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While the days of gay people being forced to undergo institutionalization, electroshock treatment, or chemical castration to “correct” their homosexuality are thankfully over, a form of talk therapy claiming to help individuals “eliminate unwanted sexual attractions” and “grow in the experience of harmony with one’s physical body” persists. However harmful such ideas may be, Justice Neil Gorsuch was correct when he wrote in his majority opinion that outlawing their expression constitutes an “egregious assault” on the First Amendment.

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“By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I,” he wrote. “Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed.”

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Against all odds, their descendants now number in the millions and live across the globe—including among our colleagues. Today, we’re honored to share the remarkable story of one of them: Free Press data and analytics lead Gabrielle Markel. Here, she reflects on her grandfather’s story of survival, and the extraordinary role it ended up playing in her marriage. —The Editors

On the morning of June 2, 1942, German soldiers and local police surrounded the Jewish ghetto in Miory, a small town in what is now Belarus. Every Jew was ordered to assemble. They were told that anyone who did not would be shot. Even the sick and elderly were forced to come.

My grandfather, Israel Lulinski, was 7 years old. He was confined in the ghetto with his father, Reb Yosef, his mother, Pearl, and his brothers and sisters. Also there that morning was a young man named Isaac Aron, then 26, a close friend of my grandfather’s family. Both my grandfather and Isaac would be among the few to survive what happened next. And their lives, from that day forward, would be forever intertwined.

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The uproar began on February 3, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) became the first major U.S. medical association to issue a policy statement recommending against gender-transition surgeries for minors. The surgeons’ statement cautioned that there is little quality research on the long-term consequences of performing transition surgeries on young people, such as double mastectomies and genital alteration. The society cited “emerging evidence of treatment complications and potential harms” of such interventions.

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Mahan, one of 10 candidates in California’s gubernatorial race, was back in the city to do some television hits and meet and greets, and he was sounding appropriately somber: A few hours before, the San Francisco Chronicle and then CNN had reported on several women accusing Representative Eric Swalwell, the front-runner in the race, of sexually assaulting or harassing them. One woman had accused the congressman of rape.

Swalwell denied the allegations, calling them “absolutely false,” but the long knives were out. There were a lot of votes on the line. And campaign cash. And endorsements.

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All of which prompts a series of questions: Who are these settlers? How should we understand their relationship with Palestinians—and with the Israeli government? And what will it take to stem the violence?

These are the questions Haviv Rettig Gur explores in his essay today. As with so many issues involving Israel, he writes, the reality is more complex than it first appears—but as the country continues to grapple with existential threats beyond its borders, its long-term future depends just as much on its willingness to confront the struggles at home. —The Editors

When it comes to Israel, the term settler is a word generally applied pejoratively. In some circles, it is used to describe all Israelis in an attempt to deny the Jews’ right to a state. More commonly, it describes a group of people who live in the West Bank, who right now are causing Israel a large and growing headache.

The first thing to understand is that the “settler movement” is enormous and enormously diverse. Calling it a movement does not quite do it justice. Many settlers live in Jerusalem, in neighborhoods that are technically beyond the borders established after the Six-Day War in 1967, but are very much attached to Jerusalem—just part of the urban sprawl and a cheaper place to live than the rest of the city. There are Haredi settlers and secular settlers, moderate religious-Zionist settlers, and even left-wing settlers in different parts of the West Bank.

Then you have the more ideologically fervent, who not only preach a religiously inflected form of Zionism, but who take the idea to its messianic edge. And on the extremes of that last group, you find a cadre of violent extremists eager to catalyze their version of redemption through violence—usually violence against Palestinians, but surprisingly, often also violence against the Israeli state and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.

The problem when the world uses the word settler is that it fails to encompass any of that diversity. The diversity matters not only to win some imagined brownie points in international debates, but to understand the phenomenon and available policy responses. For example, it explains why three-quarters of the Israelis living in Gaza in the run-up to Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the strip accepted government compensation ahead of time, and left their homes peacefully. Only about a quarter of this population—one of the most ideologically intense among the settlers—actually resisted removal in any meaningful sense.

To understand the problems that some settlers are causing Israel, you need to understand who they are and what drives them: their origins, their cheerleaders in government, and how they are working against the interests of the rest of the country.

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Last week, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University was scheduled to vote on a proposal to cap A grades, subjecting them to a limit of 20 percent plus four students per class. The proposal also included a plan to link academic honors not to grades, but to a percentile-ranking metric. This came after a long period of grade inflation at the university, to the point that in the academic year 2024–25, 66 percent of students were awarded As, and 84 percent received either As or A-minuses.

