By The Free Press | Created at 2026-09-21 10:12:10 | Updated at 2026-09-21 10:58:18
57 minutes ago
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It’s Monday, September 21. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Tyler Cowen considers the other scary AI future. Coleman Hughes meets the Harvard economist bucking progressive orthodoxy. A new book goes behind the scenes of the post–October 7 war and asks: Who really won? All that and much more.
But first: The flawed data driving the climate news.
What happens when an influential climate organization, one based out of the prestigious Imperial College London, uses flawed science to produce a preferred outcome? And what happens when they do this again and again, year after year, churning out press releases that quickly find their way into newspapers around the globe?
Less than a month after thousands of people died in a catastrophic Himalayan flood, that organization, called World Weather Attribution (WWA), published a report linking the disaster to human-caused global warming. Now Nepal is seeking $20 million in UN compensation on the basis of that report.
For more than a decade, the WWA has been churning out these reports whenever an extreme weather event like the Himalayan flood takes place—and invariably chalking up the disaster to climate change. Though the media accepts WWA’s conclusions as gospel, Roger Pielke Jr. asked what ought to be a pertinent question: How sound is their methodology? Pielke, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, went for a deep dive into the group’s work and found it lacking.
Pielke replicated 96 WWA reports and found that rather than analyzing whether climate change caused the event, the organization simply assumes it did. On the one hand, this shouldn’t be surprising: The group’s leaders have been explicit that they are trying to alarm the public about the threats posed by climate change. But what Pielke found was that, using WWA’s approach, you can link almost any trend to climate change, from an increase in baseball players hitting home runs to a rise in patent applications. It’s a model designed to produce all manner of absurd results, garnering headlines while doing a disservice to real climate science.
Read Pielke’s investigation into the group shaping global climate policy and whether any of the science behind it holds up.
—The Editors
Tyler Cowen • Tech and Business
What if the greatest AI risk isn’t the one dominating headlines right now? Tyler Cowen sketches a possible scenario in which President Trump, rattled by bad polls and a midterm wipeout, pivots from being “the AI president” to the “make AI safe president.” In this situation, he would halt the development of new American AI models and strike a slowdown deal with China. Read Tyler’s latest column on why ceding the AI lead to Beijing, not fears of AI wiping out humanity, is what we should actually fear.
The Editors • U.S. Politics
President Trump banned Politico, MS NOW, and CNN from the White House Friday, telling reporters “there’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories.” The next day, reporters were denied access to the West Wing. Read our editorial on the ban, and what it reveals about how this president views the press, and the office he holds.
Yardena Schwartz • Israel
With Israeli national elections just over a month away, the question of how October 7 happened, and the decisions made in its aftermath, are at the center of the campaign. A new book, “In The War Room,” sheds light on these issues, drawing on two years of interviews with senior American and Israeli officials to reconstruct the behind-the-scenes decisions that drove Israel’s multifront war after October 7. Three years on, Hamas still controls much of Gaza, Hezbollah has rebuilt, and Iran’s nuclear program remains largely intact. “The most revealing parts,” Yardena Schwartz writes of the book in an essay for us today, “are not so much what happened, but what could have happened.” Which leaves her with a fundamental question: Who actually won this war?
Coleman Hughes • Conversations with Coleman
Harvard economist Roland Fryer’s research on race, policing, and education has repeatedly landed somewhere progressive orthodoxy doesn’t want it to. Today, Fryer returns to Conversations with Coleman to talk with Coleman Hughes about the Jason Arday scandal, which he sees as a symptom of the same institutional cowardice he’s trying to fix with his and Bill Ackman’s new Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage: a $1 million award for scholars willing to publish research academia is too afraid to touch. Don’t miss their conversation.
MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS
THE NEWS
A Palestinian gunman shot and killed an Israeli man near a settlement of Neve Tzuf, while Israeli soldiers fatally shot a Palestinian driver they said deliberately drove at them, in two separate episodes of deadly violence in the West Bank on the eve of Yom Kippur. The gunman was arrested hours later at a hospital in Ramallah.
In an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday, Patrick Clancy discussed his life since his ex-wife, Lindsay Clancy, killed their three young children. “There was a time when I didn’t think I would make it to my 35th birthday,” Patrick, now 36, told correspondent Ross Douthat. Patrick also said he had forgiven Lindsay despite her never asking for it, and that he is starting a family with his new wife, Dr. Rachel Danis, a fertility doctor in New York City. Watch the entire 60 Minutes interview here.
President Trump will visit Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion today, while in New York for the UN General Assembly. Immigration enforcement is expected to be on the agenda, as is Mamdani’s push for billions in federal money to build housing over a sprawling Queens rail yard.
Ukraine unleashed its largest ever drone offensive against Moscow on Sunday, striking an oil refinery and killing at least three people as Russians cast their final votes in parliamentary elections. Moscow’s mayor blamed Kyiv for deliberately targeting the vote, and Russia claimed it intercepted nearly 2,000 drones in total.
U.S. embassies in the Middle East warned Americans across the region yesterday to exercise heightened vigilance amid fears the Saudi-Houthi conflict could spiral further, without citing a specific threat. The alerts came as Trump said he is in “deciding mode” on Iran, saying: “My question is, if and when do I blow the entire nation up? They better behave.”
Ed Sheeran used the opening of his Philadelphia concert Saturday to call what is happening in Gaza “catastrophic and unjustifiable,” while also condemning the attacks of October 7. The remarks came after weeks of turmoil over the removal of Macklemore from his tour following the rapper’s pro-Palestinian comments onstage. (Read Josh Kaplan on why banning Macklemore from the tour was the wrong call in the fight against antisemitism.)
U.S. forces struck a suspected drug smuggling vessel in the Caribbean on Saturday, killing four people and pushing the death toll from America’s yearlong campaign against alleged traffickers in Latin American waters to at least 231.
President Trump said on social media Sunday that he intends to outfit his planned triumphal arch near Washington with drone storage and rooftop snipers, saying it came at the “strong request” of the military. It is the second major project he has framed as a national security necessity, having made similar arguments for his $400 million White House ballroom complex.
