The Free Press

On Monday, British prime minister Keir Starmer announced his resignation after less than two years in office. The decision means his successor, expected to take office within a few weeks, will become Britain’s seventh prime minister in just 10 years. (For an in-depth look at Starmer’s tenure, read Douglas Murray’s piece also in our pages today.)

But what exactly has made Britain so difficult to lead—and is it possible that the country is simply ungovernable? The timing of Starmer’s announcement is notable. This week marks the 10th anniversary of Brexit, when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. And in the years since, political instability has been one of the few constants in British public life. Against this backdrop, we turn today to historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, for the long view on how Britain arrived at this moment. —The Editors

In my late 20s, as a newcomer to the history faculty at the University of Cambridge, I came under the bracingly baleful influence of that most acerbic of Tory historians, Maurice Cowling. He taught me to understand English history as a succession of challenges to the established religious and social order, which the Conservative Party existed to contend with, and ultimately, to contain.

Democracy, in the form of electoral reform; socialism, in the form of the Labour Party; and fascism, in the form of Hitler—each of these challenges, Cowling argued in three ironic and contrarian books (1867, The Impact of Labour 1920–1924, and The Impact of Hitler), required all the guile of the political elite to withstand. For Cowling, politics was not really about ideologies or personalities, as it might appear to the naive onlooker. It was about the maintenance of power and the allocation of high office within the elite.

As someone whose guiding light was an unholy trinity of “irony, geniality, and malice,” Cowling, who died in 2005, would greatly have enjoyed the madcap high politics of Britain’s past decade, which has now seen an astonishing seven prime ministers depart prematurely from No. 10 Downing Street. But it would have saddened him to reflect that Europe had succeeded where democracy, socialism, and fascism had all failed—by bringing the Conservative Party to the brink of political oblivion. The sole consolation would have been that it has done the very same thing to the Labour Party.

Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of Brexit, the referendum on British membership of the European Union. It is also the day after the admission by yet another party leader, Keir Starmer, that the game is up, and someone else must ascend what the Victorian Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli memorably called “the greasy pole” to occupy the post of prime minister.

All countries have periods in which they are said to be ungovernable. The resignation of Keir Starmer as prime minister of the United Kingdom makes it clear that no leader in years has been up to the task. And it captures the comedy of errors that occurs when both the left and right insist on forgoing a clear direction in favor of chasing a muddle of priorities.

Starmer became prime minister in 2024, promising to “stop the endless Conservative chaos.” He was referring to the 14 years of Conservative Party rule that had gifted the country a succession of peculiar crises. Despite their long-running dominance over Labour, the Conservatives managed to fumble the political moment at every turn.

On Thursday, the news emerged: Parastoo Ahmadi, a 29-year-old Iranian singer, alongside eight members of her production team, had been sentenced to 74 lashes by the Qom Provincial Criminal Court in Iran.

Her crime? Not violence, not incitement—but singing. In December 2024, Parastoo streamed a virtual concert on her YouTube channel in which she performed without a hijab. For that act, she and her team will be punished not only with flogging but with a two-year ban on leaving Iran or engaging in artistic activities. The charge: publishing “vulgar and immoral content” online.

Yes, this is the 21st century. The ink on the deal between the United States and Iran isn’t even dry before the Islamic Republic shows its true face. This is a regime that calls America the Great Satan, yet a woman’s voice scared them more than any superpower ever could.

Mango and blueberry. Those two flavors went down in regulatory history when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the sale of fruit-flavored vapes last month, starting with those two flavors.

It was wonderful news for millions of Americans who want to quit smoking, the biggest cause of avoidable death. Adults overwhelmingly prefer flavored vape products as alternatives to smoking and are far more likely to use fruit-flavored vapes than menthol or tobacco flavored e-cigarettes to kick the habit.

Last month’s decision allows the company Glas to market to adults its Sapphire (blueberry) and Gold (mango) flavors. The device itself is the Fort Knox of vapes. Users must pair their device with an age-verified smartphone via Bluetooth, download an app, upload a selfie and a driver’s license image, and use the device near the paired phone.

