But first: Will Rahn reviews New York City’s first-ever casino.

“It’s like watching a slow-motion mugging,” my friend Dale observed, as we walked past the tables at Resorts World New York City. This ugly little stump of a building, squashed in the hinterland around JFK Airport, is host to the first-ever casino in New York City. I visited on Thursday, two days after its grand opening, and was horrified by what I found.

All across America, casinos are spreading like weeds in an unkempt garden. Few who study the issue think they’re a good idea—casinos and their advocates have a habit of under-delivering when it comes to the new jobs and tax revenues politicians always promise the casinos will create. And then of course there are the social costs like addiction, or the savings accounts and college tuitions frittered away at the tables.

For a long time, New York resisted this creep. New Yorkers keen on trying their luck at the roulette wheel had plenty of options in the neighboring states of New Jersey or Connecticut. But thanks in part to then-governor Andrew Cuomo’s commitment to taking the path of least resistance, the legal path was laid for the gambling industry to suck the financial capital of the world dry.

I left New York’s first casino richer, but sadder, and with questions: What will the new casino do to the neat little neighborhood it’s sprung up in? What will it do to everyday New Yorkers? Is it worth it? — Will Rahn

SECOND THOUGHT

Spencer Pratt—once a reality television star, now a candidate for LA mayor—went viral this week with a video comparing the current mayor’s mansion to the burned-out plot that was once his home. “He knew what would be good TV,” says his former producer, Sophia Rivka Rossi, who joined Suzy Weiss on the latest episode of Second Thought. They talked about the secrets of her former colleague Ryan Murphy, who gave America Love Story; Rossi’s return to God; and, yes, acupuncture.

Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the YouTube vid below. And if you want to keep up to date with everything Suzy does, don’t miss her newsletter!

​​Knock Knock, It’s Cupid!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a polyglot bachelor who’s been to 803 restaurants in NYC; a music teacher in Ames, Iowa; or a dog-mom to yellow lab Winnie in Philly.

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.

It was our absolute pleasure to welcome not one, but two fantastic new writers to our ranks this week, Caitlin Flanagan and Freya India. You’ll see their names appearing in The Weekend Press, but until then—catch up on their inaugural columns, and a couple of other treats. . .

How should you spend your weekend? We asked our reporter River Page for his recommendations…

🥩 Eat . . . Nothing from an expensive restaurant. I’ve never had an entrée that was worth more than $50 and neither have you. Yes, I have! No, you haven’t—you had a good time that was completely tangential to the $95 steak you ordered, probably because you were with people you like. Invite them to a Chili’s, order the most mediocre thing there (the app platter), and tell me you still didn’t have a great time.

🥃 Drink . . . Licor 43. It’s a perfect gold-colored vanilla-citrus liqueur that pairs wonderfully with ginger ale. If you’re having a party you can use it to make delightful little “mini beers”—just pour the 43 in a shot glass and top it with heavy cream. People have been sleeping on Licor 43 for years, and not just as a homage to the napping Spaniards who invented it. When I bring it up, and I often do, most people have no idea what I’m talking about—that needs to change. Take a sip, change your life, and spread the good news as I have.

📺 Watch . . . The films of Ralph Bakshi, one of the great animators of the 20th century. His style is distinctive, grimy, and drawn by hand—a far cry from the hideous, bloated, Fisher-Price style of computer animation we see so often today. It is not suitable for kids. Start with Fritz the Cat and work your way through the filmography—you may be scandalized, but you won’t be disappointed. True, his adaptation of Lord of the Rings is bafflingly bad, but what Bakshi’s best and worst have in common is that they all look cool as hell, and none of them could be made today, for both political correctness reasons and creative cowardice on a technical level.

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

Last Saturday night, a 31-year-old computer science graduate—described by his professor as “a very good student”—checked into the Washington Hilton and attempted to assassinate the president of the United States and his cabinet.

Cole Tomas Allen had a job, was a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, and, by his own account, was acting on principle: the conviction that it was his duty to target officials he believed were destroying the country. Which is why the shooting he attempted is notable, not merely for what it was, but for what it represented: the logical end point of an education system that has mistaken zeal for truth.

