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Recovering Addicts Save an Opioid Town Oliver Wiseman

Published

12 months ago

February 7, 2024

A child inside Ready Set Play toy store in Hazard, Kentucky. (Stacy Kranitz for The Free Press)

Sam Quinones has been covering America’s opioid epidemic for about a decade. He detailed the decline of Appalachia in his seminal book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.

But a funny thing happened when he went to the town of Hazard, Kentucky, last spring. Even though the town sits in the county most devastated by opioids in the whole of the United States, Quinones looked around and saw “pockets of hope.”

In the past few years, 43 businesses have opened in Hazard, including a bookstore, a toy store, a café, a women’s boutique, and a smoothie shop.

More than 170 new jobs have been created. And about a quarter of those new jobs are held by recovering addicts.

In a story for The Free Press, Quinones tells how Hazard is being rescued by its locals, many of whom are rebuilding themselves at the same time. And they said they are no longer waiting for outsiders or the government or big-box stores to save them.

“When somebody gets clean, they want to change the world,” Stephanie Callahan, a former addict and current business owner in Hazard, told Quinones. “You do something just to prove you can do it.”

After writing so much for so long about the ravages of addiction, Sam said he seized on this story of redemption.

As he told us, “It feels good to be able to write a story about American renewal.”

Read his full dispatch here:

Stumbling toward the White House

Do voters trust Biden on. . . anything? Why are Democrats so mean to Dean Phillips? And what will Chris Christie do next? These questions—and others—answered in our (semi-) regular report from the campaign trail.

→ A-poll-calypse now: There have been lots of bad polls for Biden lately. But there’s bad, and then there’s the set of numbers published by NBC on Sunday. Where to start? Perhaps with the big headline number: in head-to-head matchups, Biden loses to Trump by five points. (The pair were neck and neck back in September.) And then here’s what voters said when asked who they thought would perform better on a series of issues:

Ouch. The really worrying thing for Biden is that 20-point gap on the economy even with the GDP expanding, inflation cooling, jobs surging, and consumer sentiment finally improving.

And when it comes to the question of mental fitness, Biden didn’t improve matters on Sunday, when he told an anecdote about a G7 meeting in 2020 where he met “Mitterrand from Germany.” François Mitterrand was, of course, French (something Biden corrected) and died in 1996.

→ Don’t be mean to Dean: Perhaps Team Biden will take some solace from the results in South Carolina over the weekend, where the president won with 96 percent of the vote. Those are North Korean numbers. Pyong-dang, Mr. President!

Making light of his disastrous loss, long-shot Democratic candidate Dean Phillips posted on X when his vote tally finally exceeded 1,000: “Cracking four digits never felt so good! Congratulations, Mr. President, on a good old fashioned whooping. See you in Michigan.”

Self-deprecating. Funny. Good stuff. But Biden World couldn’t resist some snark: “My dude, you came third in a one person race,” quipped former White House comms chief Kate Bedingfield.

At least the Biden crew are finally acknowledging the Minnesota lawmaker’s existence. Dean, you’re living rent-free in their heads. Keep on keeping on, buddy.

→ From the lake to the lake: Progressives in the Democratic Party, angered by the president’s staunch support of Israel post–October 7, aren’t helping. A new campaign group, called Listen to Michigan, is plotting to upend Biden’s numbers in the state’s primary later this month. Run by Rashida “River to the Sea” Tlaib’s younger sister, Layla Elabed, the group plans to spend $250,000 to persuade voters to check “uncommitted” next to Biden’s name on the ballot.

The anti-Israel left might be good at making a lot of noise—the president’s own speeches have been regularly disrupted in recent weeks—but Biden’s position on Israel is popular with most Americans. The latest Harvard CAPS-Harris poll finds that 80 percent of voters support Israel in the conflict and that two in three oppose an unconditional cease-fire, and back a cease-fire only once the hostages are released and Hamas is removed from power. In purely electoral terms, Biden is pursuing the least bad option. But collapsing support among progressives and Muslim voters could still leave him unstuck in Michigan.

→ Christie can’t quit: Did you miss Chris Christie? No? Well, he’s back. The former New Jersey governor is tanned, rested, and ready to get back into the limelight after his quixotic GOP primary bid. In an interview with Good Morning America’s George Stephanopoulos, Christie was asked what he’d say to No Labels, the group readying a third-party challenge to Trump and Biden, if they asked him to be their candidate. “Oh, I don’t know. There’d be a long conversation between me and [my wife] Mary Pat, I can guarantee you that.” In other words: maybe?

