The Free Press

Are AI models conscious? Do Claude and ChatGPT have an inner sentient life? At least three leading giant AI companies—Anthropic, Meta, and Alphabet—are taking those questions extremely seriously. The Financial Times reported last week that they have hired philosophers, psychologists, and ethicists to test their models’ sentience.

Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate in physics and one of the fathers of neural net research, believes AI already is conscious. Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, thinks the AIs might be conscious. As the models become more sophisticated, these believers are likely to become even more certain. On social media, I commonly see comments, including from very educated and sophisticated observers, that the most advanced AI models have internal life experiences of some kind.

I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious.

If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities. These kinds of beliefs persist today, not only in the folk religions of the world, but in human obsessions with fortune tellers, tarot cards, and the supernatural.

Earlier this year in Festus, Missouri, a municipal government meeting packed hundreds of local residents into a high school gymnasium. The council in this river city of about 14,000 convened to consider the approval of a $6 billion project to build an AI data center.

For hours, residents approached the microphone one by one, armed with simple questions. How would the data center affect their energy bills? How would this sprawling project impact land values and water usage?

The city council answered by gesturing toward the developer’s promises—and ultimately voted to approve the project. A few weeks later, voters provided their own answer. They threw out every single incumbent council member up for reelection.

As people debate the moral valence of artificial intelligence, many are asking the wrong questions. AI is not inherently a blessing or a curse; it is a tool that can be used for good or for ill. This means that whether the technology improves the lives of working people or not depends on the choices we make now.

We cannot afford to leave those choices to the venture capitalists and the engineers in Palo Alto. If we want to lead the world on technology while preserving our values—of individual dignity, of vocational work, of strong communities—we will listen to the people in Festus. We will listen to the people who feel like they are being handed the bill for Big Tech’s dystopian future.

One mom skipped her son’s all-day soccer tournament to watch it. Another sneaked in episodes between conference calls at her corporate desk job. Elisabeth, a 48-year-old mom of two who lives in Westport, Connecticut, told me she has a group chat dedicated to the show called “Elderly & Obsessed,” where they talk about how the show reignited their sex drives and how frying a turkey is always a bad idea (IYKYK).

Warning to children and needy husbands everywhere: If your mother or wife is missing this summer, she’s likely off watching Off Campus. The college romance series centered around an ice hockey team and the women who love them is the third most popular Prime Video debut ever (the show is based off Elle Kennedy’s young-adult romance novels). And it’s taken millennial moms by storm. This isn’t the first time that a bunch of 30- and 40-year-old women have gone wild for a teen romance tale—it was only last September that the final episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty aired and I spotted a grown woman in New York City sporting a “Team Conrad” T-shirt.

There’s a different sort of rabidness to Off Campus’s fan base, though. Yes, our hearts ached for the love triangle in The Summer I Turned Pretty (two brothers, Conrad and Jeremiah, pining for the same childhood friend—imagine the drama!). But the Summer I Turned Pretty boys were narrow-shouldered, effeminate Gen Zers with floppy hair. When their emotions got too heavy, they ran away.

The Off Campus actors are unabashedly men. There’s a feral quality to the show: The boobs are big and the abs are, well, hard. And while the script isn’t necessarily Emmy-worthy, that’s not the point. In one scene, the lead, star hockey player Garrett Graham, played by Belmont Cameli, finds out he’s playing against the guy who raped his girlfriend years ago, and he pummels him. Appropriate? No. But sort of hot.

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, Major Garrett wrote about John Steinbeck, whose novels echo in our memory “like a favorite family hymn, a true American hymn.” Today, Will Rahn reflects on Jack and Bobby Kennedy—their lives, their legacies, and the family America just can’t quit. —The Editors

Jack and Bobby. You see those bouncy, boyish nicknames and know exactly who I mean—you picture their faces, you hear the famous voices that went with them. I wonder, What keeps us turning back to them? The truth is, we never turned away.

