I do, however, wonder how the campus newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, would receive the news of a man busting into that room during the early, consensual part of the event. “Slut-Shaming Chi Phi Tells Sophomore: Enough!” Or, worse, “Chi Phi ‘Rescues’ Sophomore Woman—From Herself.” But the headlines this week have been starkly different, and the eyes of the world are on Ithaca, New York.

The event itself took place two years ago, and it comes to national attention now because “Jane Doe” has filed a civil suit against a range of parties, including Cornell, the fraternity, and the seven men she alleges took part in the rape. The news was broken by the Daily Sun, which has been reporting it with avenging anger, and made the decision to print the names of the accused men. There’s plenty of evidence for the crowd who thinks the whole thing is a money grab, and a solid case that it’s not. It seems to produce new text messages and documents every day.

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All of which partly explains why there is such a thing as a “botched execution.”

The subject is in the news due to the attempted lethal injection of Christa Pike on September 30, by the state of Tennessee, which convicted her three decades ago of killing Colleen Slemmer, a classmate, in an especially brutal way. After two different injections of pentobarbital, Pike remained alive and reportedly conscious for much of it, and she was rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital. It was the second botched execution by lethal injection in the state this year. The governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, has now ordered a pause on all executions for the remainder of the year and ordered what the Johnson City Press calls “a review of the state’s policies on how it puts people to death.”

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There was a man standing outside her house in upstate New York. “Is Matthew Ingalls your son?” he asked.

Victoria’s son is an active-duty sergeant in the Marine Corps. “My heart went in my throat,” she told me. She assumed she was about to hear the news that every military family dreads.

Instead, the man handed her an envelope with a 101-page lawsuit inside, accusing her son of being among seven Cornell university students who allegedly raped and sexually abused a female student, identified as Jane Doe, over the course of seven hours at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024.

But Victoria’s son, 23, never attended Cornell. The court, the family soon figured out, had served the wrong Matthew Ingalls and had added the Ingalls’ home address to the official docket.

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Most of us have. Two people caught on a kiss cam at a concert get accused of being cheaters. A father runs a marathon a few months after the deaths of his children and the internet later decides it’s proof he killed them. We conclude that a couple is miserable or a mother is negligent or a woman is stupid—and then we scroll on.

But those are real people we’re looking at, all of whom are the main characters of their own stories, which for all we know are as complicated as our own lives. We’re telling one of those stories today.

Last week, during a San Francisco Giants game, the broadcast lingered on a woman in the stands at Oracle Park. She was returning to her seat with a baby strapped to her chest and her hands full of ballpark food. Her husband stood to let her in, then sat back down and started eating as one announcer said, “That’s mom of the year right there.”

The clip only lasted a minute, but when it appeared online, it soon racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Strangers decided that the husband was a deadbeat, and that the wife should leave him. Some commenters went so far as to say he should kill himself.

The “mom of the year” is named Erika Alvarez and, still reeling from the experience, she wrote an essay about what the cameras didn’t catch that day. When team Free Press encountered it, we were so moved, we asked if we could reprint it. (Others reacted with skepticism, doubting that Erika was the woman in the clip, or that her story was true, so she wrote a follow-up.) We’re delighted that Erika said yes.

Erika’s story is a necessary reminder of how much context gets stripped from the clips of strangers you see online, reposted by accounts that know nothing about the people in them. And remember there’s always more to the story. The people on our screens have lives that go on long after we glimpse them for a moment. —Freya Sanders

Millions of people have watched me carry my daughter and food back to my seat at a San Francisco Giants game. They have praised me as “mom of the year” and called my husband too many names to list. Some have sent me DMs or posted TikTok commentary videos about why I need to leave him.

My name is Erika. Our baby is Anastasia. My husband is Ramses. Before you decide what our marriage looks like, I would like you to hear from the woman you’re defending.