But it seems that what’s good for adults is bad for teenagers. The American Lung Association pronounced the FDA’s decision “reckless,” and worried that flavors would lure teens into vaping. The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids accused the agency of “risking a resurgence of youth e-cigarette use.” And the American Academy of Pediatrics declared itself “deeply alarmed that these products will end up in the hands of young people.”

But how worried do we actually need to be about youth vaping? The facts are surprisingly reassuring.

Tara was losing her mind.

The 37-year-old, who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had four sons under the age of 8. She was looking after them all single-handedly, while freelancing part-time as an artist. The youngest, Davey, was just 16 weeks old: He’d been born just after Tara’s husband, a Marine, had been deployed to the Western Pacific. He wouldn’t be back for five months; their baby was waking up every two hours in the night. The situation felt unsustainable.

So Davey’s pediatrician—like so many pediatricians—recommended that this exhausted mother leave her baby to “cry it out.”

Also known as the “extinction” method, cry it out is a hardcore form of sleep training, the controversial practice where parents selectively ignore a baby’s cries at night, to teach them to fall asleep independently.

Tara was nervous. Although she had sleep trained her older children, with them she’d taken a gentler approach, visiting their cribs every 20 minutes or so while they cried to offer verbal reassurance and a quick pat. She knew cry it out—where parents completely resist the urge to check in—would take a bigger emotional toll on her.

Nevertheless, that night, at 8:30 p.m., Tara nursed Davey, kissed his fluffy brown hair, then gently laid him in his crib and slipped out of the room. He began crying immediately. And kept crying—off and on—for two hours.

Young Americans are drinking a lot less than they used to. That bodes ill for America.

Let me explain. A new report making headlines from the research organization Monitoring the Future reveals that the percentage of teenage Americans who had tried alcohol in 2025 was lower than at any time since the data had been collected. In the mid-1970s, 92 percent of 12th graders had tried at least a sip of alcohol; by 2025, that proportion had fallen almost by half, to 47 percent.

On the one hand, this is good news, given the many problems created by underage drinking—and I include those of my own besotted youth. But the new finding also indicates a trend that is distinctly less cheery: an unwillingness to take risks associated with adult behaviors. This is a point persuasively made by the psychologist Jean Twenge, who has shown that among adolescents and young adults, all manner of risk-taking—from having sex to driving a car—has tanked in recent years.

For example: Now that Gen Z is firmly in the workforce, financial researchers have begun to look at these young adults’ investing habits. The conventional wisdom is that young people are piling into crypto and meme stocks—and some certainly are. But on average, members of Gen Z prefer safer, liquid assets and avoid high-risk investments, compared with older cohorts.

Lest you think this is simply evidence of prudential wisdom about finances, Gen Z is even more resistant to high-stakes investments in other people. In 1980, 90 percent of 35-year-old men were married; today, the rate is 60 percent and falling fast. In 1993, 83 percent of 12th-grade girls said they hoped to marry at some point; by 2023, only 61 percent said the same.

Some of this stems from a lack of self-confidence: The percentage of 12th-grade girls who believe they would make a “very good spouse” fell by 11 percentage points from 2012 to 2022. (The decrease for boys was 8 points.) But the data generally point to the fact that rising rates of anxiety—which creates risk aversion—are a big reason why members of Gen Z are avoiding real-life relationships. For example, higher anxiety among young people predicts a preference for digital messaging over face-to-face interaction. And according to recent data analysis by the University of Washington’s Ryan Burge, this anxiety extends far beyond a preference for texting. Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z say “you can’t be too careful” in dealing with people—far and away the highest of any age cohort. Depressingly, only 13 percent of Gen Zers say that most people can be trusted. The result is that in pursuit of avoiding risk, Gen Z is avoiding people.

It’s Monday, June 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: J.D. Vance leads negotiations in Switzerland, and Caitlin Flanagan and Robert P. George dig into what really drives the vice president. Suzy Weiss names her Great Americans pick: Lil Peep. Charlotte Grinberg says we should let the kids eat peanuts. And much more.