Maybe it’s the drama of their deaths. John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the great formative moment of the Boomer generation. It gave birth to the myth of the ’60s, those few short years we compulsively revisit in our movies, our television shows, and our fashion. The notion that he would have avoided the Vietnam War had he lived, that we could have had the sunny part of that decade without the darkness, is one of the rare historical counterfactuals widely believed to be true.

Whether Bobby’s 1968 bid for the presidency would have succeeded is somewhat mythical too; he was winning primaries before they truly mattered. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, his main rival for the nomination, was seen as heroic by anyone who remembered his stand for civil rights when it divided the party in 1948. He also had more than enough support among the party bosses who would pick the nominee in the literally smoke-filled rooms. But his death shrouded him in permanent possibility.

Welcome back to the Weekend Press! Today, Kara Kennedy has two drinks with the mom who went viral for asking Trump if he’s going to help Americans pay for childcare. Former vice president Mike Pence reflects on why we’re all confused about what conservatism actually is. Joe Nocera on Rafael Nadal. Kat Rosenfield on a buzzy new horror film. And more!

But first: Maya Sulkin reports on the machines making people human again.

In October 2016, my family took a trip to Washington, D.C., with my mom’s best friend, who I call Aunt Lori—she was in the room when I was born, because my dad was so freaked out—and her husband Uncle Brian. We spent our days walking through Georgetown and taking pictures of cherry blossoms, but my always-athletic Uncle Brian started to complain that his shoulder was feeling weak.

We thought it was “tennis elbow,” or that he was being a diva. But then my aunt started to notice her husband was limping. In the months that followed, we learned Brian had ALS—a horrific disease that attacks the nerve cells that allow you to move your muscles, until you can no longer move, speak, swallow, or breathe. He was told he had five years to live, tops.

My aunt and uncle researched every medical trial, and traveled to see all the doctors and researchers who could give them any advice about treatment options. They helped launch I AM ALS, a patient-led advocacy organization that has since secured billions of dollars in research funding. I thank God every day that Uncle Brian’s deterioration, unlike most patients, has been slow. He can still walk and play with his grandchildren. He hasn’t lost his voice.

Earlier this year, I met two ALS patients who had: Brad Smith and Kenneth Shock. Or at least, they had lost their voices before they crossed paths with a company called Neuralink. Created by Elon Musk—who got the idea from a science fiction series—it makes devices that can be implanted into the brain and allow paralyzed people to control a computer with only their minds. And once they can do that, they can communicate—by rapidly typing words that can then be uttered by an AI that sounds just like them.

As of January 2026, Neuralink has implanted brain-computer interfaces in 21 human patients. Brad was the third. When I asked Brad what it was like to hear himself speak again, he didn’t miss a beat. “The truth is,” Brad told me, “nobody really likes to hear their own voice.” Brad is happiest when he’s telling jokes. ALS robbed him of his ability to do that, but AI has restored it.

While I was reporting, I kept thinking about what it would mean for my Uncle Brian to lose his voice—to be talked over, to have people assume that because he couldn’t speak he couldn’t understand what was happening around him. I would miss his favorite line at dinner: “If it tastes good, it’s good for you.”

We talk endlessly about what cutting-edge technology like AI might cost us. But this story is a reminder that it can also give us something back.

—Maya Sulkin

This week, Suzy sat down with tech writer Joanna Stern—who, for one year, let artificial intelligence into every corner of her life. She tested robot assistants, commuted in autonomous vehicles, read AI bedtime stories to her children, and even went on a road trip with her AI boyfriend, Evan. Listen to the episode—which shines a light on the brave new world that lies ahead—wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube below:

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet a Don Quixote–loving bachelor in Tuscaloosa; an early riser in D.C. looking for true love; or a Chinese-Indian-Scottish cat-lover in Singapore. 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 plenty of other excellent culture pieces this week, including. . .

And don’t miss our new Great Americans series. So far we’ve had entries by Joseph Epstein on Sandy Koufax, Joe Nocera on Louis Armstrong, Major Garrett on John Steinbeck, and more.

