But when I asked Sierra, now 29, if she would get Botox again someday, she didn’t rule it out. “There’s a part of me that is still interested in the idea of looking young and beautiful longer,” she said. “I compare myself to other women online who have great skin with no fine lines or wrinkles.” The problem, in her mind, wasn’t the Botox, but the context in which she got it. “If I ever did get it again, I would spend lots of time doing research on the best places to go.”

For the past two years, as research for my book GIRLS®, I’ve been looking into the onslaught of beauty routines, skin-care videos, and surgery ads young women see online, and the effect it has on them. But recently there have been signs that some women have had enough: They are removing their breast implants, dissolving their lip filler, and stopping Botox injections. There has been a spike in breast implant removal, and in dermal filler reversals. Influencers are beginning to undo their “Instagram face,” with some vlogging the process for their viewers. Now even the market seems to be responding: One clinic in San Diego advertises “buccal fat restoration” to reverse the once-trendy procedure of sucking fat out of the cheeks.

Some stories are horrifying. Online, women tell them calmly, casually, often while doing their makeup and getting ready for the day. In one TikTok, a woman describes developing sepsis after getting butt filler: She says she began vomiting blood, ended up in a hospital for two weeks, and, soon after being discharged, looked down to see blood and pus “actually pouring out of a hole in my ass.” Others describe their implants rupturing and leaking into their body, or giving them symptoms of what some call “Breast Implant Illness,” like chronic fatigue and hair loss.

But when I started researching this story, I was surprised to find that some of the women I watched on social media, or interviewed—women who had had experiences so painful and traumatic that their implants had to be removed, or their filler dissolved—were considering going back for more. They say they would risk these procedures again, or it’s obvious from their social media feeds that they continue to have work done. One woman describes her “nightmare” appointment getting Botox and chin filler—passing out immediately and suffering a drooping eye for a “long time”—before telling viewers that although she hasn’t had filler since, she has a “new injector” now.

Read more

“By Russian standards, I’m as lib as one can get,” says the 28-year-old. “I’m against the war. I’m pro-Western values.”

He was also the youngest campaign manager for the face of Russia’s democracy movement, Alexei Navalny, whose fight against Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship ended only when he died in a gulag in 2024.

But in the context of Brooklyn, where Cherniuk has lived since 2025, he doesn’t identify with the tear-it-all-down, fuck-America libs.

“Russian liberalism is a more classic liberalism; we care about building institutions that allow for freedom to thrive in a society,” he explains. “And so, as an activist, to bicker about pronouns when you don’t have a free press or when you don’t even have independent courts sounds so fucking ridiculous.”

Read more

The premise of the new rom-com One Night Only could not be clearer—it flashes on-screen at the beginning of the movie—and yet, it begs about a million questions, none of which are answered. If you ignore this, plus most of the acting and the gratuitous product placement, it’s actually not a bad film. It’s the perfect plane movie.

Set in New York City, One Night Only, follows Owen—an unreasonably handsome pizza maker played by Dua Lipa’s new husband, also known as Callum Turner—and Allie, a stage-shy singer played by Monica Barbaro (who was the Joan Baez to Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown). Two people you might want to see naked, but apparently, they took out all the sex scenes in post-production because focus groups kept insisting that young people these days do not want to see too much bare skin—unlike millennial moms, who can’t get enough of all the horny hockey shows coming out.

Anyway, Owen is planning on proposing to his girlfriend, who reveals to him, over an omakase dinner, with couples practically copulating at tables all around them, that she’s planning on sleeping with their neighbor that night instead of him. Allie finds herself once again single on this fateful evening, shimmying into a silky dress to meet a friend at a bar with a hope of getting lucky. The random no-sex law may sound dystopian, but it dawned on me: They didn’t need to invent a weird transhumanist holiday! This is just New Year’s Eve for single people!

Allie and Owen keep meeting, as the night devolves, as they both hunt for The One: at the police station, his pizza shop, a lighthouse. This is a New York City in which one might travel to The Bronx, deep Brooklyn, the West Village, Chinatown, and the Hudson River, all in one night—also dubious.

