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 good. After all, poverty across the world has fallen precipitously in the last 100 years. Life expectancy has nearly doubled. Literacy is four times hig...
Mar 28, 2024•1 hr 23 min
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 inclined creatures. Then, he did it again with The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failur...
Mar 26, 2024•1 hr 15 min
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 Islam that this war represents; what progressives in the West don’t understand about that fight, or about the Middle East more generally; and why ord...
Mar 21, 2024•1 hr 12 min
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 East Jerusalem daily. Then, we went to the key Palestinian political and cultural center of Ramallah. We wanted to hear the unfiltered voices of ordin...
Mar 15, 2024•2 hr 30 min
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 disaster imaginable, what emerged was a level of civic obligation, duty, and sacrifice that they themselves didn’t think they were capable of. Today, Part 1...
Mar 07, 2024•50 min
A few weeks ago, a team of Free Press producers and reporters arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The energy was somber and still, almost like the country and its people were frozen in time. As one mother of a hostage told us, “Every single second of our lives is trauma.” And as the journalist Gadi Taub told us, “People don’t even begin to understand the extent of this earthquake and how it will change Israel.” Since the earliest hours of October 7, we’ve been reporting on the war in Isra...
Mar 05, 2024•6 min
American kids are the freest, most privileged kids in all of history. They are also the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. Nearly a third of teen girls say they have seriously considered suicide. For boys, that number is an alarming 14 percent. What’s even stranger is that all of these worsening mental health outcomes for kids have coincided with a generation of parents hyper-fixated on the mental health and well-being of their children. Take, for example, the ...
Feb 27, 2024•1 hr 26 min
Two years ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The costs of this war have been unbelievably high. Half a million Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been either killed or wounded. In terms of cost, the U.S. alone has spent $113 billion on the war. And an aid package that includes another $60 billion for Ukraine is stuck in Congress. Americans’ changing sentiment about the war has certainly contributed to that package being in limbo. Two years ago, there was broad support for the wa...
Feb 22, 2024•1 hr 15 min
Last week, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny joined a long line of ordinary and noble people who were and are the victims of Stalinist tyranny and now Russian authoritarianism. Just 10 days prior, Tucker Carlson interviewed Putin, Navalny’s nemesis—and soon to be murderer—in a two-hour conversation at the Kremlin. The name Alexei Navalny never came up. Then, when Carlson appeared onstage at the World Government Summit in Dubai and was asked why he hadn’t pressed Putin about Navalny, he re...
Feb 20, 2024•12 min
Today, we’re thrilled to bring you not Honestly with Bari Weiss, but maybe something even better: Blocked and Reported with Suzy Weiss! If you haven’t heard of Blocked and Reported, it’s one of my very favorite shows hosted by two of my favorite journalists, Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal. The tagline for the show is “a podcast about internet nonsense,” but that undersells it. Katie and Jesse do a lot of good journalism on this show—it’s just swathed in humor and irreverence. This week, Free Pres...
Feb 15, 2024•1 hr 22 min
A little over two years ago, in the pages of The Free Press, Pano Kanelos announced that he was starting a new university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth. The headline was stark: “We Can't Wait For Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One.” I was one of the founding trustees. The announcement generated a lot of headlines. As expected, a lot of people dunked on it. They said, “why in a country with thousands of colleges and universities do we need a new one...
Feb 13, 2024•1 hr 18 min
For this week’s Honestly, we’re sharing a favorite episode from a favorite podcast, one you may not have heard of: UnHerd with Freddie Sayers. UnHerd’s mission is similar to ours: to push back against the herd mentality, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people, and places. On this episode, host Freddie Sayers talks to Andrew Sullivan, one of America's best known political observers and writers, about something very few public intellectuals are willing to talk about: what he...