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our publicist Catherine Morrissette for her recommendations.

🍋 Drink. . . an ice-cold Del’s Lemonade. For those lucky enough to live in the Ocean State, you know nothing beats the heat like a crisp lemonade slushy (with chunks of lemon peel) in a waxy paper cup. For the 99 percent of us not in Rhode Island on this hot Saturday, join me in blending up some ice, simple syrup, and lemon juice for a poor man’s copycat of this perfect beverage.

🦈 Listen. . . to “Fins,” by the one and only Jimmy Buffett. The keys, the steel drums, and the iconic guitar riff are the sounds of summer. The grill is hot, the coconut shrimp are crispy, and it’s five o’clock somewhere. ’Tis the season, folks.

📖 Read. . . this Free Press Forum thread where Free Press parents share their tips on raising good men. “I’m now acutely aware of the sedimented contradictions that run through the history of mothering advice,” one mom writes. “How do I excel at this?” The replies are heartening, and the advice is sage. (In case you haven’t been paying attention—it’s okay, it’s nearly summer!—we just launched the Forum, a new perk that gives subscribers a place to chat with other Free Pressers. We’ve already seen readers get job offers, life advice, and pitch stories that have made it to our editor’s room. It’s fun, and a perfect Sunday rabbit hole.)

Last but not least, in memory of the Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, who died this week aged 56, feast your eyes on an excerpt from Persepolis, the dramatization of the Iranian revolution that made her famous:

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

How much do you have to suffer to be a great athlete? Do you have to suffer like Johnny Unitas, the great quarterback of the 1960s, who was unable to lift a fork with his right arm after he retired? Do you have to suffer like Tiger Woods, whose otherworldly drives destroyed his body, resulting in seven back surgeries, five knee surgeries, and two ankle surgeries? Do you have to suffer like Larry Bird, who played basketball with such chronic back and leg pain that when he was taken out of a game to rest, he had to lie on the floor because it hurt too much to sit in a chair?

Or do you have to suffer like the Spanish tennis great Rafael Nadal, for whom pain was a constant companion throughout a professional career that began when he was 15 and ended a year and a half ago, at the age of 37?

During the course of that career Nadal won 22 Grand Slams, the second most of any player in history, and was ranked in the top 10 for 912 consecutive weeks—that’s 18 years straight, an astonishing feat. Along with Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, Nadal was one of the “Big Three” who dominated tennis for most of this century. He played in a handful of the greatest matches ever played. He won the French Open 14 times, a record that is unlikely to ever be broken.

He had, in other words, a career like few others.

Nadal was relentless on the court and a gentleman off it, and we fans loved him for both those qualities. What we didn’t see—because he tried to hide it from us—was how much suffering he endured to play at that level, and for that many years. And in Rafa, the new four-part Netflix documentary, it is his threshold for pain—his belief that suffering was required for him to achieve greatness—that writer and director Zach Heinzerling was most interested in exploring. To Heinzerling, the question wasn’t only why Nadal was willing to endure it but also: Was it worth it in the end?

In 2018, Brad Smith was at church when a fellow congregant noticed he was struggling to put on his suit jacket. Brad, then 37, was nursing a month-old shoulder injury from playing dodgeball with the church youth group, but it kept getting worse.

Brad endured months of muscle and nerve testing and MRIs to rule out a spinal cord injury before visiting a clinic in his hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, that specialized in treating a very rare neurological disease. At the end of the appointment, the doctor offered him a hug, and then a diagnosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. It may as well have been a death sentence.

ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, attacks the nerve cells that allow you to move your muscles, until you can no longer move, speak, swallow, or breathe. Doctors can manage symptoms and slow progression modestly with a handful of approved drugs, but there is no cure. The average life expectancy after diagnosis is two to five years, and there are more than 33,000 Americans living with the disease.