“I know I just met the guy, but I actually think he could be someone special,” Allie reports to Owen, as they fight over the last condom in a bodega. (Part of the rules of the one-night-only is that, legally, you must use protection.) “What does he get on his pizza?” Owen shoots back. “If you have a real connection with someone, you know what kind of pizza they like.”

This is what counts for witty back-and-forth dialogue in a rom-com nowadays. But at least these two have chemistry (don’t compare this to the Mount Rushmore of rom-coms—Pretty Woman, When Harry Met Sally . . ., Notting Hill, and Annie Hall) while trying to connect.

What’s this movie trying to say? Is it that having an oppressive government that curtails carnal pleasure might actually help people find true love? Is it a warning about what might happen if we allow a full transhumanist surveillance state to take over, since the sex prohibition is monitored through biological trackers implanted in everyone’s skin? Who knows?! The movie isn’t political, and isn’t trying to make a point about the culture wars. But my theater was full of laughs, gasps, and a few approving “yups!”

I’m all for fun films about hot people, of which there have been very few in the last few years. One Night Only was like a much dumber version of Valentine’s Day, or He’s Just Not That Into You, movies from 2010 and 2009 respectively, which were stuffed full of beautiful people, cheap jokes, and the kind of storylines it’s best not to think too hard about. This was a pale shade of a great genre that should not be left to wither. At the very least, I left the theater with a smile.

Face Tats in the Bible Belt

Nearly half of Americans ages 30 to 49 have at least one tattoo. Kids’ names on biceps, religious iconography on a pec, a flower on a shoulder blade, and if you’re in Denver, a geometric design on a calf: All these have become socially acceptable. But there’s one category that still inspires double takes, and that’s face tattoos.

Often called “job stoppers,” face tattoos are one of the last taboos; in a world where you can wear whatever you like, dye your hair weird colors, and proudly discuss your kinks, a face tattoo still inspires strangers to ask, “What the hell were you thinking?”

That’s according to the tattoo enthusiasts and artists who I spoke to for a story about face ink in South Carolina, the only state where they’re illegal—a status quo that’s being challenged by a new lawsuit that argues the prohibition is a violation of the First Amendment.

But even if they win the right to get a face tattoo, should the good people of South Carolina exercise it? Tyler Hall, a religious tattoo artist with “seven or eight” face tattoos tells me: Yes, if you pray to God first. Another South Carolinian, Sampson Stanko, describes the process of getting his face tattoos removed like “a scary movie,” and wants to kick his younger self.

Read my piece on the legality and history of inking your own face in the Bible Belt:

Brad Pitt is drinking again, and to him I say: Go for it! But for the female celebrities, like Reese Witherspoon, who are dating finance bros, I have a question: If even the junior analysts are dating supermodels and pop stars, who’s left for the rest of us?

I talk about all this, and more, in the latest episode of Second Thought, with my co-host Dan Ahdoot. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the video here:

Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About:

The Japanese government announced that men will now be allowed to wear shorts in the office for the first time. The decision was targeted at making office life more appealing, while also cutting down on air-conditioning to preserve energy. They say it’s part of Japan’s “Cool Biz” initiative, but apparently a lot of women have complained about being able to see their male co-workers’ hairy legs. I was sympathetic, until I found out the average thermostat in Tokyo is set to 80 degrees.

My colleague Maya Sulkin dug into how Gen Z employees are taking advantage of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to disappear for weeks on end—often with pay. For some people she spoke to, it was a lifesaver—one person was able to care for their sick parents—but for others, it meant skipping off to Bali and becoming an influencer. Is FMLA just another modern-day benefit, or a sign that Gen Z can’t hack work?

If you’ve looked at a red carpet lately, you’ll know that celebrities are skinnier than ever. A couple years ago, that might’ve been just because of Ozempic—but today, there’s a whole new class of drugs that celebs and other elites are shooting up to look and feel their best. They’re called peptides, and they’re getting more and more popular. This week, Tablet’s Adam Lehrer explains which ones might change your life.

