

I don’t know where Taylor and Travis are getting married, but I do know what a decoy looks like. I was John F. Kennedy Jr.’s chief of staff for five years, and 30 years ago I helped him and Carolyn Bessette get married on a remote Georgia island while some press outlets were chasing a flight to Ireland for a party that didn’t exist.

It all began on the Monday after Fourth of July weekend in 1995. Carolyn called me: John had proposed. I was thrilled for them, but even in that first conversation, Carolyn was clear-eyed about what came next. Being JFK Jr.’s girlfriend was one thing—being his wife was something else entirely. She knew she was about to face a different level of public life, obligation, and scrutiny. She just wanted a little more time before the world knew too.

So we got to planning. I had lots of conversations with Carolyn and John about where and how the wedding would happen. In the beginning, it wasn’t about keeping it top secret at all costs, but the more we planned, the more John and Carolyn wanted to protect it. They had good reason to.

Elections have consequences. This is why I left Budapest, my home for the past four years, to return to the United States, my home.

Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat in April, and the unsettling atmosphere of vengeance that has overtaken Hungary since Péter Magyar became prime minister, likely means the end of the Danube Institute, the government-funded think tank where I worked. This would be a tragedy—the Institute was center-right, but not particularly partisan, and produced excellent work—but the new regime is now cleansing public life of much of anything that Orbán and his Fidesz party touched, with the fervor of a pack of political Savonarolas. It was time to go.

I moved to Budapest in 2022 after an unhappy divorce, accompanied by my adult son, who remains in Europe, in graduate school. I had done two fellowships at the Danube Institute, and was curious to learn more about Viktor Orbán’s political ideas. Were there things we American conservatives could learn from him? I meant to find out.

“I’m a workaholic,” said Mayim Bialik—who is 50 years old, and has been famous for about 40 of those—when we sat down to film an episode of my podcast in Los Angeles. “My grandparents were immigrants, so I have that thing of hustle, hustle, hustle.”

Bialik has been in not one, but two, massive sitcoms—Blossom in the ’90s, in which she played the teenage title character, and then The Big Bang Theory, in which she played Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler. The latter ran for more than a decade, until 2019, and at a few different points was the biggest show in the country, drawing in 20 million viewers a week. Since then, Bialik’s made her directorial debut with As They Made Us—a movie about a divorced mom of two, which is one way to describe Bialik—and spent time as a host on Jeopardy! “I loved hosting Jeopardy!, I miss hosting Jeopardy!,” Bialik told me of that time. “When I was not asked back, I wasn’t all right—I wept.”

On the day she and I talked, Bialik had spent the morning recording her own show, Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, where she puts her neuroscience PhD to use exploring big questions about the brain, spirituality, and consciousness. She showed up drinking a green concoction from a glass jar: “lunch,” she deadpanned. She was wearing a long skirt, because later she’d be heading to synagogue for Yiddish night—another one of Bialik’s many passions.

So, are Bialik’s intense and wide-ranging interests—I can’t think of any other actors in Hollywood who are, like Bialik, certified lactation educators—her way of staying grounded? A strategy for keeping normal in Tinseltown?

“I wouldn’t consider myself normal,” she told me. “I think a lot of it does come down to personal neuroses, fears, anxiety, and insecurity. I hate to say it, but those are some of the things that keep you normal, because you don’t have that expanded sense of ‘I’m amazing’ or ‘I deserve this,’ or ‘Give me those drugs.’ ”

That’s another example of Bialik’s odd place in the famously fickle and unforgiving entertainment world: Even though she was a wildly successful child actress, she never had embarrassing public meltdowns. She never flamed out.

There’s been a rash lately of skeptical looks back on stardom, and the costs of it, from Lena Dunham’s memoir Famesick to the docuseries exposing the toxic working conditions on the set of America’s Next Top Model. I wondered if Bialik saw any of her own experiences mirrored in this trend at all.

Bialik told me: yes and no. She said she experienced misogyny, body-shaming, and unfair pay as she was coming up. But she “wasn’t part of the party scene,” thanks in part, she said, to her strict parents—no-nonsense educators who were “very fastidious about me not getting a swelled head.”

“I wouldn’t consider myself normal,” Bialik said.

Her own parenting has been the stuff of internet legend; she advocated for a no-diaper policy, instead using a more primal method called elimination communication, and extended breastfeeding. “What I was doing was not novel with the friends that I had; I was just one of the hippies,” she said, before observing: “I was the only hippie that was on TV.”

