The Free Press
It’s Wednesday, February 26. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Charles C. Mann on how we came to live like kings; how Western judges do China’s bidding in Hong Kong; and a modest proposal: compulsory vasectomies.
But first: Important developments on three stories The Free Press has run in the last year.
Last January, Rupa Subramanya reported on the case of Richard Glossip, who has been on death row for nearly a quarter century, convicted of a murder almost everyone agrees he is not guilty of. Glossip has had three last meals. He’s said goodbye to his wife, Lea, five times. A year ago, Rupa spoke to Glossip about his case being heard by the Supreme Court—his final throw of the legal dice. “I am here because of what happened then, but I don’t have to live in the past—what happened then. It’s about fixing it now.”
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Glossip’s case—and ordered a retrial. And if the Oklahoma County district attorney believes there is not enough evidence to convict Glossip for murder again, a trial will not be called—and Glossip will finally walk free. Rupa got in touch with Lea, who said: “This is truly a miracle.”
Read Rupa Subramanya, “Death Row Inmate Saved by Supreme Court.”
In a story we ran last August, Sally Satel reported on a sinister campaign by a group of Chicago-based therapists to blacklist their “Zionist” colleagues by not referring patients to them. The case was not a one-off. This week, a letter signed by 3,500 mental health professionals alleges that the leaders of the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest professional organization of psychologists, have allowed antisemitism to run rampant. Among the evidence cited in the letter: supporting Hamas in APA listservs, inviting speakers “notorious for antisemitic rhetoric” to headline APA conferences, and failing to reprimand a senior leader for diagnosing Zionism as a “psychosis.”
Read Sally Satel, “American Psychological Association Slammed for ‘Virulent’ Jew Hate.”
Free Press senior editor Emily Yoffe first wrote about Eithan Haim last June. He was the whistleblower who revealed that Texas Children’s Hospital continued to perform gender transitions on children even after it had declared a moratorium on the controversial practice. For this, Haim, a Texas surgeon, became the target of the Biden Department of Justice, which indicted him for allegedly violating patient privacy laws and threatened him with up to ten years’ imprisonment.
Trump’s DOJ dropped the case against Haim last month. Then, on Friday, the administration took further action, rescinding the Biden-era executive order that empowered hospitals to evade state-level investigations of their pediatric transgender practices, and left whistleblowers helpless.
Read our reporting on Haim’s case here, here, and here.
All these stories are about major flaws in systems we should be able to rely on—criminal justice, healthcare, and therapy—as well as the people working to fix those systems. That’s why we’ve followed them so closely. Our next story is about appreciating the systems that work.
“Too many of us know next to nothing about the systems that undergird our lives,” writes Charles C. Mann, in his introductory essay to a New Atlantis series, which we’re reprinting below. The mechanisms that deliver food, electricity, healthcare, and clean water to billions are “the cathedrals of our secular era.”
Read his piece, “We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It.”
How Western Judges Became China’s “Puppets”
Are the foreign judges who sit on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal helping guarantee the basic rights of Hong Kongers—or nothing more than puppets for a regime in Beijing that is tightening the screws on the prosperous former British colony?
That’s the question at the heart of Frannie Block’s story today. She talks to Lord Jonathan Sumption, a British judge who has resigned from the court. “All that we were doing is giving a spurious impression of legitimacy to a system that was becoming increasingly unattractive,” he said.
Read Frannie on how Hong Kong’s foreign judges are doing China’s bidding.
On Honestly: German Elections, Antisemitic Nurses, and the Latest Hostage Release
On the latest episode of Honestly, Bari talks to regular guests Batya Ungar-Sargon and Brianna Wu as well as Quillette founder Claire Lehmann about the latest headlines, including what the German election means for the rest of the West. They also discuss the disturbing case of two Australian nurses who went viral after they were caught boasting about how they would kill Israeli patients—as well as the latest and arguably most grotesque hostage release in Gaza. To listen to their conversation, hit the play button below, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts:
A Modest Proposal: Compulsory Vasectomies
Women complain of the pressure of the biological clock, which dictates many of the choices they make like where to live, or whether to go for a promotion. Some try to escape it by freezing their eggs. Meanwhile, many men skate blissfully through their twenties without so much as a second thought to family matters.
But imagine, for a moment, that instead of trying to rid women of their biological clocks, we forced men to have them as well.
That’s the—well—ballsy thought experiment conducted by Amelia Miller, a student studying intimacy and technology at Oxford, in The Free Press today. She considers what might happen if all men were obligated to get the snip right around when women’s fertility starts to drop.
Insane? Yes. Unethical? Certainly. But Amelia’s provocative satire gets at an important point. Read it here: Why slow down the biological clock for women when you could speed it up for men?
Ahead of his trip to Washington, UK prime minister Keir Starmer announced that his government will increase its military spending to 3 percent of GDP. The hike marks Britain’s “biggest sustained increase in defense spending since the end of the Cold War,” Starmer said. His announcement seemed to mirror Trump’s language on the issue: “All European allies must step up and do more for our own defense.”
Vivek Ramaswamy has announced he’s running for Ohio governor, capping months of speculation after his early departure from the DOGE team. “He is something SPECIAL,” wrote President Trump on Truth Social, announcing his “COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT.” Elon Musk also offered his backing. Vivek’s exit from Trump’s orbit followed his viral characterization of American culture as “venerating mediocrity,” provoking swift backlash on the right.
An “unknown disease” that kills those it infects within days is spreading through the Congo and has killed 53 people. The disease originated in a small, remote village, where three young children ate an infected bat carcass. The World Health Organization said the illness, which causes a fever and severe internal bleeding, poses “a significant public health threat” and is monitoring its spread closely.
Yesterday saw two more aviation incidents in what has now become a string of near misses and dangerous accidents. First, a Delta flight was forced to make an emergency landing in Atlanta after smoke filled the cabin. Then, a Southwest flight landed on the same Chicago runway a private jet was crossing. The pilot averted disaster by swiftly taking off again.
A group of farmers and environmentalists sued the Department of Agriculture after the agency deleted its climate data. The farmers claim that the data, while billed as related to climate change, is crucial for their “agricultural decisions” and agency funding choices. An attorney for the group said that the “USDA should be working to protect our food system from droughts, wildfires, and extreme weather, not denying the public access to critical resources.”
A trial began yesterday in England for three men charged with stealing a golden toilet worth £4.75 million ($6 million). A flush of interest has followed the case. The fully functioning high-end latrine, designed by an Italian craftsman and named America, was on display as an artistic exhibit at Blenheim Palace, the Oxfordshire country house where Winston Churchill was born, when bathroom burglars forced their entry, smashed the toilet loose with sledgehammers, and left a terrible mess as water gushed through broken pipes. Hopes of retrieving the golden potty were wiped out, as prosecutors explained it had been split into smaller parts.
"The disease originated in a small, remote village, where three young children ate an infected bat carcass."
Bats again? Can we please all agree that bats are not food?
BTW, I realize Covid was not caused by eating bats, but rather by Chinese biological warfare experiments escaping the lab. But really, freakin' bats, again?
We need a study of death penalty cases to distinguish cases that were proven beyond a reasonable doubt and cases that were proven beyond all doubt. We need to establish a list of elements that introduce doubt. We need to establish a list of elements that indicate absence of doubt. Once we have these lists, all death penalty cases need to be reviewed. Any case where there are elements that introduce doubt should be commuted to life imprisonment. This type of commutation/clemency program would reduce the chance that innocent people could be executed.