If Kendi transformed “racial research” at all, then he transformed it from an already troubled enterprise into a complete dumpster fire. After a wave of layoffs in 2023, ex-employees began complaining of a “workplace culture that included fear of retaliation and discrimination.” The ultimate indictment of the center, however, was its lack of output. Given three years, several dozen staff members, and the budget of a midsize Hollywood action film, Kendi’s research center managed to produce just two research papers before collapsing under the weight of its own pointlessness.

One could have predicted this outcome based upon the dubious quality of Kendi’s previous work—in particular his best-selling 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist. In that book, Kendi argued that there is no such thing as a race-neutral public policy. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity,” he proclaimed. Even a policy as mundane as the capital gains tax, Kendi argued, must be either racist or anti-racist. The book was a bestseller.

Kendi’s new book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, is equally nuanced. But without the atmosphere of 2020’s racial reckoning to buoy the book, it appears to be falling flat. Even the left-leaning Guardian, which reviewed his last book positively, described Chain of Ideas as “Neither artful in prose nor powerful in statement.”

Ostensibly, Chain of Ideas takes aim at the “Great Replacement Theory” (GRT from here on out)—the far-right conspiracy theory that powerful (and often Jewish) elites are engineering mass immigration in order to replace white majorities with left-wing voters of color. This “theory,” if it even merits the word, can be traced back to a 2011 book by the French novelist Renaud Camus called Le Grand Remplacement; his way of framing mass migration—as a “replacement” of one people by another, or even “genocide by substitution”—has grown in popularity on the political right in the years since.

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At a big meeting at the White House on March 6, which included athletic directors, conference commissioners, and several famous ex-football coaches (Nick Saban and Urban Meyer among them), President Donald Trump decried the fact that a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling in 2021 made it possible, for the first time ever, for college athletes to be paid for their “name, image, and likeness.” Some star athletes, like Texas Tech’s new quarterback Brendan Sorsby, are now getting millions of dollars. (Sorsby has a $5 million deal.) “A lot of really bad things are happening,” Trump said, claiming that rising athletic costs were going to put some schools into bankruptcy if something wasn’t done. “Everybody was happy” with the old system, he added, “and now you’ve got yourself a mess.”

A few days later, at a Senate roundtable to discuss the same issue, Tommy Tuberville, the former head football coach at Auburn University—and now an Alabama senator—described the current state of affairs as a “disaster”: “Are we gonna be an educational institution or are we gonna be pro sports?”

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Not long after he arrived on the Stanford University campus in 2022 as a 17-year-old freshman, Theo Baker received a tip about the school’s president, the neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker, the son of two prominent Washington, D.C., journalists, had joined the staff of The Stanford Daily and was looking for a story he could dig into. And here it was: On a website called PubPeer, a forum for discussing scientific papers, critics were claiming that papers coming out of Tessier-Lavigne’s lab contained manipulated data. And, according to posts on the site, it had been going on for years.

Tessier-Lavigne has focused much of his career on searching for the key that might unlock Alzheimer’s, a disease that has long frustrated scientists. Prior to becoming a university president—he headed The Rockefeller University before taking the Stanford post in 2016—Tessier-Lavigne oversaw Genentech’s huge 1,400-person laboratory. His private sector work had made him wealthy, and, in the world of Alzheimer’s science, famous. He had co-authored several papers that were considered pathbreaking, including a 2009 paper published while he was at Genentech. The paper had four authors, but as the lab leader, Tessier-Lavigne was listed as the “principal investigator,” or PI. Calling the research a “significant breakthrough,” he boasted that it could “turn our understanding of Alzheimer’s upside down.”

Over the next decade-plus, that paper, which had been published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, was cited 816 times by other researchers. A Duke University neurologist excitedly told Nature, “We have yet to get a disease-modifying drug that works. So we’re missing something, and maybe this is one of the missing pieces.” Genentech devoted substantial resources to “develop both antibodies and small molecules that may attack Alzheimer’s” based on the Tessier-Lavigne findings.

Except that, as Baker was discovering, the supposed breakthrough was nothing of the sort. Scientists both inside and outside the company had difficulty replicating one key element of the paper. At least one top Genentech executive believed the problem was serious enough that Tessier-Lavigne should retract the paper, according to a later investigation by Genentech. By 2012, a year after Tessier-Lavigne left the company, Genentech quietly abandoned its research effort based on the 2009 paper.

