The Free Press

Over the past several years, American Jews have watched as prejudice against their community has risen precipitously. In 2025, a string of violent events began to unfold: In April, someone tried to set fire to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home. In May, two young Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were gunned down by a …

This Father’s Day, the state of American fatherhood is strong.

Data show that fathers are investing record amounts of attention, affection, and time in their children. As Derek Thompson and Aziz Sunderji wrote in April, dads are spending nearly quadruple the number of hours their grandfathers spent with their kids. Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, wrote in May that men “have massively increased the amount of childcare and housework they are doing.” This month, University of Southern California psychologist Darby Saxbe celebrated the fact that “parenting time for fathers has been trending upward for decades.”

Thompson and Sunderji summarized it well: Today’s dads are becoming “the parents their fathers never were.”

What is behind the rise of the Super Dads? The answer lies in an underreported societal shift: Marriage in America is becoming stabler. Over the past decade, divorce and single parenthood have fallen so much that a majority of American kids will grow up with their father in the home for the entirety of childhood. And married fathers spend 13 times more time caring for their children than fathers who don’t live with them.

For children and fathers alike, it’s the best of times.

“I definitely want a cool house,” said a man in his late 20s, who works as a researcher at one of the frontier AI labs. He stands to make tens of millions of dollars when the company he works for goes public—something that may happen as early as this coming winter. “Ideally one on each coast and a pied-à-terre in Paris,” he added. “I love Paris.”

He’s one of a cohort of tech workers gearing up to spend big. Last week, SpaceX floated at a $1.77 trillion valuation, making 4,000 new millionaires out of current and previous employees—and turning its founder, Elon Musk, into the world’s first trillionaire. And earlier in the month, two of the world’s leading AI labs—Anthropic (valued at $965 billion) and OpenAI ($852 billion)—each filed S-1s with the Securities and Exchange Commission, formally signaling their intentions to go public too.

Some say we’re in a stock bubble and that it’s only a matter of time until sky-high tech valuations come crashing down to Earth. Others say the technology unleashed by these juggernauts will transform the economy and trigger a wave of mass unemployment. Either way, the employees—including engineers, researchers, and even some mechanics and welders like Juan Hernandez, who once worked at SpaceX and now works at Blue Origin—are set to cash in.

And so, they’re making big plans.

The Texas Senate race is set to be a close, grinding contest. And one overlooked candidate could tip the whole thing over.

Nearly all the attention so far has gone to the two major parties. The GOP nominee, state attorney general Ken Paxton, defeated four-term incumbent senator John Cornyn in a primary runoff last month with nearly 64 percent of the vote. It was a blowout, but Paxton’s chances in the general election are far from certain. A recent poll showed his Democratic opponent, state representative James Talarico, ahead by 3 points. Another poll, conducted before the GOP runoff, showed a tie. At this rate, Paxton can’t afford to lose a single vote—and Ted Brown is likely to take a few thousand more than that.

Brown, 65, is a retired insurance claims adjuster, a small-government activist, and the Libertarian Party’s Texas nominee for the Senate. This isn’t his first rodeo. He also ran in 2024 and got 2.4 percent of the vote. It didn’t matter, because incumbent Ted Cruz was able to beat his Democratic challenger, Colin Allred, by more than 8 points. But now, in 2026, it’s possible that a similar showing by Brown could cost Republicans the election. And Brown doesn’t feel sorry about it.

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, Ann Bauer paid tribute to L. Frank Baum, who took America on an unforgettable journey down the Yellow Brick Road. Today, Christopher Cox honors 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. —The Editors

At the millennium, the Gallup organization asked the American public to rank the most important events of the 20th century. Sixty-six percent named “Women gaining the right to vote”—ahead of landing a man on the moon, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Great Depression, and World War I. Only World War II ranked higher.

American women gained the vote in 1920 with the ratification of what has become known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Were it not for Alice Paul, it could easily have taken years longer. Woodrow Wilson opposed it in both his 1912 and 1916 presidential campaigns. So did the members of his party who controlled every key congressional committee. With America’s entry into the European war in 1917, they hoped to table the question of women’s voting rights indefinitely.