ICYMI: We’ve released the first in a series of videos from Bari and more of my Free Press colleagues’ recent trip to Israel. In it, Bari talks to family members of the hostages still being held in Gaza, including Rachel Goldberg, whose 23-year-old son Hersh is still in captivity. Of her daily struggle, she told Bari: “I say before I get out of bed, ‘Now pretend to be a human.’ ”

Watch the full video here:

Fight Club: Apple Vision Pro Edition

Apple released its Vision Pro goggles last week. The $3,499 headset, which merges digital apps into users’ real-world surroundings, is the tech giant’s biggest innovation in more than a decade. Footage of early adopters wearing their new goggles in the wild looks like a sci-fi movie: just check out this guy sporting them while driving his Tesla Cybertruck, another user courtside at a Celtics game, and another on the subway.

Is this a glimpse of the dystopia we’ll all soon be living? The biggest productivity upgrade since the smartphone? A toy for rich tech obsessives that’ll never catch on? To decide, we asked Free Press Zoomers Julia Steinberg and Kiran Sampath, who were just twinkles in their parents’ eyes when the first iPod was released. They both tried out the goggles, and duke it out below:

First up, Julia makes the case for Apple’s new gadget:

Did it feel a smidge dystopian putting on goggles that can, with the turn of a dial, transform your immediate surroundings into the moon or the ocean or a mountaintop? Absolutely. But, faux space travel aside, trying on Apple’s Vision Pro felt like stepping into a future where the digital world is better connected to the real world.

To pessimists, “mixed reality tech” like the Apple Vision Pro means neglecting your friends and family to, say, watch projected porn or MrBeast videos (or both at once, if that’s your thing). But virtually all consumer technologies have negative use cases. I was excited to experience the upside. Though I tried the Vision Pro only for a few hours, it was easy to brainstorm positive uses, like creating digital art while standing in a breathtaking landscape, or fully enjoying cinematographically impressive films (the Vision Pro has a higher pixel count than a 4K television), or conversations with friends across the country that feel like they are there with you—video calls on the headset feel much more immersive.

While demoing the Vision Pro, I tried the Encounter Dinosaurs app, which projected me into the Mesozoic Era, where I felt like I was walking the earth millions of years ago, when really I was just in a college dorm. I was both in the future and the past at the same time.

And with its ability to project multiple browsers and apps into your field of vision all at once, the Vision Pro could even boost productivity. I used the headset to type an essay while looking at different texts, and it was far easier than doing the same thing on a laptop.

Critics say the Vision Pro will create a Ready Player One-style opt-in reality where we can all tune out of the real world. But I’m not worried. New technologies, from novels to headphones, have faced this same criticism for centuries. And after all that innovation, humans still participate in society. Besides, the Vision Pro is not too different from an iPhone or a laptop. If anything, by merging the real and the virtual and allowing us to do so much on a headset, without needing bulky screens, these goggles mean our real-world spaces won’t be so dominated by tech.

And now Kiran gives a big no to the Vision Pro:

In case you were getting your ADHD for free, Apple’s selling it to you for the cost of a vacation. And who needs to travel if you have the Apple Vision Pro, which merges the material world with the virtual, putting messages, emails, videos, a web browser, and more in your field of vision at all times. (Don’t worry: there’s also a mindfulness feature.)

At first I was amazed by the Vision Pro experience. With a pinch of my fingers, I was at my first baseball game. Then I was standing on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean. In seconds, I’d ticked two things off my bucket list—and felt terrified. It’s hard to see how this gadget won’t push us further into the digital realm. And I doubt this magic device will make us happier, more connected beings.

I was relieved to learn from Apple’s demo video that you can still make eye contact with others while wearing the headset. But then I watched the guy next to me pop them on and discovered the emptiness of the word contact. Two slightly blurred eyes looked back at me, but were we really connecting? I couldn’t tell.

For the time being, the Apple Vision Pro is an expensive gadget for die-hard tech geeks. But with Apple, you know this is the first iteration of a device that will someday be as sleek as the sunglasses in The Matrix. It’s pretty cool that you can brush your teeth in Yosemite and floss them in space, but you know what else is great? Being where you are. It might not be heaven, but being unable to opt out of reality is also the only thing that’s going to make us want to improve it.

