The Free Press

Picture this: A young Kennedy is leading in the polls. He’s handsome, telegenic. The Democratic Party has been keen on promoting him with plum speaking spots on national TV. But he stumbles when forced to articulate a message, losing his primary to another Democrat who had a more conventional, which is to say less name-driven, rise in politics.

I’m talking about Joe Kennedy III, who decided to run a primary campaign against incumbent senator Ed Markey in Massachusetts six years ago and lost in rather disastrous fashion. Then again, I could be talking about his great-uncle, Ted Kennedy, who looked like he could take down Jimmy Carter in 1980 until CBS News’ Roger Mudd tripped him up with a famous softball: “Why do you want to be president?”

Teddy either didn’t know or didn’t want voters to know, and there was a glimmer of terror in his eyes before he launched into a long, rambling response that didn’t answer the question. Kennedy’s subsequent loss to Carter was quickly framed as the end of his family’s dynasty, as has just about every subsequent Kennedy defeat, of which there have been many.

Now that John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg, who we fondly call Jack, has lost his bid for a New York House seat on Tuesday night, we wonder again if the most famous name in Democratic politics has finally lost its appeal.

The reflecting pool, nestled between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, has been around for over a century. But it has never been the subject of this much intrigue, nor this many political potshots.

“It was filthy, dirty, and it leaked like a sieve for many years,” said President Donald Trump in April, when he announced a rapid renovation of the reflecting pool. Within eight or nine weeks, the entire floor was painted “American flag blue,” and the pool was refilled with water, as deep as a kiddie pool and nearly as long as seven football fields, finally clear enough again to reflect the Washington Monument. Mission accomplished.

Or maybe not. A few days later, people began to notice that the pool was turning green, and that sheets of the material lining the bottom were peeling. A dead duckling floated lifelessly to the edge of the pool. And questions began to swirl, including: How did this happen? Is this a metaphor for Trump’s presidency? Is he the victim of some kind of sabotage operation? And can the pool’s problems be fixed?

To get some answers, I spoke on Tuesday with Rudy Stankowitz, a swimming pool and aquatic design consultant who also hosts a podcast called Talking Pools. While Stankowitz has no connection to the reflecting pool renovation, he is very familiar with the materials and processes that were used during the job. His answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Tanner Nau: As somebody whose career is spent building and maintaining pools, what stood out when you saw pictures of the renovations?

A generation ago, debates about Islam in America centered on assimilation and religious freedom. Today, they are bound up with some of our most urgent political questions. Few people are better placed to make sense of this important subject than Reihan Salam. As president of the Manhattan Institute, Reihan is one of the most astute observers of politics and policy debates in the country today. He is also an American Muslim raised by immigrants from Bangladesh. In this essay, he examines two forces he sees reshaping segments of American Muslim life: Islamism, a transnational ideology seeking to impose Islamic law, and Third Worldism, which casts America and its allies as the primary drivers of global injustice. Reihan looks at where each is taking root and what it means for America. This essay was first published in the Spring 2026 issue of SAPIR Journal, and we are pleased to republish it in our pages today. —The Editors

Just days before his historic victory in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani gave remarks outside the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx. He claimed that his aunt had stopped taking the subway after the September 11 attacks because she “did not feel safe in her hijab,” and he spoke of the “fear and humiliation” that she and other Muslim New Yorkers had been forced to endure in the years since. Soon afterward, critics observed that Mamdani’s only living aunt at the time resided in Tanzania and was not known to wear a hijab. Mamdani later clarified that he was referring to a distant deceased cousin of his father’s, a woman named Zehra, whom he referred to as an “aunt” in accordance with cultural tradition.

Having grown up as a Muslim in Brooklyn, I can say that Mamdani’s bleak sense of Muslim life in that era of New York City does not ring true to me. What I remember most vividly from the aftermath of 9/11 are the displays of solidarity among New Yorkers and the many pronouncements from public officials decrying anti-Muslim hatred. Though civil libertarians objected to New York Police Department (NYPD) surveillance of Muslim houses of worship and other organizations in the years that followed, these measures by and large struck me as defensible, not least because they were grounded in a desire to understand Muslim communities and to protect them along with the rest of the city.