Allen, after all, is only the latest highly educated person to attempt an act of violence. Think of the physics prodigy who perpetrated the December shooting at Brown University, or Luigi Mangione, the University of Pennsylvania graduate who allegedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. One survey shows that Americans with graduate degrees are about twice as likely to support political violence as those with some college or less. The problem of determining what is true and false, just and unjust, has always plagued mankind. But if even those educated at the most prestigious universities feel sufficient moral certainty to commit murder, we must conclude that the problem has grown so acute that it is rotting the civilizational pillars of our existence.

And so, the question is not only why so many of our countrymen are willing to commit violence. It is why so many of the willing are so highly educated.

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After the key players in the administration were hustled out by their security detail, “a new litmus for status among the gov’t elite,” Blankfein later quipped on X, he turned to the communications official who had proudly told Blankfein earlier in the evening that she was 57th in line for the presidency. “I guess when you’re number 57, you’re just left here to die with me,” he told her.

“I was mostly trying to see what was going on,” Blankfein, in a light blue sweater and jeans, says. He and I are both safely back in New York, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table in Blankfein’s Manhattan spread which he shares with his wife, Laura. I’m sipping an Arnold Palmer-flavored Swoon—Blankfein offered me the run of the fridge, while he drinks “four-hour-old coffee” from a C-SPAN mug. Back to the chaos at the Correspondents’ Dinner: “I saw a guy in a tuxedo holding this Uzi-looking thing and I thought, ‘Where did he keep this before he took it out?’ ”

Wryness and dryness are par for the course for Mr. Blankfein, 71, who ran the behemoth investment bank Goldman Sachs from 2006 to 2018. He steered the firm through the 2008 financial crisis, and a million other smaller storms, which he details in his new memoir Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs. In other words, he knows a thing or two about keeping his head when everyone else is losing theirs. “People joked about it at the firm: ‘Lloyd’s good in a crisis, and if there wasn’t one, he’d cause it.’ ” He is currently the senior chairman of Goldman Sachs, which employs more than 45,000 people and manages $3.61 trillion in assets. Just as distinguishing: He was an early investor, and believer, in The Free Press.

But before he was the chairman and CEO of one of the largest investment banks in the world, before he got sick with cancer and worked through his chemo treatments, before the housing crisis and the dot-com bubble and Y2K—“I sent people around the world to be there when everything broke down. I wanted people on site”—Blankfein was a kid languishing in public housing in East New York. “I had a stressful upbringing,” he says when I ask him where he learned to keep calm. “There was always fighting and I was trying to be the leaven in it.”

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This week, on my pod (subscribe here), I spoke to one of the producers of that show, Sophia Rivka Rossi. “He makes whatever he wants happen,” Rossi, who is undecided on the mayoral race for now, told me. “Every day someone else says to me, ‘I think I’m gonna vote for Spencer.’ ”

On The Hills, which debuted in 2006, Pratt did things like start a rumor that the star of the show, Lauren Conrad, had made a sex tape, which he later denied. “He knew what would be good TV,” Rossi told me. He later said he cultivated his troublemaking persona to boost ratings. But if you watch his campaign ads, you can tell: He still knows how to make TV. In a piece for The Free Press, Liel Leibovitz called his latest viral campaign ad “resonant and raw,” since, “As he’s done for 20 years now, he grabbed hold of the camera, turned it around, and told viewers an inconvenient truth.”

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Fast-forward to a year after our respective births, however, and a discrepancy emerged: I was a 1-year-old baby, but Thriller was a global phenomenon, and its creator both more famous and more ubiquitous than any cultural figure before or since. This was Michael Jackson: the smallest cast member of the Jackson 5ive cartoon series that ran on Saturday mornings. The boyfriend-turned-zombie dancer in a spooky music video that was always popping up around Halloween time. The guy who convinced my entire third-grade class, circa 1989, that grabbing your crotch while letting out a high-pitched squeal was the only way to dance. He was an icon, a superstar, the King of Pop who brought crowds to their feet and women to their knees.

But there was also another Michael Jackson—one often featured on the tabloid covers at the supermarket checkout, alongside stories of alien autopsies, Bigfoot sightings, and the ongoing travails of a creature with pointed ears and luminous eyes known as Bat Boy. And this Michael Jackson was not a gifted pop artist, but a reclusive oddball who slept in a glorified test tube, looked like a ghoul, and once dangled his infant son off a balcony—which, depending upon whom you believed, was one of the less sordid things he ever did to a child. The year I was 12, Jackson settled out of court with the family of Jordan Chandler, a 13-year-old who had accused the musician of sexual abuse. A decade later, Jackson was accused again—and this time officially charged, with multiple counts of child molestation, as well as conspiracy to commit child abduction and extortion.

