By The Free Press | Created at 2026-09-16 10:32:12 | Updated at 2026-09-16 11:16:32
1 hour ago
Produced by ElevenLabs using AI narration
It’s Wednesday, September 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Elliot Ackerman on the day he was almost hit by a Russian drone strike. Will Rahn’s dispatch from a 9/11 truther conference. Jed Rubenfeld on whether or not AI companies are responsible for their agents’ crimes. And much more.
But first: You or someone you know may be suffering from Sydney Sweeney Derangement Syndrome.
Yesterday morning, in Times Square, I saw a suited man come close to death because his eyes were transfixed on Sydney Sweeney’s bare ass.
I was waiting to cross 41st Street. He had not noticed the big, red, glowing hand that tells responsible pedestrians to wait. Instead of looking ahead, he was gazing up at a huge billboard filled with Ms. Sweeney’s latest advertising campaign, in which she poses fully naked with, among other sporting paraphernalia, a wide range of balls.
The black SUV missed him by about seven inches.
If it had hit him, perhaps the internet would be justified in dragging Sydney Sweeney for taking her clothes off to promote the sports betting website Novig. The actress would have blood on her hands! As it is, her critics are accusing her not of manslaughter but the altogether more complex crime of “sexualizing women in sport.”
This, writes Caitlin Flanagan in her piece today, makes no sense. Sweeney isn’t selling sports, she’s selling sports betting; and she’s sexualizing herself, not a sportswoman. (No offense, Sydney.) It didn’t make a lot of sense, either, when people accused her of racism for starring in an American Eagle ad with the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans.”
Where’s the fury coming from? There are two reasons, writes Caitlin. The first is about Sweeney. “She has an imperious control of male desire. A woman like that is always going to unsettle the atmosphere, rile women with her power.” The second is about the way the world treats women’s sports—as a bit of a sideshow.
Will Novig regret this? The “good jeans” ad gave American Eagle’s stock a healthy bump. But more importantly: Sports betting sites are overwhelmingly used by men. Does this new ad appeal to them? Let’s just say that if that man had died in Times Square yesterday morning, gazing at Ms. Sweeney’s magnificent rump, well, judging from his expression he’d have died happy.
—Freya Sanders
Will Rahn • U.S. Politics
Last Friday, Will Rahn spent the 25th anniversary of 9/11 at a conference for truthers—the movement of people who believe the terrorist attacks were some kind of an inside job. He arrived expecting “a final remnant of the radical and conspiratorial antiwar activism of the early aughts.” What he found was much darker—and leagues more absurd. Read his report from the event, where he crossed paths with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, along with a cast of characters he describes as “another part of the wreckage of that dark day.”
Elliot Ackerman • International
Over the weekend, a Russian drone strike on Ukraine almost hit Elliot Ackerman—as well as former CIA director David Petraeus, former British prime minister Boris Johnson, and former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt. But what Elliot felt afterward wasn’t just the clarity that can follow a near-death experience. “The strike was the clearest evidence I’d seen in four years of traveling to this war that something had shifted,” he writes. In a dispatch from a nation at war, Elliot explains what he saw—and why the drone strike may actually mark a turning point in Ukraine’s favor.
Jed Rubenfeld • Tech and Business
Tech titans are warning of an AI apocalypse. But amid the cacophony of alarm bells, we may be ignoring a problem that’s already here: When AI agents commit a crime, who is responsible? Today, Jed Rubenfeld dives into the murky legal questions of the AI revolution.
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