But first: Introducing The Honesty Project.

What do Americans truly believe? It turns out nobody really has a firm grasp.

That’s because the typical methods of finding out—polls, surveys, focus groups—all have a serious flaw: They tend to elicit less-than-honest answers. As a result, shallow spasms of groupthink are often mistaken for deep shifts in the popular will. And real, slow-moving changes in American values are often missed entirely, until they manifest themselves in radical new political movements.

We at The Free Press want to shine some light into the shadowy corners of Americans’ private views. So, to try to get a more accurate sense of what Americans believe, we partnered with Populace, a Boston-based think tank that developed a method of gauging respondents’ “private” opinions on sensitive topics. From now through November, we’ll publish a series of polls designed to deliver a better representation of what your neighbors think of the biggest issues of the day. We’re calling it The Honesty Project.

The stakes of the initiative are self-evident: According to our first poll, 28 percent of Generation Z publicly believe that violence may be necessary to save the country. In private, that number rises to 39 percent.

It is core to The Free Press to explore what Americans actually think about the most important issues in public life. This work depends in part on an accurate understanding of what our neighbors believe. That’s the purpose of the Honesty Project: To understand how frayed America’s civic fabric actually is, and in doing so, take the first step toward fixing it.

Read our editorial on the mission driving this project. And explore the results of our first survey to understand what Americans think about a range of issues, including our faith in American democracy—and in one another.

—The Editors

On Sunday, Vice President J.D. Vance stepped into a role that could define his 2028 presidential campaign: leading U.S.-Iran peace talks in Switzerland.

The negotiations followed Iran’s Saturday announcement that it had once again closed the Strait of Hormuz, prompting President Donald Trump to warn Tehran: “You close it and you won’t have a country.” Vance emerged from the negotiations saying “great progress” had been made, though the Iranian delegation appeared less than enthused.

It’s only the latest illustration of Vance’s tenuous position inside the administration. Last week, Eli Lake examined how the vice president has spent days trying to sell the Iran deal to a fractured Republican coalition, split between hawks who see it as a form of American capitulation, and anti-interventionists who opposed the war from the start. The piece is a revealing look at how the vice president is viewed by his party—and the world.

But what actually drives J.D. Vance? For that, we turn to the man himself. Last Tuesday, the vice president published his second memoir, Communion, tracing his journey from a poverty-stricken childhood steeped in evangelical Protestantism, through years of atheism, to his eventual embrace of Catholicism.

Caitlin Flanagan is unconvinced by the self-portrait. Communion has the form of a pre-campaign memoir, she argues, but little of its substance: “There’s no grand vision for America, no charge for renewal.” Vance casts himself as a “Christian statesman,” yet seems perpetually frustrated by the Church’s criticism of his political agenda. In her piece today, she explains why Vance’s understanding of himself collides with the world’s—and with Catholicism.

Princeton professor Robert P. George sees something else entirely. At its core, he writes, Communion is the story of a kid from the Ohio Rust Belt who clawed his way to Yale Law School, only to discover that status alone could never provide meaning. “What I came away from the book confidently thinking is that J.D. Vance was a troubled kid who wanted to lead a meaningful life,” George writes. Read George on what Vance’s conversion story reveals about the man behind the politician.

Our latest Great American is none other than Lil Peep—the Long Island rapper who fused emo music and trap rap, two things that weren’t supposed to go together, and made something entirely his own. His story, Suzy Weiss argues, is so totally American: a freak and an outcast who took advantage of a new technology to make his art, moved to California, and gave himself a new name. “Whatever he was wearing, or saying, or intimating,” Suzy writes, “it was like he invented it. And isn’t that what a rock star is?”

• Trump said Saturday the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which just underwent a $14 million renovation, will likely need to be drained for repairs after its newly painted floor began peeling and algae spread across the water. The president blamed vandals for the damage and said those responsible could face years in prison.

