It’s Thursday, April 9. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Niall Ferguson on Iran’s skewed definition of victory. Frannie Block speaks to former astronauts about a potentially fatal flaw in the spacecraft that’s just made history. Yascha Mounk on the trouble with college grades. And much more.
But first: Olivia Reingold reports on the Senate race in Michigan that’s become a referendum on Israel and the Middle East.
September 11 isn’t usually a litmus test in American politics. For nearly 25 years, there’s been one perspective we expect leaders in both parties to take toward the attacks: They were acts of savagery, planned and carried out by al-Qaeda, motivated by fundamentalist hatred of the United States.
But one candidate’s remarks this week may mark a new era. Abdul El-Sayed is running for Senate in Michigan, and on Tuesday he held two major rallies with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker—one of the most influential figures on the young left today. Piker declared in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11,” and he gained fame in recent years by accusing Israel and the U.S. of a genocide in Gaza. Yet when a reporter asked El-Sayed about Piker’s views, he refused to disavow them—any of them. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture,” he said. “I thought we were over it.”
Our Olivia Reingold attended one of those rallies, and today she explains why El-Sayed’s comments aren’t a fluke. He speaks for a movement comprising young leftists and Muslim immigrants—two fast-growing constituencies making their mark across American politics. He’s running a campaign unlike any Senate candidate before him—refusing to condemn Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and suggesting that Israel provoked an attack on a U.S. synagogue last month. Read what Olivia asked El-Sayed—and her conversations with the voters who are driving his surge.
—Mene Ukueberuwa
The Ceasefire That Wasn’t |
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One day after President Trump declared a two-week ceasefire in Iran, almost nothing is clear. Is Lebanon included? Is the Strait of Hormuz actually open? Has Iran really agreed to any of Trump’s list of 15 demands? Elliott Abrams cuts through the fog to take stock of what the war has, and hasn’t, accomplished—and what Washington must not give away at the negotiating table. | | |
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Niall Ferguson: Why Iran Thinks It’s Winning |
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Why are missiles landing across the Gulf? Has Iran made reopening the Strait of Hormuz conditional? For the answers to more essential questions about the ceasefire, watch Rafaela Siewert’s interview with Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson as they discuss who’s actually winning this war, and what the Trump administration has misunderstood about Tehran. His blunt verdict: “Trump may have made a mistake by not deploying ground forces.” | | |
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Why Iran’s Reform Movement Failed |
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Historian Arash Azizi didn’t just study Iran’s democracy movement—he lived it. Born in Tehran and now at Yale, he joins Eli Lake on a special episode of Breaking History that asks: Was reform from within in the Islamic Republic ever really possible? How did the regime teach its citizens that dissent was futile? And what does Iran’s past mean for its future? | | |
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