The Free Press

Call the roller of big cigars! J.D. Vance is ready to throw his hat in the ring. But maybe hold off on the parade. His new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, has the form of a pre-campaign memoir, but the tone is off. There’s no grand vision for America, no charge for renewal. He vacillates between the tough guy and the one who’s always felt a little out of place, ever since he left Appalachia and his people. He’s a child of the white working class, a graduate of Yale Law School, a former venture capitalist, a rich guy, a vice president who once called his boss America’s Hitler, and—since 2016—something no one could have predicted, and that he has a hard time explaining: a Catholic.

What a punishing—but perhaps spiritually essential—choice. When he regained his religious faith after returning from the Marines, he had so many options for a familiar form of Christianity: the Pentecostalism that his grandmother preferred; evangelicalism; nondenominational Protestantism. These are faiths that were not only meaningful to him at one time, but would have brought with them great political advantages. White evangelicals accounted for 45 percent of Trump’s voters in the last election. But he settled on Catholicism, the worst possible choice for the politician he would become.

At the time of his conversion, he had come to understand that his “obsession with achievements and credentials had left me lost.” When his first book, Hillbilly Elegy, became a bestseller, he became a popular political pundit and speaker but realized that “Much of what drew me to this life was prestige.”

If that’s what ails you, Catholicism can set you straight, or at least show you the way out. With its emphasis on humility—expressed most pointedly in the sacrament of confession and the assignment of penance—it insists that all of us are sinners in the hands of an ancient and fearsome faith. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, as we recite near the beginning of each Mass.

What makes J.D. Vance tick?

Most Americans, whether or not they’ve read J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, have some idea of his remarkable journey from poverty in Middletown, Ohio, to the vice presidency of the United States. In some ways it’s the Horatio Alger tale to beat all Horatio Alger tales. A gambler who knew James David Hamel (as he was then known) as a child would have given million to one odds against his attending Yale Law School, making a ton of money in tech investing, and then becoming a United States senator and vice president of the United States. But that’s exactly what he went on to do—and he managed to do it ahead of his 41st birthday.

Another thing he managed to do before age 41: publish two memoirs. His second, released last week, is called Communion, and traces Vance’s decision, as an adult, to be received into the Catholic Church.

In the days since, reviewers of the book have written essays shaped by their opinions of J.D. Vance and his politics. My aim in this review is different. I want to explain why Communion is an interesting, and even valuable, book quite independent of readers’ opinions of the vice president, and even apart from whether J.D. Vance is living up to the Christian principles he formally embraces.

Anyone who wants to live a life that matters—and in some sense, I suppose, we all do—must first try to figure out what matters and why.

Every night before my son goes to bed, I put a dissolving tablet of dust and grass under his tongue. It’s his allergy treatment. The idea is simple: tiny, repeated exposure will teach his immune system not to overreact. In allergy medicine, this logic is trusted enough to prescribe it. By mouth, it’s called sublingual immunotherapy. By needle, it becomes allergy shots. Over time, the body can typically be trained by steady, careful contact with the thing it fears.

For years, parents were told to delay potentially allergenic foods like eggs or peanuts, especially if allergies ran in the family or if the baby had eczema. The entire conversation around food allergies taught families to think of certain foods as threats first and nourishment second. This was not fringe advice traded among anxious parents online—in 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended delaying introducing eggs to a child’s diet until age 2 and peanuts until age 3 for “high-risk infants.” Parents who followed this advice were not being neurotic. They were doing what the experts told them to do.

Now the guidance is close to the opposite: Once babies are developmentally ready for solids, parents are told to introduce allergenic foods early and keep them in the diet consistently. This shift was shaped by authoritative studies and has since been reinforced by additional evidence suggesting that early exposure is likely protective rather than dangerous.

It’s not really about who Gustav Elijah Åhr—the emo rapper known as Lil Peep, who grew up on Long Island and came up on SoundCloud, the more DIY Spotify alternative, singing in his nasally, Good Charlotte register, “Bother me, tell me awful things”—was. It’s more about what Lil Peep was.