Nevertheless, Mamdani’s belief that modern America is rife with Islamophobia is ascendant among younger American Muslims. In conversations with Bangladeshi Americans a generation younger than myself, I’ve been surprised by how estranged from America many of them feel, and how natural and even ennobling that estrangement seems to them. One survey from the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley found that 60 percent of Muslim respondents believe that Islamophobia in the United States is a very big problem, and that concern about Islamophobia was most acute among younger, female, and U.S.-born Muslims—the very Muslims most thoroughly incorporated into the American mainstream.

We often speak of America as the land of opportunity, the one place where you can really make it regardless of your background, your family, your lack of inherited social rank.

Now, that’s all splendidly true. But what’s also true, what we don’t put on the brochure, is that America will probably try to kill you first. To become the greatest at anything in this country often entails horrific struggle. The sun burns only brighter the higher you get. The price of greatness can be a sort of insanity: an all-consuming passion, a dedication to success that is borderline pathological. With the desire to be loved, admired, revered, comes the willingness to be hated.

Few have known this so richly as Ty Cobb (1886–1961). A true-blue American nutcase, he was the best baseball player who ever lived and the first true antihero in sports. Through his greatness, he achieved immortality—the final reward of lasting fame. But the media warped him into a caricature: a bigot of supernatural proportions, a purely evil man. Today a cottage industry of Cobb defenders, misguided in its own way, looks to absolve him of everything he did.

How do we reckon with Cobb? In the many descriptions recorded over the years, you notice the word “greatest” is commonplace. Grantland Rice called him “the greatest competitor I’ve ever known.” Ernest Hemingway called him “the greatest of all ballplayers, and an absolute shit.” Jimmy Cannon was right when he said Cobb was “the strangest of all our national sports idols.” And equally right when he added, “But not even his disagreeable character could destroy the image of his greatness as a player. Ty Cobb was the best. That seemed to be all he wanted.”

On April 6, 1909, Robert Peary and Matthew Henson planted an American flag at the North Pole alongside four Inuit men. But who reached the site first? Peary, a white naval officer and the expedition’s leader, claimed victory for himself, writing in his journal, “The pole at last! The prize of three centuries, my dream and goal for twenty years, mine at last!” But Henson, Peary’s African American assistant and partner, later disclosed that he had driven the lead sledge, breaking the trail and arriving before Peary.

Peary got the glory and in 1920 was buried in Arlington with full military honors. Two years later, the National Geographic Society erected a white granite gravesite monument in the shape of a globe. An inscription at its base reads “Discoverer of North Pole.” Henson lived another 35 years and was buried in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery.

Born in rural Maryland in 1866, Henson grew up on the site of a former slave market. His parents were sharecroppers and died when he was young. Around age 12, Henson headed to Baltimore, where he got work as a cabin boy and traveled the world. In 1888, while ashore and working in a Washington, D.C., hat shop, he met Robert Peary. A civil engineer for the U.S. Navy, Peary was heading on a privately funded survey trip to Nicaragua and searching for a valet. Henson agreed to come. The trip was such a success that they began plotting a joint excursion to the frozen north.

Last Thursday I spent my evening in Boston’s North End, which was overrun by joyous Scots in kilts celebrating the World Cup. As The Free Press’s head of community and events, I’ve spent the last few months helping build the Free Press Supper Club, a new dinner series connecting subscribers for real-world conversation over shared meals. And on Thursday, I finally got to attend one.

Our table was upstairs at the Union Oyster House, away from all the ruckus. Within minutes, I found myself sitting with a perfectly Free Press mix of people: the writer and policy analyst Leor Sapir; a couple who found The Free Press through our limited podcast series The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling and have been hooked ever since; an HR director for a Boston dental company who relies on The Free Press to challenge his assumptions; and a bond trader who argued that it’s our civic duty to speak up against ideological rigidity.

Needless to say, there wasn’t much small talk.

