It’s Friday, January 23. Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Friday Front Page.
For as long as The Free Press has existed, Fridays have started only one way: with TGIF. And fear not, Free Pressers, that is not going to change. (If you missed Nellie’s latest, catch it here.) But here’s the thing: There’s a lot going on out there—a lot of news to make sense of. And so, starting today, we’re introducing a Friday edition of our daily email.
As you’ll see, The Friday Front Page is a little different from what we offer Monday through Thursday. First of all, it’ll land later in the morning. It will also include a roundup of some of the unmissable stories we’ve published that you may not have had time to read in the midweek maelstrom—and the latest edition of our advice column, Tough Love with Abigail Shrier.
But like any Front Page, this one will bring you plenty of up-to-the-minute news and sense-making that are the bread and butter of The Free Press.
So, without further ado, let’s get to the stories. We start with the tale of the woman who gave AI control of her life.
Would you hand over the keys to everything in your life—your bank account, your inbox, your health data, your calendar—to a robot?
That’s what start-up founder Molly Cantillon did, building something she acknowledges might seem a little creepy: a “personal panopticon,” an all-seeing AI that knows every detail of her life. She built it using Claude Code, a coding assistant that requires no technical know-how, and is available to everyone from Anthropic’s Claude AI. Before long it was paying her parking tickets, setting the time for her morning alarm, managing her stock portfolio, and more.
Molly trusts AI with some of the most important things in her life, and admits she couldn’t live without it. Does that make her a slave to this extraordinary new technology—or freer than the rest of us? And now that there’s nothing stopping you from building your own personal panopticon, would you? Should you? Read Molly’s piece and decide for yourself.
—Josh Code
America is braced for massive snowfall over the weekend, but when Monday rolls around, closed schools won’t necessarily mean a day of snowball fights with friends. In New York City, children might be forced to partake in the charade known as “remote learning.” Stop this nonsense, demands Will Rahn today. He delivers a passionate plea to Mayor Zohran Mamdani: “For the love of God, or whatever you’re allowed to call him in a New York school these days, can you just let the kids frolic in the snow on Monday?”
Matthew is a 26-year-old Free Press reader who’s recently had a spiritual awakening—and he’s worried it’s going to mess up his relationship. His girlfriend doesn’t believe in God. In fact, she has an “adverse response” to His existence. Should Matthew marry her or leave her? Our advice columnist gives her two cents, in the latest edition of Tough Love with Abigail Shrier.
How far can positive thinking get you in the Holy Land? This week, while Donald Trump was busy assembling a rogues’ gallery of leaders to join his Board of Peace, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, shared his vision for Gaza-Lago, a resort city in a rebuilt war zone. No political or historical tract can help you make sense of these wildly optimistic moves, writes Eli Lake. Instead, to understand them, you’ll need Norman Vincent Peale’s self-help book "The Power of Positive Thinking," a Trump favorite.
Here’s something to feel positive about: There has been a sudden and dramatic fall in overdose deaths in America. The figures for the 12 months up to last August were just released, and they show a 21 percent drop from a year earlier. How did this happen? Sally Satel, who works on the front lines of the drug crisis at a methadone clinic in Washington, D.C., has some answers.
When Donald Trump tried to fire Lisa Cook last summer, it was the first time in U.S. history that a president had sought to remove one of the governors of the Federal Reserve. The move—highly controversial at the time—has since gone to the courts, and this week the Supreme Court heard arguments. Jed Rubenfeld was listening in, and reports in his latest column on this crucial case testing the limits of presidential power.
It hasn’t exactly been a quiet week. There was Trump’s war of words with Europe over Greenland, ongoing questions about what comes next in Iran, disorder in Minneapolis, and more. Here are some of the Free Press stories on all that and more that you might have missed.
Minneapolis is ground zero for the biggest fight in domestic politics right now. Clashes between ICE and protesters, and the federal government and state officials, have dominated the news. As Greg Lukianoff, among the most consistent and principled defenders of free expression in the country, wrote this week, they have also offered a real-time lesson in how the First Amendment works. Read his essay on how the fight over deportations is testing Americans’ commitment to open discourse.
Carrie McKean’s latest dispatch tackles the subject at the heart of these protests: deportations. And it does so with the kind of nuance and empathy so often missing from reporting on the subject. She tells the story of Maribis Beleño, who was sent back to Venezuela without her children—and the Trump-voting pastor who had a plan to get them home.
Rod Dreher voted for Trump and says he agrees with the president that the U.S. should acquire Greenland. But, as he wrote in his column this week, he’s appalled at the way the president has been browbeating the Europeans over it. He reports on how even those on the continent usually sympathetic to Trump were angered by his actions this week.
Just when you think you’ve heard the craziest cancellation possible, another one comes along and makes you realize that the excesses of the past decade were even worse than you thought. Kat Rosenfield brings you the latest such saga. It’s the story of Jay Asher, author of the YA bestseller Thirteen Reasons Why, whose life was destroyed by anonymous #MeToo gossip. Now, for the first time, Asher is telling his side of the story.
When the Iranian people flooded the streets to call for a better future, the regime shut down the internet. The goal was to make it harder for the protesters to coordinate with one another—and to cover up the murder of thousands in a bloody crackdown. Iran’s pro-democracy activists have been preparing for such a shutdown for years, smuggling Starlink terminals into the country so that people are still able to get the message out. In their latest video report, Rafaela Siewert and Tanya Lukyanova meet the people making it happen. Watch it here:
The Front Page will be back on Monday morning. Until then, look out for the Weekend Press—which this week will be answering the zeitgeist’s question of the week: Is it okay for Brooklyn Beckham to stop talking to his mom because she danced inappropriately at his wedding?
Soon, it appears, Repubs will blame Dems for Trump's failures, miscalculations, guarantees not kept, rudeness, name calling, rambling speeches, about faces, The Wall not being paid for by Mexico, pardoning drug deals and Jan 6 felons (ALL of them), not ending the war in Ukraine, tariffs costing the consumer, alienating allies and partners, making fun of the handicapped, using grade school nicknames, hosting anti-Semites, not bringing food prices down, for not coming close to balancing the budget, etc. Me? I think both parties are grossly derelict. Its's time to stop point fingers and get to work.
Given that most young Americans can't seem to answer the question "which river and which sea" maybe the online learning during a snow day could be about geography.