The most interesting conversations in American life happen in private. This show brings them out of the closet. Stories no one else is telling and conversations with the most fascinating people in the country, every week from The Free Press, hosted by former New York Times and Wall Street Journal journalist Bari Weiss.
I want to tell you the story of a kid, born in 1937 into segregated Washington, D.C. He’s 9 when his father dies and 13 when his mother has a mental breakdown, disappears, and is institutionalized. He’s effectively orphaned. This is how George Raveling’s story begins. Despite being dealt one of the worst cards imaginable, George, now 87, went on to become the most revered basketball coach in the world. He played against Jerry West, the man on the NBA logo. He became only the second black basketb...
Sometimes we have a guest who needs no introduction. You know Dana Perino. She took on the job of White House press secretary when President George W. Bush was at his most unpopular—back in 2007 and 2008, as the Iraq War dragged on. She did not receive a warm welcome from those covering the White House—outlets like The New Republic called her clueless, and she was even injured after an Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at Bush. It was not an easy job, but, as anyone who served in the press corps ba...
President Donald Trump has been in office for 100 days. Israel has been at war with Hamas in Gaza for 570, and Russia and Ukraine have been at war for over 1,000. Douglas Murray has had a front-row seat to all three of these unfolding stories, bringing us reportage and analysis that have illuminated the most urgent issues of our time. His reporting and willingness to call out bad actors across the world and the political spectrum has earned him his fair share of adversaries. Earlier this month, ...
Today marks President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office. What to make of this dizzying first hundred days? As Bret Stephens put it: “I’m hard-pressed to think of a more disastrous first 100 days of any presidency in American history. . . all of the wounds are self-inflicted.” Even some of Trump's most ardent supporters are struggling to understand and support his actions. As Rod Dreher wrote for The Free Press last week: “MAGA tempts the same sorry fate that conservatives like me suffered over ...
Yesterday, The Free Press had a major scoop: The State Department is launching the biggest shake-up in decades in an effort spearheaded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Today, Rubio joins us on Honestly to discuss his goals for restructuring the Department and also how the U.S. is responding to manifold crises at home and abroad, from controversial deportations to the American attempt to end the war in Ukraine to the possibility of a new Iranian nuclear deal. In his confirmation hearing, Secre...
In the past few weeks, Bari has done two episodes on religion—one asking, “Do we need a religious revival?,” and then a follow-up conversation with Ross Douthat asking how people who grew up in the secular West can actually find faith. Today, we have the last installment of this intellectual and religious inquiry, and we are asking a new question: What is the role of religion as a political force in this country? Our guest today, Jonathan Rauch, says: “Christianity is a load-bearing wall of Amer...
You may have noticed on this show that Bari Weiss is always asking her guests, “Do you believe in God?,” “What is your favorite biblical character?,” or “Do we need a religious revival?” And you might be wondering why she keeps knocking on this door? It’s partly because we’re curious about people’s metaphysical beliefs. But it’s also because we think something profound has gotten lost in our society, as we’ve lost traditional religion. You can argue that we are starting to see the beginnings of ...
In 2025 it seems like there are two types of people—those who are insanely diligent about health, the people who learn everything there is to know about ingredients, the people who run every beauty or cleaning product through the EWG Working Group (a database where you can check for the presence of alleged toxins in household ingredients)—And then there are the rest of us. The people who go about their daily lives trying to do the best they can when it comes to health. The problem is—as hard as ...
Bari Weiss and Niall Ferguson discuss the implications of Trump's recent tariff blitz, examining the potential reordering of America's place in the world. They delve into whether these actions will embolden adversaries, weaken alliances, and impact the American economy. Ferguson argues that these policies may inadvertently lead to the dismantling of the American empire, sparking a conversation on the costs and benefits of global hegemony.
