It’s Friday, May 1. 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 joins our ranks! A new Haley for a new generation of Republicans. Hadley Freeman asks: Are my Jewish children safe in London? Tyler Cowen on Allbirds’ AI pivot. Liel Leibovitz on the reality-TV star shaking up the Los Angeles mayor’s race. And much more.
But first: a message from The Free Press’s resident boomer, Joe Nocera.
Is there any generation of Americans—be it Gen X, millennials, or even Gen Z—that isn’t sick of us boomers? I kind of doubt it. Their taxes pay for our Social Security and Medicare—and there is a legitimate question about whether anything will be left for them when they’re ready to retire. More and more of us are going to require expensive medical care as our health deteriorates. We dominate the country’s politics; the Senate is practically a gerontology ward. Our current president is a boomer—as were four of the previous five.
As Jeff Giesea, the entrepreneur—and Gen Xer—writes in our lead essay today, boomers “are wealthier and healthier than any generation before them, deeply embedded in political, economic, and cultural power, and often understandably reluctant to step aside.” I’m not saying the younger generations want us all to die, but if they did, could you blame them?
Sadly (for me, at least), we are all going to die. Giesea calls the next 20 years or so “The Long Boomer Farewell.” And what we’ll be leaving behind once we’re gone, he says, is a mess. Can the younger generation fix what we baby boomers have broken? Yes, argues Giesea, if it doesn’t waste any time. You’ll find out how in his insightful essay. —Joe Nocera
The Girls Aren’t All Right
If you look at our list of contributing writers, you’ll find some unexpected bedfellows. That’s the glory of The Free Press: Nobody who works here thinks quite alike, but one thing unites us, and that’s an allergy to groupthink. With that in mind, it’s our absolute pleasure to welcome Freya India to our ranks.
Earlier this year, in an essay for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel that we knew we had to reprint as soon as we read it, Freya wrote about what she aims to do as a writer:
“I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be auto-completed because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. . . . I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of. What good am I otherwise? What am I otherwise?”
In her first essay for us as a contributing writer, Freya writes about the reception to her debut book, GIRLS®, which dives deep into the misery of Gen Z women, exploring how they’ve been commodified by Instagram, corrupted by pornography, destabilized by decline of religion, and isolated by the internet.
The book is out next week in the United States—and we highly recommend you preorder it!—but it came out a couple of months ago in the UK, and Freya was struck all over again by how her work was interpreted by a corner of the media that insists there’s only one explanation for women’s misery, and it’s this: Dudes suck.
Read on to find out what Freya makes of this, and please join us in welcoming her to The Free Press.
Spencer Pratt, Nalin Haley, and the Age of Political Disruption
Donald Trump’s political rise was built on breaking the rules of the old political establishment—to remarkable effect. If it proved anything, it’s this: Disruption works. The question, as the post-Trump era looms, is what form that disruption will take next.
Today, two stories offering two answers from opposite coasts.
In South Carolina, Nalin Haley, 24-year-old son of former UN ambassador and presidential candidate Nikki Haley, has spent the past year arguing against foreign wars, rejecting free market neoliberalism, and railing against the very establishment he grew up inside. He disagrees with his mother on a lot, and young conservative men love him for it. Isaac Grafstein went to South Carolina to find out why—and what Haley thinks comes next for the Republican Party.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, reality-TV star turned mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt just dropped a campaign ad with nearly 11 million views and counting. He filmed it standing outside incumbent Karen Bass’s mansion, then cut to the trailer where he’s been living since the wildfires burned down his house. The message: Bass doesn’t live in the mess she made. You do. Surprised a darling of the political establishment is losing ground to a former reality-TV villain? You shouldn’t be, says Liel Leibovitz: “The last 20 years of American public life have been one big reality television show.”
Why do Americans keep betting on things they’re almost certain to lose? When the struggling sneaker brand Allbirds pivoted to AI hardware, its stock surged—just the latest example, Tyler Cowen argues, of a broader cultural fixation on poorly informed risk-taking. From sports betting and meme stocks to crypto and now sneaker-to-AI pivots, the pattern is the same: a fascination with long shots in a society wealthy enough to indulge them.
