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Peter Beinart grew up a committed Zionist and changed his mind. He now believes that Israel, as currently constituted, cannot be reconciled with the principle of equality under the law, and he has spent the last decade making that case publicly in The New York Times, Jewish Currents, and most recently in his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Ga…

After nearly four months of war, President Donald Trump announced a “great deal” on Truth Social Sunday.

“The deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all,” he posted. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” The Secretariat of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council confirmed the naval blockade would end Sunday night, with the formal signing ceremony set for Friday in Switzerland—though the text of the memorandum has not been publicly released.

The agreement is not a full peace treaty, leaves 60 days to negotiate a fuller deal, and is the latest twist in a war that has reshaped the Middle East and roiled the global economy.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a joint military operation against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei alongside dozens of senior Iranian leaders and severely degrading Iran’s nuclear program. The war’s opening weeks were swift and overwhelming—what followed was anything but. Iranian retaliatory strikes have caused significant damage at U.S. military installations in the Middle East; 13 American service members were killed and hundreds more wounded; and the Pentagon has acknowledged the war has cost $29 billion, a figure other estimates put much higher. At home, the war has driven up prices. The new Iranian regime is even more hard-line than the one it replaced. A shaky ceasefire has been in effect for 10 weeks—and even on Sunday, an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs threatened to derail a deal entirely.

The agreement paves the way for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, with sanctions relief and billions in frozen assets on the table. What happens next is far from clear, but this struck us as an opportune moment to ask a range of contributors to weigh in on an urgent question: Was this war worth it? Their answers vary widely—and reflect the heated debate over the war that serves as the backdrop to the negotiations between Washington and Tehran.

Whether the conflict with Iran has been worth it depends on the terms of the deal ending it, and Trump’s willingness to enforce them. Right now, both are very unclear.

President Donald Trump gave himself a birthday present on Sunday and declared that peace has been achieved after his second Iran war. “This Great Deal will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region. Many presidents have tried to make Peace with Iran, and all have failed before me,” he posted on Truth Social Sunday evening. “With the opening of the Strait upon the signing of the Deal on Friday, for purposes of mine removal, oil will flow on both ends again for the Region, and the World!”

Don’t break out the ticker tape just yet. This is not a treaty, not a deal, and not a peace agreement. It’s a memorandum of understanding to negotiate the terms of a broader peace over the next 60 days. Put another way, it is yet another ceasefire. In this respect, the agreement does not achieve any of the aims that Trump laid out on February 28 when he launched the second Iran war with Israel.

A new line has been crossed: The U.S. government has finally declared an AI model too dangerous for unrestricted use. It’s the kind of move that could cripple AI progress in the U.S. and around the world.

I had the chance to work with Anthropic’s recently released, high-powered Fable 5 model, a version of Claude Mythos (I am a member of Anthropic’s Economic Advisory Board). But now the plug has been yanked. A federal dispute with Anthropic led the government on Friday to order an export control that requires Anthropic to withhold the model from any non-U.S. citizens. The only practical way to comply with that order was to take down the model altogether.

Federal officials believed that Fable 5 had been partially “jailbroken,” meaning users had figured out how to use it for dangerous purposes that Anthropic meant to restrict. For example, Fable 5 was designed not to answer questions about biology (it kicked the queries to Opus 4.8, a less powerful model), so that it could not be used to design dangerous pathogens. Fable 5 also would refuse to cooperate if asked to build other, potentially powerful AI tools.

It is debatable how dangerous a partially jailbroken Fable 5 could be, but the Trump administration expressed concern and claimed that Anthropic was unwilling to apply necessary patches. The company does not accept that version of events and claims that the model wasn’t jailbroken to begin with.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when I would have been among those rolling their eyes at the SpaceX IPO. At the company’s insane $2 trillion valuation. Its $5 billion in losses in 2025. Its ludicrous prospectus, with its insistence that its “total addressable market” is $28.5 trillion, which is roughly the annual U.S. GDP. Of course, to get to that number, the company will need to establish “a lunar economy” and interplanetary industrialization. That sort of thing.

I would have agreed with Morningstar’s securities analysts, who said the stock was “significantly overvalued.” I would have applauded the words of Jim Chanos—the short-seller who famously smoked out the Enron fraud—when he said that “this is really a hopes and dreams IPO.” I would have shouted from the rafters: “Where are the fundamentals to justify this kind of price?” They are nowhere to be found. Nvidia, one of the world’s most successful and profitable tech companies, trades at approximately 20 times trailing 12-month sales. At its Friday closing price of $161 per share, SpaceX trades at 95 times. As I said, it’s nuts.