Ramses is an amazing husband and an even better father. We’ve been part of each other’s lives for nine years, and today we’re raising two under 2 together. I know how he treats me, how he cares for our kids, and what he does for our family. A conversation the audience couldn’t hear became the basis for millions of judgments about that life.

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This time, the encounter in question took place in 2024 at upstate New York’s Cornell University, at the off-campus home of the fraternity Chi Phi. According to a statement given at the time by the alleged victim—identified only as Jane Doe—it all began around 11 p.m., after she left a sorority meetup and walked a mile or so to the Chi Phi frat house, to meet up with a male friend who lived there. Once there, she continued drinking and also took ketamine, until the friend suggested they have group sex with one of his fraternity brothers. Jane Doe agreed—per her statement, she was “pretty okay with having this threesome” as well as titillated by the possibility that the two men might be sexually attracted to each other—but the encounter ended when both men proved too drunk to perform. Her friend lost his erection and fell asleep; the other man started dry heaving.

But then a third man entered the room—and eventually, a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.

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Is there chaos in college sports? I can’t deny it. Ever since the Supreme Court concluded in 2021 that long-standing NCAA rules preventing college athletes from being paid violated the nation’s antitrust laws, an absolute gusher of money has poured into college sports. At the big-time sports schools, “collectives” of wealthy boosters are handing out millions to athletes under the guise of payments for their “name, image, and likeness” (NIL). Ohio State University, for instance, paid its football team between $49 million and $55 million this season, with star wide receiver Jeremiah Smith receiving an estimated $5 million. When you throw in what the school and its boosters pay its basketball players, its soccer players, its tennis players, and so on, it probably approaches $80 million. A similar story can be told at Louisiana State University, University of Michigan, Indiana University, and most of the other schools that get the College GameDay treatment from ESPN during football season.

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The famously bodacious Sweeney, 29, has been dating music executive Scooter Braun, 45, who is Jewish, for a little over a year. They met at the Bezos’ wedding in Venice. Since then, they’ve danced at a country music festival, snorkeled in the Great Barrier Reef, and jet-skied in the Mediterranean off David Geffen’s superyacht. They’ve been to NBA Finals games and the Armani Beauty Dinner at the Venice Film Festival. Most monumentally, earlier this month, they celebrated Rosh Hashanah at Temple Sholom in Greenwich, Connecticut, sparking furious speculation over whether Sweeney and Braun will get engaged anytime soon, and whether she will join the tribe, and when.

When I interviewed Braun a few months ago, he was bashful about his relationship with Sweeney—“I’ve met an extraordinary woman,” he said—but not about his faith. He’s a proud Jew who is interested in Kabbalah, takes his charitable cues from the Torah, and is outspoken about Israel; he organized an exhibition to commemorate the October 7, 2023 attack on the Nova music festival.

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In case you’ve never stepped through that famous wardrobe door and into C.S. Lewis’s magical world, you should know that Aslan is a lion and the King above all High Kings in Narnia. Why, then, would anyone mind if Streep—a lioness and the Queen above all High Queens of Hollywood—gives the big cat a new purring sound?

The usual pop pugilists, still licking their wounds from the fight over Christopher Nolan’s casting choices in The Odyssey, rose to offer the usual arguments. Gerwig, growled the culture warriors on the right, is feminizing a quintessentially male figure; they could overlook her decision to turn Ken into a bumbling bobo in Barbie, her previous film, but giving the mightily maned lion a bit of gender reassignment surgery is a step too far. Relax, cooed their counterparts on the left, this is Meryl we’re talking about here and, really, there’s no one that woman can’t brilliantly portray.

It was tempting, listening to the discussion drone on, to tune it all out and worry about weightier things. Except that, sadly, this one matters: Gerwig’s decision is neither a stroke of brilliance nor a microaggression against conservative America. It’s something much more profound and dangerous: an offense in a war not of culture or politics but of ideas and convictions.

To understand why, it helps to first know Aslan.