Jackson was acquitted of every charge at trial, but public opinion was not on his side. Polling at the time revealed that a majority of Americans held unfavorable views of the pop star—although opinions differed drastically depending on whether the respondent was black or white. In the former category, nearly two out of three people believed Jackson was innocent; white people, in the same proportion, believed he was guilty.

The child star, the pop icon, the tabloid freak, the accused sex criminal: How you remember Jackson will depend largely on which of these narratives about his life happened to coincide with your cultural awakening. I was intrigued to learn that my 73-year-old mother remembers Jackson almost exclusively as a preadolescent phenom, but she knows almost nothing about the salacious gossip that dogged him later in life—even though, back in 1993, she would have been standing right there next to me at the supermarket checkout where the tabloids lived. My 30-year-old editor, on the other hand, grew up in a world where it was simply assumed that Jackson was a pedophile; she had no idea that he’d even stood trial, let alone been cleared of wrongdoing.

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It was late in the morning on a cloudy Thursday in southeast Queens, just two days after the casino’s public debut. And the place was already busy. Its roughly 175,000 square feet of gaming excitement somehow feel a good deal smaller than that. The first floor was mostly electric slot machines, virtual roulette tables, bright lights, and big screens entrancing at least a few hundred people. Nobody was talking to each other, but the digital din, the dings and bells and Muzak coming from each machine, was deafening. Many of the patrons were Asian, most of the signs in English and Chinese, a testament to local demographics. The gamblers skewed older but morose young men in baggy clothing milled about among them. If young women were there, I didn’t see them.

These games were Asian-themed in a crude way—cartoon dragons, samurai, vaguely pornographic anime women. Dale and I looked for a way to the real gaming tables, the ones with cards and dice and human dealers, but kept getting lost. We walked outside to a concrete patio where Chinese smokers gazed out on the old Aqueduct Racetrack, where jockeys have vied against each other since the late 19th century, its greenery and classical dimensions easily the prettiest thing about this gruesome would-be adjunct of JFK Airport. The Aqueduct’s last horse race is set for June.

On one side of the patio, there was a massive fake roulette table with giant casino chips for pieces and cornhole boards next to it. It seemed to be a place where parents can park their kids while they hit the slots. Thankfully, there were no children in sight.

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But first: a message from The Free Press’s resident boomer, Joe Nocera.

Is there any generation of Americans—be it Gen X, millennials, or even Gen Z—that isn’t sick of us boomers? I kind of doubt it. Their taxes pay for our Social Security and Medicare—and there is a legitimate question about whether anything will be left for them when they’re ready to retire. More and more of us are going to require expensive medical care as our health deteriorates. We dominate the country’s politics; the Senate is practically a gerontology ward. Our current president is a boomer—as were four of the previous five.

As Jeff Giesea, the entrepreneur—and Gen Xer—writes in our lead essay today, boomers “are wealthier and healthier than any generation before them, deeply embedded in political, economic, and cultural power, and often understandably reluctant to step aside.” I’m not saying the younger generations want us all to die, but if they did, could you blame them?

Sadly (for me, at least), we are all going to die. Giesea calls the next 20 years or so “The Long Boomer Farewell.” And what we’ll be leaving behind once we’re gone, he says, is a mess. Can the younger generation fix what we baby boomers have broken? Yes, argues Giesea, if it doesn’t waste any time. You’ll find out how in his insightful essay. —Joe Nocera

The Girls Aren’t All Right

If you look at our list of contributing writers, you’ll find some unexpected bedfellows. That’s the glory of The Free Press: Nobody who works here thinks quite alike, but one thing unites us, and that’s an allergy to groupthink. With that in mind, it’s our absolute pleasure to welcome Freya India to our ranks.

Earlier this year, in an essay for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel that we knew we had to reprint as soon as we read it, Freya wrote about what she aims to do as a writer:

“I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be auto-completed because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. . . . I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of. What good am I otherwise? What am I otherwise?”