Depending on who you talk to, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are either the swampiest of swamp creatures—the epitome of all that is wrong with political journalism—or, alternatively, two of the most interesting, successful entrepreneurs in the new media landscape. In 2006, VandeHei left The Washington Post to co-found Politico, where he was executive editor. His first hire was Mike Allen, then of Time magazine. Politico turned into a massive hit, with Allen as its star writer. During the Obama year...
John McWhorter is one of the greatest living experts on the English language—and many others, too. He’s an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia, a columnist at The New York Times, and he’s an unsung Broadway aficionado. He once told us he could not do an interview because he was busy rehearsing a cabaret show for his bungalow colony. It all sounds like a scene out of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. But in his day job, he is thinking about words, language, and—the not-so-controversial topic ...
A few years ago Jay Bhattacharya was an obscure Stanford professor—a medical doctor who also had a PhD in economics. Then Covid hit, the lockdowns began, and “Doctor Jay”—as he is known—became a pariah in the medical community. That’s because, along with colleagues from Harvard and Oxford, Jay questioned whether the lockdowns were a good idea. They did this in an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration. And this idea, in the madness of that period, was considered so dangerous by fede...
For the last quarter century, an Italian macher from New Jersey has been one of the most powerful people in the United States. If you’re a certain type of nerdy, obsessive, legally inclined conservative, he’s basically Taylor Swift. But most people don’t know who he is because he doesn’t want them to know. He has never held or sought political office. He does not hail from Silicon Valley or Wall Street. He is not a writer, pundit, or political aide. He rarely does interviews. And yet his influen...
The morning of March 8, Mahmoud Khalil was detained at his apartment in New York City. Khalil is a 30-year-old Algerian citizen. He was born in Syria and is of Palestinian descent. He came to this country on a student visa in 2022, married an American citizen in 2023, became a green card holder in 2024, and finished his graduate studies at Columbia University in December 2024. Mahmoud was also the spokesman and negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group that says it is “fightin...
The other week Bari traveled to Austin, Texas, to host a debate on a simple little topic: religion and whether we need more of it. There’s a line from Proverbs that has guided believers for at least the past 2,000 or so years. It goes like this: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” But for most of our lives, this message has been turned on its head. We can’t entirely blame the so-called New Atheists, who dominated the American intellectual scene in the first part of this century, f...
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic. Although they insist they’ll never go into politics themselves, they are offering Democrats a path back to power. To see their way out of the political wilderness, the Democrats need a vision—one that goes beyond resistance to Trump. A vision that can bring back the disaffected Democrats who stayed home, or voted red for the first t...
Alex Karp is many things: a cross-country skier, a long-range shooter, a tai chi expert who might be the only man who knows how to wield a sword but doesn’t know how to drive. He’s also a collector of extremely prestigious degrees. His PhD thesis was called “Aggression in the Life-World: The Extension of Parsons’ Concept of Aggression by Describing the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture.” Since 2003, he has also been the CEO of Palantir, a software and data analytics company that...
Each one of us has a different conception story. For some parents, it’s a romantic night out, maybe over a candlelit dinner. For others, like Bari and Nellie, it involves a trip to a fertility clinic in a mall that doesn’t even validate parking. And of course, for some it’s a long, challenging, emotional process involving needles, hormones, and many false starts. We know a lot of our listeners can relate to that. Now, the topic of infertility often seems like the purview of a doctor’s office or ...
You may have never heard of Sarah Wynn-Williams, but that’s about to change. She’s written a memoir about her nearly seven years at Facebook, the company that has since rebranded as Meta. In doing so, she’s become the company’s highest-ranking whistleblower. Until around 72 hours ago, the book’s existence itself was a secret. Wynn-Williams, a onetime New Zealand diplomat, was effectively the company’s top envoy to governments around the world. She traveled extensively with Mark Zuckerberg and Sh...
Earlier this week on Honestly, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Brianna Wu, and Christopher Caldwell shared their views on President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s showdown with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and on the Russia-Ukraine war more generally. Simply put, Batya and Chris made the case that Russia is not an American adversary in the way China is and that Trump’s seeming sympathy toward Russian president Vladimir Putin is actually a strategic play to pull Russia away from Chin...
