![]() I Wrote a Book About Censorship. Then People Tried to Censor It. Plus. . . Could California elect a Republican governor? Apple and the age of surveillance. The teacher fired for an X post. And more.
Is the age of censorship really over? Our first two pieces today tackle that question.(Illustration by The Free Press; images via Getty)
It’s Wednesday, April 1. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Kat Rosenfield asks, should we judge age-gap relationships? Peter Savodnik on the Republicans leading the polls in the Golden State. Patrick McGee on 50 years of Apple. David Patrikarakos on the European officials siding with Trump on Iran. All that and much more. But first: Is the age of censorship really over? Someday, when the history of the early 21st century is written, a big part of the story will be about information. As rapidly advancing technology has reached into nearly every corner of our lives, control over knowledge and opinions has become one of the great issues of our age. Think content erased for violating the wrong set of beliefs, and people fired for posting the wrong kind of content. These are issues we’ve covered extensively here at The Free Press, because they get at some of the values we treasure the most: truth, trust, freedom. These questions are also the focus of a new book by Jacob Siegel, The Information State, in which he argues that over the past decade, a powerful new kind of censorship took hold in American public life—then finally came to an end. Or did it? Just a day after the book’s publication, Siegel found himself in a surreal position. His book about censorship was subjected to the very dynamic he describes in its pages when a review of it was purged from the website of left-wing magazine The Baffler after a person mentioned in the text requested a correction. Read his full, firsthand account of this strange tale, and what it says about how we get our information in 2026. Then, consider the case of Logan Levkoff, a sex education teacher at a private K–8 school in New York City for more than two decades—until two weeks ago, when she was fired for reposting Brianna Wu, a transgender woman. “I am a sex ed teacher with an excellent 21-year record,” she writes, “and I was targeted, scrutinized, and ultimately dismissed for daring to deviate from the mob.” |