It’s been a little over a decade since cannabis was first legalized recreationally in the United States. As of today, recreational weed is legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia, and Americans have never been more pro-weed. In a Gallup poll from last November, 70 percent of U.S. adults said they support the federal legalization of marijuan…

Steven Pinker is a world-renowned cognitive psychologist, and is widely regarded as one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. His work delves into the complexities of cognition, language, and social behavior, and his research offers a window into the fundamental workings of the human mind. Pinker, who is the author of nine books i…

Last Saturday, stunning news broke out of Israel: four hostages had been rescued by the Israel Defense Forces in a daring daylight operation in central Gaza. Noa Argamani, 26; Almog Meir Jan, 22; Andrey Kozlov, 27; and Shlomi Ziv, 41, were liberated after 245 days in captivity. The first name, Noa Argamani, was one that many people recognized immed…

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it was the largest military attack on a European country since World War II. Reliable casualty figures are hard to come by, but U.S. intelligence officials estimated last year that as many as 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed in the conflict, with an estimated 15–30 million refugees. Congr…

On May 30, former president Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to adult actress Stormy Daniels. His sentencing has been scheduled for July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention. He faces a possible sentence of four years for each count. If you wer…

At the start of the twentieth century, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The capital, Buenos Aires, was known as “the Paris of South America.” A lot can happen in a hundred years. Argentina today is in grave crisis. It has defaulted on its sovereign debt three times since 2001, and a few months ago it faced an annualized i…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of several books—including the 2006 autobiography Infidel—as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution She runs a foundation focused on human rights and, yes, she has a Substack. But Ayaan comes from a very different world from most of the people who inhabit our think tanks and ivory towers. Unlike those of us in the …

Fifteen years ago, Vice was the envy of the media industry. While other outlets were shrinking, the edgy multimedia organization with a knack for virality was growing. At its peak, Vice had a reported value of $6 billion. At one point, Disney offered to buy the company for $3.4 billion. The CEO said no. Something even bigger was on the horizon. Exc…

The first episode of Seinfeld aired in 1989. Thirty-five years later, the show remains at the apex of American culture. People speak in Seinfeld-isms, they flirt on dating apps over Seinfeld, they rewatch old episodes of Seinfeld when they’re feeling down. And, in the case of the Weiss family, Lou still watches it every night from 11 pm to 12 am on…

A few weeks ago, there was an awesome event in Brooklyn in partnership with UnHerd called Dissident Dialogues. It was exactly what it sounds like: debates and discussions on the most pressing questions facing our society today. Questions like: Have we reached peak woke? Can universities be saved? Can liberalism be saved? Is government censorship ju…

Nellie Bowles wasn’t always the TGIF queen you know and love at The Free Press. In fact, Nellie was, for a very long time, deeply embedded in the progressive left. Before Bari and Nellie met—and fell in love, blah blah blah—in 2019, Nellie was nothing short of a media darling. She had the right ideas, she wrote the right stories, and NYT readers at…

There’s a new $6 billion-dollar industry. Its global market size is expected to increase to $100 billion within the decade. No, it’s not a fancy new app or a revolutionary gadget: it’s weight-loss drugs. Just a few years ago no one had even heard the word Ozempic. Almost overnight, the drug previously used to treat type 2 diabetes became a househol…

The news lately has not exactly been a walk in the park. Iran launched hundreds of rockets at Israel, creating the prospect of World War III; we have Trump’s ongoing criminal trial; a TikTok ban; a war in Ukraine; and much of the Ivy League is now co-opted by Hamas. Should we go on? Today’s episode isn’t about any of that. Because sometimes we just…

The United States is home to more immigrants than any other country in the world. It is a truism that everyone who lives here at some point came from somewhere else. At the same time, debates about who and how many people to let in have roiled the nation since our very founding. And in the past few years, things have heated up to a new level. That’…

President Biden just signed into law a bill forcing the sale of TikTok by its Chinese parent ByteDance—or else face an outright ban. The measure was included in a bill providing a $95.3 billion foreign aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. Proponents of the bill cite privacy and national security concerns. TikTok, like all social media giant…

This weekend at Columbia and Yale, student demonstrators told Jewish students to “go back to Poland.” A Jewish woman at Yale was assaulted with a Palestinian flag. And an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia told students to go home for their safety. Demonstrators on these campuses shouted: “Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” In o…

It was November 30, 2021, when Nicole Avant got a call in the middle of the night from her husband. The unthinkable had happened. Her otherwise healthy mom, Jacqueline Avant, was in critical condition at the hospital. She had been shot. Nicole would soon find out that her mother had been having an ordinary evening at her home in Beverly Hills when …

In the late hours of Saturday night 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles barreled toward Israel. It was a direct and unprecedented strike on Israel from Iran. Extraordinarily, Israel—with the help of the Americans, the British, the French, and even the Jordanians and the Saudis—were able to intercept 99 percent of the missiles…

Uri Berliner is a senior business editor at NPR. In his 25 years with NPR, his work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Gerald Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award, among others. Today, we published in The Free Press his firsthand account of the transformation he has witnessed at…

On Election Night 2016, many of us thought we knew who would be the next president of the United States. We were blindsided when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Legacy media quickly scrambled to explain what had happened. They ultimately arrived at an explanation: Trump’s voters were racist, xenophobic conspiracy theorists, and possibly even …

If the First Industrial Revolution used water and steam to fundamentally change the nature of work, the current industrial revolution—the disruption of automation, information, the internet, and now AI—is transforming everything about the way we work, connect, and interact with the natural world. These changes have largely been regarded as a net go…

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been explaining the human condition to us better than anyone else. He first did it with his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, which explored why people were so passionately divided over politics and religion, and argued that people are fundamentally religiously incl…

Today, we close out the Israel series with a conversation with the journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who is one of the most important and insightful writers of our time on Israel and the Middle East. We talk about many things, including: the uncertain future for Israelis, for Palestinians, and for Jews around the world; the larger fight happening within…

When we went to Israel, we tried tirelessly to get into Gaza but Israel’s counteroffensive made it impossible for us to go to the strip during those days. Instead, we spent time in and around the West Bank. First, we went to the Qalandia checkpoint, one of the biggest in Israel, where tens of thousands of Palestinians cross from the West Bank into …

What happens when a country has to ask its citizens the unthinkable: What are you willing to die for? It’s a question that feels so outside the current American experience. When was the last time you asked yourself, What would I do if I had to fight for my home, my family, my nation? When the citizens of Israel were confronted with the worst disast…