It’s been four days since the diplomatic earthquake went down in the Oval Office between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian president Zelensky. The world is still feeling the aftershocks. In Europe, leaders have been jolted into action. Ukraine’s European allies, including British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron, met in London on Sunday to forge their own peace plan and agree on additional support for Kyiv. In Moscow, officials are celebrating T...
Have you ever gone on the internet and stumbled onto this combo of words, or perhaps non-words?: “Dogecoin.” “Shiba Inu.” “Hawkcoin.” “Bored Ape NFT.” If that sounded like gibberish, don’t worry—we’ll explain. And also, time to start learning, because these terms come out of a new financial ecosystem—the world of crypto, a market that started 15 years ago and is now worth about $3.3 trillion. This new world has caught the attention of none other than President Donald Trump. Since coming to offic...
Over the past year, right-wing parties across the West have been sweeping elections. Donald Trump in the United States, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and now Germany. On Sunday, 83 percent of Germans went to the polls—the highest turnout since the Cold War. The Christian Democrats, the country’s center-right party led by Friedrich Merz, won. But that’s not the big story. The big story is that the right-wing populist party, the AfD, came in second p...
I’m sure you remember the images of Kfir and Ariel Bibas. They were just nine months and four years old when they were kidnapped by Hamas along with their mother, Shiri, on October 7, 2023. It was impossible to look at the image of her shielding them, her eyes full of terror, the children clinging to her, and not think of the Holocaust. For more than 500 days, people around the world prayed for the safe return of these babies. Our hopes were raised on February 1, when the fourth member of the fa...
A lot of people are wondering if things in LA would look different if Rick Caruso had won the mayoral race against Karen Bass in 2022. If he had been mayor when devastating fires began in the city last month, would he have prevented them from consuming about 40,000 acres, which is more than twice the area of Manhattan? At the time he ran, many quietly supported the billionaire real estate mogul—scared to come out publicly against the candidate backed by Barack Obama and celebrities like Shonda R...
Running The Free Press is Bari’s hobby, but her true passion is being a yenta. And one thing Bari has learned from talking to young singles is that there is a total breakdown of sexual relations these days between men and women. Some blame social media, dating apps, or the alleged feminization of men. But Louise Perry blames the sexual revolution. In 2022, Louise wrote this for The Free Press: “The sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood. I...
It’s Trump’s third week in office and there is no shortage of news to report. Last week, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard advanced in their congressional confirmation hearings for Health and Human Services secretary, FBI director, and Director of National Intelligence, and criticisms of Gabbard resurfaced over her meeting with former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2017, and over her defense of Edward Snowden—who she refused to call a traitor. Meanwhile, Israeli prime minister Benjamin...
Two weeks ago, America thought it was leading the AI race. Then out of nowhere, an unknown Chinese start-up turned the American stock market—and that assumption—on its head. DeepSeek, a Chinese company founded less than two years ago, released a free AI chatbot that rivals the most advanced available open AI products. And they did it despite America’s prohibition on shipping our most advanced microchips to China. America was caught flat-footed, asking how did this happen? And could we actually l...
Did you know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with naked dwarfs? Did you know that Catherine the Great—long smeared as a nymphomaniac—was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod’s genitals once exploded with maggots? Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and it’s hard to remember any of it. But not ...
Fourteen years ago, Amy Chua published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It was received less like a book and more like a nuclear bomb. Here are some headlines from the time: “Why I Will Never Be a Tiger Mom.” “Why Amy Chua Is Wrong About Parenting.” “Amy Chua Is a Circus Trainer, Not a Tiger Mother.” “The Human Race Needs Elephant Mothers, Not Tiger Mothers.” “Amy Chua's Recipe for Disaster and the Externalized Cost of Book Sales.” Then, just as the publicity around Tiger Mother died down, Amy c...
