It’s Friday, June 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Freya India on the apps and subscriptions commodifying Gen Z’s religious revival. Josh Code joins Zohran Mamdani’s rent-freeze canvassing brigade. A UC Berkeley math professor on why abolishing the SAT means her students can’t understand fractions. And much more.
But first: Suzy Weiss on the AI robots coming soon to an apartment near you.
This week, the future arrived at my doorstep in the form of two sweaty college students, wearing cameras on their heads and wielding a tube of Clorox wipes.
I was getting free cleaning services through an AI training start-up called Shift, which bills itself as a gateway to an abundant new economy. In addition to two cleaners, it also sent a private chef to make me lunch.
But here’s the catch: Everyone running a vacuum over my floors or cooking me branzino did so while being recorded, their physical actions batched, analyzed, and transformed into training data for the next generation of AI-powered robots that the company intends to deploy across commercial and industrial sectors—to, eventually, complete chores autonomously.
I spoke with Bercan Kilic, one of the co-founders of Shift, as well as my college-kid cleaners, about the initiative. “What could happen, in 50 years, is basically all services and goods are free, or are close to free,” Kilic told me. But will turning our houses into self-imposed surveillance states spell the bright beginning of a liberated new age, or the bitter end of blue-collar work? Read my story to find out.
—Suzy Weiss
Much has been made of Gen Z’s apparent Christian revival. Freya India used to buy into it. Now she’s not so sure. Learning about the Christian faith has never been easier—you can find it packaged into podcasts, YouTube Shorts, hashtags, and endless feeds. But when faith is available on demand, does it start to give way to indifference? “For a while, I thought my generation might be finding God,” she writes. “Now I worry we are just finding content about God.”
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At the University of California, the nation’s largest public university system, math professors are having to stop their lectures to explain fractions. Why? According to UC Berkeley math professor Svetlana Jitomirskaya, it’s because the SAT was completely abolished in UC admissions in 2020. In her piece today, she explains how that decision has failed the very students it purports to help—and why she and her colleagues are fighting for an emergency course correction.
Is New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani using taxpayer resources to build support for his rent-freeze policy? Six weeks ago, he launched Organize NYC, a door-knocking campaign urging New Yorkers to testify before the Rent Guidelines Board ahead of its vote on whether to freeze rents for 2.4 million residents. But when Josh Code signed up for a shift, he says, the line between nonpartisan civic engagement and blatant partisan campaigning quickly became very blurry. Read his report on a night with the mayor’s rent-freeze brigade.
America’s 250th birthday is less than a month away, and we’re celebrating it by paying tribute to the Great Americans who made this country what it is.
Next up: Sandra Day O’Connor. From 1981 to 2006, O’Connor served as the Supreme Court’s enormously influential swing vote, often deciding cases split between the four liberals and four conservatives. Today, Charles Lane reflects on her extraordinary journey from a remote Arizona ranch to the highest court in the land—and how she “made herself a formidable justice the same way she had, as a girl, learned to brand calves, fire a rifle, or turn a bobcat into a house pet.”
David Mamet Joins The Lindbergh Conspiracies
On the night of March 1, 1932, someone climbed a ladder to a window of a remote New Jersey estate and stole the infant son of Charles Lindbergh, the famed American aviator. The baby was later found dead, and a man was arrested, tried, and executed—case closed. Or was it? Ninety-four years later, many of the details still don’t add up. Free Press journalists Joe Nocera and Poppy Damon became obsessed with getting to the bottom of it—and we think you will too. Listen to The Lindbergh Conspiracies, a new podcast from The Free Press hosted by Joe Nocera.
In case you’re not sold yet, after hearing about the podcast, acclaimed playwright David Mamet sent Joe Nocera a letter outlining his own theory of the crime—one that puts Charles Lindbergh at the center of the mystery. So, naturally, Joe set up an interview. Listen to a new, special episode of The Lindbergh Conspiracies with Mamet below, and follow wherever you get your podcasts.
