Where Will the Iran War Go Next? Plus. . .

It’s Friday, October 2. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Arthur Brooks wants a hobby. Should we bring back the firing squad—or get rid of the death penalty altogether? And much more.

But first: Is Iraq the next front in the Iran war?

Yesterday, President Donald Trump said the war with Iran will be over by the midterms, or soon after. But getting there may be harder than he lets on. Negotiations have stalled over Iran’s nuclear program, which Washington wants on the table now and Tehran refuses to address until its own demands are satisfied, including an end to the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz and the release of billions in frozen funds. Today we have two pieces on where things stand—and why the war may soon spill into a different front.

Michael Doran says Trump has the upper hand for now, with American pressure draining Iran’s economy. But the war is shifting power in Tehran from religious clerics to the generals of the Revolutionary Guards. And rather than cut a deal, Doran argues, they’re preparing to widen the war, turning neighboring Iraq into a launchpad against America’s allies. “Iran is indeed undergoing a regime change, just not the one Washington hoped for,” he writes. Read his piece on what the regime is planning.

Meanwhile, the last American troops left Iraq this week, closing out more than two decades of U.S. military involvement there. Elliot Ackerman, who led a Marine rifle platoon there in 2004, calls it a strategic blunder—one America has made before, with disastrous results. Read his column on what we risk by walking away.

—The Editors

This week, Tennessee’s attempt to execute Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death in the 1990s for the brutal murder of a fellow student, ended with her surviving two doses of pentobarbital and being rushed to the hospital. Today, we have two pieces on what that failure reveals about capital punishment.

When Oregon revived the death penalty after a three-decade pause, Frank Thompson was the prison official charged with designing how it would work. By the time his job was done, he had turned against the practice completely. Now 83, he talks with Noah Bernstein about his faith and his unusual proposal for lawmakers whose policies determine whether convicts live or die. Read their conversation here.

Lethal injection has become America’s go-to method of execution. Nicholas Clairmont argues that if the state is going to kill murderers, it should bring back the firing squad: a faster, more reliable method that’s honest about what an execution actually is. “If we can’t stomach a killing that looks like a killing, we shouldn’t do it at all,” he writes. Read his piece here.

Arthur Brooks • The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks

For 12 of his 19 seasons coaching the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mike Tomlin had a secret: In his downtime, he was building an elaborate city in Minecraft. Arthur Brooks, who admits he’s never had a hobby in his life, says Tomlin is on to something. He digs into the research showing why hobbies make us happier, which kinds actually work, and why they only pay off if they do nothing to advance your career. Read his latest column here.

EDITORS’ PICKS

The biggest story of the week was the miraculous averted disaster in the skies above the Middle East on Wednesday morning, when passengers aboard a plane bound for Tel Aviv thwarted an attempted hijacking by the co-pilot, a suspected terrorist. Neria Kraus spoke to one of those passengers as soon as he landed safely in Israel. In an exclusive interview with The Free Press, Yaniv Hayoun described how he stormed the cockpit as the plane went into a nosedive, put the attacker in a choke hold, and grabbed the controls himself.

The attempted hijacking was, as Douglas Murray put it in his column for us this week, “a metaphor for three years of war. The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course.” As the third anniversary of October 7 approaches, Douglas reminds us how often, and how thoroughly, Israelis have overmatched those enemies. Read his column on why, despite constant trials, Israel is winning.

If you were online at all this week, you couldn’t escape the case of the so-called “Cornell 7.” In 2024, a female student told police about a night at a fraternity house involving drugs, alcohol, and sex with seven men at the college. The district attorney declined to bring charges, citing her description of the events as consensual. But last month, she filed a civil lawsuit alleging she was too intoxicated to consent. Within days, the Cornell 7 were being named online, and this week, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten reopened the investigation. We published two essential pieces on the story.

The internet has already declared the seven men guilty, but Kat Rosenfield says none of us actually knows what happened that night. She walks through how Jane Doe’s two accounts differ and why the rush to convict on social media is a dangerous substitute for due process. Don’t miss her latest column.

The online mob didn’t only go after the accused. Frannie Block exclusively reported on Sergeant Matthew Ingalls, an active-duty Marine who shares a name with one of the accused men and was mistakenly served in the lawsuit, despite never attending Cornell. Since then, his family has been doxxed and flooded with threats.

This week, Mahmoud Khalil, the anti-Israel activist who led protests at Columbia University after October 7 and was later detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, published his memoir, No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention. Eli Lake finds the book unconvincing, saying it recasts the protesters as victims while ignoring the brutality of Hamas’s 2023 terrorist attack. Still, Eli argues Khalil shouldn’t be deported, since doing so would set a dangerous precedent.