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Honestly with Bari Weiss

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Honestly with Bari Weiss
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  • Niall Ferguson on October 7 and Our Changed World
    This week commemorates the two year anniversary of October 7, 2023. That morning, Hamas invaded Israel. They slaughtered some 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. Forty-eight hostages, some alive and some dead, are still being held in Gaza. In these last two years, the world has changed. In many ways, the past two years have felt like two decades. The world feels like it has tilted on its axis.  There is nobody better suited to make sense of this moment—the lessons learned, the harsh realities that have been revealed, and America’s changing role in the world—than Niall Ferguson. Niall is a columnist at The Free Press. He is also senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the author of 16 books, and one of the most influential historians of our time. This conversation with Niall was a Free Press livestream. To never miss those conversations, and to be able to join them as they unfold, become a subscriber at thefp.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  • He Spent 491 Days as a Hamas Hostage. This Is How He Survived.
    Two years ago today, five terrorists broke into Eli Sharabi’s safe room on Kibbutz Be’eri. He had been sheltered there for hours with his wife, Lianne, and teenage daughters, Noiya and Yahel, reading horrific texts flooding in from neighbors and hoping somehow his family would be spared. They were not. The terrorists shot and killed their dog, then dragged Eli away, leaving his family behind. As they pulled him out the door, he looked back and shouted: “I’ll come back!” After 491 days in Hamas captivity, Eli did come back. He survived—with most of his time buried deep underground, shackled, starved, subjected to constant humiliation, and psychological and physical torture—all because he believed he would one day be reunited with his wife and daughters. That belief kept him alive. But when he was released on February 8 under a ceasefire agreement, he soon learned the devastating truth: Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel were dead. Hamas murdered them on October 7, 2023. His brother Yossi, also kidnapped, had been killed in captivity as well.  Eli’s memoir, Hostage, out today, is the first published account by a released Israeli hostage. He writes in unflinching detail about being held in the tunnels, about his Hamas captors, and about his singular focus on survival. We read the book, through tears, last week on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur is a day of atonement and forgiveness, but it’s really a day of reckoning with life and death. The story Jews around the world read that morning is of Moses’s final speech to the Israelites before his death, delivered as they stand on the edge of the Promised Land—after slavery in Egypt, after 40 years of wandering in the desert and the loss of an entire generation. Moses tells them: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.” If anyone has earned a right to despair, to give up on life, it’s Eli Sharabi. But he doesn’t. What’s remarkable about Eli is that he chose—and continues to choose—survival at every turn. He chooses life in the face of death. Again and again and again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  • The Future of The Free Press
    An announcement from The Free Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  • How One Man Overcame His Autism
    Leland Vittert is one of America’s most recognizable television correspondents. You’ll know his face from years of frontline reporting in places like Egypt, Libya, Israel, and Ukraine.  You may have followed his tumultuous exit from Fox News in 2021, after clashing with the network over its coverage of Donald Trump—and then his redemption arc, becoming the host of On Balance and the chief Washington anchor at NewsNation.  But what you might not know is that Leland is autistic. He just wrote a book about it, called Born Lucky: A Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism. In it, Leland explains that he didn’t talk until age 3, was born severely cross-eyed, and struggled with basic concepts like eye contact, humor, conversation cues, and social rules. Middle school and high school were nothing short of hell.  So how did the kid we just described go from, as he says, “socially lost” to one of America’s most recognizable and charismatic voices? Training. Relentless, nonstop work. His father knew the world wouldn’t change for Leland—Leland would have to change for the world. It is a moving memoir about how Leland—and most notably, his father—worked to “beat” his autism. You’ll have to read it to understand how. Leland was diagnosed about 40 years ago. Since then, conversation has shifted dramatically—and so have rates of diagnoses. In the 1980s, about one in 1,000 American children were diagnosed with autism. Today, it’s one in 31. The questions of what causes autism and how we treat it have become so politicized that the conversation has left people either resentful, anxious, confused, or scared. And most critically, still without answers.  Born Lucky is landing at an especially interesting moment given that the Trump administration has put the topic of autism at center stage. Just last week, Trump held a press conference where he alleged that there was a link between the active ingredient in Tylenol and autism, and told mothers not to take the pain reliever and fever reducer and instead “tough it out.”  That’s among the many things Leland and I talk about in this fascinating conversation.  Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  • Inside the Mossad
    If you’re anything like us, you’re a sucker for a good spy show: Homeland, Tehran, Fauda, The Bureau. We’re fascinated by the life of spies—the secret meetings in Beirut cafés, the wigs and false identities, the double and triple lives, always one step away from exposure, risking everything for their country. Most of the time, those TV characters are pure fiction and the stories are the stuff of Hollywood. But our guest’s new book, The Sword of Freedom, reads just like one of those fantastical thrillers—except every word of it is true. Yossi Cohen—the former director of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency—spent most of his 38-year spy career in the shadows. He was known only by a letter: Y, or sometimes “The Model,” apparently for his looks. He was, as he writes, “a ghost, never to be seen and unable to be heard. I was invisible, a breath of wind in human form.” Cohen operated under dozens of different identities in some of the most dangerous places for an Israeli, and he personally orchestrated some of the most daring operations in Israel’s history: stealing half a ton of Iran’s most secret nuclear documents from a warehouse in Tehran; assassinating Iran’s top nuclear scientist using an AI-powered machine gun operated remotely via satellite; setting the stage for the pager attack that crippled Hezbollah last year; creating secret relationships with Arab leaders—relationships that changed the direction of the Middle East. If you look online, you’ll hear that Mossad has been behind everything from tsunamis to floods to political assassinations of famous Americans. So we could think of no one better to answer the question of what Mossad actually does—and to address the endless conspiracies that swirl around Israel’s version of the CIA—than Cohen.  Today, we talk about all of that. It’s a rare glimpse inside Mossad, inside the world of real espionage—and a conversation with a man who helped shape history from the shadows, and who clearly is considering a run for prime minister. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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About Honestly with Bari Weiss

The most interesting conversations in American life happen in private. This show brings them out of the closet. Stories no one else is telling and conversations with the most fascinating people in the country, every week from The Free Press, hosted by former New York Times and Wall Street Journal journalist Bari Weiss.
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