Alarm over this trend has been rising for years. In the words of Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, “Our current grading practices are not only undermining the functions of grading; they are also damaging the academic culture of the college.”

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There is a cardinal rule in diplomacy: Everything that happens before a deal is closed—the threats, the slammed doors, the declarations that “it’s over”—is simply negotiation by other means. Donald Trump’s recent move to blockade the Strait of Hormuz falls squarely into this category.

Even when the strait was effectively closed during earlier military operations, Iranian, Russian, and Chinese tankers sailed through unimpeded. Although the U.S. Navy could have easily stopped them, increasing the pressure on Iran and its key sponsors, Trump deliberately chose not to escalate. The president was walking a tightrope: maintaining heavy pressure on Tehran without triggering a catastrophic spike in global oil prices. At the time, a total blockade would have instantly removed millions of barrels of oil from global circulation. Now, however, with the countervailing force of negotiations calming the energy markets, Trump has the freedom to ratchet up the pressure.

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But first: Did Iran just blow it?

The mullahs had a rough weekend. Forty-eight hours ago, the ceasefire in Iran looked like the beginning of the end of the war—a first step by President Donald Trump toward pulling out and accepting a new status quo with the regime intact. But then talks collapsed and now Trump is escalating.

American destroyers are patrolling the Strait of Hormuz with both offensive and defensive aims. If Iran opens the waterway to free-flowing traffic, U.S. ships will be there to escort commercial vessels through. But if the regime continues charging a toll for the passage, the United States will close the gate.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said Sunday. And the strait isn’t his only target. By that evening, government sources said the U.S. is considering strikes in Iran’s interior. In other words, the war is back on.

What changed in a weekend? The White House got its closest look yet at how stubborn their counterparts are. Weeks after its supreme leader was killed, and facing even more destruction, the regime shot down every firm U.S. demand during marathon negotiations in Pakistan. What were they thinking, with so much at stake? Eli Lake explains the Iranians’ approach at the crossroads of the war.

Few could have predicted Trump’s renewed pressure campaign, and reopening the strait will require tactical genius. But Zineb Riboua believes it will be more than worth the effort. That’s because closing the waterway is the last card Iran holds. If the U.S. calls its bluff by successfully keeping it open, there will be nothing left to negotiate.

President Trump seems to seize every opportunity to talk things through, preferring a masterful deal over risking even a single American life. But one of Trump’s former advisers thinks the president was wrong to ever slow down. John Bolton spoke to The Free Press’s Nicholas Clairmont before the negotiations over the weekend, and made the early case for how U.S. armed forces can press ahead.

In many ways, the war is pushing America’s military outside its zone of mastery. One difficult new dimension consists of drones, which the Navy has at times struggled to repel over the strait and across Iran. Americans have much to learn from Ukraine, which has mastered drone warfare over years of combat with the Russians. Aidan Stretch describes how U.S. companies are racing to adapt the cutting-edge tech that’s dominating a new front.

—The Editors

MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS

THE NEWS

• A machete-wielding man calling himself “Lucifer” slashed three people on a Grand Central subway platform Saturday before being fatally shot by NYPD detectives after ignoring 20 orders to drop the weapon. The victims, ages 65 to 85, are in stable condition.

• Americans face steep price hikes on essentials, with grocery staples up nearly 43 percent since 2019 and coffee prices more than doubling. Housing has been hit hardest, with the median homeowner’s monthly payment jumping 72 percent to over $2,800.

• President Trump was booed by the crowd as he entered UFC 327 in Miami Saturday night, just as Vice President J.D. Vance announced from Islamabad that U.S.-Iran negotiations had collapsed without a deal. Trump, who walked in alongside Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, had yet to comment on the failed talks.

• Chinese car brands are growing rapidly in the UK, capturing nearly 10 percent of sales last year with well-equipped models like the Jaecoo 7 undercutting European rivals. Experts warn European automakers face an “existential crisis,” with Chinese brands forecast to claim 20 percent of the UK market by 2028.

• Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is investigating Representative Eric Swalwell after multiple women accused the California Democrat of sexual assault and harassment, including the sending of unsolicited explicit photos. Swalwell denies the allegations as “flat false” but has since decided to suspend his gubernatorial campaign.

• Justin Bieber delivered a stripped-back Coachella headline set, sitting with his laptop to revisit YouTube videos of his younger self and sing along to hits like “Baby” and “Beauty and a Beat.”

