It began Sunday night, with the president of the United States calling Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” in a long rant on Truth Social. (The Pontiff had criticized Donald Trump’s threat that, unless Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz, “a whole civilization will die.”) The Pope was not cowed; on Monday, he said he will “continue to speak out loudly against war” and that he has “no fear” of the administration.

Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance—who has a book coming out in June about his conversion to Catholicism—headed over to Fox News to say that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on with the Catholic Church.” He later said that, when it comes to the Iran war, the Pope should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

If you’re both a faithful Catholic and a patriotic American, how should you feel about these competing loyalties? I needed someone smart to help me make sense of it, so I asked professor Luke Burgis if he was free for two drinks.

Luke is the founder and director of the Cluny Institute, a fascinating project within The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Its aim is to “invest in the human person,” at a time when all the things that make us uniquely human are being eroded by technology. Last month, he was invited by Anthropic to be one of 15 Christian leaders to attend a summit to help make its AI chatbot Claude more moral. He declined on principle.

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Although he has lived in Ithaca, his wife’s hometown, for about 10 years, Magill has been everywhere. He was born in Canada and began trucking as a teenager, following in his dad’s footsteps. He spent nearly three decades driving all around North America, as well as Australia and New Zealand, hauling just about everything you can imagine: logs, produce, waste-oil sludge. Magill, who’s 47, tells me he lost his last trucking job two-and-a-half years ago. He still has his license, but he’s spent the last few years working construction; he hasn’t found a trucking company that’ll pay him enough to deal with the bullshit.

“I feel very strongly that the industry is being fucked by a number of forces and choices and policy decisions that didn’t need to be made,” Magill tells me.

This is the subject of his new book, End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, which was published a few weeks ago. In it, Magill describes how truckers—the most common occupation for young men without a college degree—are forced to contend with, among other things, shrinking wages, competition from exploited migrants, the threat of automated vehicles, and mass surveillance through driver-facing cameras and electronic logging devices, or ELDs, which monitor how long a trucker has been driving.

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“It started with boxing, but now they’re getting everything,” Austin says of the Saudis. “Golf, tennis. They’re trying for the NBA. There’s a lot of reasons the NBA doesn’t want to sign with them.” But she only gave me one.

“They say it’s because of Jamal Khashoggi,” says Austin, referring to the journalist who was murdered and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. She’s not buying it. “I don’t think the NBA gives a shit about him, if I’m being honest. They don’t care about human rights violations.”

Austin speaks bluntly, but acts carefully. As well she should, having endured her fair share of brutal criticism, from both the left and the far right, for her pro-Israel commentary and her unwitting participation in the “Epstein binders” fiasco at the White House (more on both in a moment). As we settle into an empty corner of the restaurant, she orders some nonalcoholic elderflower concoction, pushing back her long blonde hair. I order a beer.

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If you’re under 30 years old, you undoubtedly know the real reason I was so eager to talk to her. Before she was the beautiful tech CEO who has been written up in Bloomberg, she was Teddy Duncan, the main character of the Disney Channel sitcom Good Luck Charlie. In my youth, I lived for that show.

Mendler played a Goody Two-shoes who got upset when she got her first bad grade—a B. Like me, she tried a rebellious phase. And also like me, her parents reacted with laughter rather than horror.

I was hardly the only member of Gen Z for whom Good Luck Charlie is an iconic memory. When I announced in Slack here at The Free Press that I was interviewing her, those of us under 30 (a sizable portion of the place) were starstruck. Friends outside work who had zero interest in my interviews with Bill Maher or Larry Summers suddenly had newfound respect for my journalistic career.

But here was my question: How in the world did she go from being a Disney star to a space CEO? That’s what I wanted to learn.

“I actually don’t think that I’m very smart, and probably people that know me would think the same thing,” the 33-year-old Mendler told me within two minutes of our meeting. Rather, she attributes whatever success she’s had to one thing: determination. “If I want to do it, I will find a way to make myself do it.”

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But the problem wasn’t hypothetical for long.

According to recent reports, AI is already replacing thousands of workers every month, and things could get much worse, with AI CEOs like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei predicting that unemployment could spike to 10 to 20 percent within the next five years. This week, polling showed that a third of voters think neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are good at “dealing with artificial intelligence”—and, presumably, the myriad threats it poses to the good life.

