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Rye Barcott, co-founder and CEO of With Honor, veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, and author of Courage Can Save Us, joins School of War to discuss the meaning of courage, the enduring value of service, and the challenge of bridging America’s growing political divides. What separates courage from bravery? Can military service help heal a polarized Americ…

According to Luke Burgis, our biggest social problem isn’t loneliness or polarization or the decline of trust in institutions. Our problem is that most of us don’t even really understand ourselves.

We dress dress alike, flock to the same restaurants, and chase the same goals—not because we’re adjusting our behavior to fit in, but because the people aroun…

If President Donald Trump’s deal with Iran is making you anxious, I’d love to sell you on an investment opportunity in Gaza—a beachfront resort.

It’s only natural that Americans would worry about the deal. At first glance, the memorandum of understanding (MOU) looks like a wish list drafted in Tehran and rubber-stamped by President Donald Trump. It grants Iran consultations with Oman on regulating traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and even a $300 billion reconstruction and economic development fund to help rebuild and modernize Iran. In return, the U.S. receives little more than what Tehran has traditionally offered: a vague and completely dishonest commitment not to pursue a nuclear weapon.

The agreement proposes a grand windfall for Iran, including economic modernization, rebuilding infrastructure, and the removal of international sanctions. It envisions restoring Iran’s position as a major energy supplier, reopening international trade and investment, and providing access to frozen assets.

To many supporters of Trump’s stated war aims, this vision looks like a complete collapse of the American position. Words such as surrender, appeasement, and capitulation come easily. Before endorsing that assessment, however, let’s rewind to February 4, 2025, and recall the surprise that Trump sprang at a White House press conference alongside Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Last year Madi Magid, an 11-year-old from Dallas, celebrated her birthday in style: with a Taylor Swift–inspired mah-jongg party. There was a custom friendship bracelet–style sign that spelled out “In My MadiJong Era,” tile beads for bracelet-making, and even claw clips with craks, bams, and dragons. The main event? A 90-minute mah-jongg lesson.

“I love Taylor Swift and I love mah-jongg, so I put them together,” said Magid, who added that it was “exciting” for her friends to learn the game. “I’m patient with them.”

Mahj is life for Magid. “I always ask my mom, ‘Can I play mah-jongg with you?’ ” the rising sixth grader told me. “I want to play mah-jongg all the time.”

Mah-jongg—a four-person tile-based game that originated in 19th-century China—used to be associated with 80-year-old bubbes glued to the table for hours a day at their retirement homes. But recently, it’s taken Gen Zers and millennial moms by storm. Mah-jongg nights have replaced the group girl dinner. There are $15,000 luxury mah-jongg sets for the truly elite. Even Blake Lively is a fan—she had her mah-jongg set delivered to court during the Justin Baldoni fiasco.

Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Christopher Cox honored Alice Paul, the suffragist who picketed the White House without saying a word, was force-fed in prison at 60 pounds, and still rewrote the Constitution. Today Philip K. Howard pays tribute to Mary Parker Follett, the social thinker who understood the secret of group behavior—and why American democracy keeps getting it wrong. —The Editors

Mary Parker Follett was a seminal thinker in management theory. In the early days of large industrial organization, when Frederick Winslow Taylor was preaching the gospel of “scientific management,” Follett emphasized the social aspects of any group enterprise. Taylor was not wrong—improving efficiency remains an ongoing goal of successful manufacturers. But his efficient workplace could result in mind-numbing repetition. Follett understood that workers had human needs—for variety, for agency, for mutual understanding.

Follett originated the idea that, in the words of former Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, “organizations perform best when they operate on the basis of shared responsibility and not . . . command and obedience.” Rigid organizational hierarchies, Follett argued, were counterproductive; the people on the spot should have the authority to adapt to “the law of the situation.” This, she saw, requires a system of “management with authority all down the line.” Follett understood that a “final authority” is always needed, but explained how better choices and better understanding resulted when “decisions are usually reached through a process” of interaction. The practice of exploring solutions and reconciling differences melds people into a common unit: “The strength of the group,” she wrote, “does not depend on the greatest number of strong men, but on the strength of the bond between them.” Healthy organizations have an “invisible leader—the common purpose.” (Unless otherwise noted, the quotes by and about Follett are from the 1995 book Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management.)

Follett (1868–1933) came to her understandings not through study but through life. Her father, a shoe-factory machinist in Quincy, Massachusetts, died when she was a teenager. With an ailing mother and a young brother, Follett was thrust into the role of head of the household. She taught school in Boston and could pursue her studies only intermittently, eventually graduating summa cum laude at age 30 from the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women—what we now call Radcliffe College. While teaching and studying she published her first book, The Speaker of the House of Representatives (1896), which described how the speaker consolidates and wields power. In a laudatory review, Theodore Roosevelt called it a “really notable contribution to the study of the growth of American governmental institutions” and praised Follett for presenting “facts as they are.”

After graduation, Follett became a social worker, creating a network of community centers for vocational training in Boston. These hubs for self-improvement succeeded, Follett realized, when people felt a sense of ownership and a part of how the centers worked. Their success would inspire hundreds of other American cities to build similar programs.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran. The agreement set up a 60-day period of negotiations and covers the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, frozen funds, sanctions relief, Iranian oil exports, Lebanon, and more.

