By The Free Press | Created at 2026-10-08 11:09:13 | Updated at 2026-10-09 15:06:45
1 day ago
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It’s Thursday, October 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Josh Code hits the campaign trail with the long-shot Republican trying to unseat Letitia James. Patrick McGee on the problem with Jensen Huang’s AI optimism. Eli Lake on Zohran Mamdani’s sinister October 7 statement. Everything you need to know about the Russian plague story. And much more.
But first: The Cornell case and a culture in crisis.
The lawsuit accusing seven former members of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity of gang-raping a classmate, allegations they deny, will ultimately be decided in court. But for college students across the country, the consequences are happening in real time. Frannie Block and I talked to Chi Phi members at schools hundreds of miles from Ithaca who have never met the accused, yet find themselves deemed guilty by association.
Online trolls have attacked Chi Phi chapters, harassing members simply for wearing their letters in public. Meanwhile, pledges are walking away. One finance executive said he planned to blacklist any members of the fraternity in his hiring. The fraternity’s national headquarters has even become a target, with strangers flooding staffers’ inboxes and voicemails with death threats and violent messages. “I hope you and your loved ones get brutally raped and killed,” one caller told a female staffer. Read our piece on this latest example of mob justice.
Back in Ithaca, Cornell senior Jared Lederman thinks the debate over his school has overlooked something important: what it actually teaches students about sex. The same university that urges students to drink less and sleep more has embraced an approach to sex education that he says is shocking in its lewdness. See why he argues the school’s embrace of “sex positivity” may be hurting the very students it claims to protect.
—Madeleine Long
Patrick McGee • Tech and Business
While many tech CEOs are sounding the alarm about the risks of artificial intelligence, Jensen Huang, whose Nvidia chips power the AI boom, says there’s “zero percent chance” the technology ends the world by 2030. Is this a refreshing change of tone from the doomsaying? Or irresponsible? Patrick McGee gets into it in his latest column.
Aaron MacLean • School of War
A young researcher in Siberia has died of pneumonic plague, and Moscow has released few details. Former arms control envoy Marshall Billingslea joins Aaron MacLean on “School of War” to fill in what the Kremlin is keeping mum on, from the institute that defectors say tried to make the disease resistant to antibiotics to the growing bioweapons programs in Russia and China. Don’t miss their conversation on the weapons that worry him more than nukes.
On the third anniversary of October 7, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani offered a few lines of grief for the victims of the massacre, then quickly pivoted, accusing Israel of a genocide in Gaza. In his column, Eli Lake argues Mamdani has shattered the illusion that he’s mellowed in office, and that the stakes go well beyond the mayor’s relationship with New York’s Jews.
Could New York elect its first Republican attorney general since 1994? Saritha Komatireddy, a former federal prosecutor who took on ISIS terrorists and Mexican drug cartels, is betting that voters fed up with crime and disorder will help her unseat Letitia James. Josh Code joined her on the campaign trail to see how her message is playing out with New Yorkers. He found her repeating the same line: “I’m not a politician, I’m a prosecutor.” Read Josh’s piece to see whether that’s enough to win in one of the bluest states in the country.
Yesterday, the country with one of the world’s most permissive assisted-dying laws finally found its limit. Canada indefinitely shelved its plan to let people end their lives solely because of mental illness, after psychiatrists warned there’s no reliable way to determine when such conditions are truly incurable. Read Rupa Subramanya–who has spent years reporting on Canadian assisted dying–on the reversal, and why it comes with a catch.
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THE NEWS
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the USS Abraham Lincoln ahead of its return to San Diego today, taking responsibility for his decision to twice extend the crew’s record deployment, saying “I plead guilty.” The carrier spent more than 260 straight days at sea without a port call, a stretch marked by sagging morale and eight suicide attempts across its strike group.
A massive Russian barrage of roughly 70 missiles and dozens of drones killed at least 28 people across Ukraine on Wednesday, with 20 of the deaths in a single apartment building in the northern town of Pryluky. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack, which fell on Vladimir Putin’s birthday, was a gift the Russian leader gave himself: “the killing of children, the killing of people.”
Christa Pike, believed to be the first person in the U.S. to survive after receiving lethal injection drugs, is awake and talking after Tennessee’s failed execution attempt last week, but she’s battling pneumonia and can’t move her arms or swallow, her lawyers said Wednesday.
The FBI said yesterday they foiled a planned mass shooting at the Mall of America, arresting an 18-year-old after he paid an undercover agent posing as an ISIS member for an assault rifle. According to a criminal complaint, Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud told the informant he wanted to kill non-Muslims at the mall.
Four astronauts who spent nearly eight months aboard the International Space Station are set to splash down off the California coast today, after their SpaceX capsule departed the station yesterday. The team circled Earth nearly 3,800 times during the 237-day mission, while a fresh crew arrived last week for a six-month stay.
Russia said yesterday that it’s willing to set up a call between Trump and Putin about the death of a Siberian plague lab worker, as the U.S. and World Health Organization push Moscow for answers. Russian health officials, who still blame “pneumonia of an as-yet unestablished origin,” say there’s no risk of an epidemic.
France’s Henri Kagan, 95, and Japan’s Kenso Soai, 76, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for discovering how to make molecules come out in just one of their two mirror-image forms. Their work is key to making safe medicines, since one version of a drug can heal while its mirror twin can cause harm.
