SOLANO COUNTY, California — About an hour and a half northeast from San Francisco, past Travis Air Force Base and the original Jelly Belly factory, you’ll find one man’s dream. It’s 68,000 acres of farmland, punctuated by windmills and sheep, but in Jan Sramek’s mind’s eye, it’s a bustling city of 400,000 people, about the population of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has a walkable commercial district, schools, offices, and rows of single-family homes where neighbors enjoy wine on each other’s porches at dusk. If someone—anyone! everyone!—would just agree to let him build it.

He’s been dreaming about this city for at least a decade. “My foundational belief when I started this was that the situation in California would get worse,” Sramek, 38, tells me from the driver’s seat of his Rivian truck. He thought the high house prices across the state would get higher, and that companies would start to leave, because California’s voters had been, in his words, “hoodwinked into this degrowth mind-set.” And so, in 2017, after a short career in business and finance, he started his company, California Forever, which aims to build “the next great American city,” right here in Solano County.

His first move was to spend nine months trying to talk himself out of it—“I tried to prove out that this would fail, because it seemed so outlandish and crazy”—before he decided it was, in fact, a great idea, and went out to investors. “I told them, ‘Hey, you should invest in this crazy thing that no bank or private equity firm or anyone else would touch,’ ” he said. “We should build something spectacular in California—partially as a for-profit investment, but partially as a way of giving back to the state.”

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan looks at the British general who coined the phrase “hearts and minds” as a military strategy. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

One man had come to America to bring peace through negotiations. The other had come to impose peace through war. Two hundred fifty years ago this week, Lord Drummond, a Scottish noble acting as an unofficial peace emissary, and Henry Clinton, a high-ranking British general, met on a warship in New York Harbor. The surprise is how much they agreed upon. During their conversation, Clinton summed up his preferred strategy this way: “To gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America.”

With that turn of phrase, a British general fighting to thwart the American Revolution articulated the doctrine that the nation born out of the struggle would later deploy itself in places such as Vietnam and Iraq: winning hearts and minds. Max Boot, in his book about the history of guerrilla warfare, credits Clinton with “the first recorded use of ‘hearts and minds’ in a counterinsurgency context.” No less of an authority than General David Petraeus has written that the phrase remains the “most succinct explanation for how to win a counterinsurgency.”

It’s Wednesday, February 4. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: An AI tool to hold politicians to account. The problem with Mamdani’s gifted and talented plan. Can we get politics out of the Fed? Nellie Bowles livestreams the news. And much more.

But first: Epstein.

The Jeffrey Epstein saga is a controversy without end. It is also, arguably, the defining scandal of our age. Even now, more than six years after the suspicious death of the shadowy financier and convicted sex criminal in a New York prison cell, his crimes and connections drive the news and loom large in our public life.

That’s been as true this week as any, after last Friday’s Justice Department release of more than three million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images from the so-called Epstein files.

Today, we bring you three perspectives on the meaning of the latest twist in the Epstein account.

Up first is Rod Dreher, who tries to make sense of the larger meaning of the Epstein story. If you want to understand the “tear it all down” rage that drives so much of our politics today, look no further than these documents, says Rod. Drawing ominous parallels with pre-revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, Rod argues that “the real meaning of the Epstein files is not likely to be found in its pages, but in what some ambitious genius convinces an increasingly polarized, increasingly anxious American populace to think they mean.” Read Rod on how Epstein and his elite can be anything you need them to be—and why that’s so dangerous.

Is this justice? That’s one question we’ve found ourselves debating in the newsroom this week, as the document dump dragged innocent names into the sordid story—and even inadvertently revealed the identity of Epstein’s previously anonymous victims. To Robby Soave, the answer is a clear no. Writing for The Free Press today, he argues that the push to release the Epstein files—something that Trump was in favor of, then opposed to, and Democrats were opposed to, then in favor of—sets a dangerous precedent. Welcome to a world where gossip, unverified information, and outright lies can be released into the world, consequences be damned.