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, Charles Lane wrote about Sandra Day O’Connor, the rancher’s daughter who went on to become the most powerful woman in Washington, D.C. Today, Mark Gimein writes about Edwin Land, the man who put a darkroom in your pocket.
—The Editors

As he reached the end of his career, Walker Evans, arguably the greatest American photographer, finally turned to a color camera: the Polaroid SX-70. Andy Warhol favored the simpler Polaroid Big Shot. Ansel Adams and Chuck Close used specially made giant Polaroids.

None of this was by accident. Edwin Land, the founder and driving force behind Polaroid, made sure to get his cameras into the hands of just about every notable American photographer. It was great advertising, the predecessor to everything from Absolut’s collaborations with artists to Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” ads. But it was something else, too. For the polymathic Land, art, science, and engineering all fit together naturally. He appreciated the work of artists and as he did that of scientists. Both, in his mind, pushed boundaries and did it for love of the enterprise. And he loved what artists did with his inventions. Nothing defined the look of the 1970s and 1980s quite like a Polaroid snapshot.

I have a friend with whom I exchange text messages a few times a week. We’re about the same age, are from the same hometown, and share strong religious convictions (though not the same religion). Our conversations are often philosophical and metaphysical. Two weeks ago, he was lamenting the evidence of falling spirituality among young people, and wrote this: “We’ve gained the whole world and have lost our souls.”

Heavy, man. A few seconds later, however, he followed with this: “At least the Knicks are crushing it.”

As we all know, the Knicks went on to win their first NBA finals since 1973 on Saturday night, making my friend even happier alongside millions of New Yorkers. From Brooklyn to Queens to the West Village to the Upper East Side, fans of all ages, races, and religions streamed onto the streets, hugging and high-fiving each other at random. Fire trucks honked along with chants; taxi cabs blasted “New York State of Mind”; and walkers whooped as they passed each other, for no other reason than the exhilarating experience they had just enjoyed together.

As a happiness specialist, one thing I have seen in the studies and data over the past decade is that sports fandom is one of life’s unalloyed sources of joy. In Fans Have More Friends, the sports writers Ben Valenta and David Sikorjak show that professed sports fans who have favorite teams are twice as likely to be “very happy” compared with nonfans, are far more likely to feel known, and are more grateful about life.

Welcome back to the Weekend Press! Today, Niall Ferguson will make you love soccer. Kat Rosenfield on the cowardice of Olivia Rodrigo. River Page has two drinks with Trump’s tourism tsar. Will Rahn on Steven Spielberg’s new alien epic. And more!

But first: Josh Code reports from Christian Men’s Camp.

When I first saw a promotional reel for 252 The Weekend, a retreat organized by the New Jersey megachurch Transform, I almost mistook it for a trailer for a new season of Survivor: dramatic music, stone-faced men staring into fire, men carrying logs, men climbing over walls and crawling under netting. And I wondered: Is this actually about getting in touch with God—or is it just a chance for dudes to be dudes?

There’s much talk that a religious revival is happening in America, especially within Gen Z, but some have questioned whether the newly holy are authentically interested in God, or just superficially attracted to the ever-multiplying influencers and apps and podcasts that are springing up to make Christianity hot again. Does packaging religion to appeal to a certain set of people make it any less meaningful?

That’s the question I set out to answer last weekend, at 252, which I attended alongside 580 men, most of whom were from suburban New Jersey—where a man can’t exactly roam a ranch on horseback or even pump his own gas. They were locksmiths, electricians, landscapers, jujitsu fighters, auto parts sales associates. They were also, it turned out, men who hadn’t cried in years, had never heard their fathers say they were proud of them, and had no idea how much they needed a weekend like this.