He was Gen Z’s own Kurt Cobain: gleefully mischievous and deeply, obviously, troubled, sporting red nail polish and pink hair. Peep—it was a childhood nickname, and a cute rejoinder to the harder rap honorific “Lil”—didn’t reflect the landscape he came from, which included the internet and the suburban mall as much as it did Long Beach, so much as he transformed himself into it. He had a Lisa Simpson tattoo on his neck and another that said CryBaby in big curved letters above his eye. He was always a little bit making fun of the underground rap world that he rocketed to the top of in the late 2010s and was meant to swagger through. His crew was called GothBoiClique, and they rapped about their own anxieties and awkwardness alongside the typical bars about drugs and women. “Never in the streets ’cause I never leave my home,” Peep sang on “Gym Class,” a song he put out on SoundCloud in 2016.

Happy Father’s Day from The Free Press! We’ve published a lot of great essays on fatherhood this weekend: P.G. Sittenfeld explained why, when he was staring down a prison sentence, he and his wife decided to try for another baby. Alex Berenson defended dads against the bad rep they usually get in the movies. And Liel Leibovitz celebrated the fact that “Toy Story 5,” released Friday, bucks the trend—filling our screens with positive messages about fathers.

Today, we’re bringing you something a little different. Six weeks ago, Casey Babb learned that his 80-year-old father had an aggressive brain tumor. Right now, his father may have only hours left to live. But in today’s essay, Casey writes not about fear, but about an “extraordinary gift: the opportunity to say goodbye.” —The Editors

In April of this year, when my mother called me in a panic to say the radiologist wasn’t letting her or my father leave the waiting room after his CT scan, I didn’t think much of it. Anything related to medicine—especially in Canada, where we live—frequently comes with delays. Maybe the doctor went on a lunch break, or a computer froze—or maybe she was taking her time going through the images she’d just taken of Dad’s brain.

I told my mom to relax. I told her to remember what a geriatrician had told us a few hours earlier: that my 80-year-old dad, who had been behaving abnormally the last few weeks, and who appeared to have some trouble with his vision, may have had a minor stroke that we hadn’t detected, or perhaps, dementia. No one wants to hear these things—but at least, I told her, the reason for the wait wasn’t going to be a catastrophic surprise.

I was wrong.

Moments later, my phone rang again. “Hi Casey,” my mom said. “The radiologist is here with me and Dad now, and she wanted us to get you on the line.” The doctor cut to the chase: She had found a large mass in my dad’s brain.

Welcome to The Weekend Press! Today, River Page has two drinks with the AI policy adviser who thinks “a lot of crazy and destabilizing shit might go down.” Doree Lewak wonders if playing mah-jongg will make your kid smarter. And: What should you read this summer? Abigail Shrier, Douglas Murray, and many more Free Pressers have recommendations . . .

But first: Happy Father’s Day!

When’s the worst possible time to decide to have a baby?

When you’re about to go to war? When you’ve just lost your job?

P.G. Sittenfeld and his wife decided to try for a second child when he was battling his way through the courts, trying to prove his innocence after being implicated in an FBI sting.

There are so many twentysomethings who don’t want kids, and when you ask them why, the answer boils down to: The future is uncertain and scary. They need to make more money first. They don’t want to bring a baby into a world that’s burning.

But in his essay today, P.G. gently suggests that uncertainty isn’t a good reason to reject fatherhood. He should know. When he was eventually sentenced to 16 months in prison, his wife was 32 weeks pregnant.

“Being an inmate and a father at the same time was anguishing,” he writes. Still, he never questioned his decision for a second. Don’t miss his moving case for becoming a dad—despite it all.

Even for those who aren’t in prison, fatherhood is no cakewalk—and society doesn’t offer a ton of good blueprints. “The media has stereotyped fathers as goofy, hapless fools who depend on their superhero wives,” Alex Berenson writes, in our second story today about fatherhood. “The only good dad is a feminized ‘gentle parent’ who never raises his voice, is always ready with a hug, and never lets his kid take a risk or get hurt.”

“In other words,” says Alex, “the only good dad is a mom.”

But in his piece, he rejects this very modern idea, and makes the case that dads must be free to be dads—with a few tips that any father might find useful . . .