In her first essay for us as a contributing writer, Freya writes about the reception to her debut book, GIRLS®, which dives deep into the misery of Gen Z women, exploring how they’ve been commodified by Instagram, corrupted by pornography, destabilized by decline of religion, and isolated by the internet.

The book is out next week in the United States—and we highly recommend you preorder it!—but it came out a couple of months ago in the UK, and Freya was struck all over again by how her work was interpreted by a corner of the media that insists there’s only one explanation for women’s misery, and it’s this: Dudes suck.

Read on to find out what Freya makes of this, and please join us in welcoming her to The Free Press.

Spencer Pratt, Nalin Haley, and the Age of Political Disruption

Donald Trump’s political rise was built on breaking the rules of the old political establishment—to remarkable effect. If it proved anything, it’s this: Disruption works. The question, as the post-Trump era looms, is what form that disruption will take next.

Today, two stories offering two answers from opposite coasts.

In South Carolina, Nalin Haley, 24-year-old son of former UN ambassador and presidential candidate Nikki Haley, has spent the past year arguing against foreign wars, rejecting free market neoliberalism, and railing against the very establishment he grew up inside. He disagrees with his mother on a lot, and young conservative men love him for it. Isaac Grafstein went to South Carolina to find out why—and what Haley thinks comes next for the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, reality-TV star turned mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt just dropped a campaign ad with nearly 11 million views and counting. He filmed it standing outside incumbent Karen Bass’s mansion, then cut to the trailer where he’s been living since the wildfires burned down his house. The message: Bass doesn’t live in the mess she made. You do. Surprised a darling of the political establishment is losing ground to a former reality-TV villain? You shouldn’t be, says Liel Leibovitz: “The last 20 years of American public life have been one big reality television show.”

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EDITORS’ PICKS

This week, the nation was shaken when 31-year-old Cole Allen attempted to breach the White House Correspondents’ dinner and assassinate the president and his cabinet. In the days since, we’ve been trying to make sense of the incident, and the alarming rise of political violence.

First, as Douglas Murray observed, Allen’s actions didn’t occur in a vacuum. Douglas began the night like everyone else: being harangued by protesters shouting slogans remarkably similar to those later found in the shooter’s manifesto. That overlap, he argues, underscores how disturbingly normalized this kind of discourse has become, and hints at the consequences of letting it fester unchecked.

For all that was grim about the night, it also offered a reminder of what people are capable of when things go sideways. After shots rang out, Suzy Weiss couldn’t help but notice that many of the men in the room activated. Military veterans mapped exits; journalists spoke of “perimeters”; and lobbyists turned into bodyguards. It was a big night for “the best of the masculine traits: calm, humor, dependability, protection, chivalry, and knowing, offhand, an oddly specific level of detail regarding Secret Service procedures.”

And then there’s the great Caitlin Flanagan, announced this week as a Free Press columnist. She wasn’t at the Washington Hilton that night. But when the news came across her phone, she felt nothing. “That’s when I realized that political violence is truly back,” she writes, “that an attempt to assassinate the American president is within the realm not just of possibility but of the unremarkable.”

Jeffrey Epstein’s executive assistant managed his schedule, arranged his travel, and coordinated the young women he brought to his island and ranch. Her name, Lesley Groff, appears in the Department of Justice files over 150,000 times. Yet today, Groff lives in one of Connecticut’s wealthiest towns, hosts game nights, does Pilates, and dines at high-end restaurants. How did she emerge from the scandal unscathed? Our Tanya Lukyanova went to New Canaan to find out.

Two hours after anti-Israel protesters pitched an encampment on Dartmouth’s campus, President Sian Beilock called the police. Eighty-nine people were arrested, and Beilock was the only Ivy League president to avoid a federal civil-rights investigation. Jonas Du sat down with her to ask why she thinks American universities have lost their way, and what Dartmouth is doing to buck the trend.

Even amid a relentless cycle of bad news, moments of extraordinary human achievement break through. On Sunday, Sabastian Sawe of Kenya became the first person ever to run a sanctioned marathon in under two hours. Joe Nocera spoke with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and a record-setting long-distance runner, about the remarkable innovations that made the feat possible.

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

Earlier this year, in an essay for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel that we knew we had to reprint as soon as we read it, Freya wrote about what she aims to do as a writer:

“I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be auto-completed because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. . . . I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of. What good am I otherwise? What am I otherwise?”