Together they danced, sang, prayed, and competed in a field day for grown-ups. One boy’s name was engraved on a sword. Men kept saying “iron sharpens iron.” A couple of them got baptized in iron tubs, but the Holy Spirit was often hard to discern. Nevertheless, there was something profound about it all. Because the obstacle course, the bench press, the sheer testosterone of it all, gave the men permission to be vulnerable. After all, it’s okay to cry when you’ve just benched your own body weight 28 times. —Josh Code

In the latest episode of Second Thought, Suzy Weiss sits down with the Roastmaster General, comedian Jeff Ross—who explains why a well-crafted insult is the ultimate sign of respect and the last bastion of truly free speech in our culture. In their conversation, he reflects on the best burns he issued to Joan Rivers, Justin Bieber, and Charlie Sheen—and tosses out a brand-new one for Suzy herself. Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the YouTube vid below. And if you want to keep up to date with everything Suzy does (this week, she gave a company that wants to train robots to do the cleaning full access to her apartment)—don’t miss her newsletter!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site. Click here to meet a midwife in New Mexico; a vegan master of divinity in Virginia; or an athletic outdoorsman in Florida. Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

We’ve published a lot of stories worth catching up on this week, from Caitlin Flanagan’s review of Jill Biden’s memoir, to Larissa Phillips’s latest personal essay, about her summers spent working at restaurants in Nantucket . . .

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our colleague Danya Jacobs for her recommendations…

🏃Run. . . the Central Park loop before the city wakes up. As a born-and-bred New Yorker, it is mildly embarrassing to admit that I did this for the very first time this week, and it completely shifted my perspective on how peaceful the city can be. It turns out this city does sleep, but only between the hours of 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. If you’re not in New York, find a park nearby and get your run finished before anyone has the chance to hit snooze. It’s a meditative experience.

📺 Watch. . . Obsession, a supernatural thriller in theaters now. It’s buzzy, gory fun; I found myself laughing quite a bit between the jump scares. Some are reading this film as a cautionary tale about how dangerous men are to the women they love, but I saw it pretty differently. (And so did Kat Rosenfield: Read her recent review!)

🍦Skip. . . the two-hour line for whatever new, overhyped frozen yogurt spot is currently hijacking your Instagram feed. The obsession with queueing up has officially devolved into insanity. If you want froyo, do the sensible thing: Go to Pinkberry. You will wait approximately four seconds at the register, get your food, and actually enjoy your weekend.

Last but not least: When we asked our art director Clara Grusq for the most beautiful thing she saw this week, she chose this photo of David Hockney at work in his studio in the mid-’60s. The British artist, who died this week at age 88, was a pioneering force in the Pop Art movement and one of the most influential artists of the last century.

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

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The problem with Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day? It just isn’t very good. Now, it is a Spielberg movie, and there are things to like about it: the lighting, the special effects, the action set pieces. The technical elements, in other words. Because Spielberg has always been a great technical filmmaker.

That’s not to knock the action-movie elements. Those work fine. What doesn’t work is that this is one of those movies where Spielberg is indulging his intellectual pretensions. Or, rather, the intellectual pretensions he believes a man of his stature ought to have. And it could be, as some have theorized over the decades, that Spielberg is a certain sort of idiot savant: that he lives entirely in his own head, without much of what lies beyond his head ever making its way in.

Disclosure Day lends fresh support to this hypothesis. The story of a committed team of whistleblowers who finally reveal that the U.S. government has been hiding encounters with intelligent life beyond the stars, it’s being billed as a spiritual successor to Spielberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And it arrives in your local metroplex with exquisite timing: just as members of Congress are talking about alien bodies and secret UFO retrieval programs and the Trump administration is releasing gossipy documents and blurry videos. We can’t say definitively that any of this footage shows anything extraterrestrial, but some of it’s been interesting nonetheless.

“We go to war here—spiritually.”

That was what John Porras, a 39-year-old former Marine, told me on my first day at 252 The Weekend, a Christian men’s retreat.

I arrived last Friday morning at 9 a.m.—just in time for the morning worship session, which kicked off not with a prayer, but with a cup-stacking contest. Under a large tent, 580 men sat rapt, watching six guys on a stage competing to build the highest red Solo cup tower. Other challenges scheduled for the weekend would include a bench press competition and an obstacle course—the winner of which, I was told, would have his name engraved on a sword.

Run by a New Jersey-based megachurch called Transform Church, 252 The Weekend is named for Luke 2:52. It’s the only Bible verse that references what Jesus, who began his pastoral work when he was about 30, got up to as a teenager and a twentysomething: “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” The verse is the weekend’s blueprint, in the words of Transform Church founder and senior pastor Anthony Fleming, who created and runs the retreat, which is now in its fifth year; the aim is “for boys to become young men, and for young men to become great men.”