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When Howard shuffles into the café down the street from his apartment in London, all leonine beard and bedraggled mane, our server greets him as a regular. She looks at his bruised face and then at my hand—and asks me if I did it.

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On Thursday morning, Bob Kerrey—the 82-year-old former Nebraska senator, then governor, then Democratic presidential candidate—told me exactly what it’s been like, at least for him. Kerrey’s name popped up in the Epstein files because in 2013, he did indeed have a meeting with the pedophile, as well as a few email exchanges in which they discussed further meetings. (He told me he doesn’t recall whether he attended a second meeting.) Beyond that narrow time frame, the two men never interacted.

But because of that meeting—and the ruckus it caused—last Friday Kerrey resigned as chairman of a Nebraska-based clean energy company called Monolith. The press, of course, was all over the story, just like it was all over the Casey Wasserman story, and the J.K. Rowling story, and the many others whose glancing appearance in the Epstein files made them, you know, newsworthy.

“Let me read you this text I got yesterday from The New York Times,” Kerrey said. “Hi, Bob,” the text began. “This is Sonia Rao. Could I get you on the phone for just two minutes, just to give you a chance to defend yourself? I’m writing an article that’s running in the Times today. I would like this article to be fair and not one-sided. Otherwise, we’d have to write it without comment from you, unless you’d like to give a statement.”

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It’s past 4 p.m., and she’s been saving her caffeine hit for my visit.

We’re meeting at her apartment on the Upper West Side—a gorgeous condo with high ceilings and stunning views. Her cream-colored cockapoo puppy, Chester, joins us with an agenda of his own: gnawing at his pink toy rabbit.

In recent years, Komisar has become a social media superstar—with over 300,000 followers on Instagram, she describes herself as an “author helping parents to live their best lives and raise healthier children.” She talks a lot about how so many modern mothers do not securely attach to their babies, and is best known for her zingers—parents today are “pussies,” day cares are “warehouses for children,” sleep training is “neurologically damaging.”

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Instead, I’m visiting the 94-year-old psychiatrist at his apartment in Baltimore where he’s lived since 2022, after his wife of 62 years died and he sold the family home.

We sat at his dining table, an elegant room full of books and family photographs. The wooden chairs, he said, are better for his back than the couch.

It’s not my first time meeting McHugh. He and I became fast friends in 2018 when I was starting out in journalism as a reporter for National Review. Back then, he was one of the few leaders in psychiatry speaking both skeptically and publicly about “gender-affirming care.” He told me then that lawsuits would be what finally brought down the transitioning of minors. And indeed, just last week, The Free Press reported on the first detransitioner in the United States to win a malpractice suit.

As early as in the ’70s, McHugh has been warning that hormones and surgery are not safe and effective treatments for gender dysphoria (or gender-identity disorder, as it was then known) for patients of any age. As head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in 1979 he shut down sex-change surgeries after follow-up studies showed they weren’t improving patients’ mental health outcomes.

“I didn’t think it was such a big deal,” he said, noting that the idea of medical transition as a right—as opposed to a radical, and at best experimental, intervention—came only later.

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“I like it,” he replied. “I like the defiance of it.”

In case you missed it—and I hope you didn’t—TV viewers heard Fox utter those memorable words a week and a half ago, during the first episode of season three of the Apple TV show Shrinking.

One of the show’s main characters, Paul, played by Harrison Ford, is a curmudgeonly psychologist who has Parkinson’s. As season 3 begins, he has clearly deteriorated: His hands shake uncontrollably, and he has trouble doing simple tasks like brushing his teeth. In the waiting room of his neurologist’s office, he meets Gerry, played by Fox, whose condition is far worse than Paul’s. But when Paul tells Gerry he feels stupid complaining about his problems to someone whose symptoms are so much worse, Gerry reassures him. “We’re all on the same shitty train to Sucksville,” he says.

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“We call it the ‘Milking Merry-Go-Round,’ ” says Ron Kreider, 67, who runs the farm with his two daughters. I’m seated behind RFK Jr. as Ron explains to him that Kreider Farms owns 4,000 acres in three counties. It’s about a 45-minute drive from Harrisburg, and it is just north of Lancaster, effectively the Amish capital of the world.