In her first essay for us as a contributing writer, Freya writes about the reception to her debut book, GIRLS^®, which dives deep into the misery of Gen Z women, exploring how they’ve been commodified by Instagram, corrupted by pornography, destabilized by the decline of religion, and isolated by the internet.

The book is out next week in the U.S.—and we highly recommend you preorder it!—but it came out a couple months ago in the UK, and Freya was struck all over again by how her work is interpreted by a corner of the media that insists there’s only one explanation for women’s misery, and it’s this: Dudes suck.

Read on to find out what Freya makes of this, and please join us in welcoming her on board. —The Editors

Why are young women so unhappy? Rates of anxiety disorders, depression, and self-harm are soaring; in the U.S., almost one in three teenage girls seriously considered suicide in 2021. Read the mainstream press and you will overwhelmingly find the same answer: teenage boys, misogyny, masculinity, Andrew Tate. For years, blaming men has been the accepted explanation for our misery.

Into this climate landed a viral cover story from the flagship magazine of the British left, The New Statesman, headlined “Meet the Angry Young Women.” Gen Z women in Britain, they found, feel unhappy, hopeless about the future, and hostile toward men. According to new polling, around 72 percent of young men say they have a positive view of women; only half of young women say the same about men. And while just 7 percent of young men have a negative view of women, 21 percent of young women have a negative view of men.

The piece itself was balanced, finally acknowledging that the “femosphere”—left-wing female influencers—also “reinforces this hostility toward men.” But plenty of commentators still read the report as yet more evidence that men are the problem; even an op-ed offering an economic explanation for the angriness of women couldn’t help but conclude: “a woman can choose to subjugate herself to a man, or to the man.”

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On Wednesday, in my home city of London, two men were injured in a knife attack in broad daylight. The video footage is jarring; the fact that it happened at all is much less surprising. It’s the latest attack on British Jews among dozens of others in the past few weeks alone.

Growing up in Britain in the early 2000s, we never thought of our country as a place where this type of violence could happen. When incidents would happen on the continent, we would offer our pity to Europe, all the while thinking of our home as somewhere safer, more accepting—more similar to America than Europe.

But the events of the past few years have shattered that illusion. These are, of course, not novel observations. I’ve made them before, including in these pages. But the incidents have not slowed down—indeed, they’ve only grown worse. As one British rabbi, who was touring Auschwitz with a school group when he found out the news from London, put it yesterday: “There are Jewish communities that have been decimated and don’t exist anymore, and one day, in 80 years’ time, am I or my children going to take our grandchildren down the streets of Golders Green, Hendon, Edgware, Stamford Hill, any Jewish community in the UK, and they’re going to say, ‘Look at that marking on the wall. There was once a Jew here.’ ”

While the Jewish community’s heartbreak is profound, the reaction from those in British society at large has remained the same: total apathy. This indifference feels like it is becoming one of the defining features of life for Jews in the UK in 2026.

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Well, as the Yiddish proverb goes, “Man plans, God laughs.” Because while it’s true that I don’t have to worry about my children being shot at school, I do have to worry about them being attacked by terrorists every time we go to synagogue, or when I drop them off at Hebrew school. Which, okay, is not Annie Hall levels of funny. But you have to admit, that’s a heck of a Jewish joke.

Calm and reassuring are not words any Jew would use to describe life in Britain today. In the past two weeks, two synagogues near me in northwest London have been firebombed. On Monday, the Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green, just 10 minutes up the road, suffered a suspected arson attack. On Wednesday, two Jews were stabbed on Golders Green’s main high street, near the much beloved Kosher Kingdom supermarket that every Jew in London knows.

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Next, on May 17, we’re back at the Comedy Cellar for a Sunday afternoon of stand-up, emceed by Judy Gold. The only thing bigger than the laughs she gets are her glasses. And on May 19, School of War host Aaron MacLean sits down with historian Niall Ferguson for a live conversation at the New York Historical, covering the Middle East, China, military deterrence, the future of American power, and the compatibility of their astrological signs.

To the news.