Feb 09, 2024•39 min
There’s increasing concern that as scary as this period feels—between Russia’s two-year war in Ukraine and Hamas’s ongoing war with Israel—that all of this will come to be seen as the calm before the storm. Should China decide to move against Taiwan in some way, then we’ll have war in three regions, and U.S. involvement in all three. Or perhaps by then it will not seem like separate wars, but a single global one. Most Americans in the last fifty years, and certainly since the end of the Cold War...
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Today, Yascha Mounk and Christopher Rufo debate the origins of DEI and the right way to fight the illiberal orthodoxy that has consumed our schools and institutions. Christopher is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a board member at New College of Florida, and maybe the country’s most influential conservative activist. He thinks that using the power of the law to stop DEI is essential. Yascha is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an international affairs professor ...
Jan 26, 2024•2 hr 55 min
It’s been four years since the first American death from the coronavirus. Four years since we were told that wearing masks—even cloth masks—were essential to keeping us safe. The same goes for lockdowns and social distancing. Any inconvenience to society was outweighed by the lives saved. And remember what President Biden told us after Covid vaccines were rolled out a year later? “The CDC is saying, they have concluded, that fully vaccinated people are at a very, very low risk of getting Covid-1...
Jan 17, 2024•57 min
One hundred days ago, the world changed. October 7 has proven to be many things: the opening salvo in a brutal war between Israel and Hamas; an attack that could precipitate a broader, regional war; the beginning of a global, ongoing orgy of antisemitism; a wake-up call regarding the rot inside the West’s once-great sensemaking institutions; a possible realignment of our politics. One of the things it has also been is a test. A moral test that many in the West have failed. That test of moral con...
Jan 15, 2024•31 min
We're less than two weeks out from the first Democratic Primary in New Hampshire, and the mood among Democrats is grim. Joe Biden is polling behind Trump in almost every national poll. And the feeling among Democrats is well, there’s just nothing we can do about it. Enter Dean Phillips: the one lone soldier Democrat trying to make a last ditch effort to stop the 2020 rematch from hell. Dean is a moderate Democratic Congressman from Minnesota. He has political experience, but not the baggage of a...
Jan 10, 2024•1 hr 25 min
Last year was certainly eventful. It brought spy balloons, Donald Trump’s indictments, the coronation of a king, the fall of a crypto prince, and no shortage of chaos in Washington, from the ousting of Kevin McCarthy to the farcical George Santos scandal. Oh, and then there’s the small matter of two major wars, one in Gaza and one in Ukraine. Plus, ongoing tension between the U.S. and China. On a cheerier note, 2023 was also the year of Barbenheimer, the year it felt like AI really arrived, and ...
Jan 05, 2024•2 hr 49 min
Over the last six months, we’ve run two essay contests in The Free Press. The first was for high schoolers; we asked them to write about a problem facing American society—and how to fix it. The second contest was for an older generation—70 years and over—and we asked them to tell a story about an event that shaped their life and helped give them wisdom or a fresh perspective. Today, we are thrilled to bring you the winners of both of those contests. Voices of wisdom exactly 60 years apart. First...
Dec 25, 2023•29 min
Over the last month, America has been witnessing one of the biggest abortion battles in the country since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Today, Bari shares her thoughts on the case of Kate Cox. She explains why it’s an appalling example of the cruelty of near-total abortion bans, and a tragic rebuttal to the pro-life claim that exceptions to these bans allow for a doctor and patient to make decisions in the woman’s best medical interest. And, Bari explains why she still grapples with the other ...
Dec 22, 2023•17 min
On October 7, Hamas terrorists stormed into the home of Hadar and Itay Berdichevsky in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the Israeli communities along the Gaza border. Hadar and Itay— both 30 years old—were butchered in their own home. Miraculously, their 10-month-old twins survived. The babies were found—rescued by the IDF—14 hours later, crying in their cots. Their parents’ bodies lie in pools of blood around them. Today on Honestly, we’re talking with the twins’ aunt and uncle, Maya and Dvir Rosenfeld...