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But then my mind flicks to darker memories: the sadistic crackdowns and the long history of crushed uprisings. I watch Iran strike its Gulf neighbors. Another proverb surfaces: Mar-e zakhmi khatarnak-tar ast—“A wounded snake is more dangerous.”

Twenty years ago, I lived in the foreigners section of the student dormitories (Kuye Daneshgah) of Tehran University, a dense complex of concrete blocks just off Enghelab Street where arrivals from across Iran crowded into functional rooms for the duration of their studies. Like almost everywhere in the country, the regime’s violence had struck these buildings. Only a few years earlier, security forces and Basij militia had stormed them during the 1999 student protests, beating them in the corridors and throwing some off balconies. As an older student told me matter-of-factly one day: Inja bud. It was here.

Two decades on, the violence has never really stopped. In January, the regime murdered around 30,000 of its own people; weeks later, the United States and Israel began pounding its facilities, trying, finally, to end it for good. For now, Iranians can only wait. Many hope the war will not last, and that it might herald the birth of something better. In the meantime, explosions are constant. Tehran’s night skies flare with ordnance as cell phones light up with rumor. So far the strikes have largely hit regime facilities, although 153 people, including children, were killed when a reported U.S. strike hit a school in southern Iran.

As the war rolls on, I try to speak to the people who matter most in all this: Iranians. These days, checking in on those I care about is a valuable exercise in more ways than one. Only by understanding what is happening inside the country, and in the minds of its people, can we begin to judge whether this war—and the colossal gamble it represents—has any chance of succeeding.

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Longtime readers of The Free Press and “Honestly” listeners will know the name of its author, Jonathan Rosen, and, we hope, will have read his astonishing book, “The Best Minds.”

It’s days like today that we wish we had a printing press, given the importance and length of this particular piece. But we did the next best thing: Scroll down to find the link for a made-to-be-printed PDF version of this essay.

— Bari, Adam, and Oliver

Thirty-seven years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, sentenced Salman Rushdie to death on Valentine’s Day for writing a novel.

It is hard to write that sentence without feeling it is a parody of the opening line of Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” Nevertheless, that is what happened. And as Rushdie told Ezra Klein in spring of 2024, “We live in Kafka’s world.”

I remember reading about the fatwa—a word everyone suddenly knew—in the newspaper at the time. I had recently dropped out of graduate school and was trying to become a writer myself, and it seemed absurd that a best-selling novelist born in India, living in London, and famous around the world might be murdered because the octogenarian ruler of an Islamist theocracy thousands of miles away had called for his death, like the Red Queen shouting “Off with their heads!” in Alice in Wonderland.

The ayatollah died four months later, but it soon became apparent that Rushdie’s 1988 novel was no match for a few sentences read over the radio calling on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be” to kill the author of The Satanic Verses and anyone else who helped bring his blasphemous book into the world.

Ever since, the fatwa has hovered over the West it was designed to destroy, waxing and waning like a moon. Sometimes it is a pale crescent, barely there; sometimes, as now, a round blood moon full of portent. But a portent of what?

The question remains urgent even after the joint American and Israeli strikes on the early morning of February 28 marked a new phase in the long war waged by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which came into the world chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” I have been thinking a great deal about the fatwa now that the murderous regime the ayatollah founded in 1979 is teetering on the bloody brink. Because it may yet be that of all the proxies nurtured over the years by the Islamic Republic for its apocalyptic showdown with the Jewish state and the West, and after all the billions spent on Islamist militias, ballistic missiles, and global terrorism— plus half a trillion dollars on its nuclear weapons program in pursuit of its endlessly repeated aim of “wiping Israel off the map”—it is a few sentences read aloud on Radio Tehran, mere breath, that will remain its most successful method of exporting the Islamist revolution, even after the murderous regime it created goes down.

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Unlike World War I, which began in 1914 when all the European empires more or less simultaneously activated their …

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When I recently asked the Airbnb co-founder if he ever expected to be living and working in the capital, he told me in so many words: No.

The exact words were: “You could have made me a bet a long time ago that I’d end up here—and won a lot of money.”