And finally, Nellie Bowles, whose name was in the documents released this week because she once, as a business reporter at The New York Times, met Epstein for coffee. Her regret, she writes, is not that she met Epstein, or emailed him, but that she “had the chance to profile one of the darkest, most interesting characters of that moment, and I didn’t.” Read Nellie on the time she went to Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion to meet the man whose twisted life still drives investigations, conspiracy theories, and headlines today:

—Oliver Wiseman

On March 9, The Free Press is coming to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy today. Coleman Hughes will be joined by Ambassador Andrew Young, who marched alongside King, and Jonathan Eig, whose biography King: A Life won a Pulitzer in 2024. At the church led by King, they’ll explore how the civil rights movement used nonviolence to bring Americans together and change the country—and what that strategy can teach us today at a time when America is at a boiling point. Book now to grab a seat for this unmissable conversation. Tickets and more details are available here:

• On Tuesday, French prosecutors raided the Paris office of the social media platform X as part of an investigation into child sex abuse images and deepfakes on the site. The prosecutors also requested Elon Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino sit for interviews in April.

• U.S. Forces shot down an Iranian drone on Tuesday after it “aggressively” approached the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln positioned 500 miles off the coast of Iran. The escalation comes as White House negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are slated to meet with Iranian officials on Friday in Istanbul to discuss Iran’s nuclear program.

• Blood was discovered in the home of Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie. The 84-year-old was reported missing around noon Sunday, according to local authorities. The sheriff’s department believes that Guthrie was abducted.

• After a four-day standoff, the House of Representatives voted 217 to 214 to approve a $1 trillion spending package that will end the partial government shutdown. Now they can tee up a new fight over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

• President Trump met with Colombian president Gustavo Petro at the White House on Tuesday, marking the first in-person meeting between the two leaders. “We’re going to be talking about drugs,” Trump said before the meeting, “because tremendous amounts of drugs come out of his country.”

• The American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major medical association to shift its guidance on gender transition surgery for minors on Tuesday. The decision came after a New York plaintiff won $2 million in damages this week for a mastectomy received as a teenager that she said left her disfigured. (Read Benjamin Ryan’s piece on that case: “A Legal First That Could Change Gender Medicine.”)

• Volodymyr Zelensky implored European allies to apply “maximum pressure” against Moscow after Russia launched hundreds of missiles and drones early Tuesday morning, targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Trilateral peace talks resume today.

• The Walt Disney Company named Josh D’Amaro, a nearly 30-year veteran of the company, as its next CEO, succeeding Bob Iger, who served in the post for nearly 20 years. D’Amaro currently oversees Disney’s global portfolio of theme parks and hotel resorts.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

Do I believe that George H.W. Bush once participated in an orgy along with Bill Clinton on Jeffrey Epstein’s yacht, and that dear old Poppy ritually sacrificed babies and ate excrement from their intestines? No, in fact, I do not. But somebody reached out to the government with this claim, so it’s in last weekend’s massive Epstein file dump.

Do I believe that Bill Gates might have gotten the clap from a Russian hooker and tried to hide it from his then-wife, as Epstein himself alleged in a (perhaps unsent) email to Gates? That’s not impossible. Gates denies the claim, but then, who really knows?

How about Lord Peter Mandelson, the former senior Labour Party politician and until recently the UK’s ambassador to Washington? His extensive ties to Epstein have been meticulously demonstrated by earlier Epstein releases. The new upchuck revealed that, among other things, Mandelson shared confidential government emails with Epstein, including a tip-off to the shadowy financier about a major Eurozone bailout in 2010, on the eve of the event.

Yeah, that’s true—and that’s why, as of Tuesday, Mandelson has resigned from the House of Lords, may be stripped of his title, and is under investigation by the police.

At long last, the much-desired release of the Jeffrey Epstein files—a key goal of the MAGA movement (previously) and the Democratic Party (currently)—is underway. On Friday, the Department of Justice made millions of files available, including partially redacted emails, photos, and investigative reports, many of which have now flooded social media.

The release has been a long time coming. This past November, in the face of overwhelming congressional support for disclosure, President Donald Trump dropped his stated opposition to the Epstein Files Transparency Act and signed the measure.

In the House of Representatives, the vote had been 427–1. The lone dissenter, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), expressed his doubts in stark terms. “As written, this bill reveals and injures thousands of innocent people—witnesses, people who provided alibis, family members, etc.,” he wrote on X. “If enacted in its current form, this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt. Not by my vote.”

