It’s Tuesday, June 30. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Tyler Cowen on why our future will resemble small-town America. Madeleine Long speaks to the detransitioner whose case could change the legal game for gender surgery medical malpractice lawsuits. Spencer Klavan on the scientific breakthrough that deciphered a 2,000-year-old scroll. And much more.
But first: The Christians held hostage by the Iranian regime.
Inside Iran, a quiet war has been waged against the country’s Christian community for decades. Pastors have been assassinated, Farsi-language Bibles are banned from print, and many Christians are forced to practice their faith in secret. Muslims who convert are treated as national security threats.
An estimated 1.2 million Iranians have converted to Christianity anyway, making Iran the fastest-growing Christian nation in the Middle East by some counts. They worship in living rooms, apartments, and underground house churches, trying to stay out of sight of a regime that sees their faith as an act of subversion.
The regime had always refrained from going after the oldest Protestant church in Iran out of fear of what America might do in retaliation. But according to the sources I spoke to for my latest story, that fear is gone. They say that Iranian officials showed up last week at St. Peter’s Evangelical Church in Tehran, threatening church leaders and telling the families living there to leave. The Iranian government said that it is seizing the property.
“I will tell you the literal words they used,” Sasan Tavassoli, an Iranian Presbyterian pastor in the U.S. with direct contacts at St. Peter’s, told me. “We were concerned about America all these years. America came. They slapped us on the face. We slapped them on the face back. And then America withdrew. So we are no longer afraid of America.”
I spoke with a former pastor of St. Peter’s, who now lives in exile and advocates for the Iranian Christian community in the West, about why the regime sees Christianity as an existential threat and its strategy for exterminating other churches in Iran. Read my story for a sense of how high-level geopolitics is changing the lines for some of the most vulnerable Iranians.
—Maya Sulkin
What do falling fertility rates have to do with the rise of artificial intelligence? The answer, according to Tyler Cowen, is that the two forces are combining to determine that our future will look a lot like small-town America. Get ready for a world where people are kinder, more forgiving, and more likely to talk to strangers in the checkout line. Read Tyler for more on why.
A decision from the Texas Supreme Court last week offers some hope to detransitioners who believe they were talked into irreversible gender surgeries by activist clinicians. Today, Madeleine Long talks to the Texas plaintiff—a 24-year-old detransitioner who sued the therapist she accused of enabling her double mastectomy at age 19—about her quest for justice and what the case might mean for other detransitioners.
It was a scientific breakthrough straight out of “Indiana Jones”: Last week, a team of scientists and classicists managed to extract the writing from a delicate, 2,000-year-old papyrus scroll encased in the volcanic ash of Mount Vesuvius. Today, Spencer Klavan chronicles the long effort and unpacks what it means for a budding, beautiful friendship between AI and the humanities.
Less than two weeks after Trump’s memorandum of understanding, strikes by the United States and Iran again rained down over the Strait of Hormuz. Today, shipping expert and Cornell history professor Sal Mercogliano joins School of War to discuss why he thinks the ceasefire is beginning to unravel and what the latest attacks mean for trade, consumer goods, and the future of the crucial energy-shipping route.
Great Americans
Robert H. Jackson was the last justice of the Supreme Court not to have finished law school. He grew up milking cows in upstate New York, had no college degree, and still went on to become one of the chief legal minds behind the prosecution of Nazi war crimes. Robert H. Jackson was the greatest jurist America has ever produced, argues Matthew Walther, and the world that made him no longer exists.
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President Trump said American and Iranian negotiators are set to meet in Qatar on Tuesday for a new round of talks after striking and targeting each over the weekend. But Iran’s deputy foreign minister said that its officials only planned to work through mediators to prod the U.S. to honor its side of the ceasefire.
The Supreme Court broadened presidential powers in a ruling Monday that said Donald Trump can fire most independent regulators, including a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission. In a separate case, Trump was blocked for now from firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. The justices did not clearly explain the legal basis by which Trump could get rid of Cook, who was accused of mortgage fraud last year. She has denied wrongdoing and said Monday that the ruling affirms the need to protect the central bank from “political interference.”
The Supreme Court also allowed states to count mail-in ballots received after Election Day and declined to consider President Trump’s request to overturn the civil ruling that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. The nation’s highest court is poised to hand down multiple blockbuster decisions on Tuesday as its term ends, including on birthright citizenship.
A record-setting heatwave continues to scorch Western Europe, killing over 1,300 people so far. Some French mortuaries have run out of storage space for bodies.
The official death toll from last week’s earthquakes in Venezuela rose to 1,719 people. The total is expected to climb as more people are found under the rubble. Several countries have sent emergency workers and financial support, including the United States.
Chris Johnson, 40, a former NFL running back, lost his voice to ALS after being diagnosed with the disease last year. He announced the diagnosis on Monday in an interview with Good Morning America, speaking with assistance from a computer-generated reproduction of his voice. (Read Maya Sulkin’s piece about Neuralink, a start-up company that helps ALS patients restore their voices.)
Interesting that the worshippers in the photo at the top of the page seem to be making the sign of the Cross and bowing--which I have not known Protestants to do.
I know trump got a lot of bad news on Monday, but the ruling on transgender women in women’s sports is a victory for all.