This has been Second Thought, my weekly newsletter about popular—and unpopular—culture. You can sign up here!

This, the opening scene of Rob Reiner’s film Stand by Me, is the first indication that this story takes place in a very different time; the second, in case you missed the first, is that the boys are smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and listening to Bobby Day on a transistor radio. But this is only the setup for a punch line that arrives moments later, as another boy bursts into the tree house with a breathless question that will alter the trajectory of the rest of their lives:

“You guys want to go see a dead body?”

The answer, obviously, is yes.

Read more

But first: how Caitlin Clark became a culture war piñata.

I’ve been watching the WNBA for a couple of decades now, going back to Rebecca Lobo and Lisa Leslie, to the more recent era of Tamika Catchings and Diana Taurasi. They were all great players, but there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard of them, even if you’re a sports fan. Only die-hard women’s basketball fans watched the WNBA, and there weren’t very many of us.

But three years ago Caitlin Clark, with her amazing long-range shots and gorgeous blind passes, joined the league and became its first breakout superstar. On the one hand, her astonishing popularity has done wonders for the WNBA, bringing with it higher player salaries, a $200 million TV deal, and a status quo in which teams fly on private jets instead of commercial flights.

On the other hand, her popularity has had a dark side. The heightened scrutiny of Clark, her team, and the league has led to culture war after culture war in the WNBA—an organization that was woke before people used the term woke.

Clark’s popularity, in a majority-black sport, has led to accusations of racism. Her teammate Sophie Cunningham has been dragged for saying it’s “common sense” to exclude trans women from the league. Two former NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, have declared that they’ve decided they are women and plan to offer themselves up in the draft—a stunt apparently designed to expose the WNBA’s hypocrisy on the trans issue. Though a WNBA task force met this week to come up with a definition for woman, the meeting ended, astonishingly, with no decision.

I spent some time this week trying to learn whether the WNBA would be able to get past its culture war controversies—or whether the controversies would do it serious damage. Read my story to see where I came out.

—Joe Nocera

EDITORS’ PICKS

As the whole internet now knows, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at the age of 36, is freezing her eggs. She shared her decision on social media in the hope that it would “normalize” the process. But Caitlin Flanagan, in her latest essay, argues that if we’re raising awareness of egg freezing, we should raise awareness of its success rates. “The truth is that many, many times, egg freezing can lead to heartbreak because it’s hardly foolproof, or even a likely way to get pregnant.”

Critics accused AOC of putting career ahead of starting a family—the latest pile-on to prove that the cultural tide has turned against the girlboss. To make sense of the backlash, Rafaela Siewert interviewed sex researcher Dr. Debra Soh. Don’t miss their conversation on AOC’s gambit to have it all, why more women are choosing to become single moms, and why America just can’t quit its trad wife obsession.

Meanwhile, Zoomers who leave their love lives to the optimizing forces of the algorithm are finding themselves worse off. This week, Kara Kennedy reported on the young people who are fed up with dating apps—and the dreamers reinventing romance for a post-app world. Meet the AI matchmakers, the “dating doc” writers, and the people stapling personal ads to telephone poles.

A blockbuster from Rupa Subramanya dropped this week: her investigation into the Virginia high school where antisemitic bullying, allegedly mostly by Muslim boys, went unpunished by administrators—until the state attorney general’s office stepped in. Rupa’s story caught the attention of Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, who posted on X, “This is concerning. We are looking into it.”

Finally, New York magazine’s most recent cover story christened the Big Apple “Habibi City,” celebrating a community of Middle Easterners “flexing their cultural clout.” Not so fast, writes Liel Leibovitz—himself a Middle Eastern immigrant—who sees something darker afoot than vapid ethno-narcissism. Habibi City, he argues, sees itself as an “oppositional force, here to fight against all of America’s many transgressions, with the goal being the remaking of America in their own image.”

It was not Hall’s first face tattoo. That would be the umbrella under his right eye, which he got a few months before the torch, to “symbolize protection against obstacles in life.” There’s also the script Never Again, over his brow, lyrics borrowed from a song he loved as a teen. Also: a crescent moon, the word restless on his cheek, for his children and wife, and a long-stemmed rose under it, in honor of his youngest daughter, whose middle name is Rose.

