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| By The Free Press |
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
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The Girls Aren’t All Right
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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.
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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.”
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Have Money to Lose? Bet on Allbirds’ AI Pivot. | ||||
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