→ White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Is it even big news anymore when people try to assassinate Donald Trump? It’s a blip. Happens so often. I’ll scrape the back pages of America’s newspapers to find tidbits. Okay, so: It appears that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was derailed after a crazed left-wing gunman allegedly stormed the hotel lobby to try to kill Trump. Shots were fired. Then he was stripped and rolled up in a tinfoil wrap like a little burrito (our copy editor tells me it’s a Mylar blanket). The only times a person gets wrapped in tinfoil are if they try to shoot the president or if they finish a marathon. Quite a delta between those endeavors, but the same outcome. And the dinner was canceled. Nothing to worry about.

When journalists walked out of the ballroom, they were met by normal, run-of-the-mill protesters who carried signs reading: DEATH TO ALL OF THEM (a Wendy Williams reference). And DEATH TO TYRANT (the singular makes it more aggressive, I think). Everything is good. There is no relation between the protester holding a sign that says DEATH TO ALL OF THEM and the gunman inside trying to bring. . . death to all of them. He’s just mentally ill, I’m sure. There is no popular movement encouraging people to slaughter their political enemies en masse.

Photos via Katie Pavlich of what she saw as she left the assassination-attempt dinner. No big deal, purely symbolic, no need for the mainstream media to cover any of this:

When I logged into Bluesky and Threads to check the temperature, some normal-seeming media figures were arguing the shooter himself was an inside job to garner sympathy for old Trumpo. But the dominant energy was bloodlust. Clara Jeffery, the editor in chief of the progressive magazine Mother Jones (I like her a lot), tried to calm down her followers on Bluesky: “People here are being really shitty, including at fellow journalists who’ve been traumatized, and you will regret those posts. Or should. Also this does not help your political cause, whatever that might be.” But blood was what they wanted. Blood had been denied. She had to turn off replies.

Some interesting context from last month is that nearly half of Dems think the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on Trump was faked. A Manhattan Institute poll found that 47 percent of Democrats believe “the July 2024 assassination attempt on Trump was orchestrated by his supporters to increase sympathy for him.” Half! Half of Democrats think Trump supporters organized for someone to shoot at the president’s ear and kill a random father in the stands.

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Today, she pulls back the curtain.

On this week’s episode of Second Thought, Sophia joins Suzy Weiss to unpack the machine behind reality TV, the secret sauce behind Ryan Murphy’s dominance, and what happens when you finally stop ou…

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It’s a humid evening in late March and we are at the kickoff event for the Tri-County Young Republicans, the organization that Nalin, the 24-year-old son of former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, launched in February. Featured guests include gubernatorial candidate Ralph Norman and state senator Wes Climer. Several have driven hours to get here. And Nalin appears to be the main attraction.

“He’s a rising star,” Matthew Carlyon, a 21-year-old campaign staffer for Norman, told me. “I think he’s going to get into politics one day.”

A day earlier, Nalin assured me that wasn’t on his mind: “People who plan that far ahead are kind of psychotic.” But in the past year, while working a finance job outside Charlotte, he has quickly become a poster boy for the young, post-Trump right that believe the system is rigged and the old guard has failed.

In November, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and argued, among other things, that naturalized immigrants should not be able to hold public office and that dual citizenship should be illegal. A little more than a week later on Fox & Friends, he urged Republicans to reject “free market neoliberalism” to win over Gen Z. A recent X post, calling for a shift away from foreign wars to domestic spending, amassed 29,000 likes. (He has over 42,000 followers on the platform.) Even former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino is a fan.

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I’ll go with President Trump’s description of Allen. He’s a whack job. A whack job with an impressive level of intellect culminating in climactic stupidity.

Trump attracts assassins. At his black-tie briefing later last Saturday night, the president seemed to revel in this fact a bit, saying that assassins shoot only at the impactful presidents, Gerald Ford and James Garfield excepted. Then Trump laid some statistics on us about race car drivers having safer jobs than presidents. Exaggerated, but four presidents assassinated out of 45 is actually a pretty high percentage.

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Dan was a longtime friend and mentor, the man I jokingly called my “Jewish dad.” I’d known him since my early 20s, when we met at a political event in Washington. Over three decades of lunches, always with dessert, he coached me through building a business, navigating personal crises, and thinking seriously about the world. A few days before Christmas, we met one last time at his usual table in the back of his usual restaurant. We caught up, joked around, and swapped advice.

“How do I get people to stop nagging me about my health?” he asked.

I didn’t know that would be our last conversation. Or maybe, deep down, I did.

Dan was born in 1944, on the outer edge of the baby boomer generation, part of a cohort now entering its 80s. His death was personal, but it felt epochal. The Long Boomer Farewell, I realized, had begun.

