It’s Wednesday, March 18. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Eli Lake on Joe Kent’s resignation. Josh Kaplan investigates whether there’s a moral panic about the “manosphere.” The foreign money behind anti-war protests. Liel Leibovitz explains why he’s proud to call himself a Disney adult. And much more.
But first: The alarmist eco-warrior who never admitted defeat.
Imagine getting almost everything wrong and still transforming the world with your ideas. That, more or less, is what happened to economist and professional eco-pessimist Paul Ehrlich, who died this week at 93. Ehrlich shot to fame in 1968 with his bestseller The Population Bomb. It predicted an explosion in humankind, draining the planet’s resources and triggering a near apocalypse.
Thankfully, Ehrlich would be proven wrong—stunningly wrong—by events. But even if Ehrlich lost the argument, his Malthusian mindset still won him award after award and, in many ways, became conventional wisdom.
Today, we’re bringing you two pieces on Ehrlich’s ideas and why they matter.
Up first, the British science writer Matt Ridley details the callous policy proposals Ehrlich’s thinking led him to support—including forced sterilization programs that Ehrlich called “coercion in a good cause”—and the policymakers who listened to him.
Up next, Larissa Phillips. She was born to parents beholden to Ehrlich’s theories. In fact, she says, she almost wasn’t born because of them: Her parents were trying to model their own family planning on his prescription for zero population growth. Thankfully, they didn’t quite get it right. Ehrlich’s death caused Larissa to contemplate not just the impact of his ideas on her family but also where the line falls—where idealism becomes pretentious, or pessimistic, or harmful.
—The Editors
Joe Kent Resigns. Will Others Follow? |
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For opponents of the war in Iran, director of National Counterterrorism Center Joe Kent, who resigned on Tuesday, is a dissident. He accused Trump of being duped into a war by Israel. But is he a reliable witness on Iran policy? Eli Lake dives into the claims in Kent’s resignation letter, and where his departure leaves the MAGA debate over this war. | | |
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The Boys Are (Mostly) Alright |
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Reports of the manosphere’s sinister influence on young men are greatly exaggerated, writes Josh Kaplan. Nothing has laid this bare quite like the latest film by British documentarian Louis Theroux, “Inside the Manosphere,” an exercise in hand-wringing that stokes an outsized concern about the threat of figures like Andrew Tate radicalizing a generation of boys. “It’s patronizing and infantilizing to assume that just because boys watch these things, they think it’s a perfect and true representation of the world and will act accordingly,” writes Josh. | | |
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The Foreign Money Behind America’s Anti-War Protests |
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Strikes on Iran have opened up a new military front abroad and an old one at home, with protests on the streets of American cities that bear striking similarities to recent protests against ICE, in support of the Cuban regime, or against Israel. Part of the reason why is because the organizers’ funding network is the same. Tal Fortang and Stu Smith follow the money. | | |
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I’m Proud to Call Myself a Disney Adult |
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This Sunday, it wasn’t a canned Oscar acceptance speech that captured the hearts of Americans. It was a 30-second, tear-jerking ad for Disney Cruise Lines, showing a father and son taking the same moonlit walk on a cruise ship deck, year after year. It touched Liel Leibovitz, too, who writes that in a world hellbent on delivering the next shiny new thing, Disney “understands that there’s something far, far greater powering the American experiment: tradition.” Read Liel on why the ad worked—and why he’s proud to be a Disney adult. | | |
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