It’s Thursday, February 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: More footage from the Epstein tapes. Will Rahn on how he built an app to tackle Catholic guilt. Peter Coy on the Bitcoin crash. And Columbia’s four finalists for the new Edward Said Professorship.
But first: He tried to warn them.
Senator Rand Paul is one of Washington’s loneliest men, with ironclad libertarian views that often put him at odds with Donald J. Trump’s Republican Party. But now, in his third term, Paul is also a party elder, with a prominent platform to challenge his colleagues.
Today, as the head of the Homeland Security Committee, he’ll question Trump’s top immigration officials about the showdown in Minneapolis that has made ICE, and Trump’s deportation push, the talk of the nation. Don’t expect Paul to go easy on his subjects. As he told Peter Savodnik in a new interview for The Free Press, Paul believes the Trump administration has been “reckless” in its pursuit of mass deportations.
It didn’t have to come to this. Last June, Paul tried to slash the massive amount of funding Republicans wanted to supercharge ICE, and he warned that the cash would let the agency run amok. His party pushed him aside and raced ahead.
Where does Paul expect things to go from here? Read the full interview to find out.
—Mene Ukueberuwa
AI and Me
AI is advancing at a bewildering pace, and leaving anyone who uses it wondering where things are heading. Today, two Free Press writers reckon with the astonishing advances and what it means for how we live.
Up first: Maya Sulkin recounts the tale of how ChatGPT saved her from a nurse practitioner’s misdiagnosis—and what the experience taught her about the future of medicine. Read Maya on how ChatGPT saved her feet:
Next: We’d been wondering where our colleague Will Rahn had been over the past few days, and what exactly he was up to. The answer, it turns out, is building an app. Yes, “vibe coding” has arrived at Free Press HQ, and Will has used it to build an app that will distill Catholicism’s best advice for quelling his anxiety about “mass unemployment” and runaway tech. Will discovers that “you tell Claude to do something and it just does it.” Read about Will’s app—and what he learned from the bewilderingly easy process of making it without knowing any coding skills:
Bitcoin’s latest crash isn’t about lost faith, it’s about debt. In “Why Bitcoin Is Crashing,” Peter Coy explains how risky bets in so-called “perps” (trades in which speculators borrow 10 or even 50 times their cash) triggered a wave of forced sell-offs. Investors who vowed to “HODL” (hold) instead found themselves “rekt” (wrecked), with one Reddit user admitting, “I bought at the top and just sold it all. . . . It’s embarrassing.”
After Columbia university pledged a “thorough review” to ensure “comprehensive and balanced” curricula amid federal scrutiny over antisemitism, Maya Sulkin says the four finalists for the new Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies suggest anything but balance, raising doubts about whether Columbia is serious about reform. “One has to wonder how many applicants did they start with, and how did they narrow it down to these four?”
Newly released Epstein files include previously unseen 2016 deposition footage of Ghislaine Maxwell, his most notorious accomplice and the only surviving person believed to know the full scope of his crimes. The clips, from Virginia Giuffre’s civil suit, are being published by The Free Press today.
In this episode of Old School, English journalist David Aaronovitch joins Shilo to discuss Dylan Thomas’s 1954 play Under Milk Wood, a lyrical portrait of a small Welsh seaside town that explores the secret dreams, lusts, and longings of its villagers. They examine how Thomas’s rich, musical language honors the complexity of ordinary people in a culture often flattened by cliché and surface image.
Conversations with Coleman: Is Epstein Story a ‘Moral Panic’?
This week’s guest on Conversations with Coleman is journalist Michael Tracey, who argues that the Epstein saga has spiraled into a “moral panic” untethered from the documented facts. While not defending Epstein’s “reprehensible behavior,” Tracey challenges claims that he ran a “global pedophile ring” or left behind a secret “client list,” urging the media and the public to separate what’s proven in court from what has grown in the cultural imagination.
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THE NEWS
A transgender shooter killed at least eight people—six at a secondary school and two of the shooter’s family members at a nearby home—and wounded 27 others in remote Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, before committing suicide. This marks Canada’s deadliest mass shooting since 2020.
The Congressional Budget Office warns that despite President Trump’s sweeping tax cuts and high tariffs, the federal debt is still projected to reach record levels—hitting 120 percent of GDP by 2036—with a $23.1 trillion shortfall over the next nine years.
A growing coalition of Hollywood unions, trade groups, and antitrust advocates is mobilizing in Washington to oppose Netflix’s proposed $82 billion acquisition of Warner Bros., warning regulators that the merger could slash residuals, cut production jobs, and pose an existential threat to entertainment workers and theaters.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Congress he met Jeffrey Epstein “three times over 14 years” and insisted “I have done absolutely nothing wrong in any possible regard,” while acknowledging he once had lunch with his family on Epstein’s island. Republican congressman Thomas Massie called on Lutnick to “just resign,” a move the White House says President Trump does not support.
The Pentagon has directed a second aircraft carrier strike group to prepare for possible deployment to the Middle East as President Trump considers military action if nuclear talks with Iran collapse, potentially marking the first two-carrier presence there in nearly a year.
The IRS improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with the Department of Homeland Security as part of a controversial data-sharing agreement targeting undocumented immigrants, a disclosure discovered only recently that may have violated federal privacy law.
In the current 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, Norway leads the medal table with 13, while Team USA has won 12 total medals (4 gold, 6 silver, and 2 bronze).
Cue the panic with a "possible deployment . . . potentially marking the first two-carrier presence there in nearly a year." Something possibly, potentially will maybe happen that has never ever happened in all recorded history . . . except in the last 11 months or so. The horror.
Wowie, zowie--stop the free presses: "a disclosure discovered only recently that may have violated federal privacy law." May have. Pretty much anything "may have" done pretty much anything . . . what a tough standard of what is newsworthy. But since it's the Trump administration that "may have" done it, print it.