Best of The Free Press: It’s Okay to Change Your Mind

Welcome back to our holiday series, Best of The Free Press—your essential guide to all the stories you need to read before the year’s end. Each day this week (except Sunday—that’s for Things Worth Remembering), a different Free Presser will nominate a handful of the illuminating, challenging, or just plain delightful pieces we published over the year, and explain why it’s time to revisit them. Yesterday, Managing Editor Margi Conklin wrote about the stories that stirred her soul. Today, Deputy Managing Editor Joe Nocera writes about the stories that made him rethink some deeply held beliefs.

I’m going to be honest. I first approached The Free Press because I needed the money. It was late 2023 and, having just finished a book, I had to find a job—or at least a steady writing gig. The Free Press looked like it was publishing interesting work, so I got in touch. Our courtship started slowly, The Free Press and I, but in time we fell in love and tied the knot. Thankfully, it came with a salary.

The thing about falling in love is that it is a time when you are completely open to what your betrothed has to say and how she thinks. I’m a liberal living in Manhattan, a borough enclosed by a progressive bubble that independent thought struggles to penetrate. But my book, The Big Fail, was about the government’s appalling response to the Covid pandemic, starting with the insanity of lockdowns and school closures, so I had already poked a few holes in the bubble. In fact, for much of my career as an opinion journalist, I had championed certain causes that liberals and progressives viewed as anathema. (I once got accosted in a grocery store because I had written a column in The New York Times in favor of fracking. But that’s a story for another day.)

To work at The Free Press, though, you have to completely exit the bubble. This is one of the things I’ve come to value most about it. My colleagues and our contributors have opinions across the political spectrum—and consequently, we publish articles across the political spectrum. I’ll admit I found it annoying during the presidential campaign that many of my colleagues kept hitting Kamala Harris over the head with a two-by-four. But I couldn’t deny the rationale—that the Democratic presidential candidate fundamentally had nothing to say. When Bari was asked why we focused more on Harris than Donald Trump, she replied that the legacy media was all over Trump, and somebody needed to hold Harris’s feet to the fire. I couldn’t disagree.

And the Free Press articles and podcasts that I find myself reflecting on, as the year ends, are the ones that most made me rethink my bubble views.

One important reason Free Press stories are persuasive is because we do the on-the-ground reporting, which means our stories aren’t skewed in one direction or the other. They are simply, you know, the facts.

Let’s start with immigration. Like any card-carrying liberal—and as the grandson of Italian immigrants—I am devoutly pro-immigration. So when the border crisis began after President Joe Biden took over, I was unperturbed. It wasn’t until I began editing Madeleine Rowley’s stories about the border that I began having second thoughts. Her first big immigration story explained how the government was paying billions to a handful of nongovernmental organizations to relocate underage migrants—and that far too often, the NGOs were putting migrants in incredibly unsafe situations.

Her second story was even more shocking. It explained how many of these migrants were being sexually trafficked by the cartels in cities all over America. I’m still pro-immigration, but I now believe that the only way to stop the exploitation of illegal migrants is to tighten up the border, and that the country should expand the number of legal immigrants allowed in every year. Thank you, Maddie.

Vinay Prasad, a practicing hematologist-oncologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, has written some terrific pieces for The Free Press. His most recent was entitled “A Simple Litmus Test for RFK Jr.’s Ideas.”

If you’re like me, you probably view RFK Jr. as a crank—someone who spouts ridiculous conspiracy theories about vaccines. Since Trump nominated him to be the secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr.’s views have suddenly taken on immense importance. Prasad’s article goes through some of the key ones—and makes important distinctions between those ideas that truly are crazy (his anti-vax stance) and the ideas that actually make sense (his opposition to many food additives). If his nomination is approved by the Senate, this distinction is something to which we are all going to have to pay attention.

Nobody at The Free Press has affected my thinking more than my colleague—and now my friend—Eli Lake. This is especially true when it comes to Trump. I believe that Trump is a grifter and a crook who is out only for himself; no one is going to shake me from that belief. I think the Jack Smith investigation into the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago was legitimate, and so was his probe into Trump’s ugly effort to overturn the 2020 election. But Eli’s work convinced me that at least some of the prosecutions were, as the Republicans have long contended, an effort by Democrats to “get” Trump, and to weaken him as a presidential candidate—lawfare, as they call it. Eli has been particularly scornful of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s flimsy case against Trump for paying off two women he had sex with. He brought me around on that one. Take a look for yourself: Eli’s awfully convincing.

Then there’s Eli’s podcast (and article) about the fall of Rome. Yes, that’s right: the fall of Rome. It’s about a Roman tribune named Tiberius Gracchus, who broke norms, just as Trump likes to do. But as Eli points out, every time he broke a norm, his opponents upped the ante by breaking a different norm. This process of escalation continued until Tiberius was beaten to death—talk about a norm violation!—and there were no norms at all. It led, says Eli, to a century of bloodshed.

Eli draws the parallel to the U.S. today, suggesting that Trump’s norm violations have led the Democrats to commit their own norm violations, just like Tiberius’s opponents. When I read that Biden was considering a preemptive pardon to people he thinks Trump will go after—something that no president has ever considered—I thought of Eli’s podcast. It’s a brilliant piece of work:

As for me, I’m still more liberal than not, and my hope for 2025 is that I will bring my colleagues around on some issues I still hold dear—like why DEI sometimes serves a purpose, and why vaping could save millions of lives.

The president-elect? I still loathe him, but as you can see from this column, I’ve shed the Trump Derangement Syndrome that characterizes, say, the Upper West Side. As I write in the column, “The voters have spoken.”

Beyond the Best of The Free Press, here’s what summed up my 2024. . .

Best thing I read this year: A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery, by Lawrence Ingrassia.

Best thing I watched: Fleishman Is in Trouble on Hulu.

Best thing I heard: Merrily We Roll Along (on Broadway), with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

Best thing I bought: YouTube Music subscription.

Best thing I ate: Two Oreos and milk before bed.

Biggest regret of the year: Two Oreos and milk before bed.

Best thing that happened: Joining The Free Press.

Do I have a New Year’s resolution? No. If you don’t have one, you won’t disappoint yourself.

What I am most looking forward to in 2025: Winning the Pulitzer Prize (just kidding!)

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