We spoke over FaceTime, him from his office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just off Pennsylvania Avenue—where, in the fall of last year, he set up the National Design Studio (NDS), per one of President Donald Trump’s many executive orders. Under his leadership, the NDS has since made waves by overhauling government websites about everything from the food pyramid (“We are ending the war on protein,” one section of the landing page reads) to the federal retirement system. Gebbia has spearheaded new platforms, too, like TrumpRx, where Americans can download coupons for prescription drugs, or Tech Force, which the administration set up to recruit software engineers to “tackle the most complex and large-scale civic and defense challenges of our era.”

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But this isn’t true. And the confusion matters, because if you misread what this war is actually about, you will misread everything that follows.

This is not a war about Israel. This is not a war for Israel’s sake. Israel is a beneficiary, a capable and willing local partner, but it is not the reason America is in this fight. America is playing a much bigger game, about more than what happens in the Middle East. The subtext, that Israel exercises outsize influence or “drags Americans into wars they don’t want,” borders on the conspiratorial.

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Federal agents were going to be in my driveway at 9 a.m. sharp on the morning of Thursday, November 19, 2020, and I was told not to be late.

Home was Cincinnati, but I would be starting the day in Cleveland, four hours away. My wife, Sarah, was finishing her medical residency at the Cleveland Clinic, and we were frequently back and forth between the two cities.

In order to not cut it close, I set my alarm clock for 3:30 a.m.

But setting my alarm didn’t matter. I never fell asleep. How could I? I had no idea what the feds were saying I had done—or what would happen next.

A week earlier, a member of the Cincinnati City Council had been indicted on charges of accepting cash bribes from undercover FBI agents in exchange for support of a project to redevelop a large blighted downtown building on Elm Street. I was also on the city council, and was a big supporter of the Elm Street project. And in 2018 and 2019, I had been in frequent contact with those same undercover agents, who were posing as out-of-town investors.

During that time, they had made legal contributions to my political action committee—donations that any citizen could look up. They had proposed the donations, not me, and not a cent had ever gone into my own pocket. I couldn’t imagine that their political donations could be construed as a bribe. The redevelopment that they were pretending to be involved with was one I had supported since before I had met them and was clearly in the public interest.

What was I missing?

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Davidson, 54, is afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological condition whose symptoms cause involuntary tics, including coprolalia—or, to the layperson, shouting swear words. A film based on Davidson’s life, rather providentially titled I Swear, was up for six BAFTAs that night; the audience had been alerted that someone with Tourette’s was in the building, and BAFTAs host Alan Cumming acknowledged the outburst with an apology from the stage. But Davidson’s involuntary shout was picked up by the cameras, as were Lindo and Jordan flinching a bit in response, fueling a controversy that has continued to escalate in the days since.

Within 24 hours of the incident, two distinct teams had emerged: Anti-Racists on one side, Anti-Ableists on the other, locked in battle over who had been the victim of the greater offense.

For anyone who lived through the era that my friend and podcast co-host Phoebe Maltz Bovy refers to as the Long 2010s, the rhetoric coming out of the Team Anti-Racist camp will be the more familiar of the two. Woke may be in cultural decline, but its die-hard adherents still exist in alarmingly large numbers, and they’re starving. Davidson looked like so much fresh meat.

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He’s right to worry. In addition to generally neglecting his education, his mother insists that 13-year-old Block revert to crawling on all fours instead of walking upright, saying that this will restart his developmental process and improve his atrocious handwriting. “Mom doesn’t let me stand the rest of the day, and when I wake in the morning she’s upset to find me walking down from my bedroom,” Block writes. He crawls for the next several months, to the point that he gets rug burns on his knees and has body aches so painful it’s difficult to sleep. When he repeatedly suggests returning to school, his mother implies this would leave her alone and miserable, her eyes sometimes filling with tears at the thought.

This is not the first memoir that lays bare a dysfunctional family’s homeschooling journey. Block’s memoir joins Tara Westover’s Educated, which made a splash eight years ago. Westover, who grew up in rural Idaho with devout parents who didn’t trust the government, turned 18 having gleaned all the math she could from a single battered textbook and never having heard of the Holocaust. Dark stories like these confirm the popular narrative: that homeschooled kids are isolated losers from strange, cultish families, that they’re undereducated and unsocialized, and that homeschooling is general malpractice on the part of the parents.