All told, “I’ve got about seven or eight face tattoos right now,” he said. Does he have plans to get more face tattoos? “Not necessarily,” he said. “But you never know.”

Hall tells me his face tattoos act as a “bold statement of individual expression,” and that he enjoys the big reactions they get; sometimes it’s judgment by strangers turned off by them—and by extension by him—and sometimes it’s people who “are shocked to realize behind the rough exterior is a kind, God-fearing soul.”

But because Hall works in Clover, South Carolina—he’s a contractor at The Local Tattoo Studio—he may never know the satisfaction of inking another man’s forehead. That’s because he is subject to his state’s very strict and specific laws concerning where (geographically and dermatologically) you can get a tattoo. South Carolina officially legalized tattoos in 2004, but the law stipulates that a tattoo shop can’t be within 1,000 feet of a playground, a church, or a school—and bars tattoo artists anywhere in the state from inking anything above a client’s shoulders. The penalty for breaking the law, which falls on the artist, goes up to a $2,500 fine or one year in prison, or both.

Hall tells me he has to turn down clients “all the time” who come in requesting a tattoo on their head, face, or neck. “We’re turning money away.” He advises these clients to drive the few miles to nearby North Carolina to get the job done—which is exactly what he did to procure his beloved face tattoos. “There’s a clientele that has to go across state lines just for them to be able to express their First Amendment.”

Now, South Carolina’s draconian tattoo restrictions are being challenged, on constitutional grounds, by a lawsuit filed last month. The plaintiffs are two South Carolina residents who say they’d like to get more tattoos, plus a New York City-based tattoo shop, Tiny Zaps, which wants to do business in the state, and says its laws prevent them from doing so.

Read more

Bird and Johnson—a white man playing for the Boston Celtics and and a black man playing for the Los Angeles Lakers—were charismatic players who could do it all with great style and verve. They were exciting to watch. They transcended race. Their rivalry made the NBA cool, with the result that, 47 years later, the NBA reaps $7 billion in annual TV revenue and the average player salary is $13 million—with stars getting tens of millions more.

In the three years since Caitlin Clark graduated from the University of Iowa and joined the Indiana Fever, it can look like she has had the same effect on the WNBA that Bird and Johnson once did on the NBA. After all, for most of its existence—it is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year—the WNBA was barely a blip on the radar for most sports fans. Today teams play to sellout crowds, especially if the game involves Clark’s Fever. Its TV deal has gone from $50 million to $200 million. For the first time, teams are flying in private jets instead of commercial. Salaries have risen dramatically; no longer do players have to go to Russia during the winter to make enough money like Brittney Griner did. And TV ratings have doubled since Clark joined the league.

Read more

Some housekeeping first: Last week, Nellie announced we’re doing a Free Press Forum Book Club. Today, we’re happy to say the winner of the Forum Book Club is John Steinbeck’s East of Eden! Use this link to get book club announcements, and read and discuss alongside the other literate Free Pressers in the forum.

And ask Coleman Hughes anything! This Tuesday, August 18, at 3 p.m. ET, Coleman will take all of your questions—on music, race, writing, the precarious stack of books on his piano, and whatever else you can think up. Start dropping your questions in the forum now. Now let’s do the news!

→ The empire strikes back: It turns out the Democratic establishment has some fight left in it. After being consistently humiliated in primary elections by their socialist rivals since Donald Trump returned to power, they finally notched a victory on Tuesday when Milwaukee County executive David Crowley became the party’s candidate for governor in Wisconsin.

Who is David Crowley? Who cares! The point is that he’s not state representative Francesca Hong, a socialist and an inept campaigner whose campaign was already planning a “staff overhaul” should she win the nomination. Her preelection team included a deputy campaign manager who’s moonlighted as an OnlyFans model and who also won “Penthouse Pet of the Year” in 2024. Lest we forget: Hong called for the cancellation of Thanksgiving in 2020 because it’s a “colonizer holiday” and “the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx [sic] and women.” And just for good measure, she also had major issues with Fourth of July fireworks, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and the Pledge of Allegiance. If it’s not Indegenous [sic] People’s Day, forget it.