• Russian-occupied Crimea halted civilian gas sales Sunday after Ukrainian strikes on fuel infrastructure killed four people and triggered the region’s worst energy crisis since Russia’s 2014 annexation.

• British prime minister Keir Starmer is facing growing calls to resign from within his own Labour Party, with one senior member of the party saying he has “absolutely no authority” left. Andy Burnham, the popular former mayor of Greater Manchester, is widely seen as his likely successor after winning a special election last week.

• The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating a near-collision at Boston Logan Airport on Saturday, after a Delta flight aborted its landing to avoid an American Airlines plane taking off from an intersecting runway.

• A Spanish judge ruled that Begoña Gómez, wife of the prime minister Pedro Sánchez, will stand trial on corruption charges and has been barred from leaving the country. She is accused of using her proximity to power to secure public contracts—part of a widening web of investigations that have put Sánchez’s circle under scrutiny.

• The U.S. men’s national soccer team advanced to the World Cup knockout round as group winners Friday, shutting out Australia 2–0 without injured star Christian Pulisic. It’s the first time the Americans have topped their group since 2010. They close out group play against Turkey on Thursday before their round-of-32 match on July 1.

Caitlin Flanagan is one of the best essayists in America. She recently joined The Free Press, and I was glad to finally get her on the show. She is funny, opinionated, and not particularly interested in telling you what you want to hear.

We started with Los Angeles, where she lived for 35 years before deciding she’d had enough. Flanagan grew up in Northe…

It is undeniable that there is a darkness in the hearts of many Americans today. And not only the deranged few who commit horrible crimes against their neighbors. For every famous alleged killer—the Luigi Mangiones and Tyler Robinsons—there are millions of people who excuse or even support the evil they commit.

This turn toward political violence has been documented thoroughly in our pages, and in countless polls. With each politically driven attack, murder, or public threat, it becomes increasingly clear that the old norm against political violence is eroding, and a share of the public is glad to see it go.

And yet, because this type of violence remains extremely controversial, polls may discount the true share of Americans who have come to embrace it. The radicals who mocked the death of Charlie Kirk from behind anonymous social media accounts, for example, might be somewhat coy if a pollster asked them if they believe the murder was justified.

That’s why we chose a different method to gauge Americans’ opinions. On Monday, The Free Press launched The Honesty Project, a series of surveys we’re conducting through November to understand what our fellow Americans truly believe—and the size of the gap between those true beliefs and their publicly stated views. To pull it off, we’ve partnered with Populace, a leading, Boston-based think tank. The key to our surveys is a system that asks sensitive questions, along with a group of less controversial ones, letting respondents signal their answers without stating them directly. (You can read more about the full methodology here.)

What do Americans really believe? It turns out nobody really knows.

That’s because the typical methods of finding out—polls, surveys, focus groups—all have a serious flaw: They tend to elicit less-than-honest answers. Regardless of whether the designers intend it, participants feel like they’re taking a test, and they adjust their feelings to give the “right” answer.

Political correctness, party loyalty, and other factors drive many respondents to hide their true feelings. About two-thirds of Americans believe that most people lie in political surveys, according to one 2020 poll.

As a result, politicians and the media constantly misread the actual views of the public. Shallow spasms of groupthink are mistaken for deep shifts in the popular will. And real, slow-moving changes in American values are often missed entirely, until they manifest themselves in radical new political movements.

We at The Free Press want to shine some light into the shadowy corners of Americans’ private views. To try to get a more accurate sense of what Americans believe, we partnered with Populace, a Boston-based think tank that developed a method of gauging respondents’ “private” opinions on sensitive topics.

From now through November, we’re partnering with Populace to conduct a series of polls designed to get close to gauging what Americans truly believe—and the size of the gap between those true beliefs and publicly stated views. We’re calling it The Honesty Project, and the aim is to deliver a better representation of what your neighbors are thinking on the biggest issues of the day.

How will we do that? The key is a system Populace uses to ask sensitive questions along with a group of less controversial ones, and allow respondents to signal their answer clearly without stating it directly. (You can read more about the full methodology here.)