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His latest book, “If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil,” hits shelves next week. Drawn from a weekend-long lecture Prager delivered to 74 teenagers in 1992, it is a full-throated defense of objective, biblical morality at a time, he says, when more people dispute its existence than ever before. Though rooted in an earlier moment, the book holds new weight: In 2024, Prager suffered a catastrophic fall that paralyzed him from the waist down.

“A certain percentage of this book,” he reveals in the introduction, “was written by dictation and editing from my hospital bed. Were it not for Joel Alperson, who also organized and recorded the entire weekend, the book would not have been finished. We completed the book together. It is a testament to how important we both consider this work.”

Next week, Abigail Shrier will interview Prager from his hospital room, so stay tuned for their full conversation. And below, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from his book, answering a question that many of us ask every day: In a world where profoundly evil things happen, how do we raise good people? —Jillian Lederman

Ever since I was very young, I have been preoccupied with one issue: Why do people hurt other people? Why do people do evil?

I was born in 1948, only three years after the Holocaust. I’m a third-generation American. Yet, when I was a kid, from the earliest time I could think, the Holocaust consumed me. When I was about 10, I watched a program on television, and I saw an image of Adolf Hitler. I asked my father, “Who is that man?” He said, “He was Hitler, and he killed six million Jews.”

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If Sir Keir Starmer is driven from 10 Downing Street by (among other things) the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, it will bring the total number of prime ministers Britain has had in the past 10 years to seven (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Starmer).

That is certainly reminiscent of Italian politics in the second half of the 20th century. The Italians had seven prime ministers in 10 years not once but twice: in the 1950s and the 1990s. (I won’t list them all; life’s too short. The only name you’d recognize would be Silvio Berlusconi.) But the resemblance is superficial. British politics is much funnier than Italian politics has ever been. It is also much more British to behave this way than most Americans realize.

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I have reported on the atrocities committed against Christian communities by Islamists in Nigeria. I’ve also spoken to Nigerians who are on the ground. I’ve reviewed photographs of butchered children and heard eyewitness testimonies that are not easily forgotten. So I was curious to know how her husband’s government views the violence.

In early October 2025, President Bola Tinubu told an audience in Imo State, which is majority Christian, that there is no religious persecution in his country. To say otherwise, he said, “is a lie from the pit of hell.” I asked his wife if that is still his position, and she replied: “To an extent.”

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All of this happened less than two months after Australia enacted the world’s first nationwide age limit, which requires users to be 16 for opening or maintaining social-media accounts, and which puts the responsibility for enforcing the age limit on the platforms themselves.

The tide is turning, but I have been shocked by how quickly it is happening. Social media has been dominating kids’ attention for decades. Now, in the span of just a few weeks, the landscape has been transformed. What happened?

The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker can help explain it. His most recent book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, explores the massive social change that can occur when widespread private knowledge suddenly becomes public knowledge. For example: Many people may privately know that a dictator is brutal, or that an ideology is bankrupt, yet nothing changes for many years until something happens that lets everyone know that everyone else knows it too, and that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows. Once that threshold is crossed, new forms of coordination become possible. Social movements ignite. Regimes and walls fall. Norms can change almost overnight.

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While they are technically public, in practice, these videos are very difficult to access. There is no master index listing all the files in one place, no way to browse the archive, and no ability to search by file type. That’s why, unlike the emails in this release, the videos have not been pored over and shared widely. The DOJ does provide file lists for each data set, but it disables automated crawling or link extraction, leaving the public with two options: Download hundreds of gigabytes of material, or click through hundreds of web pages, one by one.

I did both.

The material released was divided into 12 batches, or “data sets.” Roughly 400 videos live in a folder called Data Set 8, which contains prison closed-circuit television footage, including hallway cameras and angles from inside Epstein’s cell. But the vast majority of the videos—and by far the most revealing ones—are in Data Set 10. These are videos seized from Epstein’s devices: footage he recorded himself, received from others, or downloaded from the internet.

Individually, most of these videos tell us little we didn’t already know; but taken together, they paint the most vivid picture yet of Epstein’s dark world: his lavish lifestyle and twisted worldview, his mannerisms and quirks, his sense of humor—and sense of impunity. The videos are heavily redacted, to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims. In some clips, these redactions mask explicit content. In others, they lend an air of criminality to otherwise innocuous-seeming footage.