Needless to say, this all made Hong the runaway front-runner for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin even as Bernie Sanders and AOC kept their distance from her. Polls had her leading by roughly 20 points in the weeks before the election as her opponents dropped out.

Read more

Is the tank obsolete? As drones and precision strikes transform modern battlefields, some have predicted that armored vehicles may soon meet the fate of the cavalry charge. Today on School of War, Colonel Jose A. Reyes and Lieutenant Colonel David “Cam” Smith of the 1st Cavalry Division make the opposite case. Drawing on their experience operating and c…

Read more

They celebrate Brad Pitt’s return to drinking “in a more restrained manner” after seven years of sobriety. They explore the Tokyo government’s decision to let men wear shorts to the office—and the resulting conc…

Read more

The issue cuts in the exact opposite direction of how many critics understand it. Opponents of immigration often picture a rosy image of American life to which they want us to “retvrn”: the widely shared prosperity of the 1950s, backed by a growing economy, and leavened by an optimistic culture focused on family life. But if we wish to keep a dynamic, pro-wealth, pro-family American ethos in place, we will need a liberal immigration policy.

Unfortunately, we seem to be tightening. The migration inflow into the U.S. has declined precipitously, and it is not just because illegal border crossings have been curtailed (I do support that particular development). For instance, net inward migration was 2.7 million in 2024, but only 1.3 million by 2025.

Read more

It’s widely understood now that dating apps have destroyed romance, and Gen Z is struggling to couple up. We’ve published a few stories about how this happened—but here at The Free Press we’re also frustrated by the pessimism we see, everywhere, when it comes to the pursuit of love. The New York Times declares “Gen Z Can’t Afford a First Date” (ever heard of a walk in the park!?) and “Gen Z-ers Are Ditching Sex. They Might Be Onto Something” (on what? Libido-crushing medication!?). The Cut writes that “heterosexual women have reached a breaking point.” Celibacy is glamorized. Our fear is that, if you say the search for love isn’t worth it, young people come to believe it.

And they give up on one of the greatest joys life has to offer.

Plenty of our columnists have injected some romantic optimism into our pages. Kat Rosenfield wrote, “Stop Saying Dating Is Terrible.” Larissa Phillips declared: Bring back matchmaking! Arthur Brooks explained how to make dating apps work for you. And for today’s feature, Kara Kennedy—who, lest we forget, married a man she’d known a few months—interviewed half a dozen post-app dating pioneers, young people who decided that just because Tinder is terrible, they didn’t need to give up on dating completely. Instead, they got creative, inventing new ways to track down The One . . .

While reporting, she spoke to Jake Kozloski—founder of Keeper, an AI matchmaker—who gave her a scoop we think is representative of the dating crisis. He told her that Hinge had been interested in acquiring his company, but took issue with their mission—which is, controversially, “to give everyone on Earth the opportunity to marry the right person.”

During negotiations, Kozloski said, “I ended up getting a stern call from someone on their team saying that they read our blogs and did not like that they were pro-marriage, as they felt that was a value judgment they weren’t comfortable making.”

It’s almost as if the aim of the apps was never to get people coupled up for life—but rather, to keep us swiping. Read on to meet the young people with other ideas.

In April of this year, 22-year-old Erin St. Gull printed out a hundred copies of a one-page document and hung them up around Toronto. She calls it a “dating doc,” and in it, she lays out what she needs: marriage; kids; someone, male or female, who is in their late 20s or early 30s and who, preferably, can make her feel excited about life. She also includes what she can offer potential suitors: fertility and youth. She writes that she is extremely smart—and that she can “say this with little pretension as it is the one most provable trait I can claim to have”—as well as “philosophically inclined [and] ruthlessly committed to reason.”

She is also, as you can probably tell, incredibly self-starterish. St. Gull recognizes, like most of her generation, that the modern dating landscape is broken. But instead of waiting around for someone vaguely acceptable to swipe right, she is willing to put herself out there and scour continents to find the one.