Perhaps we should have taken his concerns more seriously. It’s been just days since the majority of the files were released, and a vast campaign is already underway to embarrass, harass, or smear anyone tangentially associated with Epstein—a serial sexual predator—no matter how slight or incidental the connection.

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism for his plans to phase out the public school system’s gifted and talented (G&T) program for kindergarten, starting next year. This feels like Groundhog Day for public school parents like me who fought former mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to end G&T, abolish entrance exams for the city’s prestigious specialized high schools, and root out, in the name of “anti-racism,” any honors program that smacked of academic excellence.

The same tired arguments about the racism of meritocracy are still unconvincing and are still unsupported by data or evidence, yet tenaciously hang on like land acknowledgments, “hands up, don’t shoot” chants, and the idea that socialism will actually work this time.

No matter what happens to the New York City school system, which had 906,248 students during the 2024–25 school year and is the largest in the United States, Mamdani’s first month as mayor will be forever marred by the deaths of 16 people who “passed away outside during this brutal stretch of cold,” as he put it on Monday. The new mayor reversed a policy by predecessor Eric Adams that would have allowed the police to get the homeless inside. Mamdani’s brand of progressivism essentially handcuffed the police in order to “protect” the homeless from the very people who might have saved their lives.

About 18,000 elementary school students in the city are enrolled in G&T, with about 2,500 admitted for kindergarten each fall.

In September 2022, about a year after Joseph Wang left his job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he came across an odd new research paper from his former employer. Wang had been a senior trader on the Open Market Trading Desk, carrying out the Fed’s monetary policy. In his five years there, the usual Fed research covered topics like inflation, labor markets, and bank capital. This paper, though, was titled “800,000 Years of Climate Risk.”

“I thought that was very strange,” Wang recalled. “The Fed writing about CO2 concentrations.”

Wang wasn’t the only one to notice what looked like mission creep at the Fed. Just before Thanksgiving in 2021, a tweet from the St. Louis Fed suggested replacing Thanksgiving turkey with “a soybean-based dinner.” The post drew thousands of replies, many of them demanding that the Fed get back in its lane.

The 2011 film Moneyball, based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis, chronicles the rise of sports analytics to detect hidden patterns in Major League Baseball. For the Oakland Athletics, this embrace of data took a team with a shortage of star power to victory in the American League West in 2002.

John Hart, the CEO of Open the Books, a right-leaning watchdog that tracks federal and state spending, and Citizen Portal AI founder Paul Allen, who co-founded data giant Ancestry.com, are now building what they hope will be a sort of nonpartisan Moneyball for politics.

They are melding a massive database of government funding assembled by Open the Books with Citizen Portal AI’s database of over one million hours of interviews, speeches, and other comments by public officials, Hart and Allen told me. They said the move will better inform the public about the most consequential public policy decisions and debates—and make it possible for users to easily compare what politicians spend with what they say. The partnership has not been previously reported.

It’s the second month of the new year, and the news cycle is just as difficult to keep up with as ever. So we thought: Who better than Nellie Bowles to help us all get up to speed? So Nellie sits down with some of our brilliant editors and writers to discuss politics, culture, and more.

Free Press senior editor and writer Will Rahn discusses new reports …

This week I was BUSTED for the crime of REPORTING. A journalism professor is even on the case. And it’s true: I met Jeffrey Epstein once for coffee.

When I was a reporter on the New York Times business desk in the fall of 2018, a representative for Epstein invited me to have coffee with him. I was curious.

I googled Jeffrey Epstein one last time and popped my head above my cubicle to ask colleagues: “Should I really do this? Would I be killed inside the largest home on the Upper East Side?”

There were a few stories I thought he could be useful for—the curious and ubiquitous Russian woman who made the introduction was potentially a profile, though The Wall Street Journal had just done one; Epstein’s effort to reemerge on the social scene, and the many famous people who were in his orbit, was absolutely a story; and various tech stories I was doing at the time could have an Epstein angle.

A colleague in the newsroom assured me I’d be safe and that Epstein was an occasional source for business reporters at the Times. So I agreed to meet the man for coffee. I’ll never forget ringing the doorbell of that mansion. Doors the size of a truck swung open and an elegant woman in her late 20s welcomed me in.