And yet, despite the crunchy parenting—she reports that 10 or so years later, her kids are “more obedient than a lot of people would assume”—and the fame, Mayim Bialik is, in the end, oddly relatable.

There are the out-there pursuits, and seeming contradictions—she is a spiritually inclined scientist, a socially conservative famous person—and yet Bialik is firm in her core values. When it comes to money, she believes it’s for giving away, and for teaching your children about the world. “I’m one of those people who believes there should be a cap on how much you can earn, and it should be a lot less than what it is,” she told me. She also believes in, and is vocal about, feminism, criminal justice reform, and Israel’s right to exist and defend itself. So politically, she told me, “I don’t even know what I am anymore.”

You can listen to my entire conversation with Mayim Bialik—we covered a lot of territory—or watch it below:

Also, one housekeeping note: I’ll be taking off next week for the Fourth of July, so there will be no new episode of Second Thought. We’ll be back the week after, and we’re already booking guests for the fall. I’d love to know who you’d like me to interview and what topics you’d like me to cover. So please tell me, in the comments below!

In honor of Pride Month, much to the chagrin of Free Press readers, I came out as a fan of Lil Peep, who, yes, I consider a Great American. But for those worried that I only listen to emo rap on repeat (I do), I wanted to offer another recommendation if that’s not really your thing. It’s a new album from the Yiddish singing duo called the Shvesters. Free Presser Polina Fradkin is one of the singers; and, yes, I’m biased, but they’re glorious.

Who doesn’t love a pivot? I’m always happy to see that the girlbosses of the 2010s (and before) can’t be kept down. Cases in point: Bobbi Brown’s new makeup company; Audrey Gelman’s new inn. Gelman also has a home goods store, and recently licensed a historic Jewish German textile company’s signature patterns for a new line of pillows and dresses.

Madonna’s new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, is out next week. She told Interview magazine that the “mood” of the album is “the girl in high school, me, that never got invited to any dances because I scared everybody, boys. I’d go to dances by myself, go crazy, and do whatever I wanted.“ And about her biopic, Julie Garner was set to play her, but it was shut down, apparently because no one would cough up enough cash: “I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget.”

We’ve reported extensively on the parents betting big on tech for their kids. But some parents are starting to fight back, claiming that their local school’s device policies have thwarted their domestic lives. “These electronics have ruined parenting,” one father said. “I was in tears,” commented another, who watched his daughter zone out in front of her screen. “It’s like the computer stole her.” Read the full report for a glimpse into the analog rebellion in Philadelphia.

This week, The Atlantic declared that the hot new place for singles isn’t dating apps, or even that one World Cup bar in your city. Instead, the spot to land a hot new date is Substack. Across the platform, “newsletter writers are playing Cupid with their like-minded readers,” Anna Holmes writes. I couldn’t agree more. Here at The Free Press, we’d like to remind you that we aren’t just playing at being Cupid; we’ve been at it for years. You can find your soulmate by clicking here, or offer up your own ad by emailing [email protected].

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, we hear from veteran journalist Nicholas Lemann, whose new book, “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries,” traces his family’s extraordinary journey as Jews navigating the assimilationist culture of the 19th-century American South. Today, he reflects on “Remember Me to God,” a little-known 1957 novel that helped him understand why his parents sought to minimize their Jewish identity—and why, years later, he chose to reclaim it.

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Antisemitism comes in many varieties, but it may be useful to divide it into two broad categories: populist and elite. Populist antisemitism is loud, conspiratorial, and regularly violent. Elite antisemitism, which is the variety I have regularly encountered, is genteel, private, and exclusionary. It takes place in rooms with closed doors, where, probably, it is expressed in euphemisms, not direct statements. Being proximate to populist antisemitism generates fear. Being proximate to elite antisemitism generates suspicion, suppressed anger, self-doubt.

I have spent the last several years investigating my family’s history, going back five generations—something I was able to do because the Lemanns have been living in Louisiana for the past 190 years and have been compulsive record keepers. My great-great-grandfather came to New Orleans, alone, from the village of Essenheim, Germany, started out as a peddler, and wound up as the prosperous owner of a small-town dry goods store and a string of sugarcane plantations during the post–Civil War era. During my childhood, none of this seemed like a long-ago past; I regularly visited these establishments.

But not everything I wanted to know was in my family’s papers. In particular, I wanted to understand why my parents, both born in 1926, were as adults so eager to play down their Jewishness, as if that were the price of full acceptance. Having come to maturity at the dawn of what was supposed to be an era of multicultural tolerance and ethnic pride, shouldn’t they have felt free to embrace being Jewish, as the generations of our family preceding them had been?