The Free Press

In Jeremy Tate’s office in Annapolis, Maryland, there’s a plaque bolted to the wall, with words engraved in tarnished brass. It’s the kind you’d find on a historical landmark, only this message is from the future; it reads: In 2040, the CLT surpassed the SAT and ACT as the number one college entrance exam globally.

“Every day we say our job is to come here and to make this become true,” Tate told me of the sign, which he had made two years ago.

On the surface, the Classic Learning Test (CLT) doesn’t seem all that revolutionary. It’s a two-hour test of reading, grammar, and math, taken by high school seniors as an alternative to the SAT or ACT. There are a few important differences though. Unlike the better-known tests, the texts are Western canon, not news article clips or the Common Core. There is no calculator. The reading passages are more than a few hundred words. The test does not get easier every year if students perform poorly.

The point of the CLT is to make college entrance academically rigorous again, so kids rise to the challenge—and so, ultimately, every high school classroom in America starts teaching the classics again. Tate says he’s “in a battle to save Western civilization.” And he’s not afraid of the competition.

I grew up in the limelight, with my appearance scrutinized weekly from the time I starred in my own NBC show at 14. I was blissfully unaware of my weight back then. I was naturally lanky and athletic, and I ate whatever I wanted with no concern for weight gain. All that changed when, as a teenager, I was put on medication to manage my moods, and weight gain followed me from there. By my 40s, still actively working as an actress, I acquired a deep sense of shame around my body. At a size 6, I felt obese. By the time social media arrived—with its fixation on being thinner, more toned, more surgically perfected—that pressure tipped into a disordered relationship with food that I have spent years trying to untangle.

Early menopause did not help. In the last several years, I’ve put on about 20 pounds that I really don’t need. I also don’t seem to have the discipline, motivation, or time to lose them.

Still, that’s not why I went on a GLP-1. I went on a weight-loss drug because a doctor told me it might help ease symptoms I’ve struggled with for basically my entire adult life.

I was diagnosed with my first autoimmune condition—Graves’ disease—at the height of my health, when I was 23. My immune system forgot that my thyroid was a part of my body and attacked it, sending it into an overactive storm that made me very, very sick. My doctor prescribed strong medication and sent me on my merry way. In 1998, there was no discussion of diet or lifestyle or any of what we now know can influence autoimmune conditions. I probably did a lot of things that very slowly made my condition worse.

For many Jews, it can feel like the walls are closing in on both sides. On the left, the rising tide of anti-Zionism comes with a belief that America is uniquely evil; that capitalism should be uprooted; and that the decline of the West would benefit the world. Meanwhile, among growing sects of the right, virulent nationalism and white supremacy manifest as isolationism, conspiratorial thinking about Israel, and resentment of the Jewish people. It’s a classic example of the horseshoe theory of politics: Extreme views often reach the same destination.

This week, it was the right’s turn for the microphone. Political commentator and former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is a member of a rising cohort of conservative voices—including Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, among others—whose opinions are increasingly interchangeable with those of the most radical anti-Zionist leftists. This week, Kelly sat down with Shawn Ryan—a podcaster who, like her, is a Trump fan turned critic—for an episode of his show.

Welcome back to the news summary where we look at the week that has passed. No, I will not be commenting on 60 Minutes other than to say that there are 11,492,640 minutes until I am 60. Do with that what you will, Puck. I’m Nellie Bowles, and this is TGIF.

→ Trump walking back his slush fund: We finally found a scam that’s too scammy even for the Trump administration, and it’s his $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund, in which Trump planned to hand out cash to people who felt they’d been unfairly targeted by the Biden administration and IRS. Scam cell phones, scam crypto, scam crypto platform—that we could handle, that we could ignore, fine. But an actual bag of cash? It’s a little on the nose, even in 2026. “We are not moving forward with the fund. Period,” said acting attorney general Todd Blanche, trying to assuage House lawmakers. It was part of his IRS truth and reconciliation program.