The national movement for women’s right to vote had been gathering pace for two-thirds of a century when the 28-year-old Alice Paul delivered her first spectacular coup to marshal support for the cause. It was an enormous parade down Pennsylvania Avenue—featuring 5,000 marchers, inspiring music, and beautiful floats—on the day before Wilson’s 1913 inaugural parade on the same route. Tourists jamming the nation’s capital for the inauguration couldn’t help but notice the front-page stories trumpeting Paul’s planned spectacle. Hundreds of thousands attended as spectators. When drunken hoodlums assaulted the marchers, the D.C. police not only failed to stop it but joined in with physical and verbal abuse of the women.

I’ve never been much of a gambling man. Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, I knew a few bookies. Suffice it to say, they were not the sort you ever wanted to owe money to, so I left the gambling to other, braver men. In my early 20s, I hung out with some young journalists who bet on football every Sunday. For a while I joined them, until I got tired of losing money week after week. My last significant bet came in 1986, when I put money on my beloved New England Patriots to defeat the mighty Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XX. The final score was Chicago 46, New England 10.

For most of my life, of course, gambling was illegal, unless you went to Las Vegas. Even after the rise of FanDuel and DraftKings, I was never tempted. But now, prediction markets have arrived—and somehow, they feel different. They offer betting opportunities that go well beyond sports. After Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, I wrote a story about a French investor who made $85 million betting that Trump would win. Needless to say, that piqued my interest.

Since then, prediction markets have only gotten bigger. In April, the two biggest players, Polymarket and Kalshi, processed $24 billion in trading volume—more than 10 times what they did a year earlier, according to the Pew Research Center. Some 40 percent of American men between the ages 18 and 34 are using prediction markets, an April survey found.

And the companies have been cutting deals with major media companies: New York–based Kalshi has agreements with CNN, CNBC, and Fox, while Polymarket, which is officially registered in Panama City, has partnership arrangements with The Wall Street Journal and Substack. The media companies see the prediction markets not just as lucrative sponsors, but also as a potentially more accurate alternative to polls, which have a checkered track record in recent elections.

In the decades after the trial, a conclusion that once seemed certain begins to collapse. As Charles Lindbergh’s legacy darkens and a postwar America grows more suspicious of official narratives, new theories arise about what really happened—and who really killed the Lindbergh baby.

“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all!” So wrote President Donald Trump on Truth Social on Sunday. After weeks of back-and-forth, the announcement seemed to herald the end to a bloody conflict that has lasted more than 100 days.

In the following hours, the public learned that the U.S. had reached a memorandum…

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where discussion about Zionism and indigenous self-determination became a debate about Canada’s future, the “new world order” arrives in a different part of the world, and Justin Trudeau goes on boyfriend duty at the World Cup. Let’s get to it!

It sounded like an extremely wonky academic event. The discussion was titled “Antizionist Colonization of Indigenous Movements—and Our Response.” Its speakers’ goal was to challenge a narrative that has increasingly taken hold in Canada since October 7, 2023: Israel is a colonial project, so indigenous groups should identify with the Palestinian cause.

This intellectual framework dominates much of academia and activism. Settler colonialism, identity politics, the division of society into the oppressors and the oppressed, and related ideas are used to cast Israel as a colonial enterprise and Jews as privileged settlers. While many Jews in Canada have become deeply skeptical of this view, it is just as deeply rooted throughout Canada.

Last week’s event at the University of Ottawa was organized by members of the city’s Jewish community and featured Harry LaForme, Canada’s first indigenous appeals court judge, and New Zealand historian Sheree Trotter, who is Māori. “People are forced into categories of colonizer and colonized, and the actual histories are often much more complicated than that,” Trotter told me. “It’s become a lens through which everything is interpreted.”

LaForme approached the subject through the vantage point of indigenous experience. He laid out what he described as the defining characteristics of colonization: language suppression, religious imposition, population displacement, settler colonization, economic exploitation, legal hierarchies favoring the colonizer, and cultural erasure. “We have experienced all that,” the retired judge told the audience. “In fact, Israel has experienced that. The Jews of Israel have experienced that.”

