Substacks

Wisdom from a Teen and a Grandfather—60 Years Apart Bari Weiss

Published

12 months ago

December 25, 2023

Over the last six months, we’ve run two essay contests in The Free Press.

The first was for high schoolers; we asked them to write about a problem facing American society—and how to fix it.

The second contest was for an older generation—70 years and over—and we asked them to tell a story about an event that shaped their life and helped give them wisdom or a fresh perspective.

Today, we are thrilled to bring you the winners of both of those contests. Voices of wisdom exactly 60 years apart.

First, you’ll hear 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca read her winning essay, “A Constitution for Teenage Happiness.” As you’ll hear, her happiness guide involves less phones (in fact, she doesn’t own one) and more old books, less TV and more memorizing poems. Ruby is a homeschooled senior. She told us she entered the contest because she believes in our mission of finding “the people—under the radar or in the public eye—who are telling the truth.”

Then, you’ll hear Michael Tobin—a 77-year-old psychologist living in Israel—read his winning essay, “A Love Song for Deborah.” It is about grappling with his wife’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and nearly giving in to despair—until he found the one thing that awakened her.

We hope you enjoy today’s episode, and that it moves, uplifts, inspires—and all of those other holiday spirit verbs. It sure did for us.

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Substacks

Is a Foreign Adversary Flying Drones over New Jersey? Madeleine Kearns

Published

5 hours ago

December 12, 2024

For the past four weeks, car-sized objects have been reported flying over critical infrastructure and military assets in New Jersey. They come from the ocean, appearing around sunset, and sometimes turn off their lights. Residents demand answers, but despite scrambling for information, state and local authorities say they remain largely in the dark.

But on Wednesday, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) offered what he said was “the real deal” explanation of the mysterious drones. “Iran launched a mothership that contains these drones. It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America,” he told Fox News.

Van Drew’s account, which he said came from “very high, very qualified, very responsible” sources, was startling.

Yet in a matter of hours, the Pentagon dismissed his claims out of hand. “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States and there’s no so-called ‘mothership’ launching drones toward the United States,” said Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon spokeswoman. “We’re going to continue to monitor what is happening, but at no point were our installations threatened.”

Substacks

Niall Ferguson: The Vibe Shift Goes Global Niall Ferguson

Published

10 hours ago

December 12, 2024

I am a 60-year-old Scotsman with a penchant for red suspenders, oolong tea, and the novels of Walter Scott—so no one will ever accuse me of being an arbiter of cool. But to understand politics and even geopolitics you have to understand culture, which is sometimes—often—upstream of both. And to understand culture you have to understand, well, vibes.

Specifically, vibe shifts.

The pop culture commentator Sean Monahan identified three mini-epochs between 2003 and 2020: Hipster/Indie (ca. 2003–9), Post-Internet/Techno (ca. 2010–16), and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20). Each was defined by a distinct aesthetic, and the vibe shift from one to the other was swift and palpable. As the pandemic receded, New York magazine’s Allison P. Davis predicted that another vibe shift had to be approaching. (And indeed, Monahan has dubbed the new epoch “Pilled/Scene.”)

I confess none of this meant much to me. I couldn’t tell a hypebeast from a hipster if my life depended on it.

But the term finally clicked—and acquired a powerful significance—when it was imported to the world of tech. In a clever Substack post in February, Santiago Pliego tried to sum up the change that had occurred from the epoch of woke—which began with the cancellation of James Damore by Google in 2017—to the unfiltered era of Elon Musk’s X.