Dec 20, 2023•1 hr 16 min
How did the congressional hearing on antisemitism last week go so awry? Was the resignation of University of Pennsylvania’s president just another cancellation, only this time on the other side of the political aisle? How can we fix our broken universities? And what’s at stake if we don’t? Bari’s thoughts on these questions and more on today’s episode. For further reading on these topics, please check out the following pieces in The Free Press: The Ouster of Penn’s President Won’t Fix the Proble...
Dec 14, 2023•29 min
One of the words that’s become utterly void of meaning in the last few years because of its overuse and misuse is privilege. White privilege, male privilege, able-bodied privilege, gender privilege, heterosexual privilege, even hot privilege. In these contexts, privilege is a stain, a kind of original sin meant to guilt the offending party into repenting for it at every twist and turn in their life. “Check your privilege” became a common refrain of the past decade. What all of this has done is c...
Dec 08, 2023•1 hr 21 min
In the past few decades, the Democratic Party has undergone a seismic shift. Kitchen table issues like the economy and public safety have been overshadowed by more elitist topics like identity politics, gender ideology, defunding the police, climate change, and the vaguely defined yet rigidly enforced ideology of anti-racism, which sees white supremacy as the force behind every institution in America. But while activists, lobbyists, and pundits were busy reshaping the Democratic Party, ordinary ...
Nov 29, 2023•45 min
It’s Thanksgiving week, which for many of us means eating too much turkey and pumpkin pie. For others, it means getting into arguments with your Gen Z cousin who, in a fit of righteous rage, calls you a settler colonialist and storms out of the dining room. Whatever your holiday may bring, we here at Honestly wanted to bring you a drop of delight from none other than the most delightful man on planet Earth: David Sedaris. Sedaris is a humorist and author of many best-selling books: Calypso, Thef...
Nov 21, 2023•16 min
When The Free Press decided to rent a theater with 1,600 seats for our first-ever live debate a few months ago, most people looked at us with a mixture of pity and concern. We would have to fill all 1,600 seats. The theater we’d booked in L.A.—not exactly a city known for its culture of public debates—was smack in the middle of downtown, where after-hours can look a little bit like San Francisco during the day. To make matters worse, we had only managed to get the place on a Wednesday night. We ...
Nov 17, 2023•2 hr 31 min
Months ago, I was asked to give a lecture at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention. It was a surprising invitation for a number of reasons. First, I am not a lawyer. Second: I am not a member of the Federalist Society—the prominent conservative and libertarian legal organization. (If the name rings a bell it’s probably because you’ve heard of it in the context of the hearings of any of the conservative justices who currently sit on the court.) Third: If you look at the people who ...
Nov 14, 2023•43 min
For today’s episode, we’re thrilled to share the most recent episode of our friend Sam Harris’s podcast, Making Sense. Moral confusion is plaguing this moment like never before. It’s everywhere: from college campuses to congress. Sam, better than almost anyone, is able to speak to that confusion, with facts, nuance and moral clarity. Importantly, he doesn’t just visit this topic with the narrow lens of this particular war between Hamas and Israel, but with a bird’s eye view of history. But accor...
Nov 12, 2023•1 hr 4 min
For the longest time, when you thought about the most powerful person in the world, the person who probably came to mind was the president of the United States, the leader of the free world. But in 2023, the person who comes to mind for most people these days isn’t an elected official at all. Instead, a lot of people picture a 52-year-old civilian who, through his own determination, ambition, and sheer will, has amassed an enormous amount of wealth—more than any other person on this planet—and a...
Nov 08, 2023•1 hr 24 min
There are a lot of experts that you may have heard on the news in the past few weeks. People who know a great deal about Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran or China or Russia—regional experts. There are also many subject matter experts who can tell us about cyber warfare or decolonization or, for example, the way that foreign governments have influenced higher education in America. All of those stories are important, but each one of those topics gives you only a slice of the whole story. What if you wan...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 16 min