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The data was clear: Women accounted for 158,000 of the 162,000 jobs added to the American economy in August—or 98 percent of the total. CNBC called it “the latest sign of the growing power of women in the labor market.”

You might expect me, a professional matchmaker, to look at those numbers and panic. After all, if women keep advancing economically while men fall behind, who exactly are all these successful women going to marry?

I hear some version of this question almost every day. Throughout my 19-years-long career, which has included running a successful matchmaking company, writing several books, and hosting a hit Netflix show, I have set up hundreds of marriages and spoken to thousands of single women. These women often tell me that they just want a man they can look up to. “I don’t need him to be rich,” they say, “but he has to be at least as successful as I am.” They go on to tell me that they are afraid they won’t respect a man if he makes less than she does.

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There’s big business behind this, too. Download more dating apps, then pay for premium. Take a course on upgrading your profile. Take another on your attachment style. Talk to a life coach. Invest in therapy. Try skin care routines, hair transplants, and cosmetic surgery. Of course, people have always worked on themselves to attract partners, but it’s beginning to feel as if love is for the best object, as if marriage is for whoever spends the most time marketing themselves. And if dating isn’t working out, well, you must be faulty somehow.

But is it always so personal? What if there’s nothing wrong with who you are, but something wrong with where you are?

The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) has launched a new interactive Marriage Map of where adults between the ages of 22 to 39 are getting married in the United States. It shows that young adults do face different odds depending on where they live. For example, among those who want to get married at a younger age, defined as 22 to 29, the highest marriage rates are in Utah, Kansas, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The lowest are in big coastal cities like New York City and Los Angeles, where marriage rates rise only later, among adults in their 30s.

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The reason for Last Ditch’s sudden infamy is an article published by The Boston Globe on Monday—an article that reached the sort of stratospheric virality that most journalists (and bars) could only dream of.

The simple, straightforward headline, “Greenfield Lesbian Bar Last Ditch Faces Mask-Rule Backlash,” did not adequately describe the crazy within. With lines like “Customers fondly remember a raucous opening night with a (clothed) simulation of a lesbian sex act—masks in place,” it’s not hard to see the appeal. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that the story has already netted the Globe 1,000 new subscribers.

The article, by Annalisa Quinn, was the first that most of America, and the internet, had heard of the Last Ditch, but I’ve been covering this particular drinking establishment for weeks on my podcast Blocked and Reported. And while I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting it, after years of covering idealistic, politically progressive, and often queer institutions that collapse under the weight of staff or customers’ demands, to me, the story of Last Ditch is a familiar one.

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Homesteading was a uniquely American experiment. If you were willing to risk your life, your family’s life, and your limited means, not to mention bears, moose, and disease, the government rewarded you with the most meaningful asset of the 19th century and most of the 20th: land to call your own. Giving people the chance to take a risk and be rewarded for it was the role of government back then. Risk-taking was something people once aspired to, but don’t seem to anymore. By the time Deardorff, a boomer from Southern California, sought to homestead in Alaska, it was considered an eccentric choice.

I was introduced to Deardorff through people I know from my own time in Alaska. More than 25 years ago, I spent a summer in a small fishing village where I sold incense and worked on a food truck grilling halibut. In the 1990s, college-age students often went to Alaska seeking a summer of adventure. Carrying a tattered copy of Into the Wild, we arrived with no plan, and worked all sorts of odd jobs, usually in the fishing industry. The frontier was gone by then, but we at least got to experience this frontier-like adventure for a summer before most of us pursued more conventional and safer lives. I am told even this is rare now. Migrants work the fish canneries, and if young adults do come to Alaska, it is part of an organized program where everything is prearranged and they get college credit.

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It’s a sleek ad featuring the world’s sexiest woman saying the word sports over and over again, and if that isn’t an inducement to the average online sports bettor (overwhelmingly young and male), nothing is. I knew that the ad was stirring up something powerful because of the moralizing terms with which the press described Sweeney’s appearance in the ad. Variety called the ad “risqué,” ESPN said the star wore “little or no clothing,” and many outlets described her as “nearly nude.” What was this, Raquel Welch wearing a fur bikini in One Million Years B.C.?