Calls for gun control abounded after the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner last weekend. But according to Mike Pesca, who supports stricter limits, that’s wishful thinking. Americans have made their preferences about guns clear, he writes, and no law can realistically change that. Read his essay on why the only honest conclusion is one his side refuses to hear.
On Wednesday, a man stabbed two Jews on a London street in what police have declared a terrorist incident. The act follows weeks of antisemitic arson attacks, firebombs, and violence, all met with apathy from the British public. For Hadley Freeman, who moved from the U.S. to London to raise her children somewhere she thought would be safer, it feels like a cruel irony. “Calm and reassuring,” she writes, “are not words any Jew would use to describe life in Britain today.”
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EDITORS’ PICKS
This week, the nation was shaken when 31-year-old Cole Allen attempted to breach the White House Correspondents’ dinner and assassinate the president and his cabinet. In the days since, we’ve been trying to make sense of the incident, and the alarming rise of political violence.
First, as Douglas Murray observed, Allen’s actions didn’t occur in a vacuum. Douglas began the night like everyone else: being harangued by protesters shouting slogans remarkably similar to those later found in the shooter’s manifesto. That overlap, he argues, underscores how disturbingly normalized this kind of discourse has become, and hints at the consequences of letting it fester unchecked.
For all that was grim about the night, it also offered a reminder of what people are capable of when things go sideways. After shots rang out, Suzy Weiss couldn’t help but notice that many of the men in the room activated. Military veterans mapped exits; journalists spoke of “perimeters”; and lobbyists turned into bodyguards. It was a big night for “the best of the masculine traits: calm, humor, dependability, protection, chivalry, and knowing, offhand, an oddly specific level of detail regarding Secret Service procedures.”
And then there’s the great Caitlin Flanagan, announced this week as a Free Press columnist. She wasn’t at the Washington Hilton that night. But when the news came across her phone, she felt nothing. “That’s when I realized that political violence is truly back,” she writes, “that an attempt to assassinate the American president is within the realm not just of possibility but of the unremarkable.”
Jeffrey Epstein’s executive assistant managed his schedule, arranged his travel, and coordinated the young women he brought to his island and ranch. Her name, Lesley Groff, appears in the Department of Justice files over 150,000 times. Yet today, Groff lives in one of Connecticut’s wealthiest towns, hosts game nights, does Pilates, and dines at high-end restaurants. How did she emerge from the scandal unscathed? Our Tanya Lukyanova went to New Canaan to find out.
Two hours after anti-Israel protesters pitched an encampment on Dartmouth’s campus, President Sian Beilock called the police. Eighty-nine people were arrested, and Beilock was the only Ivy League president to avoid a federal civil-rights investigation. Jonas Du sat down with her to ask why she thinks American universities have lost their way, and what Dartmouth is doing to buck the trend.
Even amid a relentless cycle of bad news, moments of extraordinary human achievement break through. On Sunday, Sabastian Sawe of Kenya became the first person ever to run a sanctioned marathon in under two hours. Joe Nocera spoke with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and a record-setting long-distance runner, about the remarkable innovations that made the feat possible.
Could we get more on the UK grooming gangs, according to this - https://connortomlinson.substack.com/p/how-the-home-office-buried-the-grooming?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=497219&post_id=195725566&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ozoda&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email it's even worse than what most people realise, well, worse than I realised.
RE: Nothing Will Solve the Tragedy of Gun Violence in America: "The best response is a bad one, but it’s the one we have: to be guarded by better-trained and better-funded people carrying their own, more sophisticated guns, if you’re lucky enough to enjoy their protection. It isn’t a good place to be. But it’s where we are."
The best response is to take responsibility for your own safety because no one else will. Did you know that the USSC has ruled that the police are not obligated to save your life? Your safety is your own responsibility. Do your research, get a gun that matches your needs, get training and become proficient.
No politician who supports gun control should get armed protection paid for by those they want to disarm.