It’s Thursday, April 9. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Niall Ferguson on Iran’s skewed definition of victory. Frannie Block speaks to former astronauts about a potentially fatal flaw in the spacecraft that’s just made history. Yascha Mounk on the trouble with college grades. And much more.
But first: Olivia Reingold reports on the Senate race in Michigan that’s become a referendum on Israel and the Middle East.
September 11 isn’t usually a litmus test in American politics. For nearly 25 years, there’s been one perspective we expect leaders in both parties to take toward the attacks: They were acts of savagery, planned and carried out by al-Qaeda, motivated by fundamentalist hatred of the United States.
But one candidate’s remarks this week may mark a new era. Abdul El-Sayed is running for Senate in Michigan, and on Tuesday he held two major rallies with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker—one of the most influential figures on the young left today. Piker declared in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11,” and he gained fame in recent years by accusing Israel and the U.S. of a genocide in Gaza. Yet when a reporter asked El-Sayed about Piker’s views, he refused to disavow them—any of them. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture,” he said. “I thought we were over it.”
Our Olivia Reingold attended one of those rallies, and today she explains why El-Sayed’s comments aren’t a fluke. He speaks for a movement comprising young leftists and Muslim immigrants—two fast-growing constituencies making their mark across American politics. He’s running a campaign unlike any Senate candidate before him—refusing to condemn Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and suggesting that Israel provoked an attack on a U.S. synagogue last month. Read what Olivia asked El-Sayed—and her conversations with the voters who are driving his surge.
—Mene Ukueberuwa
War and Peace in Iran
One day after President Trump declared a two-week ceasefire in Iran, almost nothing is clear. Is Lebanon included? Is the Strait of Hormuz actually open? Has Iran really agreed to any of Trump’s list of 15 demands? Elliott Abrams cuts through the fog to take stock of what the war has, and hasn’t, accomplished—and what Washington must not give away at the negotiating table.
Why are missiles landing across the Gulf? Has Iran made reopening the Strait of Hormuz conditional? For the answers to more essential questions about the ceasefire, watch Rafaela Siewert’s interview with Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson as they discuss who’s actually winning this war, and what the Trump administration has misunderstood about Tehran. His blunt verdict: “Trump may have made a mistake by not deploying ground forces.”
Historian Arash Azizi didn’t just study Iran’s democracy movement—he lived it. Born in Tehran and now at Yale, he joins Eli Lake on a special episode of Breaking History that asks: Was reform from within in the Islamic Republic ever really possible? How did the regime teach its citizens that dissent was futile? And what does Iran’s past mean for its future?
It’s easy to feel that NASA’s Artemis II mission has been an unequivocal triumph for America. But the most dangerous part of the space flight is yet to come: the reentry into the atmosphere, when the craft will face temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The only thing that can stop it burning up is a heat shield that, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman told The Free Press, has “shortcomings.” A former astronaut who thinks the mission should never have begun says: “We’re putting the crew at totally unnecessary risk.”
At Harvard, getting in is the hard part. Once you’re there, collecting straight A’s is apparently a breeze. The faculty planned to vote this week on whether to curb grade inflation—which has led the average GPA to rise from 2.55 to 3.8 since 1950—then kicked the can down the road. But Yascha Mounk thinks today’s college grading system can’t last—with or without inflation. Instead, he wants to scrap grades altogether, and stop slapping a letter on something as complicated as each student’s performance.
MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS
THE NEWS
Voters in Port Washington, Wisconsin, approved the nation’s first anti–data center referendum by a 2-to-1 margin, requiring voter approval before city leaders can grant tax incentives to any future projects—though it won’t stop an existing $15 billion OpenAI-Oracle “Stargate” facility already underway.
A new poll found 48 percent of New Yorkers approve of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s performance as he nears his 100th day in office, with 56 percent saying the city is headed in the right direction. However, at this point in his term, Mamdani’s predecessor Eric Adams had a 61 percent approval rating.
Democrats overperformed in elections this week, winning Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race by nearly 20 points, and cutting their margin of defeat by nearly two-thirds in one of Georgia’s reddest House districts. One former GOP strategist called it “a wow moment”—though many Republicans brushed off the losses as a product of low spring turnout.
Hawaii is bracing for another round of heavy rain and potential flash flooding from a severe Kona low storm Wednesday through Friday, just weeks after March storms caused damage expected to top $1 billion. “This comes at a time when many of our communities are still working to recover,” said Honolulu mayor Rick Blangiardi.
The encrypted messaging app Telegram appears to have a problem with what’s known as “nonconsensual distribution of intimate images.” Researchers at AI Forensics found nearly 25,000 users trading tens of thousands of such images of women—some real, some AI-generated deepfakes, and some depicting minors—across 16 Telegram channels over a six-week study. The group criticized Telegram’s moderation as “insufficient.”
Kristi Noem’s controversial $70 million luxury Boeing jet—originally purchased by ICE for deportations, and featuring a bedroom, shower, and marble bar—will now be available for First Lady Melania Trump and other cabinet members to use, per The Wall Street Journal.
I am still waiting for the expose about the Christophobia of many leftists
Another Mamdani-like candidate? Gee, I would have never thought I see that happen again. And you (media) think Carlson and Owens are scary? At least they are smart enough not to run for public office.