She left Toronto shortly after covering the city with posters, returning to her native France, but on the way she embarked on a 13-city tour of Europe, “a big part” of which was “trying to find the person.” She went to an effective altruism conference, conscious that there would be, she told me, “a high concentration of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes in this circle . . . so I knew to scan the room.”

For St. Gull, dating apps are just “one channel,” and one that often doesn’t lead to much.

“At some point,” she said, “my relationship with dating apps shifted from ‘I’m trying to find someone on here,’ to, ‘I am using this purely for entertainment, and on the off chance that someone comes along and is actually interesting, I’m going to talk to them.’ ”

Read more

Read more

I’m the mother of a 23-year-old son, and I feel like I’ve lost him even though he’s still alive.

He grew up in what I believed was a loving, close family. We traveled together, celebrated holidays together, and genuinely enjoyed one another’s company.

During college, my son met a woman his age online. She lived on the opposite side of the country, and for the first two and a half years, their relationship was entirely long-distance. During that time, she was in constant contact with him, through texts, FaceTime, Snapchat, and online gaming. My son, who had always been outgoing and sociable, gradually stopped building friendships in college, and instead spent nearly all his free time talking to her.

After graduation, she joined my son on the East Coast, and they moved into a luxury apartment together, against our wishes. We had encouraged them to continue dating while living separately because we felt that, at 22, they were too young to become so dependent on each other. Instead, they both work remotely from their apartment and spend nearly all their time together. She knows no one on the East Coast, even after a year here. The only people she interacts with are people in my son’s friendship group, which has become smaller and smaller.

Since the beginning of their relationship, nearly every family gathering has become a source of conflict. After they visit us, my son will accuse us of having said or done things that offend his girlfriend—things that never happened. His girlfriend seems unable to tolerate him spending time alone with his family. On my husband’s birthday—an occasion he had always marked with a father-son golf outing—she insisted on riding in the golf cart throughout the round, and my son left immediately afterward without spending any meaningful time celebrating his father.

Most recently, my son declined to attend the wedding of the son of our closest lifelong friends, after learning that girlfriends were not invited. He made many excuses that were lies, saying for example that it would be logistically difficult for him to get there. My brother-in-law, whom my son deeply respects, spent hours talking with him, and even offered to drive him door-to-door, to eliminate any practical hurdles. My son still refused.

I know parents aren’t perfect, and I’m sure we’ve made mistakes. But we worked hard to give our son every opportunity in life, including a debt-free education and career guidance. Yet he believes we—in particular, me; he views my husband as my puppet—are controlling, judgmental people who ruined his life. (Think: Brooklyn Beckham.) It feels as though his world has shrunk to one relationship. The family, friendships, and interests that once brought him joy have slowly disappeared, diminished by his girlfriend, who is 100 percent emotionally, financially, and socially dependent on our young son.

We have continued inviting him to family events, and never stopped loving him, but my husband and I have lapsed into an ugly pattern: spending time analyzing every conversation we have with our son, and debating every text and every family interaction. We are exhausted, and terrified that any decision could permanently damage our relationship with our son.

When do you stop trying to convince your child that you’re not the person they’ve come to believe you are? When does continuing to pursue an adult child become counterproductive? Every attempt at contact with our son is fraught with stress and disappointment. It is now putting stress on our marriage, and our relationship with our other son. Is the loving response to keep reaching out, or to step back, leave the door open, and hope he someday finds his way back on his own?

—Heartbroken Mother, 63

Dear Heartbroken Mother,

Your son met a girl—yes, she seems clingy—from the other coast. They dated through college. After graduation, she moved across the country to be with him and despite your urgent advice, they moved in together.

You aren’t paying their rent—but you’re offended that your son is living in a “luxury” apartment with this girlfriend, while they both work from home. He still attends family gatherings but after, complains that you said something insensitive to his girlfriend, which strikes you as supremely unfair. Your son joined his dad for the annual father-son golf match (a several-hour outing, no doubt), but he brought his girlfriend along and didn’t spend “meaningful” time with his family after. Worst of all, he declined to attend your lifelong friends’ son’s wedding when his girlfriend wasn’t invited.