In the hours since, figures acr…

VERMONT — As her neighbors were on hour two of debating whether Israel was an “apartheid regime,” a Jewish mother in the audience sat in the back of the town hall, shaking.

“It was a visceral reaction,” she said.

Ten years ago, the woman and her husband left Israel to move to Bristol, Vermont—a 3,782-person town she described as the kind of place where you let your kids run outside barefoot and leave your doors unlocked. A child of the Second Intifada, she thought she had left behind the violence of the Middle East. But sitting in a folding chair, hearing words like land theft and occupied land of Palestine, the woman said she “no longer believed that I was safe.”

In early March, hundreds of towns across Vermont met for their annual town meeting—a tradition that stretches back to 1762. Bristol was one of nine considering a pledge condemning Israel as an “apartheid regime” guilty of “settler colonialism” and “military occupation.”

“The minute people hear I was born in Jerusalem, they stop listening,” the woman told the crowd. “You don’t have the lived experience to understand what really happens there and how difficult it is.”

“It’s a very, very complicated conflict,” she said. “My own dentist was an Arab from Jerusalem.”

She tried to tell them about the reality of Israel—how Arabs and Christians and Jews live there side by side, with equal rights. Her 80-year-old mother, she said, had spent the last weekend sleeping in a bomb shelter.

“Which one of you in this community who knows me, who knows my husband and knows my kids, have called or texted to check how my family is doing?” she asked. “None of you.”

“Oh, because it’s Israel, they’re the colonialists,” she said.

An hour later, at 11:01 p.m., the town passed the pledge.

Dear Abigail,

My wife and I both work full-time, and I grew up around working women: My mother and my grandmothers had careers. My mother-in-law did, too. In fact, she is what you’d call an old-school feminist: educated, opinionated, independent, the kind of woman who spent decades rejecting traditional gender roles. Which is why I find her marriage so baffling.

My father-in-law is treated like someone who cannot function independently. When they visit us, he sits at the table waiting to be served. If food arrives while others are still bringing dishes from the kitchen, he simply starts eating. When he finishes, he leaves the plate there for someone else to clear. If he wants something, he asks his wife to get it. If he wakes up before her, he waits for her to get up and make breakfast. It’s honestly astonishing to watch.

What bothers me isn’t some abstract political issue about household labor. I have three boys, aged between 10 and 15. And though I’m not trying to raise my sons according to internet slogans about fairness—in fact, we’re probably more conservative than liberal in most ways—I do want them to grow up understanding that a competent adult man should know how to take care of himself, contribute to a household, and not behave like a dependent child waiting for women to orbit around him.

My kids see me cook, clean, fold laundry, and do dishes. I take them to doctor and dentist appointments because my schedule is more flexible than my wife’s. Not because I’m trying to make a statement but because that’s what functioning adults do.

Now, my oldest son is beginning to notice his grandfather’s behavior and is asking: “Why doesn’t he help?” I usually say something diplomatic like “he grew up in a different time,” but what I really think is: Because everyone around him enabled him to become spoiled and helpless.

The truth is that watching this dynamic unfold in my house makes me angry. Not occasionally irritated—genuinely angry. Partly because of the example it sets, and partly because my wife and I are both exhausted professionals and he contributes nothing, spending most of the day watching videos on his phone. Increasingly I find myself wanting to say, politely but firmly: “When you visit our house, you’re expected to participate. Clear your plate. Help carry things. Get up and get what you need.”

Am I being unreasonable? Is this something I should address directly? Or is it one of those family dynamics where keeping the peace matters more than trying to correct behavior that will realistically never change?

—Eli, 49

Dear Eli,

All marriages are idiosyncratic. Every single one “baffling” to outsiders. How can she smile while he bloviates? How does he deal with her crazy?

I sometimes imagine that, like George Washington in his lifetime, I’d never seen a bicycle. An inventor approaches me with his prototype. “This is my human-powered, two-wheeled transporter,” he says. There’s no doubt I’d have laughed, thinking this thing was obviously going to topple over and crash the moment the rider climbed on.

And yet it moves.

Despite so many glaring offenses to your ideal of parity or even your mother-in-law’s, their marriage balances, rolls forward, and works.

Which is enough for them, apparently, and ought to be for you. If you don’t like the bargain your mother-in-law has struck with your father-in-law, then I suggest you don’t marry him.

It’s Thursday, June 18. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Is the Iran deal worth the paper it’s written on? Batya Ungar-Sargon on the state of liberal American Jewry, Richard Reeves on embracing masculinity, and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant on why military aid to Israel isn’t charity. And much more.

But first: Hard-selling the Iran deal.

President Donald Trump signed perhaps the biggest deal of his life yesterday, and so far, he’s struggling to sell Americans on its merits. It isn’t hard to see why. The first proposed benefit to the U.S. is Iran’s promise to open the Strait of Hormuz—a pledge it has repeatedly made and betrayed. Meanwhile, once the deal is negotiated in its first 60 days, Iran would gain access to up to $300 billion in foreign investment. That would help rebuild Iran’s arsenal, which the U.S. spent months attempting to destroy.

