Emily Oster, Bari Weiss, and the perils of being a woman on the internet

And what the heck is The Free Press anyway?

A few weeks ago a reel popped up at the top of my Instagram feed about the importance of free play. It was highly professional: someone had clearly put in many hours worth of work finding and editing footage. The content was exactly in line with my research. It was a collaborative post between two of my parenting heroes, Emily Oster and Jonathon Haidt, and…The Free Press? I clicked “follow.” 

Over the course of the next several weeks The Free Press fed me a string of content that I admit I found highly intriguing. Frankly, I find the New York Times’ content to be pretty snooze-inducing most days. The Free Press’s content felt different, controversial, interesting. I enjoyed a post where they interviewed people in the street who identified as either Republican or Democrat about something they appreciate in the other party. So many of us are so sick of our polarized politics in America and are looking for ways to bridge the divide. This kind of content hits home with us. Then there was a piece about a French teacher who had been fired from a private school for discussing France’s ban of the hijab. As someone who has lived and worked in France for many years, that landed too. Another post pointed out how DEI education in the workplace actually makes racism worse: an interesting perspective. My own experience with corporate DEI has been that it allows execs to check a box without actually getting involved in any kind of real systemic change within their organization or beyond. 

But then things started getting weird. There was a post asking, “Is the U.S. preventing Israel from winning?” Um, no. Then there was an interview with Douglas Murray about how the “West is drunk on peace” and how we ought to ignore the Torah and take “enormous delight in the decimation of our foes.” Regardless of where you stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no one should be taking “enormous delight” in all of the death and destruction. Then there was a lot of content praising Trump and Musk (in subtle, more palatable ways than Fox News tends to serve up) and a lot more criticizing Harris. It sounded suspiciously like content I had seen in The New York Post and on Fox News (both of which I follow because I like getting news from both sides of the political spectrum). I googled The Free Press. It said, “The Free Press is a new media company built on ideals of great American journalism. Honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.” Well gee, that sounds good. But the content I was getting did not seem particularly honest or independent. It seemed full of bias and strong moral convictions. 

But what the hell is the relationship between The Free Press and parenting advice and why is Emily Oster partnering with them? I think it’s worth saying that in general I have enormous respect for Oster and for how she has brought a data-driven approach to parenting. No, I do not agree with her position on every subject (specifically, I think the topics of sleep training and daycare deserve a lot more nuance). And yes, she brings her own bias to interpreting the data (we all do). But in my eyes she has done an excellent job of parsing and interpreting the scientific literature on pregnancy, birth, and parenting and making it accessible to everyone. For the most part, she sticks to the science, which is what makes her so popular. I listened to a couple of episodes of Raising Parents, the podcast she is hosting and co-creating together with The Free Press, and it is a good podcast. Still, I can’t help but question: why this partnership?

I have two theories. One is that Oster is simply a bit of an opportunist. The Free Press is growing fast, has tons of funding, and partnering with them allows her to talk about her ideas without doing all of the leg work of curating a high-quality podcast. But that seems insufficient. I think Oster must, on some level, identify with Bari Weiss and The Free Press. Why? 

Theory two is that Oster is fed up with people attacking her for presenting unpopular, data-backed points of view and she identifies with Bari Weiss because of this. She has broken with liberal party lines on multiple occasions, like when she advocated for schools reopening in 2020 during the pandemic. She got absolutely skewered for her opinion piece on this topic in The Atlantic; a piece I personally thought was well-argued .

Here’s the thing: when you get publicly skewered for holding an unpopular opinion, it pushes you further to the extreme. A friend of mine who works with an anti-racist coalition mentioned to me that one thing they work on is how to gently correct people without antagonizing them. As this Times piece puts it, the way to actually change someone’s mind is to stop talking and listen non-judgmentally. On the internet, we prefer to shout each other down (preferably in all caps). I’ve been a victim of my fair share of online bullying on Instagram, and bullying almost always had the effect of pushing me further to the opposite extreme (at least in the short term). So I get why Oster is mad. I get why she might not identify as a card-carrying liberal anymore. I get why she likes The Free Press. In her intro to the first episode of Raising Parents, Oster says of her unpopular position on reopening schools, “I just said what every other parent in America was thinking and got crucified for it.” She positions herself as someone who “challenges conventional parenting wisdom” by taking a cold, hard look at the data. I see why it fits with the Free Press’s mandate. 

Can we still trust Oster? I think so. I am not sure what I think of The Free Press and Bari Weiss. I think she’s mostly an opportunistic proponent of unregulated capitalism for the ultra wealthy, parading as a neutral, independent journalist. But she does occasionally point out interesting, unpopular truths and she is certainly very good at all things media. The fact that Oster is partnering with her does make me question Oster’s values, but I also happen to think the podcast is great. Oster is an economist. Economists tend to like capitalism. They tend to trend right. That’s never really bothered me about Oster because her content is generally a-political. Her partnership with the Free Press definitely cements her as, well, not politically left anyway. I think it’s important to recognize this. It reveals her bias. She’s also going to land favorably on positions that support mothers’ participation in a late-stage capitalist economy: sleep training, formula feeding, unlimited daycare at any age. Mostly, I think the data agrees with her, but when it doesn’t, she tends to gloss over it. 

Oster and I share a common goal of alleviating maternal guilt. In her article, Is Daycare Bad For Children, she concludes by saying, “my biggest issue with these panic headlines [on daycare being bad] is that they take people who were happy with how things were going and make them feel like bad parents. You are a good parent. Period.” That’s why I was so surprised to see her invite Erica Komisar, the queen mother of maternal guilt-loading, onto the Raising Parents podcast. But I was equally relieved when she pushed back hard against Komisar’s point of view and on her general lack of data. These are complex subjects to analyze, but in the absence of clear evidence, I tend to err on the side of saying: do what feels right for you and your child! Oster tends to do the same.

At the end of the day, I think maybe sometimes it’s okay to separate the artist from the art. I still binge-watch Woody Allen movies when I am depressed because there is something so comforting about watching trouser-wearing Diane Keaton solving a goofy murder mystery alongside her neurotic partner. I think Emily Oster is saying things that need to be said and bringing good data to back her arguments. You don’t have to agree with everything she stands for and everything she says to get value out of her content. The same goes for me. Maybe you think this piece is utter bullshit but you get value out of the research I share on how hunter-gatherers parent. Great! Stick around. There’s a lot more of it to come.