Let’s recap your son’s attendance record: The golf outing? Present! The family gatherings? Present! His uncle’s lecture? Present! (He suffered through it respectfully). The friend’s wedding invitation? He declined, as many in his situation would.

Now, you are “heartbroken” and bereaved, feeling as if you have “lost” your 23-year-old son “even though he’s still alive.” You wonder if you should stop reaching out to your son and just hope he someday “finds his way back on his own.”

I read these lines, picturing myself as your son. And I was seized by an overwhelming desire to find a girlfriend on the internet, move into a luxury apartment with her, and visit my parents infrequently.

Read more

But first: AOC’s race against time.

Heading into the 2026 midterms, the Democratic Party is plotting a rebrand, and 36-year-old congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in the center of the action. And while she crisscrosses the country to stump for a new crop of socialist candidates, her personal life has suddenly spilled into view.

Last Saturday, AOC went viral after she posted on Instagram that she had decided to start freezing her eggs. The next day, she went on a Sunday show and took a fertility shot in the green room. And on Monday, TMZ announced that she and her fiancé had split.

Her decision sparked a debate about women preserving their freedom into middle age—but our columnist Caitlin Flanagan has a different take.

“It was like watching the cycle of life in reverse,” she writes. Read Caitlin’s essay on what’s wrong with AOC’s effort to “normalize” egg freezing.

—The Editors

Establishments vs. Insurgents

When DSA-backed Francesca Hong lost her bid for the Wisconsin governorship on Tuesday, much of the press raced toward a premature conclusion. From Bloomberg to National Review, commentators declared that democratic socialism had “hit a wall.” The idea is that the populist movement sweeping the Democratic Party had reached a limit of sorts, rejected by primary voters in a politically moderate state.

Yet look a little closer and you’ll see that it took plenty of effort to make voters spurn her. Today, Audrey Fahlberg reports on how Hong’s opponent, David Crowley, and other moderate Democrats in Wisconsin mobilized to take down Hong with little time left in the race. It’s a comeback that should be studied closely by Democrats around the country who are desperate to halt the socialist surge.

But what gave rise to radicals like Hong in the first place—and how can a party stamp them out before they ever arrive? No one knows that story better than Evan Barker, a former Democratic operative who once worked for Abdul El-Sayed, and who witnessed the takeover of identity politics firsthand. This month, she laid out her takeaways in a new book—and when Rod Dreher read it, the message felt more familiar than he expected. Today, he explains what the Democrats’ turn has taught him about the future of the Republican Party—and how the GOP can avoid falling into the same trap.

And, in case you missed it, read Rupa’s investigation:

MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS

THE NEWS

• Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz fell to a one-week low on Wednesday. The drop came amid increased volatility in the region, as President Donald Trump claimed “total control” over the strait, and the Iranian-backed Houthis killed six people in the Red Sea.

• Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth upset Trump-backed Mike Lindell, of MyPillow fame, to win the Republican nomination for governor on Tuesday. Demuth will run against Senator Amy Klobuchar in the general election.

• President Trump announced Wednesday that his press secretary Karoline Leavitt is stepping down at the end of August. Leavitt will be leaving to spend time with her two young children, and will remain a top outside adviser to the president’s team.

• The Trump administration is set to spend at least $900 million on White House construction by routing funds from other agencies and private donors. The renovation plans include a gilded East Wing ballroom, a new helipad, and a visitor screening center.

• Federal authorities arrested a former Southern Poverty Law Center employee, Heidi Beirich, on charges that allege she oversaw secret payments to informants inside of white supremacist groups. Prosecutors claim Beirich lived with and was romantically involved with one of the recipients. (For more on the scandals rocking SPLC, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s essential piece.)

• Former Disney chief executive Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner are buying the Los Angeles Lakers for a record $12.5 billion. Their purchase marks a significant increase from the $10 billion Mark Walter paid for the franchise less than a year prior, despite star player LeBron James’ recent departure.