We went straight into Olivia Reingold’s reporting on anti-Israel sentiment in my home state of Vermont. From there, the conversation widened to Title IX, public schools, parenting, and whether the country is really as fractured as it feels.

And that was just our table.

While I was at one table in Boston, more than 2,000 Free Press subscribers across the United States, Canada, and Israel gathered at nearly 300 tables to do something increasingly rare: sit down with strangers and have an open, unfiltered conversation.

Join the July Supper Club!

After dinner, nearby tables converged at after-parties. At a cocktail bar in Boston, a woman from Israel told me she came partly for conversation, but mostly in search of love. People exchanged phone numbers, and WhatsApp groups sprang to life on the spot.

All of this grew out of a project we launched less than a month ago: a new world of community experiences designed to bring Free Pressers together. Alongside the Supper Club, we launched The Free Press Forum, a digital community where thousands of readers have discussed the Iran war, the rise of socialism, books worth revisiting, political primaries, and plenty more. You’ve also welcomed newcomers, offered wise advice, made wedding dress recommendations, and, most remarkably, required very little moderation. Then you started asking for something else: a way to meet each other in real life.

At a moment when we’re constantly told Americans are retreating into tribes, 2,042 people volunteered to spend an evening with complete strangers and speak freely. I’ve spent the last few days looking through photos from the dinners in The Free Press Forum’s Neighbors channel, reading Forum posts, and thinking about the conversations I overheard that night.

What I keep coming back to is this:

Most of us know what it’s like to tiptoe around the subjects that matter most. It can be lonely. Last Thursday, we stopped tiptoeing. At our table—and at hundreds of others—we asked questions, challenged assumptions, and talked openly about topics that are the third rail elsewhere.

It’s easy to forget how good that feels.

If you missed out on the fun, don’t worry! Our next Free Press Supper Club is July 15, and we’re expanding from 28 to 39 cities. The theme is America at 250—we’re throwing birthday dinners for the country, Free Press style.

If you’d like to join us, reserve your seat now. Last month’s dinners sold out quickly, and July is already filling up!

The Free Press has always believed that adults can handle complexity—and each other. Last Thursday, you showed up looking for just that. And we’re just getting started.

The Free Press Supper Club and The Free Press Forum are available exclusively to paid subscribers. Upgrade today.

See you in July.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where Parliament slams the brakes on psychiatric MAID, some trees in Quebec have rights too, and the “fun police” are rolling into the Calgary Stampede. Let’s get to it!

During my four years of reporting about Canada’s government-run assisted-suicide regime, I have spoken with patients, physicians, ethicists, and families wrestling with impossible choices. Again and again, I found myself confronting the same question: Can doctors ever know with confidence that someone suffering from mental illness is truly beyond hope?

Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying delivered a surprising answer to that question last week. After years of study and delays, the committee recommended that the government change its criminal law to “indefinitely exclude persons whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness from eligibility” for MAID.

Canada was preparing to become one of the few countries in the world to explicitly allow MAID for mental illness. That was supposed to happen as soon as 2027. Canada already does not require that a person be terminally ill. MAID patients must show only that they have a condition that is “intolerable” and cannot “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.”

It’s Tuesday, June 23. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Kara Kennedy on why you need to stop shaming 40-something pregnant women, an Iranian singer gets lashed for not wearing her hijab, and more.

But first: Is Britain ungovernable?

Yesterday, UK prime minister Keir Starmer announced his plans to step down, less than two years after moving into No. 10 Downing Street. Starmer becomes the sixth prime minister to resign in the past 10 years. If the country cannot maintain stable political leadership, it raises the question: Is Britain ungovernable?

To make sense of this, we bring you two of our favorite Brits. Up first, Douglas Murray. In his column today, Douglas offers his diagnosis for where Starmer went wrong. The answer, he says, is all too familiar: a leader knowing what he was against, but not what he was for. Read Douglas’s column to understand not just the downfall of Britain’s PM, but what the country’s political leaders keep getting wrong.