That’s what I’ve come to call it: the roughly 20-year period, from now through the mid-2040s, during which the boomer generation will pass from dominance into history.

Sleepwalk into this era and we’re looking at decades of gerontocratic drift, fiscal implosion, and a younger generation that inherits a country stripped of the investments it needed. Get ahead of it and we have a genuine shot at renewal. Almost no one is treating it as the civilizational reckoning it is.

To understand why this generation’s passage will be different—harder, slower, more disorienting—it helps to remember the last one.

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You might have heard the sneaker company Allbirds is trying exactly that. This once-highly touted company that made shoes out of wool for tech bros was valued at $4 billion soon after it went public in 2021, but the main business lines failed and the assets ended up worth a tiny amount of the peak total.

So Allbirds sold those assets for a pittance, and said it will rebrand as “NewBird AI.” The company also announced it had raised $50 million, supposedly for hardware to train advanced AI models. The stock rose rapidly from $2.49 to a close of $16.99, with the price later falling again, and now trading in the range of $6 to $7.

What is going on? One issue is that some underinformed investors may have been out there, looking to snap up any stock issue that appears related to artificial intelligence, given the current boom. In all likelihood, most of these investors will end up burned, but in the meantime some of them can flip it for higher value, as many did during the recent price run-up.

This part of the story is not new; during the dot-com boom of 1999–2000, we saw some businesses try to rebrand as internet companies. Sooner or later, corporate earnings—or the lack thereof—have a way of imposing reality.

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Here’s a brief synopsis: Bathed in ethereal California light, Pratt, 42, stands outside the mansions of incumbent LA mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember (and mayoral candidate) Nithya Raman. They, he tells viewers, do not have to deal with the consequences of their bad policies. Cue the consequences, flashing across the screen: homeless encampments, buildings on fire, a masked man holding a flare in front of a graffitied wall.

“This is where I live,” Pratt says, as the ad cuts to an Airstream trailer on the scorched lot where his Pacific Palisades property used to be. He’s been living there for most of the time since his house burned down in the 2025 LA wildfires. The response to the fires by Bass’s administration has been widely maligned.

“They let my home burn down,” Pratt says in the ad. “I know what the consequences of failed leadership are. That’s why I’m running for mayor.” The camera pans back to reveal his empty lot surrounded by some trees, the sun in the sky, and the campaign’s slogan: “A New Golden Age for Los Angeles.”

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There was a time when Americans celebrated great industrialists—when Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie were household names spoken with pride, rather than contempt. Today, the conventional wisdom in mainstream media outlets and storied educational institutions is that capitalism is evil—and that violence may even be justified to thwart it.

In our morally inverted world, it’s worth remembering that, for all its imperfections, American capitalism is worthy of celebration. So this week, as part of America at 250—our yearlong celebration of this country’s milestone birthday—we’re celebrating America’s great capitalists, from Ford and Carnegie to Taylor Swift: how they made their fortunes, how they spent them, and the legacies they leave behind.

As we enter the age of artificial intelligence, the great entrepreneurs of our time produce things that live in servers and on the cloud—inventions that may leave little physical trace hundreds of years from now. But, in our first offering, Philip Delves Broughton takes us on a different journey: into the Walmart Supercenters you can shop in, the golden arches you can enjoy a burger under, the factories humming across America. He’s celebrating the titans who changed our physical world: the Builders.

If the Builders mold the physical world, consider the woman whose very presence boosts revenue at every business in every town where she performs—the first major pop star to own all of her own copyrights, and the undisputed ruler of the sonic world: Taylor Swift. “Swift is a titan of industry,” writes Dominic Green, “one of the great American capitalists that Ralph Waldo Emerson called ‘monomaniacs’—the creative spirits whose ‘speculative genius is the madness of few for the gain of the world.’” Read his essay on how Swift made it in the business of sound, right before the hostile takeover by the business of images.

After making all their money, America’s great capitalists are faced with the question of how to spend it—and how much of it to give away. That can be a trickier dilemma than you might think. Mark Gimein traces the arc of American philanthropy from Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 “Gospel of Wealth” to the Giving Pledge, launched in 2010 by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates, and asks why today’s billionaires are walking away from the tradition that made their predecessors immortal.

—The Editors