It’s Friday, July 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The Saudis are going nuclear. History isn’t dead. Zohran Mamdani’s millionaire working-class comrades. The history of the Navy SEALs. And more.

But first: What the Trump administration gets right about sex.

Ask the millennial woman in your life: What’s the craziest thing you were taught in sex ed?

Having been born in 1995, I was fortunately informed that I could get pregnant from sitting in a hot tub 24 hours after a guy—it could be a man I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW and he could be OLD and CREEPY—contaminated it.

At the time, the culture was reeling from the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic and spiraling from a spike in teen pregnancies. In the first year of the ’90s, there were a million of them in the U.S. Last year there were about 125,000. Teenagers just aren’t having that much sex anymore, for reasons we’ve explored plenty of times in these pages.

So you might think it’d be logical, and uncontroversial, for our Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), charged with helping Americans flourish, to stop putting quite so many tax dollars into preventing teen pregnancy. The money’s probably better spent elsewhere.

And yet, when it was reported this week that HHS was doing just that, sworn enemies of the administration saw not a sensible fiscal decision but a sinister plot to promote the idea that a woman’s womb must, at the earliest opportunity, be yoked into generating fresh new American citizens.

In today’s essay, Kat Rosenfield cuts through the hysteria and argues that the new guidelines for sex ed are a course correction designed for the challenges actually facing teenagers right now, in a world where girls aren’t taught what the contraceptive pill actually does and boys aren’t taught how porn might affect their minds and bodies.

May the next generation of young women be saved from believing that a hot tub can ruin their lives.

—Freya Sanders

Zineb Riboua • International

Why Trump Tied Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Future to Israel

Saudi Arabia will be permitted to stand up a civilian nuclear program, the Trump administration announced on Wednesday—a marked shift in U.S. policy in the Middle East. President Donald Trump cautioned on Thursday that the deal does not include enrichment for weapons use, but it represents a big gamble in an already tenuous region. Zineb Riboua makes sense of the deal and what it could mean for the balance of power in the Gulf and the broader Middle East. Read story ›

Omar Mohammed • Antisemitism

History Was Sentenced to Death in My City. It Survived.

Last week, Niall Ferguson wrote that he felt his life’s work as a historian was a failure. But Ferguson hasn’t failed as a historian, writes Omar Mohammed, because the goal of history isn’t to beat the algorithms, but to be the first authors of history and record keepers—something Omar had to do in his home city of Mosul, Iraq, after the Islamic State took over. “The one territory [the Islamic State] could not annex was the record,” Omar writes. Read story ›

Rob Henderson • U.S. Politics

Why Mamdani Thinks a Millionaire Is Working Class

What is considered “working class”? Ask a dozen people and you’re likely to get a dozen answers. But few will say that somebody who earns a million dollars a year is considered “working class”. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani thinks so. His admission says a lot about his conception of that term. Rob Henderson unpacks what Mamdani’s expansive definition of the working class says about his politics and where the mayor actually sits on conflicts between the classes. Read story ›

Aaron MacLean • School of War

The Rise of the Navy SEALs, with Ben Milligan

The Navy SEALs are arguably the most famous military unit in the entire world. But it hasn’t always been this way. The story of the SEALs goes back to World War II, and Ben Milligan, a former Navy SEAL himself, tells it in full in his new book on the history of the Navy SEALs. He joins Aaron MacLean on the newest “School of War” podcast to discuss how the “Frogmen” became America’s most lethal and mysterious fighting force. Watch now ›