EDITORS’ PICKS
Yesterday, SpaceX filed for the largest IPO in history. But the real story isn’t the $1.77 trillion valuation; it’s what SpaceX has made possible: a manufacturing boom—in space. “Musk’s company has lowered launch costs and increased launch frequency to the point where private businesses are planning to build data centers, manufacturing hubs, and labs in orbit,” wrote Sean Fischer this week. He spoke to Delian Asparouhov, the co-founder of space-based manufacturing start-up Varda, about the rapidly growing space economy, and why, in Asparouhov’s words, whichever nation “nails economic activity in low Earth orbit” may just win “the rest of the solar system and likely the rest of the galaxy.”
One of the biggest stories this month has been the personal life of Graham Platner, Maine’s embattled Democratic Senate candidate. Two weeks ago, Platner’s ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield told The New York Times that he emotionally abused her and became physical multiple times. But in the days that followed, many supporters of the #MeToo movement went on the attack, expressing skepticism about Fifield’s testimony—while others questioned her motives on the grounds that she is a Republican. Frannie Block and Audrey Fahlberg sat down with Fifield, who wants to set the record straight.
But if this kind of behavior is becoming more and more common among our politicians, what are voters meant to make of it? Should it matter to us if our elected officials are cheaters? Arthur Brooks says yes. Moral questions aside, he wrote this week, social science research “finds that adulterous behavior is an accurate predictor of professional misconduct, duplicitousness, low conscientiousness, and a tendency to betray promises.” In other words: Vote for faithful spouses.
Speaking of spouses, a very famous one—Jill Biden—has a new book out. The former First Lady’s new memoir is being criticized by journalists, ex-aides, and Democratic operatives—the same people who once pretended her husband was fit for office. But Jill is too convenient a scapegoat for Joe Biden’s brain fog debacle, argues Caitlin Flanagan: “If an old man can’t do his job anymore, don’t ask his wife to keep careful records on his decline. That’s not a wife’s job.”
Last summer, Vaibhav Duggal, a medical student at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso, learned he would have to face the school’s disciplinary body after a patient accused him of asking inappropriate questions about her relationship status and then following her on Instagram. The next day, he died by suicide. Now, his parents are suing the school. Frannie Block has reported extensively on many examples of disciplinary overreach at schools across the country—and in her story this week, she investigated this tragic tale, and the question at its core: What do schools owe their students, even when they are accused of misconduct?
The neuroscientist, philosopher, and podcaster Sam Harris has built his reputation on intellectual honesty, moral clarity, and a willingness to follow arguments wherever they lead. Those traits were on full display in a piece he published last weekend: a methodical explanation of why he refuses to debate people whose obsession with Israel has convinced them that the Jewish state represents a unique form of evil. He isn’t talking about mere critics of Israel, but rather, those unwilling to honestly answer a simple question: What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted? The result is a powerful, rigorous essay that’s well worth your time this weekend.
As school lets out and the pool covers come off, the kids of America are entering three months of treasured freedom. But while that used to mean one simple thing—it’s time to go earn a paycheck—this year, only a third of teens will work summer jobs. Read Larissa Phillips’s essay on why that may be—and how years of sweating it out in restaurants, retail, and movie theaters brought her a sense of the world that traveling to Europe or lounging by the pool never could.
TGIF! In tomorrow’s Weekend Press, Josh Code spends the weekend at a Christian men’s retreat, where Marines and Muay Thai fighters go to war for Jesus. Niall Ferguson explains why loving football (sorry, soccer) is really all about suffering. Will Rahn reviews “Disclosure Day,” Steven Spielberg’s new alien movie. Kat Rosenfield ponders why Olivia Rodrigo just can’t seem to grow up. And much more.
Forty years ago when we were dating, I saw my now-husband walking towards me on the beach and gasped out loud because I thought he was naked; I wondered what kind of perv I’d gotten involved with. He wasn’t, and I was able to explain to him why a flesh-colored swimsuit is a bad idea. Looking at the photo at the head of this article I thought the woman was vacuuming topless for the same reason, though, now that I consider it, I bet that’s nice and cool.