Now, to back up a bit about Trump vs. IRS: It’s not great that the IRS leaks personal tax information about people its employees don’t like, which is what happened when an IRS contractor leaked Trump’s and thousands of other wealthy people’s returns, much to the joy of ProPublica and The New York Times. It’s been memory-holed, but as a reminder: IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn, an alum of the St. Louis prep school Crossroads and UNC Chapel Hill, got his little paws on those documents and shared them with reporters. He was sentenced to five years in prison, and then I’m sure he’ll get an amazing sinecure somewhere.

For a year, tech writer Joanna Stern turned herself into an AI guinea pig. She let artificial intelligence into every corner of her life: testing robot assistants, commuting in autonomous vehicles, reading AI bedtime stories to her children, and even going on a road trip with her AI boyfriend, Evan.

That experiment became her new book, I Am Not a Robot. …

Anthony Vinci—co-founder and CEO of Vico, an AI company that empowers judgment and analysis in finance and national security, and author of The Fourth Intelligence Revolution—joins School of War to discuss the technological evolution of spy craft. How does an intelligence officer operate in a world of rapidly advancing technology? What happens when mach…

The Justice Department is preparing criminal charges against an illegal alien for allegedly using fake identities to gain custody of unaccompanied migrant children, The Free Press has learned. The prosecution could shed new light on how relaxed screening for sponsors of unaccompanied minors in recent years has allowed widespread fraud and endangered the welfare of thousands of children.

A criminal complaint was filed against the defendant, Guatemalan national Maritza Azucena Cahuec Coc, in an Ohio federal court last week for allegedly filing fraudulent unaccompanied alien children sponsorship applications to facilitate their entry into the U.S. An indictment is expected within the next two weeks, according to a source familiar with the matter.

It’s been three weeks since Donald Trump returned from his Beijing summit with Xi Jinping and asked the Chinese leader to release Ezra Jin. The Christian pastor has been imprisoned in China for nine months for practicing his faith. Back in the States, Trump told Fox’s Bret Baier he was “optimistic” Jin’s case would “get very strong consideration” from Xi.

It seemed possible. After he met with Xi Jinping, Trump informed reporters on board Air Force One that Xi was giving “very serious consideration” to Jin’s release.

Today, not only is Ezra Jin still in prison, but his lawyer, Guisheng Li, says he’s been cut off from Jin and that the pastor effectively has no contact with the outside world.

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, Daniel Akst paid tribute to Elisha Otis, the godfather of the American skyline. Today, Major Garrett writes about John Steinbeck, whose novels echo in our memory “like a favorite family hymn, a true American hymn.” —The Editors

In the mid-1970s, a sturdy, vivid, and largely untroubled American author, by then dead, left a gift for me in my middle school library.

Standing up on its hardback edges atop a table that the librarian, desperate for TV-obsessed boys like me to read anything, had marked “Good and Easy Reads” was John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America.

It caught my eye one random Monday because the night before my father, in his imposing way, had made me watch the movie The Grapes of Wrath. My father’s stern tendencies rarely packed the warmth of generosity, but this time was different. The edict opened my eyes, my mind, and my heart to the grandeur of John Steinbeck.

Jason Scharf, 44, isn’t your typical 21st-century parent. In an age of iPad babies, he’s “dropped the hammer” on social media, banning TikTok and YouTube entirely; he says Roblox, which lets kids make online games, is likely next to go. Instead, he insists on raising his three kids—who are 7, 10, and 12—in a way that equips them for the real world.

So when his eldest turned 9, he took him right to the range to learn how to shoot a bow and arrow.

But his son ran into a problem. Despite hours of after-school lessons in their neighborhood of Austin, Texas, and ample tutoring from his father, he could never get a handle on the complicated vocabulary of the shooting range. Until one day, around 2023, Scharf finally tried a technique that the loincloth-clad archers of old never would’ve dreamed of.

“I literally just threw it into Chat and said: Can you explain ‘The range is hot’ to a 9-year-old?” said Scharf, who’s a biotech professional. “It worked like a charm. All of a sudden, he got it.” They moved onto the next phrase he’d had trouble with.

Soon, Scharf’s son knew all about the terminology he needed to understand—plus the mechanics of a long bow, and what separates it from a recurve. Now, three years later, artificial intelligence has taken over his family’s life—and nothing feels impossible.