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Here was a man who had lost everything, and wasn’t hiding it. At the time, strangers cheered his name along the course. But two years later, the internet, which spent this summer obsessively watching the trial for his children’s murders, dug up the footage and turned against him. Patrick Clancy was coping too well. This isn’t how someone who’s grieving should act. He should be too busy crying to train for a marathon. He must have done it.

Seeing this gave me flashbacks to the relentless scrutiny of my own behavior in the wake of my roommate’s murder in Perugia, Italy, in 2007, for which I was falsely imprisoned. There is no one “right” way to react to trauma, or to grieve, but when the lens of suspicion falls on you, everything is wrong. When I cried, they were crocodile tears; when I didn’t, I was cold and unfeeling. When I smiled at my family in the courtroom—a brief glimpse to let them know I was okay—I was a whore for the cameras.

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Our public square has become a defamation orgy. “He was having an affair, he plotted, drugged her, made her crazy, killed their kids,” said another post about Patrick Clancy, this one repeated over and over on Instagram. “Tried to kill her. When she didn’t die, he convinced her she killed them. Framed her. Sent her to prison.”

Last week, one of Patrick Clancy’s attorneys released a statement threatening legal action against the “blatant and baseless falsehoods” spread against Patrick Clancy online: “Enough is enough.” But could such a case actually succeed? And could it be a reckoning that stems the tide of online defamation?

Clancy could win, but he can’t stop the tide because it is driven by two phenomena that are basically untouchable. Here’s why.

First, platform immunity. If The New York Times runs an opinion piece libeling someone, the Times can be sued for damages. And if NBC News runs a commercial libeling someone, NBC can be sued for damages. But if TikTok or Instagram carry a libelous post or advertisement, they cannot be sued. They have immunity under the famous Section 230, a federal statutory provision enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 under which social media platforms bear no legal responsibility for almost any ads or user content they carry.

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The party was hosted by a journalist friend, and among the guests was the author Jon Ronson, who showed up around dinnertime accompanied by an entourage of beautiful 20somethings who actually, wholesomely, turned out to be his son and some friends. After we had been introduced—which is to say, after I cornered Ronson like a deranged fangirl to gush about how much I’d loved his last book—I asked what he was working on lately. His response was a bit hard to follow, because he was very excited: something about his son, a party, and a castle nestled in rural no-man’s-land in the uppermost eastern corner of Connecticut, where a madman was luring vulnerable young Zoomers in order to. . .

Well, this part was still unclear, and Ronson didn’t want to say much more. An absolutely spectacular story had fallen right into his lap; he was thrilled at the prospect of telling it, but also terrified that someone else might tell it first. When he left the party a couple hours later, he tapped me on the shoulder on his way out.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” he said, “about the castle.”

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It’s Labor Day, and work is on our minds. How do we make our work meaningful? And how much is too much? The Front Page will be back tomorrow, but today we’re publishing an essay by reformed workaholic Lindsay Crouse. She once gave up nights and weekends writing for “The New York Times” about how perseverance makes successful people—until she “started to recognize another, darker trend in this relentless compulsion to stay and strive.” In an excerpt of her new book, “The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out,” she argues for a new way of thinking that all of us would do well to consider—workaholics, slackers, and everyone in between. “Quitting is not simply a failure of resolve or easy way out,” she writes. “Often, it’s the courageous first step to something better.” —The Editors

For a long time, I was an eager disciple of the grind. One night, I hit a dead end.

I was pregnant and exhausted. I had just run a marathon, because I’d registered and paid and I don’t quit, but I hadn’t trained enough and days later, my legs still felt like stilts. It was midnight, Thanksgiving weekend, and I was still working.