It is because of that impression left by the videos, as well as the difficulty of accessing the files, that we’ve decided to publish all 14 hours of the footage contained in Data Set 10. We’ve excluded only obvious duplicates, audio-only files, and fully redacted videos that contain neither sound nor image. You can watch them yourself, although viewer discretion is advised. The footage contains clips with toddlers, a lot of (redacted) porn, eerie footage from Epstein’s private islands, and scenes from inside his office, where young women dance for him with a paternity test visible on the corner of the desk. There’s also a nearly two-hour interview conducted by Steve Bannon.

If you’d rather not watch for yourself, here’s what stood out to me.

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These incidents, and many more, were reported in a pathbreaking story, “Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex,” by Katie Herzog, published in July 2021 in The Free Press, or Common Sense as it was then named. It was our first story about a gender mania that was sweeping the country and undermining institutions, from education, to government, to the media, to—most shockingly—medicine itself.

This ideology had come on so quickly, and was enforced by activists so fiercely, that using the wrong pronoun could and did put one’s job in jeopardy. People were told that biological sex was a fiction. Many, depending on their profession, were forced to say they believed this. Remember the attestation that “trans women are women”?

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The man who told me this has just left Iran. I have known him for two years, but for his own and his family’s safety he can’t be identified, so I am calling him Ali. He and his wife are in a neighboring country for now, where they fled last week, after the protests in Iran were crushed by Ali Khameini’s regime in a violent crackdown that has taken at least 6,000 lives—a number that after all the injured and missing are accounted for could climb to over 20,000. Both are young professionals who intend to return home to Iran, but they need the internet, still cut off in Iran, to do their jobs. And they need to breathe.

Ali first joined the protests on January 8. By then, they had grown to a million people. He and his wife, whom I’ll call Roya, live in one of Iran’s bigger cities, and were not activists or dissidents. “I had never been to a protest before,” Ali told me. But he felt a responsibility to take a stand. And, for the first time in Ali’s life, the prospects for a change in the regime appeared hopeful.

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New York attorney general Letitia James is among the most gung ho: telling hospitals that they must provide radical treatments to comply with state law; leading a multistate lawsuit against federal restrictions; even creating a path for out-of-state minors to come to New York to access the drugs and surgery required to transition.

It’s been hard for Glenna Goldis to watch.

Until last week, Goldis was an attorney in James’s bureau for consumer fraud and protection. As a lesbian who worked on progressive causes, she has always passionately believed in protecting gender nonconforming children. And so, during her four years working for James, she tried to sound the alarm about a practice she believes is a danger to them.

In response, she received multiple warnings to stop writing and speaking critically of pediatric gender medicine—until, on January 22, she was unceremoniously fired.

When we reached out to Goldis’s former employer about her claims, they issued a statement:

The Office of the Attorney General has rules and protocols for employees who engage in activities that can impact the work, operations, or integrity of the office. This employee’s flagrant and repeated disregard of these rules and protocols disrupts and undermines our efforts to protect the rights of all New Yorkers.

Scroll down to read Goldis’s side of the story.

—The Editors

On January 15, New York attorney general Letitia James—who was, at the time, my boss—accused me of engaging in “disruptive public speech.”

What had I done to deserve this charge? I had repeatedly spoken and written about my concerns regarding pediatric gender medicine—that is, the practice of blocking children’s puberty, administering cross-sex hormones to teens, and subjecting them to breast and genital surgery.

As a lesbian, I care passionately about the safety of gender nonconforming youth. I am also experienced in identifying consumer fraud, and I am troubled by how vulnerable patients in psychological distress are being misled.

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Marsilla had just learned that her 26-year-old son, Kiano Vafaeian, was approved for “medical assistance in dying” (MAID), Canada’s government-run assisted-suicide regime. He was blind, struggling with complications from type 1 diabetes, and living in public housing in Toronto. He also suffered from depression.

Vafaeian was not terminally ill—and did not need to be to end his own life. In Canada, MAID patients must show only that they have a condition that is “intolerable” and cannot “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.” These people often feel beset by enduring illness, unresolved social hardship, and other afflictions, all of which blur the line between medical suffering and the hardships of daily life itself.

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