Who are you with, readers? Are you a techno-optimist like Julia, or do you agree with Kiran the Doomer Zoomer? Tell us in the comments.

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.

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The inauguration of a multi-billion dollar grift Judd Legum

Published

4 hours ago

January 21, 2025

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On Monday, Donald Trump took the oath of office — the first person to be sworn in as president while simultaneously hawking an eponymous meme coin.

Trump launched $TRUMP, a crypto token, on Friday night. Meme coins are crypto tokens tied to a celebrity or joke. The first and most famous is DOGE coin, a cryptocurrency centered around a famous image of a Shiba Inu dog. $TRUMP features an image of Trump during the assassination attempt last summer.

While meme coins are nominally tied to digital “artwork,” they function primarily as a speculative asset. Since many meme coins attempt to capitalize on online trends, they are known for extreme volatility. Hailey Welch, an online personality known as the “Hawk Tuah girl,” launched the “Hawk” meme coin in December. The Hawk coin’s value exploded shortly after launch, reaching a market cap of $490 million. But the price quickly collapsed. Today, the total value of all the 999 million Hawk coins is less than $30,000. You can buy 338 Hawk coins for less than one cent.

Trump is leveraging the prestige of the presidency and the global coverage of the inauguration to boost the price of $TRUMP. By Sunday evening, the price of one $TRUMP coin soared to over $75, putting the value of the 200 million $TRUMP coins in circulation at nearly $15 billion. By Monday afternoon, $TRUMP had lost about 40% of its value.

The primary beneficiary of this speculative activity is Trump himself. In a move that raised red flags even among crypto enthusiasts, 80% of all $TRUMP coins are reserved for a company owned by Trump. At its peak, the value of these coins exceeded $50 billion, making $TRUMP, which did not exist a few days ago, the dominant source of Trump’s wealth. The $TRUMP coins owned by Trump are currently locked, meaning they cannot be sold, but will be released in tranches over the next three years.

In 2016, Trump’s net worth was estimated to be about $3 billion. Before the launch of the $TRUMP, that had increased to around $7 billion, largely due to the public listing of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. Truth Social loses millions of dollars every quarter and has few users, but Trump’s fans keep its stock price elevated.

So Trump has a huge financial incentive to keep the price of $TRUMP elevated until he can sell his coins. For Trump, there is nothing but upside. He received the coins for free — whatever he can sell them for will be a windfall. Trump’s supporters, however, could suffer huge financial losses. By Monday afternoon, a single $TRUMP coin cost $40. People who buy these coins looking to turn a big profit could instead find themselves with massive losses.

A vehicle for corrupt foreign influence

$TRUMP does not only create problems for reckless Trump fans. It means that the White House is for sale. Anyone seeking to curry favor with Trump — including foreign governments — now has a vehicle to transfer a virtually unlimited amount of money to Trump by driving up the price of $TRUMP coins.

As with all crypto transactions, anyone can purchase $TRUMP anonymously. The only record involves a digital wallet with no public owner. This means a foreign entity could make a large purchase of $TRUMP coins — perhaps boosting $TRUMP’s value before Trump sold some of his holdings — and no one would know. It creates an unprecedented and completely opaque method to bribe the President of the United States.

“While it’s tempting to dismiss this as just another Trump spectacle, the launch of the official Trump token opens up a Pandora’s box of ethical and regulatory questions,” Justin d’Anethan, an independent crypto analyst, told Reuters.

This week, we started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so I hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.

Subscribe to Musk Watch

Crypto companies under federal investigation boost $TRUMP

Thousands of meme coins are launched every month. The failure rate for meme coins is estimated at over 97%. With so much competition, it is hard to make a significant number of people become aware of a meme coin. Trump, as the President of the United States, solves that problem. But even once people discover a meme coin, it needs to be easy to buy and sell in order to sustain interest.

It is possible to buy and sell crypto assets without an intermediary. But most people buy and sell crypto through a handful of popular exchanges, which make the process easy and allow you to use cash and other assets to fund purchases.

Exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood can greatly increase awareness and demand for a meme coin. At the same time, they are not going to list every new meme coin that is issued — especially since many of them are scams.

But Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood all have made $TRUMP available to their users, dramatically increasing the number of buyers, and sending its price higher. And they aren’t just quietly listing $TRUMP. They are promoting $TRUMP to their user base.

Improving your relationship with the president is a good idea for any business. But these companies have even stronger motivations. Coinbase is currently being prosecuted by the SEC for “operating its crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency.” The SEC is also prosecuting Kraken for similar alleged activities. Robinhood has not been charged but received a “Wells Notice” from the SEC last May, indicating enforcement action is coming.

The crypto industry is reportedly hoping that, under the Trump administration, the SEC will either end their prosecutions and investigations or offer a favorable settlements.

More broadly, these companies are counting on the Trump administration to allow them to operate legally. The $TRUMP coin allows Trump to make billions from a more permissive regulatory environment. It transforms the presidency from a public trust into a tool for personal enrichment.

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Trump’s Back. What Now? Oliver Wiseman

Published

5 hours ago

January 21, 2025

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Yesterday, we saw the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaug…

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Trump’s Back. What Now? Oliver Wiseman

Published

5 hours ago

January 21, 2025

admin

It’s Tuesday, January 21. I’m Olly Wiseman and this is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. It’s good to be back.

Today we answer the big questions about the transfer of power in Washington. Among them: Will Trump fight lawfare with lawfare? Will TikTok survive? Is neoliberalism dead? Is Trump cool? Does that even matter? Are we at war with Panama now? And: that hat.

But first: the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaugural address and more like a State of the Union / campaign speech mashup. Ignoring unifying inaugural speech traditions stretching back to George Washington, he trashed his political opponents and touted new policies that would bring about a “golden age.”

His proposals were a Trumpian mix of serious (action on immigration and inflation) and, well, strange. It’s the Gulf of America now, and we’re “taking back” the Panama Canal, baby!

His promised day-one executive orders included:

Declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, unlocking federal funding for a border wall, reinstating the “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, and designating drug cartels as “global terrorists.”
Cutting regulations around oil and gas production by declaring another national emergency, this one on energy. (“We will drill, baby, drill.”)
Ending the environmental rules he calls “Biden’s electric vehicle mandate.”
Establishing an “external revenue service” to collect tariffs.
And ending the “government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” (You read about Trump’s repudiation of gender ideology in the federal government first in The Free Press on Sunday.)

Later in the day, Trump signed these orders. He also pardoned members of the mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. Trump’s January 6 pardons went further than his closest allies appear to have anticipated. Earlier this month, J.D. Vance said that those who committed violence during the riot “obviously” should not be pardoned. But Trump has commuted the sentences of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

Back to Trump’s speech. If there was a theme, it was that his own astonishing political comeback portends a national revival, one that he’ll deliver.

“I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do,” he said. “In America, the impossible is what we do best.”

Trump went further. His comeback, and his country’s, he claimed, weren’t just linked but were providential. Recalling the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, he said: “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Gone was the grim “American Carnage” theme of his first inaugural speech. He spoke of the many challenges that “will be annihilated by this great momentum that the world is now witnessing in the United States of America.”

It is a promise both populist and popular, a reminder of why Trump won.

It is also, as my colleague Peter Savodnik argues in his column today, the death knell of neoliberalism and the end of cool.

Here’s Peter: Trump’s critics, “the so-called progressive elites, are howling at the idea that this chump, who is so very unserious, is The One who will restore our seriousness. They miss the point. Only the brawling, bumbling ringleader of the great circus that is today’s Republican Party could break open our sclerotic overclass and lay it bare for the whole republic to see not simply its emptiness but its rot.”

Read Peter’s article, “Trump Is Uncool. And That’s a Good Thing.”

Joe Biden’s Unpardonable Last Act

Another promise Trump made was to “rebalance” the scales of justice. “The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department of our government will end,” he said in his inaugural address. This would normally sound like a partisan gripe, if it weren’t for the final presidential acts of his predecessor, writes Eli Lake in The Free Press.

Just moments earlier, Joe Biden had issued sweeping preemptive pardons for his siblings and their spouses. The outgoing president did the same for some of his successor’s high-profile opponents, including Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney. The level of clemency is without precedent, writes Eli, and inconsistent with Biden’s 2020 promise to uphold the rule of law. Indeed, four years ago Biden expressed his concern that Trump would pardon his own political cronies.

Trump now faces a choice: continue Biden’s erosion of norms, or end the cycle of lawfare. Which will it be?