Hollywood may have a long history of daddy issues—but there’s a new movie that finally gets it right: Toy Story 5. Pixar’s latest offering, which came out yesterday, follows our cowboy hero Woody—now a rotund, balding father to dozens of discarded toys—as he and the gang face a new villain. But according to Liel Leibovitz, the real story is about fathers confronting perhaps the hardest realization of parenthood: Their children are becoming adults, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

“Our kids grow up,” Liel writes in his marvelous review, “and we don’t get to decide how or when that happens. All we can do is be there to help them along as best as we can.”

This week on Second Thought, Suzy Weiss sat down with Luke Burgis, founder and director of the Catholic University of America’s Cluny Institute, which exists to “invest in the human person.” They talked about his new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. From the mobs of Knicks fans flooding the streets to endless Froyo lines, Burgis is fascinated by the ways in which we follow the herd—and has thoughts on how you can break out of the “cult-like” conformity that defines our culture in order to find your “solid self.”

You can listen to their conversation by clicking the link below, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to keep up-to-date with everything Suzy does (this week, she interviewed the new AI millionaires about how they’re spending their fortunes)—subscribe to her newsletter!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a teetotaling accountant in Chicago, a Bay Area venture capitalist looking for her lifelong dinner party co-host, or a healthcare worker from Portland, Oregon, with a love for ’90s comedies. (Party on, Wayne!) 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 to [email protected].

We’ve published plenty of other culture pieces this week, including . . .

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our features editor, Dana Schuster, for her recommendations . . .

See . . . Giant on Broadway, starring John Lithgow as Roald Dahl. It closes next week and is on my personal to-do list. My best friend, whose opinion I trust on everything (though apparently she didn’t think to invite me to the show), said that Lithgow “did a brilliant job portraying Roald Dahl as a charming egoist” and that the play shows just how little has changed in the conversations about antisemitism during the last 50 years.

Watch . . . I feel a little weird recommending Off Campus after my love-fest of an article devoted to the show. (Can you be too into a college romance series?) So may I instead suggest the second season of Beef? While there’s no hot hockey player seductively dancing, Beef will still delight. It’s weird, it’s dark, and it’s funny. Eat up!

Read . . . Among Friends. The debut novel from Hal Ebbott first came out a year ago, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Ebbott tells the story of two men who met in college and stayed best friends through middle age. Despite their seemingly perfect bond, the book explores the resentment and jealousy that festered for decades and comes to a head during a weekend away. The novel is out in paperback next week.

Last but not least, feast your eyes on one of the most beautiful paintings on fatherhood, in all its beauty and melancholy: Breaking Home Ties, by Norman Rockwell.

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

Every summer, the same flood of new books hits the shelves, each one apparently more unmissable than the last. The truth is, most aren’t—but how are you supposed to know which ones are worth your time? To find our favorites for this summer, we turned to some people whose taste we would stake our reputation on. From Arthur Brooks on the mystery of the human mind to Elliot Ackerman on the crime novel he couldn’t put down, we’re certain there’s something here for everyone. We can’t promise these will be light reads, but we can promise they’ll be worth it. —The Editors

Host of Old School and our in-house bibliophile Shilo Brooks chooses a front-row account of 1970’s rock and roll, The Uncool: A Memoir, by Cameron Crowe.

The Uncool is a coming-of-age rock and roll odyssey doubling as an electric teenage dream. Cameron Crowe, best known for writing and directing the films Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, and Vanilla Sky, became a rock journalist in 1971 at age 14. By 16, he was criss-crossing America on smoke-filled tour buses, profiling acts like Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, and David Bowie for Rolling Stone magazine.

Crowe’s memoir exposes the creative essence of the ’70s rock gods and goddesses who shaped American culture in a Watergate world of guitar solo protests and Hyatt House hijinks. The awkward journalism nerd who goes everywhere with a tape recorder philosophizes in hotel rooms with Ziggy Stardust, sneaks into bars with Kris Kristofferson, lives with the Eagles off Mulholland Drive, and coaxes Jimmy Page and Gregg Allman into poetic confessionals.

Last weekend, New Yorkers flooded the streets after the Knicks won the NBA championship for the first time in 53 years. Many die-hard fans in New York and those in the extended New York diaspora, tears in their eyes, said and wrote that they felt like they’d waited their entire lives for this moment.