• A blast of record-breaking heat will sweep into the eastern U.S. next week, with Washington, D.C., expected to hit 94 degrees, and New York’s Central Park reaching 87 degrees, by Wednesday.

• Rory McIlroy won the Masters on Sunday, becoming the fourth-ever repeat champion and the first to accomplish the feat since Tiger Woods in 2002.

Shadi Hamid came of age in an environment where America was often seen as a font of destruction, the root cause of the world’s problems rather than their solution. He marched against the Iraq War. He read Noam Chomsky. Like many on the left, he saw the United States primarily as a source of global harm. But over time, he came to see American power as a …

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As an American who has lived and worked in Hungary for several years now—and not as one of the ideological tourists drawn here by the Orbán movement itself—I will say a few kind words about Viktor Orbán. The old battle-ax rose from a young anti-communist activist to prime minister to international political celebrity, no small feat for a kid from small-town Hungary. Much to the chagrin of liberal critics who wanted to use him as a symbol of everything around the world they disagreed with, Orbán was right about a few big issues, notably immigration and the importance of encouraging families to have more kids. One sign of his enduring influence is how widely his ideas have been copied: The European Parliament just passed tough new immigration enforcement measures slated to go into effect in June, and pro-natalism has gone from a fringe preoccupation to a thoroughly mainstream concern. Much of Orbánism’s program, it must be understood, has also been copied by the man who just defeated him. If Orbánism’s appeal for Hungarians remains, why was the man himself just tossed from power?

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Wars usually shut doors for American foreign policy. But this episode has revealed that Operation Epic Fury has opened them with uncommon force. To understand why requires an honest reckoning with Iran’s biggest mistake in this war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) decision to weaponize the Strait of Hormuz ranks among the most consequential miscalculations in the regime’s history.

Following the American and Israeli strikes, the Revolutionary Guard pursued two anticipated outcomes from its Hormuz strategy.

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I asked evolutionary biologist Colin Wright to explain what turned these Ngogo chimpanzees against each other, whether their civil war can be stopped, and what it tells us about humans.

Wright isn’t one of the article’s authors, but he has studied various animal species and their social dynamics and community ecology. He is also founding editor of Reality’s Last Stand, an online publication about free speech, science, and reality, and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Tanner Nau: What’s going on with the chimpanzees? Why are they waging war on each other?

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Over the years, the message has gotten through: As of the end of last year, index funds and exchange traded index funds held a combined $30 trillion. Stock picking has become extinct, almost. Since 2000, the S&P 500—the most commonly used index among fund companies like Fidelity and Vanguard—has gained over 630 percent.

The trouble is that Bogle’s original premise no longer holds: Index funds have stopped being a proxy for the entire market.

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A New York Times investigation by John Carreyrou published last week is the latest effort to unmask Satoshi’s true identity. Based on evidence that ranges from an early interest in anonymous digital cash to hints in his writing style, the Times article concludes that Satoshi is British crypto CEO Adam Back. Two years ago, an HBO special, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, identified Satoshi as Canadian programmer Peter Todd, but as possibly working with Adam Back, giving the nod to Todd on the programming side. To be clear, Back denies the claims, as does Todd.

The identity of Satoshi isn’t just the greatest mystery of the crypto world, it’s one of the great mysteries of the world, period. So it’s no surprise that historians, journalists, crypto enthusiasts, and casual crypto watchers (I include myself in that latter category), are eager to know who Satoshi really is. In 2014, Newsweek identified him as an unemployed Japanese American programmer, in a scoop that quickly fell apart. Wired pinned him as Craig Wright, an Australian cryptographer, who turned out to be an imposter. There have been many other guesses over the years.

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“They have chosen not to accept our terms,” the vice president told reporters in Islamabad on Saturday before departing for Washington. “I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America.” Vance’s message was backed up by President Donald Trump, who told reporters over the weekend, “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me. And the reason is because we’ve won.”

Going into the talks, the Iranians acted as if they had the upper hand. Iran’s threats to international shipping through the vital choke point of the Strait of Hormuz threatened to send the global economy into a tailspin. Trump said he had an agreement before the talks for Iran to open the strait in exchange for a ceasefire. But when the negotiations began, the strait remained largely closed.

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The Donald Trump administration, and those around it, have spent years looking for lessons in Ukraine, which has developed some of the world’s most sophisticated drone expertise in its war with Russia. The administration saw an opportunity to learn from Ukraine’s lessons, but missed acting on it. Now the U.S. is racing to catch up to the frontier of drone warfare.