Brad walked to his car in a state of shock. On his drive back to work—he was a technology executive—he stopped at a parking lot, cried, and appealed to God. “I said the most desperate prayer in my life, asking Heavenly Father if this was really ALS,” Brad told me. “I remember getting a very clear answer: Everything is going to be all right.”

Within three years of being diagnosed with ALS, Brad had lost control of his entire body. When it came time to tell their three children—their oldest was in first grade at the time, their youngest was just 1—his wife, Tiffany, sat them down, had them put on oven mitts, and asked them to try to build something with Legos. It was nearly impossible. “That’s what Dad’s ALS is doing to him,” she told them.

Welcome back to the Second Thought newsletter. This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about Heidi Montag, the First Lady LA deserves.

We live in an age of outsider politicians who are deftly using social media to get and hold onto power—to the surprise of everyone else, including their wives. Melania Trump never thought she’d be First Lady of the United States, and yet there she is, mournfully decorating Christmas trees and picking out chargers for state dinners when she should be doing damage at a galleria. Rama Duwaji, Zohran Mamdani’s bride, was reportedly unenthusiastic about leaving Astoria for Gracie Mansion. “It’ll be fine. I’ll be down the street from the Guggenheim and the Met,” she told New York magazine.

But on the West Coast, there are so very many first ladies-in-waiting. There, any woman worth her salt is always ready for a close-up, and has a closet full of costumes to play any part. And for the second time, the former reality star Heidi Montag might just be getting the call that she’s been cast as herself.

That’s because she’s married to Spencer Pratt—who, following in the footsteps of both New York’s mayor and the president, is trying to post his way into office. This week, LA had its mayoral primary. The votes still have not been fully counted, but reports have Pratt in second place, with about 29 percent of the vote—which would mean he’s headed for a runoff against incumbent Karen Bass come fall. If he wins, Montag will become the First Lady of the city. But really, isn’t she that already?

Montag and Pratt—though viewers of The Hills will always remember them as “Speidi”—met on a fateful night in 2006 at a club called Privilege in West Hollywood. Their dramatic relationship—Pratt was the show’s villain, Montag the small-town transplant who promptly got implants—was the load-bearing wall of the reality series, which followed a clique of twentysomethings as they got their footing as adults in LA. “I want to be the fun party-PR-girl-in-LA type of thing,” Montag announced on her first appearance on the show, to a prune-lipped college administrator. Later, she’d call her friend Lauren Conrad, who was working a party, to deliver LA’s unofficial motto: “We’re outside. Can you get us in?”

The Hills ended in 2010, Privilege shuttered years before that, and yet against all odds, Speidi stood strong. They’ve been married for 17 years and have two sons named Gunner and Ryker, because of course. Though Montag did not go quietly into the California mom life. Like any good LA reality starlet, she parlayed her celebrity into other reality shows about being a celebrity, like I’m a Celebrity . . .Get Me Out of Here! and Celebrity Big Brother. She started putting out pop music, too. Her newest album, Heidiwood, follows the 2010 release of Superficial, which includes the head-scratching lyric “I wear diamonds for breakfast.” Her Instagram is shellacked with pictures of herself in full glam, edited to poreless perfection, in a bikini walking a German shepherd with palm trees in the background—Caption: “🚨🚨Neighborhood watch🚨 🚨”—and doing an ad for McDonald’s in a gold lamé tube top and matching Daisy Dukes. In other words, she’s already representing the essence of LA.

Besides, she has decades of experience standing by her man. Even Hillary Clinton can’t say she was loyal when her husband spread a rumor that her best friend had a sex tape—which Pratt did, about Lauren Conrad. The affection appears to be mutual: Pratt is often seen campaigning in T-shirts with his wife’s face plastered across it, and told Fox News last week, “Thankfully, I married an angel who is very connected with Jesus and has brought me to the light.”

On Tuesday, Speidi arrived at a Mexican restaurant for an election watch party; she wore a slutty rendition of a Jackie O skirt suit—bright white, with satin 5-inch pumps and a micro miniskirt and full glam. Caption? “Ex Machina,” the title of her latest bubblegum pop single. Like it or not, she was born for this.