And I was celebrating right alongside them. After being a Knicks fan for all of two minutes.

I’m not the only bandwagon fan to root for the Knicks only once it got fun. Across the city, bars have been packed with girls in orange crop tops and blue hats, scrolling their phones in front of the TV; Taylor Swift and her friends caught some strays for sporting matching Knicks T-shirts and taking up multiple courtside seats, despite not being “real fans.”

So why was everyone so quick to jump on a hype train they knew nothing about? I invited author and professor Luke Burgis to come on Second Thought and go deep on the answer to why being a fan is so intoxicating.

Burgis studies what philosopher René Girard calls “mimetic desire,” or imitation of the wants of the people around us. Burgis says that we’re all under the spell of the “desires we catch from other people and imagine are our own.” As far as the Knicks go: “It’s an emotional contagion,” he said, but beyond that, ”our culture has become cult-like.”

Maybe you’ve noticed that, more and more, everyone wears the same outfits, waits in the same frozen yogurt line, idolizes the same celebrities. And what’s worse, our uniform desires are even starting to change who we are: We used to have unique aesthetic preferences; now, everyone embraces the same “tasteslop.” We used to have our own quirks; now, as Freya India wrote in our pages, “Nobody has a personality anymore.”

“Groups are becoming homogenous,” Burgis said. “It makes people boring.”

That’s the problem he tackles in his new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, about forming a “solid self” who can participate in group dynamics without melting into it.

“It’s easy to go with the flow,” he said. But “if you do that for too long, you’ll end up with a pseudo-self.” It’s something Burgis knows about firsthand: In his 20s, feeling unsatisfied, he sold his posh Las Vegas home, broke up with his girlfriend, and moved to Rome to join a seminary. He told me that deciding to uproot his life to find his higher purpose was one of the hardest things he’d ever done—but leaving the seminary was even harder.

Years later, when the AI company Anthropic came to him and asked him to be a spiritual adviser to their AI, helping to “make Claude good,” he said no. “They were using me,” he claims, “and using the Pope.” When an Anthropic representative came to the Pope’s encyclical, Burgis took a sharp stand: “It was a bad idea.”

His fellow Catholics told him he was neglecting his duty and tried to shame him out of his position—but Burgis wouldn’t budge. In fact, he said, being canceled is a “modern rite of passage.”

Why is our culture so fanatic, and punitive? How do you say no to the comfort of the crowd—and, perhaps more importantly, how do you discover who you really are? Watch my conversation with Burgis below, or listen wherever you get your podcasts, to learn how to find your “solid self” and break out of a culture where everything feels the same these days.

Is AI ushering us into a brand-new gold rush?

Last week, the world got some pretty good signs that the answer is yes. Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation, making him the world’s first trillionaire. Dario Amodei’s Anthropic (valued at $965 billion) and OpenAI ($852 billion) have also filed the paperwork to go public, and will likely do so soon.

But it’s not just the CEOs raking it in; soon, legions of people who work at or close enough to an AI company are about to make a fortune. This week, I spoke to them to find out how they’re spending their new millions.

At SpaceX, their IPO made more than 4,000 new millionaires out of current and previous employees, including mechanics, factory workers—and recent immigrants, like a welder named Juan Hernandez. So begins the great AI shopping spree.

“I definitely want a cool house,” said one researcher I spoke to, who stands to cash in this winter. “Ideally one on each coast and a pied-à-terre in Paris.” Others I spoke to want pointillist paintings, a glass sculpture, a compound, and to endow their beloved local restaurants. One, Zach Kass, became part owner in a women’s volleyball team. “I made it,” he told me. “I mean, I bought a sports team!”

As the new class of millionaires games out which causes to give to, and which over-the-top vacations to take, one reflected, “You have to have mechanisms that tie you to the mast lest the siren song drive you to your death, so to speak.” After all, “After everything is said and done, the richest people in the world are deeply addicted to shitposting on Twitter.”