The two men couldn’t look more different. RFK Jr. is wearing a black suit and black shoes, and a baby-blue dress shirt with a black silk tie that has a little red snake peeking out of the top left corner (Gucci, limited edition). Kreider is wearing a dark khaki jacket, navy-blue jeans, and leather boots. But they are in full agreement when it comes to the importance of dairy.

In addition to being the largest producer of eggs in Pennsylvania, Kreider’s buttermilk, chocolate milk, pumpkin pie milk, and two dozen ice cream flavors are sold across supermarkets in the mid-Atlantic. Before we hop on the bus, one of his daughters shares that she drinks two glasses of milk a day. “We’re happy to have you on our side,” Kreider says to RFK Jr. as they discuss the new food pyramid.

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“Then I hear, ‘What the hell!’” McDowell said over lunch last week. “I realized it was Don.”

When he’s not traveling the world chasing deer or bears or ducks or turkeys—“Doin’ a brown bear in Alaska with a bow in the spring”—McDowell is working at his day job as a prominent Republican lobbyist. When he first started his firm, Checkmate Government Relations, more than two years ago, it was headquartered in his home state of North Carolina. After President Donald Trump won reelection in 2024, though, he opened an office in Washington, D.C. The money followed. It helps to be Don Jr.’s hunting buddy.

Just since July, Checkmate has reeled in more than $21 million helping corporations like Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Juul Labs, and Hanes navigate the shifting tides in Trump’s D.C. federal disclosures show. That’s in addition to the firm’s lucrative work for governments and companies overseas, including Canada, Panama, and even a media group in Turkey aligned with the Libyan government, according to other disclosures on file with the Department of Justice. Those foreign contracts can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars each month.

McDowell is the guy who helped persuade Trump to pardon Changpeng Zhao—the infamous CZ—the co-founder of crypto exchange Binance, which had helped the Trump family score a $2 billion crypto deal last year. CZ had been convicted of money laundering. And McDowell successfully lobbied the Trump administration to federally recognize his client, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina—something the tribe had sought for 137 years and which will give it rights to self-governance and federal benefits. The Lumbee Fairness Act was cleverly tucked into the $900 billion military spending bill that passed in December. “That will be the biggest success of my career,” McDowell said.

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Well, yes, I suppose. In a sense. Two decades before the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling that college football players could receive money for endorsements and the like, Shapiro, then in his 30s, was paying University of Miami football players, under the table, to play football. And not only that: He was throwing parties for them at his lavish home in Miami. He was picking up the tab at strip clubs. He was taking them out on his yacht. He was providing them with women. Anything they needed, Shapiro took care of. “I spent millions on the team back then.”

Shapiro, who’d made millions through a business that distributed groceries, loved the team. And he hated the iron rule of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which back then held that, while coaches and administrators could get rich from college sports, any player who took money to play their sport would fry in hell. Or at least be banned from college sports if they were caught.

Shapiro made a mockery of these rules, and for a long time, he did not get caught.

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“Here, I want to show you some things,” he said as he ushered me into his library. There I found the relics from his extraordinary life: African masks, various pistols and edged weapons, the helmets he wore while fighting for Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars, and most of the Loeb Classical Library, the Harvard University Press series that contains the great Greek and Roman masters from Cicero to Aristotle. “I bring one or two of these on flights for reading,” he said.

At 83 years old, Luttwak remains a dynamo. He still writes columns and does research projects for the Pentagon and the Israel Defense Forces. He is fluent in English, Spanish, Italian, French, and German. He speaks conversational Japanese and reads ancient Greek and Latin. And for a few weeks each year, he visits his Bolivian cattle ranch in the Amazon.

“In the evening, after drinking from the river, the cows form a circle and their calves are in the center,” he told me. “And then the bulls gather around the cows.” That is how they protect themselves from predators like jaguars, pumas, and Amazonian wolves.

Over Campari and soda, Luttwak held court on everything from the wonders of bovine digestion (their stomachs and intestines turn grass into bone, milk, hoof, and meat) to the loss of Europe’s culture of military heroism (Finland and Switzerland, he said, have the only armies in Europe that know how to fight). Luttwak is known for his unsentimental assessments of geopolitics. While most foreign policy mandarins in Washington bemoaned the humanitarian cost of the Syrian civil war, Luttwak wrote in The New York Times about the virtues of letting both sides kill each other.