• A total solar eclipse swept across Iceland and Spain, the first to cross mainland Europe since 1999. Spain set up 350 viewing sites amid heat and wildfire warnings, where the eclipse produced a rare “sunset” effect.

Yet moderate Democrats in the state were as wary of Hong as Republicans were giddy. And they went into overdrive in the final weeks of the race to block her from gaining the nomination. In a wild turn of events, Milwaukee executive and mainstream Democrat David Crowley squeaked out a victory over Hong in last night’s primary, defeating her by a few thousand votes and dealing a blow to the insurgent socialist wing of the party that is hoping to remake the Democratic Party in its own image.

Crowley’s comeback is one for the ages. The Milwaukee county executive had suspended his campaign on July 8 amid what was then a crowded and fractured field that included Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez and former lieutenant governor and failed 2022 U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, both of whom dropped out of the race in the final weeks.

Read more

Barker, now 33, is a white woman from a working-class family in the Midwest. During one post-campaign period when she had no place to live before the next political cycle, Barker couldn’t go home, because there was no room for her in the house trailer where her mother and grandmother lived together to save money.

Born with a rare and potentially fatal genetic condition, Barker got into Democratic politics in the hope of improving the healthcare system she had struggled with her whole life. She also wanted to see political programs address the economic precarity her extended family lived under. This is why she became a Bernie Gal in 2016, and discovered she had a real gift for campaign fundraising.

As Barker details in Nothing Left (which The Free Press recently excerpted), her years working within the Democratic machine taught her some painful lessons. For one, she saw how party bigs sabotaged not only Bernie Sanders in 2016, but subsequent progressives contending for office in Democratic congressional primaries. As she puts it, party leadership would rather have seen progressive Democrats lose than surrender message control.

Her deeper warning, however, is that the party has become entirely controlled by both its donor class and its activists, who share the same destructive obsession with identity politics. In Barker’s view, the Democrats have become a party of man-hating girlbosses who prioritize race and gender over everything else, and who despise white people. The fact that many of these same people are themselves white is part of the party’s pathology.

Read more

Where was the “zero emission” engagement ring, the one made from “recycled gold”? Where was the boyfriend she’d begun dating in college, who supported her so much during her campaign? Things change.

In the videos, she sits alone in her apartment, looking especially beautiful—at times excited and at others a bit vulnerable. In fact, she looked like a woman who takes you aside to tell you she’s pregnant, not that she’s embarking on a moon shot. She talked about the current administration and its practice of “punishing us around our decision to be pregnant or not to be pregnant.”

Freezing your eggs is the universal signal for “Don’t rush me!” It’s the answer for your mother and aunts and the girl in the break room, who poke at you endlessly about when, when, when are you going to have a baby? And it’s a warm, Xanax-infused bath for any woman who feels her time to have a baby might be running out. Out here in real life you may be aging a little bit more with each passing year, but down there in the deep freeze, the real you—perfect and never getting a moment older than you were on the day you had the procedure—is safe. It will never be too late.

Read more

—The Editors

As a high schooler, I can tell you the scale of antisemitism among my generation is far worse than any adult realizes. Among young men, a new, mainly right-wing brand of Jew-hatred has become omnipresent and is calcifying into an insurgent political movement. And despite how widespread it’s becoming, it’s newer and far less understood than the more pervasive antisemitism on the left.

One word captures this new form of antisemitism: goy. A Hebrew word used to refer to non-Jews, it has been captured by the fringe right and used to imply that Jews see non-Jews as subhuman cattle to be controlled. A pro-Israel non-Jew, for example, might be called a “goy slave,” to indicate that he is loyal to his Jewish overlords.

Today, the word has migrated—through memes and TikToks—into the everyday vocabulary of young American men who in large part have no idea what it means. The chemistry teacher who gives too much homework might be called a goy. Bad food is called goyslop. There are TikToks with millions of views claiming that kosher-labeled food is healthier because Jews deliberately made non-kosher food into goyslop to keep non-Jews unhealthy, weak, and easier to control.

Read more