I was nearly 40, and yet I related to how students at pressure-­cooker universities sometimes describe themselves: like ducks, gliding along on the surface while my legs churned furiously below. It wasn’t that I was failing, at least not if you asked the internet. I had a good job at The New York Times, and raced marathons on the weekends, for fun.

Every spring break, students would send messages asking how to be like me, and I’d usually shoot back the same advice I told myself: Keep showing up. Never, ever quit. But it was starting to feel a little like a lobotomy. The harder I worked, the duller I grew. Instead of moving forward, I was spinning and stuck.

I desperately wanted to stop. I needed to stop.

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I knew Gloria very well back in the day. She originally came to my attention in 1963, soon after Betty Friedan published her legendary book The Feminine Mystique. That year, Gloria went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for a piece published in Show magazine—an exercise intended to expose the way in which women were treated as “sex objects.” I always found this an interesting contradiction. Gloria condemned the objectification, yet she also used it to her own advantage, and to the advantage of liberal feminism.

In early 1971, I attended the very first meeting that led to Gloria’s founding of Ms. magazine. I forget how I came to be there, but Gloria and I had already been meeting and talking for at least three years, maybe a bit more, because I wrote to her after her piece about the Playboy Club was published. Indeed, I never really “joined” the feminist movement. As someone who was very early aligned with its goals, I simply almost instantly, as did so many other radical feminists, became a leader. I attended National Organization for Women (NOW) meetings in New York City, including one in Ti-Grace Atkinson’s home. I remember that Kate Millett wore her hair in a neat little bun and spoke in a slightly British accent. But that was not as important as Kate’s 1970 book, Sexual Politics, or Shulie Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. I remember reading them both while standing up in a bookstore in Greenwich Village.

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If one side of the debate online has demonstrated a disturbing solidarity with Clancy, another has decided it’s a straightforward case, and that Clancy is self-evidently guilty. We asked Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine, to weigh the psychiatric evidence and tell us what she thought. She said she disagreed, and thought Clancy was driven by psychosis to kill her children. Whatever you think of the tragic case that has captivated the country, her essay is essential reading. —The Editors

The trial of Lindsay Marie Clancy is over, and unresolved. After 21 days of testimony and seven days of deliberation, a Massachusetts jury could not agree on whether the 36-year-old former nurse was criminally responsible for strangling her children—Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months—or not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge declared a mistrial.

I had been hoping for an acquittal and commitment to a mental facility because, in my clinical opinion as a psychiatrist, psychosis drove Clancy to kill.

The prosecution now has the option of bringing an entirely new trial, negotiating a plea deal, or dismissing the charges altogether.

Clancy continues to be charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Her lawyer and the prosecutors will consider next steps while she remains in a mental-health facility.

Whatever comes next, the case is a reminder about the hazards of addressing mental illness challenges in the courtroom, the need for legal and psychiatric reforms, and the urgency of educating doctors as well as patients about psychosis in general and postpartum psychosis in particular. If Clancy is retried, here is why I hope the next jury will find her not criminally responsible.

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And Anchorage is where Tom Phillips needed to be. Hennigh recounts the story. Phillips was a fisherman who’d just had his leg ripped off in a freak boating accident. Cathy Hoff, King Cove’s only medical care provider, was insistent that Phillips be taken to a hospital in the state’s largest city to save his life. The issue was, King Cove has only a single gravel airstrip that is unusable, on average, 100 days out of the year owing to inclement weather. This was one of those days. There was an all-weather airport 18 miles away in Cold Bay, but no road to get there.

In the end, PenAir, the local carrier, decided to take the risk and fly out of King Cove. Hoff jumped onto the plane to help, as did another fisherman, Darien Gorsinger.

“They crashed right before they got to Cold Bay,” Hennigh told me. “The Coast Guard came and found everybody dead about six hours later.”

Hennigh says this tragedy kick-started serious efforts to get a gravel road built between King Cove and Cold Bay. However, more than 40 years later, people are still dying—19 in total have passed, he says, either from lack of urgently needed medical care or via plane crash—and the road still hasn’t been built.

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