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“People come up with so much shit now that I assumed it was false,” Lopes Lara told me as she sipped sauvignon blanc in a wine bar in the West Village. “I’m a big Taylor fan, so any headline with my name and Taylor’s is like the craziest thing I’ve seen in my life.”

It was 5:30 p.m., an early hour to end the workday—except that Lopes Lara was planning to return to work after our meeting and not finish until 10, her usual schedule. That Lopes Lara would, at age 29, be in the exalted company of Taylor Swift was not exactly something that she had predicted. But as I listened to her explain her childhood, her current success made perfect sense. As a young girl in Brazil, she placed next to her bed a list of some of the people she hoped to emulate, including Winston Churchill, Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf, and Alexander the Great. “Since I was very little,” Lopes Lara said, “I was weirdly obsessive and ambitious.”

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Now I’m being ushered into the guest seat in Maher’s studio. The room is still pungent from the joint he smoked during the last recording. “There’s just nothing you can do that’s more fun than getting high with me,” he tells me. I believe him. But because of the weed, he doesn’t want one drink—let alone two.

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The former congressman had “appearances he was under contract for” and there had been a “major delay,” so everything had to be “pushed back.” Or in my case, pushed forward. All of this is to say that less than two months after being granted clemency by Donald Trump and being released from prison, the sixth member of Congress ever to be expelled from that august body is a very busy man. Especially today, on the eve of his inaugural “Santos Claus” Christmas party.

“The most competitive cutthroat event of D.C. for some reason,” Santos tells me as we ordered our drinks—me a gin and tonic, him a martini—all under the watchful eye of his assistant Debbie, who sat silently at the table sipping, sadly, on tap water.

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But this week, a viral essay suggested that the end of a marriage is anything but a catastrophe. Written by Cathi Hanauer, a 63-year-old novelist, essayist, and mother of two adult children who recently separated from her husband of 30 years, it argued that what we think of as a failure is more like the final act of a perfectly great love story—just one in which the happily ever after is lived apart, instead of together.

“We could’ve tried to put Band-Aids on our issues until they healed, or didn’t-heal-but-whatever,” she wrote. “Instead, we made an increasingly common choice: We hugged, apologized for our shortcomings, and freed each other.”

It was a provocative idea, and people were indeed provoked. On social media, people lambasted the author for being “selfish,” “a homewrecker,” “a narcissist”; even on the usually-friendly New York Times comment section, the top reply announced that, “[reading] this essay, I am struck not by courage or insight but by sheer self-absorption.”

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The 34-year-old actor and podcast host had her contract rescinded last Friday. The same day, she got a call from her talent agency, Gersh, who told her that they were dropping her, and that she should probably hire a crisis publicist. “It felt like there were a lot of people who didn’t want to get in trouble,” she tells me, describing the experience as “Kafkaesque.”

Like in Iconoclast, there’s an online streamer that haunts this story. Last month, Red Scare had the white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes on for a two-and-a-half-hour conversation. “He has his trust issues,” Dasha tells me of Fuentes. “I thought maybe we could break through—not fix him, but I thought we’d be friends.” The show went up, to little fanfare—until Tucker Carlson hosted Fuentes on his show more recently, causing a cataclysm on the right. A lot of mainstream outlets started paying attention to Fuentes. Then, Dasha got dropped.

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“I am always joking,” he told me, leaning back in his chair. “It is important to transform some challenges into jokes, into something creative, something fun.” Marynovych’s smile faded. “Of course, it wasn’t all jokes. I did get arrested, you know?”

Yes, indeed, I knew that all too well. It is part of the reason I had sought him out during a recent visit to Lviv, in the parochial heartland of Western Ukraine. We met late on a Friday afternoon in a well-lit corner of Frayerka Bakery, a cobblestoned block away from his home. The row of chocolate cakes displayed by the entrance looked tempting, but Marynovych, a teetotaler following an encounter with Christ during his confinement, strolled right past them and ordered coffee. My drink of choice was tea.

The neighborhood first became his home half a century ago when he began engineering studies at the Polytechnic National University in Lviv—then a Soviet city. During his freshman year in 1969, Marynovych was approached by the KGB, the Soviet Union’s security agency. They wanted him to become an informant. He declined, and instead launched a career as a Soviet dissident: In 1976, he co-founded Ukraine’s first human rights organization. He then spent seven years in the gulag, followed by another four years in exile, before returning home to help usher his country out of communism.

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