Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Evan Gardner reports from the front lines of the AI revolution. Kat Rosenfield reflects on an eerily prescient Iranian vampire movie. Howard Jacobson explains why he yelled at his audience during Jewish Book Week. And more!
But first, there are tens of thousands of American servicepeople in the Middle East right now, and retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling knows exactly how they feel. . . .
As all-out war explodes out from the Middle East, uncertainty reigns. All week, we’ve been wondering: Is this how World War III begins? What’s next for Iran? What’s President Donald Trump’s plan? But war is never just about nations and politics. It is also about human beings, including the people asked to fight, and the families waiting for them back home.
At time of writing, six American service members have already been killed in this war. “There will likely be more before it ends,” Trump said after the first casualties were announced. Each one leaves behind an entire life—a clapboard house, a beloved spouse, a couple of kids maybe, a dog, a lot of plans that will never be fulfilled.
No one understands that more clearly than retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Mark Hertling. Over nearly four decades in uniform, Hertling completed multiple combat tours in Iraq and commanded soldiers at every level of the Army. But throughout those years, he couldn’t shake the very rawest form of fear: that he might not make it home. So he began writing a journal that, he thought, his two young sons would read in the event that their father never returned from the Gulf.
But he did. And in his new book, If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal—which will be released next week—Hertling shares those journal entries, as well as the wisdom he’s gained during the long life he once wasn’t sure he would have.
“I’d like to say that all my training and preparation helped me face going to war. But the truth is: I was very frightened,” he writes, in the exclusive excerpt we’re publishing today. “I wasn’t ready to die. I’m still not.” Yet there’s a reason parents risk their lives to defend their countries. “For years, men have been going to war in the hopes that their children wouldn’t have to,” writes Hertling. “That is part of what love is all about.”
Howard Jacobson is the big fish in the small pond of British Jewish writers. This week, he released his 19th novel, “Howl,” which he wrote in a post–October 7, 2023, rage. It’s a tragicomedy about a Jewish principal at a school in South London whose staff revolt after Hamas attacks Israel. (One of his teachers calls the massacre “Zionist propaganda.”) For this week’s Two Drinks, the 83-year-old author met Dominic Green down the street from his London apartment; they talked about Jacobson’s awkward encounters with literary titans like Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth—and why he yelled at his audience during Jewish Book Week.
Want to know what our fully automated future is going to look like? Then read Evan Gardner’s report from New York City’s first-ever ClawCon—a gathering of over 1,300 devotees of the AI agent known as OpenClaw. Their promise is to free us all from digital admin so we can spend more time drinking beer and hanging out. “If you’re in this room, all your family and friends think you’re crazy,” said the host Michael Galpert. But the young people Evan spoke to couldn’t wait for AI to replace their jobs and save them from online banking.
If you want to understand what life in Iran has been like for women, writes Kat Rosenfield, you need to watch “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” A vampire movie set in the dark streets of a Tehran-like city, it was actually filmed in a California desert town because it’s too dangerous to make honest art in the Islamic Republic. Because of this, Kat writes, the Iranian American director Ana Lily Amirpour “could have made a far more explicitly political movie; instead, she made something much better, much weirder, and much more beautiful.”
Which way, Western woman? On the one hand, we have Hannah Neeleman—a.k.a Ballerina Farm—who had her ninth baby this week and doesn’t care if you call her a tradwife. On the other, we have New York magazine, that infamously progressive publication, which this week published a series of articles on The Cut about whether women should have a baby with titles like “ ‘I Regret Having Children’ ” and “Maybe Knowing Too Much About Motherhood Has Ruined Me.” Suzy Weiss makes sense of these wild extremes in this week’s Second Thought—and interviews a girlboss to boot.
We have another batch of Free Press singles looking for love, and this group is highly eligible: a painter in Jerusalem, a psychology PhD candidate, and a 68-year-old retired judge who is on a “semi-competitive” canoe team. And don’t forget MJ, who never left Atlanta after college because “something about the South—handwritten thank-you notes and never returning an empty dish—speaks to my soul.” Check out the newest FP Cupid ads here, and if you want the chance to be featured next week, write to Cupid@TheFP.com!
We’ve published plenty of other treats this week, from Suzy Weiss’s profile of the man charged with beautifying our government’s very un-chic websites to Nick Clairmont’s entertaining ode to “monitoring the situation” in the Middle East:
How should you spend your weekend? We asked our business and tech editor, Mark Gimein, for his recommendations . . .
📺 Watch . . . the films of Ruben Östlund. The problem with so-called black comedies is they are most often not funny. Not so with Östlund. His best known film, Force Majeure, is a tight family drama set on a ski trip. But his following movies, The Square, about the art world, and Triangle of Sadness, about the foibles of the rich, are even better. Vicious enough to merit the “black comedy” label, but they are genuinely funny, even if—spoiler alert—Triangle of Sadness kills off characters with more abandon than Game of Thrones.
📚 Read . . . City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai by Paul French. It is a story about how an Eastern European Jewish performer turned nightclub promoter teams up with an ex-con Navy vet who burned off his fingertips to make a fortune on illegal slots. The setting is the late 1930s, but here is the twist: The city in the title is Shanghai. Did you know that the pre–World War II Shanghai underworld was dominated by the Jewish mob? If so, you win the prize for mob history deep cuts.
🍳 Eat . . . Everyone with a kid needs a comforting oven-baked or stovetop casserole to pull out. So here’s mine. Take one pound of ground beef, and 17 ounces (one package) of tteokbokki, as in Korean rice cakes. Brown the beef, add five cloves of chopped garlic, white parts of about eight scallions, and lots of fresh ginger cut into matchsticks. Boil the tteokbokki, and toss in with the beef. Then add a mix of five tablespoons of gochujang, two tablespoons of sugar, a quarter cup of soy sauce, one tablespoon of sesame oil, two tablespoons of cooking oil, and a quarter cup of water or chicken broth. Cook until sticky with crispy blackened bits. Serves four, or two adults and one hungry teenager.
This past Tuesday, Chinese communities around the world celebrated the Lantern Festival, which, coinciding with the full moon, marks the end of Chinese New Year celebrations. Releasing lanterns into the sky is supposed to symbolize letting go of your old self. Here’s how the festival was celebrated in Taiwan:
That’s all, folks. Have a great weekend.
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Suckers and losers.
It's normally Lunar New Year vs Chinese New Year in Taiwan... Just saying