The World Cup is in full swing, which means hundreds of international tourists are arriving on North American soil. And they’re falling in love with the best of American customs, from marveling at the halls of Buc-ees to peeling open their first pack of Chick-fil-A sauce. And that’s all before the game even starts. As my colleague Arthur Brooks wrote this week, sports fandom is a science-backed way for anyone to become a happier person. Read his piece for the definitive case on why we should all be sports fanatics, and read my colleague Jillian Lederman’s argument as to why Americans should care.

If the fun of being a fan isn’t enough to sway you, maybe the money will. Because of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, sports fans now have the chance to put their obscure sports knowledge to use, raking in thousands. Still, the rise of these platforms begs the question: Where should the betting stop? Is putting thousands on the invasion of Venezuela the same as five bucks on an early Knicks lead? We let our veteran writer Joe Nocera ditch his day job to explore the wild west of prediction markets. In his new piece, he explains why his betting was obsessive and exhilarating—and ultimately, deeply exhausting.

New York Magazine’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood called up FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who is currently chipping away at a 25-year prison sentence, to see what the disgraced wunderkind has to say about, well, everything. Bankman-Fried went on about his favorite vegan prison recipes, his Adderall regimen, and the serialized memoir he’s been working on in jail. Two years in, SBF still maintains his innocence, and blames his fraud conviction largely on a simple accounting glitch.

Today marks the official release date of Toy Story 5—the latest installment of a series that nurtured an entire generation. For many critics, the new movie is a thinly veiled commentary on how modern parents lost the plot, raising their kids with an iPad instead of a stuffed cowboy named Woody; but my colleague Liel Leibovitz saw it differently. As we head into Father’s Day weekend, don’t miss his essay on why Toy Story 5 is the ultimate ode to American dads.

Evan Gardner contributed reporting.

Dean Ball is running headfirst into the future. One of the most visible experts in the fledgling world of artificial intelligence policy, he spent much of 2025 advising the White House on emerging technologies before moving to the Foundation for American Innovation. Then, just yesterday, he announced he was joining OpenAI, to lead the new “Strategic Futures” team. “An incredible opportunity that came at the right time!” he texted me.

Ball sounded a bit frantic when I called him on Friday, June 12, around 3 p.m. We were supposed to meet for drinks an hour later, but I hadn’t gotten a confirmation. Something came up, he said on the phone, and he’d been dealing with it. We arranged to meet at a hotel bar in Midtown Manhattan.

He didn’t say what had been keeping him busy. But around the time we were ordering our second round of drinks—5:21 p.m. on Friday—the AI company Anthropic received a letter from the Department of Commerce informing them that two of their newest and most powerful AI models, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, had been placed under an export control. According to Anthropic, this meant that they were banned from allowing foreign nationals, whether inside or outside the U.S., to access either product. “The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance,” the company wrote.

This is the same model that, Anthropic said, “found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities,” when it was first released to a limited number of companies in April, “including some in every major operating system and web browser.” Reportedly, the order came after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told White House officials that his team had found a way to “jailbreak” Fable 5—which is, confusingly, a version of Mythos—by getting the model to give them classified information about cyber attacks.

Hollywood has always had daddy issues.

On screens big and small, the fathers Tinseltown tosses our way are always too something: too dumb (Simpson, Homer), too murderous (Vader, Darth), too perfect (Cleaver, Ward), too self-absorbed (Tenenbaum, Royal), too likely to snap his fingers and literally destroy the world (Thanos). Complicated mothers capable of having meaningful, adult relationships? That we’ve had aplenty. But if Pop’s on the scene, you better believe he’s about to deliver either menace or mischief, never anything that too closely resembles actual, relatable, human emotion.

Well, dads, our long, national nightmare is finally over: We now have an on-screen dad capable of all of the above-mentioned empathy and then some. His name is Woody, and he’s a toy; maybe you’ve heard of him?

By now, of course, the mere mention of Woody and his franchise, Toy Story, may provoke even Pixar’s biggest fans into asking whether we really needed a fifth chapter in the series. The answer, I’m thrilled to report, is you betcha: No. 5 is easily the best of the Toy Story films, a surprisingly deep, frequently hilarious movie that has more to say about the current state of human affairs than anything Hollywood has produced in ages.

It’s also a remarkable meditation on fatherhood.