Honestly with Bari Weiss

Uri Berliner is a senior business editor at NPR. In his 25 years with NPR, his work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Gerald Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award, among others. Today, we published in The Free Press his firsthand account of the transformation he has witnessed at National Public Radio. Or, as Uri puts it, how it...

On Election Night 2016, many of us thought we knew who would be the next president of the United States. We were blindsided when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Legacy media quickly scrambled to explain what had happened. They ultimately arrived at an explanation: Trump’s voters were racist, xenophobic conspiracy theorists, and possibly even proto-fascists. That wasn’t quite right. My guest...

If the First Industrial Revolution used water and steam to fundamentally change the nature of work, the current industrial revolution—the disruption of automation, information, the internet, and now AI—is transforming everything about the way we work, connect, and interact with the natural world.  These changes have largely been regarded as a net good. After all, poverty across the world has falle...

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been explaining the human condition to us better than anyone else. He first did it with his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, which explored why people were so passionately divided over politics and religion, and argued that people are fundamentally religiously inclined creatures. Then, he did it again with The Cod...

Today, we close out the Israel series with a conversation with the journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who is one of the most important and insightful writers of our time on Israel and the Middle East. We talk about many things, including: the uncertain future for Israelis, for Palestinians, and for Jews around the world; the larger fight happening within Islam that this war represents; what progressives...

When we went to Israel, we tried tirelessly to get into Gaza but Israel’s counteroffensive made it impossible for us to go to the strip during those days. Instead, we spent time in and around the West Bank. First, we went to the Qalandia checkpoint, one of the biggest in Israel, where tens of thousands of Palestinians cross from the West Bank into East Jerusalem daily. Then, we went to the key Pal...

What happens when a country has to ask its citizens the unthinkable: What are you willing to die for?  It’s a question that feels so outside the current American experience. When was the last time you asked yourself, What would I do if I had to fight for my home, my family, my nation? When the citizens of Israel were confronted with the worst disaster imaginable, what emerged was a level of civic...

A few weeks ago, a team of Free Press producers and reporters arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The energy was somber and still, almost like the country and its people were frozen in time. As one mother of a hostage told us, “Every single second of our lives is trauma.” And as the journalist Gadi Taub told us, “People don’t even begin to understand the extent of this earthquake and how it...

American kids are the freest, most privileged kids in all of history. They are also the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. Nearly a third of teen girls say they have seriously considered suicide. For boys, that number is an alarming 14 percent.  What’s even stranger is that all of these worsening mental health outcomes for kids have coincided with a generation of...

Two years ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The costs of this war have been unbelievably high. Half a million Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been either killed or wounded. In terms of cost, the U.S. alone has spent $113 billion on the war. And an aid package that includes another $60 billion for Ukraine is stuck in Congress. Americans’ changing sentiment about the war has cer...

Last week, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny joined a long line of ordinary and noble people who were and are the victims of Stalinist tyranny and now Russian authoritarianism.  Just 10 days prior, Tucker Carlson interviewed Putin, Navalny’s nemesis—and soon to be murderer—in a two-hour conversation at the Kremlin. The name Alexei Navalny never came up. Then, when Carlson appeared onstage a...

Today, we’re thrilled to bring you not Honestly with Bari Weiss, but maybe something even better: Blocked and Reported with Suzy Weiss! If you haven’t heard of Blocked and Reported, it’s one of my very favorite shows hosted by two of my favorite journalists, Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal. The tagline for the show is “a podcast about internet nonsense,” but that undersells it. Katie and Jesse do a...

A little over two years ago, in the pages of The Free Press, Pano Kanelos announced that he was starting a new university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth. The headline was stark: “We Can't Wait For Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One.” I was one of the founding trustees. The announcement generated a lot of headlines. As expected, a lot of people dunked...

For this week’s Honestly, we’re sharing a favorite episode from a favorite podcast, one you may not have heard of: UnHerd with Freddie Sayers. UnHerd’s mission is similar to ours: to push back against the herd mentality, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people, and places. On this episode, host Freddie Sayers talks to Andrew Sullivan, one of America's best known political obs...

There’s increasing concern that as scary as this period feels—between Russia’s two-year war in Ukraine and Hamas’s ongoing war with Israel—that all of this will come to be seen as the calm before the storm. Should China decide to move against Taiwan in some way, then we’ll have war in three regions, and U.S. involvement in all three. Or perhaps by then it will not seem like separate wars, but a si...

Today, Yascha Mounk and Christopher Rufo debate the origins of DEI and the right way to fight the illiberal orthodoxy that has consumed our schools and institutions. Christopher is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a board member at New College of Florida, and maybe the country’s most influential conservative activist. He thinks that using the power of the law to stop DEI is essential. ...

It’s been four years since the first American death from the coronavirus. Four years since we were told that wearing masks—even cloth masks—were essential to keeping us safe. The same goes for lockdowns and social distancing. Any inconvenience to society was outweighed by the lives saved.  And remember what President Biden told us after Covid vaccines were rolled out a year later? “The CDC is sayi...

One hundred days ago, the world changed. October 7 has proven to be many things: the opening salvo in a brutal war between Israel and Hamas; an attack that could precipitate a broader, regional war; the beginning of a global, ongoing orgy of antisemitism; a wake-up call regarding the rot inside the West’s once-great sensemaking institutions; a possible realignment of our politics. One of the thing...

We're less than two weeks out from the first Democratic Primary in New Hampshire, and the mood among Democrats is grim. Joe Biden is polling behind Trump in almost every national poll. And the feeling among Democrats is well, there’s just nothing we can do about it. Enter Dean Phillips: the one lone soldier Democrat trying to make a last ditch effort to stop the 2020 rematch from hell. Dean is a m...

Last year was certainly eventful. It brought spy balloons, Donald Trump’s indictments, the coronation of a king, the fall of a crypto prince, and no shortage of chaos in Washington, from the ousting of Kevin McCarthy to the farcical George Santos scandal. Oh, and then there’s the small matter of two major wars, one in Gaza and one in Ukraine. Plus, ongoing tension between the U.S. and China. On a...

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 thril...

Over the last month, America has been witnessing one of the biggest abortion battles in the country since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Today, Bari shares her thoughts on the case of Kate Cox. She explains why it’s an appalling example of the cruelty of near-total abortion bans, and a tragic rebuttal to the pro-life claim that exceptions to these bans allow for a doctor and patient to make decis...

On October 7, Hamas terrorists stormed into the home of Hadar and Itay Berdichevsky in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the Israeli communities along the Gaza border. Hadar and Itay— both 30 years old—were butchered in their own home. Miraculously, their 10-month-old twins survived. The babies were found—rescued by the IDF—14 hours later, crying in their cots. Their parents’ bodies lie in pools of blood a...

How did the congressional hearing on antisemitism last week go so awry? Was the resignation of University of Pennsylvania’s president just another cancellation, only this time on the other side of the political aisle?  How can we fix our broken universities? And what’s at stake if we don’t? Bari’s thoughts on these questions and more on today’s episode. For further reading on these topics, please...

One of the words that’s become utterly void of meaning in the last few years because of its overuse and misuse is privilege. White privilege, male privilege, able-bodied privilege, gender privilege, heterosexual privilege, even hot privilege. In these contexts, privilege is a stain, a kind of original sin meant to guilt the offending party into repenting for it at every twist and turn in their lif...