It’s Friday, May 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Gad Saad says the West is on a suicide mission. Faye Flam on life in space. Mene Ukueberuwa on why the Trump administration is suing The New York Times. Max Raskin on “Shabbat 250.” And much more.

But first: the culture war over right-wing women.

How should a woman conduct her life? It’s a totally uncontroversial subject—whether a woman should marry as young as possible, or focus on her career; whether she should get plastic surgery, or not; if she should cook bountiful, homemade seed oil-free meals for her family; or live alone, as a childless cat lady. There seem to be no right answers, only blaring alarms from a judgmental public when some women go a little too far. Five years back, they came for the girlbosses, and now, they’re coming for the tradwives.

Tradwifery, the online trend where women document their commitment to their domestic life by posting videos of themselves making cumbersome recipes, or photos of their offspring in matching organic-cotton dresses, is the subject of a buzzy new book: Yesteryear. In it, a present-day tradwife influencer wakes up in the 19th century and has to contend with what life was actually like in the era she glorifies online. (Spoiler: It was brutal!)

Kat Rosenfield reviewed Caro Claire Burke’s book, and beyond that, dove deep into why tradwives seem to enrage liberal women so very much. Yesteryear is “parasocial hate porn for millennial feminists,” Kat writes, a book aimed at “women who can’t stand tradwives, and also can’t stop watching their every move.”

And if the ultimate culture-war figure women love to hate is the tradwife, her second cousin might be the clean-eating health nut who goes to Burning Man and votes for Republicans. Last week, The New York Times put out an article about Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, the girlfriend of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who the Times called a “firebrand in Trump World” and “outspokenly conservative.”

Brin, who at a net worth of $300 billion is the third richest man in the world, has moved rightward in recent years, and the Times posits that Gilbert-Soto, who calls herself a “California Republican,” is to blame. I thought there was more to the story when it came to the 32-year-old former health coach who once interned for Kris Jenner, so I met up with her a few hours before she was set to appear with Brin, 52, on the stairs of the Met Gala, to see what she was all about.

Read Kat’s piece, about the difficult women who hate difficult women, and mine, on GG Soto and her yacht-tripping, clean-eating, Sergey Brin-dating life.

—Suzy Weiss

‘Reverse Racism’ in Employment and Admissions Is Still Racism

Mene Ukueberuwa

The Justice Department is suing “The New York Times” for allegedly passing over a qualified white male editor and claims UCLA is discriminating against white and Asian medical school applicants. But is the push to protect white people really necessary? Mene Ukueberuwa says yes. “Discrimination is wrong and illegal regardless of which group is the target,” he writes. Read full story

America Needs to Rest

Max Raskin

As America prepares for her 250th birthday, President Donald Trump has invited American Jews to celebrate a national Sabbath from May 15 to 16. “Shabbat 250” is an invitation worth taking seriously, says Max Raskin. The wall of separation between church and state, he writes, was never meant to scrub religion from public life: “Few religious practices are more deeply enshrined in our founding heritage than the Sabbath: the weekly refuge from ambition, appetite, and noise.” Read Max on why we could all do with a break. Read full story

The Dark Side of Living on the Moon? It Might Be the Other People

Faye Flam

Building a permanent lunar base is the next great American space ambition. Faye Flam has some concerns, and her biggest one isn’t the 300-degree temperature swings, the flying dust, or even the deadly radiation. It’s the people. Specifically, what happens when you trap a small group of them together in an extreme environment with nowhere to go? Read full story

The West Is on a Suicide Mission

Rafaela Siewert

Can an abundance of sensitivity destroy a society? Gad Saad sits down with Rafaela Siewert to discuss his new book, “Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind,” making the case that one of the West’s most celebrated virtues has been weaponized against it. And most urgently, he explains what it will actually take for the West to wake up. Listen on