Read Eli’s full report on Biden’s final act as president—and how Trump might respond.

(Photo by Rebecca Noble via Getty Images; illustration by *The Free Press*)

TikTok on the Clock

The first big internal MAGA dustup of Trump’s second term centers on TikTok, the Chinese-owned social network. Congress passed legislation that forced either the ban or the sale of the app, but on Sunday Trump gave TikTok an eleventh-hour reprieve announcing his intent to keep the app alive for 90 days. Hours after going dark, the short-video platform blinked back on.

This was welcome news to the crowd at a TikTok-sponsored inauguration party Sunday evening. Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold was on the scene and spoke to influencers who say: “We the people are for TikTok.” Read her full dispatch here.

Meanwhile, Joe Lonsdale, a prominent Silicon Valley supporter of Donald Trump, argues that the new president’s TikTok maneuvers undermine the rule of law. Now that Congress and the Supreme Court have weighed in, it doesn’t matter what Trump thinks of the TikTok ban. “The law must take effect,” writes Joe. “Because in our republic, it is the Congress that writes the law. If President Trump disagrees, he can try to change Congress’s mind.”

Read Joe Lonsdale’s op-ed: “Mr. President, Don’t Abandon the Rule of Law to Save TikTok.”

Melania Trump, wearing a hat, looks on during the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena. (Jim Watson via Getty Images)

Fashion Police: Inauguration Edition

Okay, now the important stuff: the outfits. Suzy Weiss answers some of the really pressing inauguration questions: How did Melania pull off a hat that obscured half her face? Was there a hidden message in Trump’s choice of tie? And Lauren Sanchez’s white lace corset under a blazer: inappropriate or awesome? (Answer: both.) Read Suzy’s full fashion report here.

(Of course, the best-dressed crowd in D.C. this past weekend came to the party we threw. Read about that here.)

More Notes on the Inauguration. . .

Did the inauguration really need to be inside? Freezing temperatures forced proceedings indoors for the first time in forty years. But America’s ruling class wasn’t always so sensitive. As my colleague Chuck Lane points out, yesterday’s weather, frigid as it was, couldn’t hold an icicle to the 30-below wind chill at Ulysses S. Grant’s second inauguration on March 4, 1873. Chuck describes the frosty scene at that evening’s inaugural ball, held in a hangar-like temporary pavilion, in his book The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction: “Dignitaries gamely shuffled across the dance floor in their overcoats, as horn and tuba players squeaked out music through the frozen valves of their instruments. Dozens of birdcages dangled from the ceiling; the canaries inside were supposed to accompany the orchestra. But the cold was so intense that the birds shivered, tucked their beaks under their wings, and then began to drop dead.”
In the beginning—i.e., last Friday—there was the $TRUMP meme coin. It’s kinda sorta like Bitcoin, only Trumpier. On the day it was issued, as traders anticipated the new president’s inauguration, it rose from $10 to $75, giving it a total value of more than $10 billion—billions, we should point out, backed by nothing but Trump’s considerable celebrity. It was yet another signal that his administration would embrace crypto. Then came the $MELANIA meme coin. Weirdly, its arrival caused the $TRUMP coin to drop down to $40. Then $TRUMP rose again in anticipation of the inauguration. Then, both the $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins fell by 30 percent as he gave his inaugural address. Strange. Or maybe not. The volatility of meme coins is a given—that’s kinda the point for traders—and anticipation is always a more powerful driver than the actual event. What does the future hold for $TRUMP and $MELANIA? Probably more extreme volatility. But maybe people will figure out the coins’ value is built on air and they’ll collapse—at which point, maybe the president might decide to regulate crypto after all.

Indicted New York mayor Eric Adams ditched MLK Day celebrations in his city to attend the president’s inauguration. It’s the latest act of Adams’ MAGA charm offensive, which has included a trip to Mar-a-Lago and a shift in his position on immigration, saying he is open to a rollback of sanctuary city policies. Many speculate Adams—who faces federal bribery and fraud charges—is angling for a pardon. Whatever Adams’ next chapter, his eyebrows will still be flawless.
Carrie Underwood improvised an a cappella performance of “America the Beautiful” after technical difficulties nixed her backing track. “You know the words—help me out here,” the country singer said, before launching into the patriotic anthem. . . and nailing it.