Coincidentally, Starmer’s resignation came one day before the 10th anniversary of Brexit, the national referendum that severed Great Britain from the European Union—and triggered a decade of political turbulence. Today, Niall Ferguson marks that milestone by taking the long view—on Starmer’s departure, Britain’s divorce from the EU, and whether or not the country regrets it.

—The Editors

• Vice President J.D. Vance said Monday that Iran would permit nuclear inspectors to return following what he described as a “very, very good” first day of U.S.-Iran talks in Switzerland. Iran’s foreign ministry, however, denied this and said it has made “no new commitments” regarding inspections.

• Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Manchester and fellow member of the Labour Party, is the presumptive pick for the next prime minister after Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday. Burnham won his election to the House of Commons just last week for Makerfield, Greater Manchester. The precinct voted heavily for the 2016 “Brexit” referendum.

• Alan Greenspan, famed economist and chairman of the Federal Reserve for five terms, died Monday at the age of 100. Greenspan’s nearly 20-year term as chairman spanned four presidencies—from Reagan in 1987 to Bush in 2006.

• Alligator Alcatraz, Florida’s large migrant detention center nestled in the Everglades, will soon be demobilized, CBS News reported Monday. The facility, which was opened last July and cost an estimated $1.2 billion, was heralded by Florida governor Ron DeSantis and President Trump as a model for other detention centers across the country.

• A federal judge tossed out federal grand jury subpoenas for Minnesota governor Tim Walz and several of his allies, calling it “blatantly unlawful.” U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz said there was “no doubt” that the subpoenas were issued to damage Walz. The ruling was dated June 17, but was unsealed on Monday. Schlitz is a George W. Bush appointee.

• On Monday the Treasury Department dropped sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil, allowing for an estimated $10 billion of revenue to flow into the country while nuclear negotiations with Iranian officials continue. The temporary waiver lasts through August 21.

• Argentina’s Lionel Messi’s two goals against Austria in a Monday World Cup match made the superstar the all-time leading scorer in World Cup history. Messi, 38, scored his 18th goal after scoring three last week against Algeria. Messi has scored all of Argentina’s five goals during the 2026 World Cup so far.

Earlier this year, Aaron MacLean visited Ukraine, where he met with Georgian Legion commander Mamuka Mamulashvili. What happens when a boy goes to war at 14 years old? What does a lifetime of fighting Russians teach you about how they operate? And what lessons should the West be learning from the war in Ukraine?

When Diane Keaton’s character goes to her doctor with symptoms of menopause in the 1995 sequel to Father of the Bride, she’s supposed to be around 45 years old. It turns out that, surprise, she’s actually just pregnant—at the exact same time as her 25-year-old daughter. And thus a classic rom-com is born. Dressed in a string of pearls, a beige skirt suit, and a chin-length, graying bob, Keaton listens as her husband, played by Steve Martin, panics: “Between us, we are almost 100 years old. We’re gonna be in our 50s when our baby is in preschool!”

According to Hollywood lore, it took a lot of persuading to convince Keaton to sign up for the second film. She was 49 by the time filming started, and she thought the idea of her character being pregnant at that age was too ridiculous for any audience to buy. Keaton agreed only after being begged by Nancy Meyers, the co-writer and producer, but there was a backup plan just in case: They would write her character out through a messy divorce and have Steve Martin marry and impregnate a much younger woman. Maybe Diane Keaton took the role just to save us from the alternate-universe, midlife crisis plotline that would’ve made Martin look like a total schmuck.

In the decades since the movie, as the average age of a woman’s first birth steadily increased from 21.4 in 1970 to 27.5 in 2023, we have adjusted our eyes to a new kind of mother. Kourtney Kardashian delivered her fourth child at 44 without a single wrinkle in sight; Jennifer Meyer had her third at 49; Halle Berry had her second at 46 while looking considerably better than I do at 28; and Hilary Swank gave birth to her first and only child at 48 (Swank told ABC News that she didn’t “actively wait [to get pregnant] until” then, and that she “would have had kids earlier,” if she could). It is probably more jarring nowadays to hear about a 20-year-old getting knocked up than a 40-year-old. In my local prenatal yoga class, I am the only woman in her 20s—or even 30s.