It’s Friday, May 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Alex Berenson on why the latest health-tech fad device is actually making us less healthy. Matti Friedman joins School of War. Our editors’ picks. All that and more.
But before we get to today’s stories, it has been an exciting week over at 60 Minutes, with Bari announcing a new executive producer for the most storied show in TV news: the award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker Nick Bilton. Read more about it here, and check out Nick’s note to the show’s team. We’re excited to tune in.
Now, our lead story: The Baltimore miracle.
What’s broken? That’s a question we ask a lot here. It’s one you can’t ignore if you want to understand the world, and perhaps even make it better. But if you want to fix what is broken, you need to ask another question—one the media is prone to ignore: What works?
Today’s lead investigation, by Charles Fain Lehman, is an answer to that question, focused on one vital issue in one city. For decades, Baltimore has been synonymous with homicides. In 2020, homicide rates in the city were eight times higher than the national average. Then, starting in late 2022, the rate started falling precipitously. Today’s numbers would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. In April, Baltimore had four homicides, a lower total than for any single month in 50 years.
“What has happened in Baltimore was supposed to be impossible,” writes Charles. The cycle of homicides was, we were told, never going to fall unless America ended its war on drugs, or until systemic racism was fully disassembled. But those fatalistic predictions turned out to be wrong.
So how did Baltimore do it? Charles went to find out. Take the white pill this Friday morning, and read his fantastic dispatch.
—Oliver Wiseman
This week, a young, healthy man named Steven Bartlett received 25 million views on X as he described the suffering he faced when he pushed his body to its limits. Did he climb Everest or run a marathon? No. He had a couple of glasses of wine. It’s an extreme example of the popular trend for hyper-optimized biometric tracking. But does any of it make you healthier? Or just more anxious? Alex Berenson has some thoughts.
Everyone has a theory about the fertility crisis: housing costs, smartphones, late-stage capitalism. One group that warrants a little more scrutiny are ob-gyns—the doctors women trust most with their reproductive health. That’s the view of Brian Levine, an ob-gyn and reproductive endocrinologist who says that too many of his colleagues refuse to have honest conversations with their patients about the hard choices women face.
On the latest “School of War,” Matti Friedman joins Aaron MacLean on the show to discuss the Jews who fought on behalf of the British Army in World War II, how success on the battlefield helped create a nation, and more from his new book, “Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe.”
Claude, the AI for problem solvers
AI helps most with the hardest work, not the simplest. Anthropic analyzed 2 million conversations and found Claude’s biggest impact is on complex, college-level tasks. The Economic Index tracks adoption across every state and occupation.
EDITORS’ PICKS
This was a big week at Free Press towers, with the launch of The Free Press Community. That means a whole slate of new offerings for Free Pressers. There’s the Free Press Forum, an online meeting place to discuss, debate, and debrief the news. You’ll also find a place to chat with Free Press staff—including our own Queen of TGIF, Nellie Bowles, today at 2:30 p.m. ET.
Want to get offline? Sign up now for The Free Press Supper Club and mark your interest for Free Press Excursions and Retreats. Check it out—you might meet your next spouse or business partner at one of these events. For more on all this, read Bari’s note laying out the next chapter of The Free Press:
While you can pick your friends—and we hope yours read The Free Press—who you get as your parents is a sort of cosmic roll of the dice. This week, one of our favorite pieces was by a young woman who won the dad lottery—her father is former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, the moderate Republican who is now dying of pancreatic cancer.
Most parents ask their kids “what did you learn today?” after school. Sasse asked his kids, including his daughter Alex Sasse, “Who did you serve?”
Alex’s essay this week is about her parents’ values—and how they have shaped her. It’s one of the most moving things we’ve published:
Knowing your father is going to die and celebrating his life is one thing. Knowing your daughter doesn’t want to live and trying to talk her out of it is another.
This week, Rupa Subramanya spoke with Omar and Cizzy Dekker, whose 19-year-old daughter, Iris, chose to end her life after years of severe depression.
“I tried to understand how loving parents could be persuaded that the best decision for their daughter was an early death,” writes Rupa. “What I found was a system that turns young people’s ambiguous wishes into a diagnosis of incurable depression.”
The headline news this week was Iran—and the always-imminent-but-never-actually-materializing deal to resolve the conflict. We ran two essential pieces of analysis on the state of play this week. One, from Michael Doran, lifted the lid on what the president plans to do next and looked at whether it will work.
In the other piece on the conflict, Niall Ferguson compares the Iran war to a roller-coaster ride on magic mushrooms. What happens when the ride ends and the drugs wear off? Read his piece to find out:
The Free Press has a new culture podcast—Second Thought with Suzy Weiss—and this week’s guest is a big one. Last week in LA, Suzy sat down with arguably the biggest villain in the music industry: Scooter Braun.
You may know him as the man who discovered Justin Bieber and made him a teen sensation. Or, more likely, you know him because, in 2019, Taylor Swift accused him of denying her a fair opportunity to own her original studio recordings.
The real story, like any with suspiciously obvious heroes and villains, is more complicated. That’s why Suzy spoke to the mega-manager, onetime Kanye West collaborator, and archnemesis in Swift’s fairy tale. He says: “I legitimately don’t know her.”
We move from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., where Tanner Nau spoke to some hopeful former January 6 defendants about their hopes for getting a piece of the action from President Donald Trump’s new $1.776 billion fund for those targeted by the Biden Department of Justice.
One man, who sprayed an aerosol irritant at three Capitol Police officers, entered through a broken window frame, and threw a punch at another officer, is hoping for up to $10 million. But he told Tanner he’d settle for $3 million.
Read Tanner’s report on the rioters hoping to strike it rich—and what the law says about whether or not they’ll ever see a dime.
The biggest tech news of the week came out of . . . the Vatican? Pope Leo XIV published his encyclical on artificial intelligence, warning that AI risks creating a new Tower of Babel. The introduction to the English translation was written by our very own Arthur Brooks. We adapted it for our pages and you can read it here:
For more on AI: Tyler Cowen offers his tips for how to keep your job in the age of employment disruption. Don’t miss his dos and don’ts:
Claude, the AI for problem solvers
AI helps most with the hardest work, not the simplest. Anthropic analyzed 2 million conversations and found Claude’s biggest impact is on complex, college-level tasks. The Economic Index tracks adoption across every state and occupation.
Our society is hurt far more by the bottom 1% than the top 1%. If our justice system can enforce laws and incarcerate violent criminals, all cities like Baltimore will improve significantly. That will also help with housing affordability because so many more places will become livable again: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/make-america-affordable-again