‘Fauda’ Tells the World the Truth. How to Find Love. Plus . . .

It’s Friday, September 25. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The Free Press guide to cuffing season. Andreessen Horowitz launches a new university for the AI age. And much more.

But first: why this Israeli Netflix show is a worldwide hit.

It’s been fascinating, and more than a little heartwarming, to see so many viewers tuning into the latest season of Fauda, the Israeli show about a counterterrorism unit that operates undercover in the West Bank and Gaza.

Until recently, Fauda was just a well-produced Netflix series—one of many. Then, October 7, 2023, happened.

To say the least, many people across the globe have been quick to dismiss or distort what took place that day and why Israel has responded the way it did. The fifth season of Fauda, oddly enough, is something of a corrective. It’s a make-believe story, but it’s also based on real life, and it hews closely to the facts. And it does a better job, a more powerful job, of conveying the feeling of that day than any news report or footage or podcast I’ve encountered (and I’ve spent the better part of the past three years consuming a lot of October 7–related coverage).

I recently reached out to Avi Issacharoff, one of Fauda’s co-creators, and Omri Givon, the director, to find out why they think the show has gained such a wide following—not only in Israel but worldwide, including many Arab countries. Read my piece to understand why the series may do more than almost anything in recent years to shift public opinion on Israel.

Fauda also captures something striking about Israel—particularly Israeli Arabs. When Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar planned the October 7 attacks, he assumed that some (many?) of the country’s two million Arabs would join the fight. They didn’t—as is depicted in the show. “And why would they?” writes Seth Mandel today. It’s a reminder, he observes, “that Israel’s democratic character and its national culture are far healthier than you would ever imagine from watching or reading Western news.”

—Peter Savodnik

If you ask 10 people how artificial intelligence will affect education, you’ll probably get 10 different answers. It’s one of the most important questions of our era—and one for which there is absolutely no consensus. Which is why, here at The Free Press, we’ve covered it from many different angles: from the school integrating technology into every step of the learning process to the high school English teacher who banned AI in her classroom altogether.

But has AI’s breakneck pace outrun education altogether? Do tech-minded students even need school—particularly higher education—at all? If you ask tech titans like Peter Thiel or Alex Karp, you’ll get an answer that’s pretty close to “no.” Indeed, they’re already founding alternatives to college. That’s why it caught our eye this week when Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced that, rather than encouraging students to drop out of college, it is starting a new one. We wanted to know more. So we asked Erik Torenberg, one of the school’s co-founders, to explain why he’s betting big on a university built for the AI age—and the change he hopes it will bring. —Jillian Lederman

Fall has arrived, and with it, cuffing season: a term recently added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary (definition: “a time of the year when people who are not married or in a relationship begin looking for a short-term romantic partner to spend the colder months of the year with”). Today we bring you stories about how to fall in love—and find a partner who will stick around even after warmer weather returns.

First, where should you find love? New data from the Institute for Family Studies reveals that increasingly, the top places to start a relationship are cities where marriage and family values are a part of the social fabric. Freya India unpacks the shifting attitudes driving this change and asks: “What if there’s nothing wrong with who you are, but something wrong with where you are?”

Next up, women are earning more money now than at any time in history. But this becomes a recipe for disaster when high-earning women seek even-higher-earning men—a common practice known as “marrying up.” Aleeza Ben Shalom, also known as the Jewish Matchmaker, has set up hundreds of marriages, and today she explains why women must embrace a new definition of “up”: men who don’t have high paychecks but rather a strong character, discipline, and emotional intelligence. Those virtues don’t show up on a W-2, she writes, but they are much better predictors of lasting relationships.

Finally, TikTok’s “Queen of Confidence” Serena Kerrigan went on more than 50 virtual dates to figure out what’s wrong with modern courtship—then wrote a book about it. On the latest episode of Second Thought, she joins Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot to talk about what she found and why she believes four dozen first dates led her to crack the code on love.

EDITORS’ PICKS

The midterm elections are fewer than 40 days away, and a hotly contested Senate race in Michigan could decide control of the chamber. But something striking is happening in the state: Some hardcore Democrats are considering voting red for the first time ever. It’s not because they love the GOP candidate, Mike Rogers; it’s because of how his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, responded to a terrorist attack six months ago on their synagogue, Temple Israel. This week, Olivia Reingold spoke to congregants who were shocked at El-Sayed’s apparent sympathy for the attacker. “I can’t support someone I don’t think will keep my family safe,” one mother said.

On Wednesday, shareholders of The New York Times filed a lawsuit against the paper of record, accusing it of ignoring years of complaints about antisemitism and skewed reporting. Maya Sulkin had the exclusive on this story about allegations of inexplicable edits and unchecked bias in the newsroom, including how one Times freelancer was quietly rehired after being let go for praising Hitler on social media. Read her entire report below.

Speaking of The New York Times, one the paper’s own pieces went viral this week. Written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, high priestess of woke and the face of The 1619 Project, it detailed the consequences of her decision to send her daughter to a struggling school system in the name of racial justice. Or, as the piece puts it, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” Coleman Hughes knows something about the subject: As a kid, he went from a public school that was 30 percent black to a private school where he “was one of four black kids in a class of 50 or so.” But framing this kind of experience as racist, he wrote this week, “helps no one, least of all the kid experiencing it.” Read his full reaction to Hannah-Jones’s piece—and the important lessons we should take from its admissions.

Finally, this week, the internet lost its mind over a Boston Globe article about a “Covid-cautious, gender-inclusive, anti-carceral, anti-profit lesbian bar” in western Massachusetts that recently did the unthinkable: relaxed its N95 mask mandate (yes, this happened in 2026). But Katie Herzog had the story first—she dug into it a few weeks ago on her podcast with Jesse Singal, Blocked and Reported. Don’t miss her piece this week, which is complete with juicy, unreported details about the absurd locale, and how she got the story before everyone else.