Perhaps the most convincing demonstration of Ukraine’s drone expertise came in a Ukrainian assault behind the Russian line last summer. In June, four trucks hiding more than 100 Ukrainian drones in wooden cabins hurtled down Russian highways toward four of the country’s most protected airfields. Hours later, pilots located thousands of miles away in Kyiv sprang the drones from the trucks and began flying them into some of Russia’s most expensive aircraft. By the end of the operation, Ukraine’s small first-person-view drones, which cost no more than a few hundred dollars a unit, had dealt more than $7 billion in damage to Russia’s air fleet. Military experts across the globe lauded the mission, code-named Operation Spider’s Web by Ukraine’s security services, as one of the most daring and successful in modern warfare.

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But first: the man who went to Michael Jackson’s ranch—and stumbled into an afternoon with Jeffrey Epstein.

The release of the Epstein files forced a lot of people to reflect on their interactions—however innocent—with the man at the center of them. One such person was a literary agent named David Vigliano, who met Jeffrey Epstein once, in bizarre circumstances, and kept very detailed notes. Today, he shares them in an exclusive essay for The Free Press.

In the summer of 2002, Vigliano went to Neverland Ranch—Michael Jackson’s sprawling estate in the Santa Ynez Valley—to discuss the possibility of a Jackson autobiography. The pop star never showed. Instead, Vigliano found himself seated across from Epstein, who had arrived with a harem of college-age women. “In my line of work, I’ve met many extremely wealthy men with girlfriends half their age. None of them had nine,” he writes today. “I guess he just likes to surround himself with beautiful young women, I thought, in all my cluelessness.”

Years later, after Epstein was convicted of pedophilia, and Jackson was accused of the same thing, Vigliano found himself “struck by how easily I was seduced” by the mystique around these two men. His epiphany came after he read Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl; he had nothing to do with its publication but, he writes, it “made me think about whose stories get to be told, and the role I play in their telling.”

​​Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site! Click here to meet a sober, tattooed, curly-haired atheist in Salt Lake City; a well-traveled JewBu photographer based in Los Angeles; or a petite blond woman in the Windy City looking for a love that’s pretty, pretty, pretty good.

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, your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to Cupid@TheFP.com.

We’ve published a lot of pieces this week that you’ll want to read, if you haven’t already—including Frannie Block’s profile of the triumphant head of NASA; a biting Coleman Hughes’s review of a new book by America’s most famous anti-racist; and a fascinating set of stories about how AI is changing everything from cancer treatment to your favorite song:

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our senior editor Peter Savodnik for his recommendations. . .

🥃Drink. . . a classic Negroni, in honor of the arrival of spring, preferably at Florentín, a rooftop bar in downtown Los Angeles—one of the few outstanding outposts of civilization in this town.

🎵Listen. . . to Alisa Weilerstein perform Shostakovich’s No. 2 concerto for cello, with Ryan Bancroft conducting. It’s happening at Walt Disney Concert Hall, which (for the uninitiated) remains the country’s best music venue, architecturally and acoustically—and, helpfully, is just down the street from Florentín.

📺 Watch. . . A Separation, the powerful 2011 Iranian movie directed by Asghar Farhadi about patriarchy, dementia, the end of a marriage, and more. It’s a wonderful film, and, just as important, a reminder that the war over the future of this country is not only about nuclear missiles, oil, and geopolitics, but human beings trapped in a medieval theocracy.

📚Read. . . Badenheim 1939, by Israel’s greatest novelist: Aharon Appelfeld. The novel is about a colorful band of Jews in a resort town in Austria shortly before they’re all herded off to concentration camps, and it’s a brilliant exploration of human beings’ ability to delude themselves. It feels all too timely, alas.

Last but not least, a beautiful thing to feast your eyes on:

This month, four astronauts traveled to the moon and back aboard the Integrity. As someone who has loved science fiction for as long as she can remember, our art director, Clara Grusq, couldn’t help but think of the 1968 Planet of the Apes, a Cold War–era film she thinks is often overlooked, yet arguably one of the most enduring works of sci-fi storytelling. We won’t give away the ending, but we will say: The final haunting image of the ruined Statue of Liberty, half-buried in sand, delivers one of the most iconic and devastating reveals in cinema history.

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

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

Crowds lined the beaches of California. Children on the East Coast stayed up late to watch the broadcast. Millions around the globe anticipated the safe return of four human beings—three Americans and one Canadian—who had ventured farther into space than anyone before them.

It felt magical. It felt like a miracle.

But it was neither.

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