Joanna Stern really wanted her laundry robot to work. “I’m not very good at folding the laundry,” said the woman who is the most readable and funny consumer tech columnist around, if not a domestic goddess. “My wife complains constantly that I’m putting glasses into the dishwasher wrong,” she told me, on the latest episode of Second Thought.

We’re constantly told something big is coming when it comes to artificial intelligence injecting itself not only into our screens, but our lives in the physical world. But: When exactly? And how? Will it be that we each have home robots like Rosey on The Jetsons? A daily pill tailored to each of us to stave off diseases that a superintelligent doctor-bot screened us for? Or should we simply just expect a gusher of AI ads and slop to glut our feeds?

That’s where Joanna comes in. For a year, she invited AI into every corner of her life. She listened to AI-generated music and took self-driving cars. Alas, for all the big talk of menial labor, Joanna reports that the laundry robot was a bust. “It can only fold T-shirts right now,” she said. “And if you’re only wearing T-shirts, you have a pretty big problem.”

But though she gave that bot a failing grade, she told me she’d be all in on AI-assisted medicine. In other words: AI will revolutionize some aspects of our life, and especially the industries that rely heavily on technology and machinery—like healthcare, and car manufacturing and driving—but not all of them. Poetry, film, and music? Better to leave those to the flesh and blood pros. You can read all about Joanna’s great big experiment here, or listen to her on Second Thought. Or watch our conversation—including Dan Ahdoot’s stylings on the culture news of the week—below.

The new thriller Backrooms released last weekend, earning $81.5 million domestically—eight times what it cost to make. The twist? The movie was made by a 20-year-old director, who adapted it from his viral YouTube series. Read Spencer Klavan’s piece in The Free Press about why internet kids are taking over the movies—and how they just might save Hollywood from itself.

Speaking of Hollywood: This week marked the season finale of Euphoria and, likely, the end of the series. Across three seasons, director Sam Levinson chronicled the messy, drug-addled, and often tragic lives of the teens of East Highland. Adam Lehrer profiled the man behind the show, and went deep into the psyche and politics of the “god of Euphoria.”

This week, Hoan Ton-That of Clearview AI argued that actually, AI won’t be taking all the jobs: He writes that he’s addicted to Claude Code, having the time of his life—and that this tech will both empower and employ software engineers like never before, to build more and build bigger. Read his piece for a weekend white pill before you dive back into AI Armageddon talk on Monday.

They say that New Yorkers never get along—that it may well be the rudest city in the world. Except, that is, when the Knicks manage to get a small orange ball to go through a hoop more times than their opponent. On Wednesday night, the Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs in Game 1 of the NBA Finals and all was right on the isle of Manhattan. Now, Mayor Mamdani is signing executive orders to extend kids’ bedtimes, and President Donald Trump is planning to come back to New York, where both leaders will cheer on their hometown team. If the Knicks win their next two, expect a new Middle East peace deal by Game 4, inked over a hot dog and $30 beer.

“I intentionally decided not to do a gotcha,” Reshma Saujani tells me.

She’s talking about Donald Trump and the viral clip of her asking him how he plans to make childcare affordable. This was during his campaign for reelection in 2024, when he’d already made clear that, in his second term, “we wanna produce babies.” He’d spoken about making it easier for women to get IVF and flirted with the idea of a $5,000 “baby bonus”—which in most states wouldn’t even cover six months of infant care—but Saujani wanted to know: What specific piece of legislation would Trump push Congress to pass, to help hopeful American parents cover the costs?

His team, she tells me, “knew the subject matter of the questions that were going to be asked beforehand.” Still, Trump’s answer was a two-minute-long ramble in which no real ideas were put forward and which left everyone perplexed.

“I’m more baffled by his most recent thing, where he said that he can’t pay for childcare because he’s got to pay for wars,” says Saujani.