By Wednesday afternoon, Trump seemed to admit that he struck the deal under pressure. “I didn’t want to see an economic catastrophe,” he said, suggesting that the stock market would have tumbled if he’d failed to reach an agreement.

Trump condemned any comparison between his agreement and former president Barack Obama’s 2015 deal, saying Iran’s leaders “laughed at Obama” after that deal and “said he’s a stupid son of a bitch.” Trump also defended allowing funds into Iran: “What do you expect me to say: No one is allowed to invest?”

He’s now relying on Vice President J.D. Vance to help sell the deal, and Eli Lake suggests that Vance isn’t faring much better. As a leader among right-wing skeptics of war, but also loyal to the president, Vance is at pains to portray the outcome in Iran as a win for America. Read Eli’s take on Vance’s tightrope walk between the hawks and the doves.

Our columnists also decipher the deal, sorting fact from fiction and exposing its potentially fatal flaws. Niall Ferguson is cautiously optimistic, arguing that a cascade of misfortunes among America’s enemies could yield a new status quo in the Middle East. Douglas Murray takes a contrary view, suggesting that Iran’s record of aggression means there’s little chance of good faith today.

Trump’s deal not only withdraws America from the conflict; it also requires Israel to halt its war on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rebuffed Trump this week, saying “the struggle has not ended,” yet Trump says he shouldn’t worry because Syrian forces may head into the breach. Tanner Nau games out the scenario with Ahmad Shawari, a researcher on the region and Hezbollah.

And finally, Mark Dubowitz considers how we got to the deal, and the details Trump and Iran will hash out in the coming two months. Watch Mark on the latest episode of School of War.

—The Editors

Are Jews still welcome in today’s Democratic Party? That’s a question that an increasing number of Jewish Americans have asked themselves as the political left abandons its support for Israel, while inviting antisemites into the party under the guise of progressivism. But it hasn’t always been this way. Jewish Americans are pivotal to the formation of today’s left, according to Batya Ungar-Sargon in her new book, The Jews and the Left. Batya, a Free Press contributor and host of Batya! on NewsNation, sits down with Rafaela Siewert to discuss the state of American Jewry on the left—and how it got this way.

Supporters of Israel—both left and right—vary in their stances on how best the United States should support its ally in the Middle East. Some stand with Benjamin Netanyahu, who has advised it’s best to gradually wean Israel off military aid, both for the sake of Israel and the United States. Former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant says this is a mistake, as U.S. “aid” to Israel is not charity, but a key to technology and investments in security. He lays out his case calling for a shift in perspective when evaluating whether the U.S. should provide aid to Israel.

American boys are in trouble. And yet, few seem to care. Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, sat down with Shilo Brooks for the season finale of Old School to talk about why men have fallen behind, the unique challenges they face, and how a future that embraces masculinity instead of deriding it as “toxic” should look.

For the last week, we have paid homage to Great Americans who blazed new frontiers or broke barriers. We will continue to do so until our country’s 250th birthday, now less than a month away. Today’s installment of Great Americans will have to wait, but catch up on some of our latest favorites in the meantime.

Speaking of great Americans, our own River Page will answer all of your questions at 2 p.m. today in The Free Press Forum. Ask him about the scene at the UFC fight, the Libertarian who may spoil the Texas Senate race, or whatever is on your mind!

• President Trump abruptly called off the confirmation hearing of his director of national intelligence nominee Jay Clayton, bucking Republican senators, who were scheduled to consider Clayton later Wednesday afternoon. Trump said that Bill Pulte, the embattled federal housing director, will remain acting director, and said he would not sign a bill renewing a key intelligence program if it did not include provisions establishing voter ID laws and banning mail-in voting.

• Rex Heuermann, known as the Gilgo Beach serial killer, was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday after he pleaded guilty to killing eight women between 1993 and 2010. Heuermann was arrested in July 2023 and will spend the remainder of his life in state prison.

• The Federal Reserve unanimously held interest rates steady in what was a highly anticipated June meeting, the first of Kevin Warsh’s tenure as Federal Reserve chair. “Economic activity is expanding at a solid pace despite elevated uncertainty that owes, in part, to the conflict in the Middle East,” read the Federal Reserve’s statement on the decision.

• The Federal Trade Commission, along with a handful of Republican-led states, is suing the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), alleging that WPATH recommendations misled parents and children about the medical consensus and medical necessity of gender transition surgeries.

• Luigi Mangione plans to argue at trial that he was suffering from an extreme emotional disturbance when he fatally shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. The defense, if successful, would not exonerate Mangione, but could significantly reduce his prison time if convicted.

• The Justice Department is suing the New York State Department of Health, the state’s Medicaid director, and Public Partnerships, LLC, which operates a $10 billion home health program for New York. The lawsuit alleges that PPL made false or misleading claims about its ability to take over and manage the state’s Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program.

• Louisiana Republican senator Bill Cassidy called the memorandum of understanding with Iran “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” “Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed,” the senator wrote on Wednesday, “and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future.”