It’s Tuesday, June 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Where does all the stolen art go? Elliot Cohen on School of War. What Spencer Pratt got right. Plus: Mr. President, publish the details of your Iran agreement. All that and much more.

But first: ICYMI, Douglas Murray is (re)joining The Free Press. Check out the details, including his note to subscribers, here.

Now to the news, starting with what both sides are getting wrong about America’s 250th.

On Monday morning, evidently still fired up after a raucous 80th birthday spent watching UFC fights on the White House lawn, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he would be celebrating America’s 250th anniversary with “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”

It is the latest example of the split-screen visions of the republic as it approaches the semiquincentennial. On one side, there is a Trumpian spectacle that often conflates celebration of the United States with celebration of the man in the White House. On the other side are those who find celebration of the country close to impossible given who is in the White House. The New Yorker summed up this sentiment in a recent story with the headline “How Problematic Is Patriotism?”

In our editorial today, we say both sides have it wrong. You can ignore the self-aggrandizement and self-flagellation. Read the full column to find out how:

As for Sunday’s UFC fight that was part of the president’s Freedom 250 celebrations? We sent River Page to take in the spectacle. Among the fans he spoke to was Antonio Sanchez, who mused: “This is like, the Founding Fathers’ house and they’ve got a fuckin’ Monster-sponsored octagon in the middle of the lawn. That is retarded. But also, it’s cool. People are gonna remember this fucking shit.”

Very true, Antonio. Read River’s full dispatch:

—Oliver Wiseman

From the pageantry of power to the substance of governing: Before Sunday’s fight, President Trump announced a new agreement with Iran that would end the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. On Monday, Washington was abuzz with debate over the merits of the memorandum of understanding that officials said had been signed electronically by Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. When Republicans complained that the deal looked like capitulation, officials vented about what they say is misinformation about the agreement. In our second editorial (what can we say, the editors ate their Wheaties yesterday), we propose a simple solution: Publish the deal.

And for more analysis of the war, the deal, and what’s next, tune in to the latest episode of School of War. Today, Aaron McLean sits down with Eliot Cohen, co-host of the Shield of the Republic podcast, to answer the most pressing questions about the conflict.

With America’s 250th birthday just a few weeks away, we’re honoring some of the Great Americans who shaped our country. Today, Ann Bauer remembers L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Baum’s story started as a popular 1900 children’s book—and then grew into a franchise that has raked in billions of dollars and been adapted in hundreds of forms. Read her piece to find out how this “sickly, studious boy” became one of America’s biggest cultural forces, penning a story that will outlive him for centuries to come.

• Oil prices fell and the S&P 500 jumped 1.7 percent on Monday after President Trump and Iran struck a peace deal. The Strait of Hormuz is set to reopen Friday, reviving one of the world’s biggest passageways for oil and liquefied natural gas.

• Russia launched a new round of missiles and drones into Ukraine on Monday. The attack damaged at least 14 residential buildings and caused the Dormition Cathedral, one of the country’s oldest and holiest sites, to burn down.

• British prime minister Keir Starmer announced a new plan that would ban social media for all children under age 16. Starmer framed the policy as an attempt to protect young minds, but some critics fear it will add to the UK’s crackdown on free speech.

• President Trump arrived in France on Monday for this week’s G7 summit. The meeting of world leaders comes at a crucial geopolitical moment, with Ukraine continuing to suffer major blows and the terms of the final U.S.-Iran deal uncertain.

• California governor Gavin Newsom said Monday that the Trump administration is investigating him and his wife. Newsom accused the president of political prosecution, saying Trump targeted him because Newsom is considering a presidential run in 2028.

• A consumer lawsuit filed Monday against Anthropic alleges that the AI company misled customers about the limits of its $200-a-month plan. The suit might deepen scrutiny of Anthropic, which has clashed with the Trump administration.

• Fox agreed to acquire the streaming giant Roku on Monday in a deal worth $22 billion. The agreement marks a major consolidation of live television programming with streaming platforms, as Fox looks for new ways to attract viewers.