It’s Friday, June 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Freya India on the apps and subscriptions commodifying Gen Z’s religious revival. Josh Code joins Zohran Mamdani’s rent-freeze canvassing brigade. A UC Berkeley math professor on why abolishing the SAT means her students can’t understand fractions. And much more.

But first: Suzy Weiss on the AI robots coming soon to an apartment near you.

This week, the future arrived at my doorstep in the form of two sweaty college students, wearing cameras on their heads and wielding a tube of Clorox wipes.

I was getting free cleaning services through an AI training start-up called Shift, which bills itself as a gateway to an abundant new economy. In addition to two cleaners, it also sent a private chef to make me lunch.

But here’s the catch: Everyone running a vacuum over my floors or cooking me branzino did so while being recorded, their physical actions batched, analyzed, and transformed into training data for the next generation of AI-powered robots that the company intends to deploy across commercial and industrial sectors—to, eventually, complete chores autonomously.

I spoke with Bercan Kilic, one of the co-founders of Shift, as well as my college-kid cleaners, about the initiative. “What could happen, in 50 years, is basically all services and goods are free, or are close to free,” Kilic told me. But will turning our houses into self-imposed surveillance states spell the bright beginning of a liberated new age, or the bitter end of blue-collar work? Read my story to find out.

—Suzy Weiss

When Faith Is Just an App

Freya India

Much has been made of Gen Z’s apparent Christian revival. Freya India used to buy into it. Now she’s not so sure. Learning about the Christian faith has never been easier—you can find it packaged into podcasts, YouTube Shorts, hashtags, and endless feeds. But when faith is available on demand, does it start to give way to indifference? “For a while, I thought my generation might be finding God,” she writes. “Now I worry we are just finding content about God.” Read full story

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Bring Back the SAT

Svetlana Jitomirskaya

At the University of California, the nation’s largest public university system, math professors are having to stop their lectures to explain fractions. Why? According to UC Berkeley math professor Svetlana Jitomirskaya, it’s because the SAT was completely abolished in UC admissions in 2020. In her piece today, she explains how that decision has failed the very students it purports to help—and why she and her colleagues are fighting for an emergency course correction. Read full story

Knocking on Doors for Mamdani’s Rent-Freeze Brigade

Josh Code

Is New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani using taxpayer resources to build support for his rent-freeze policy? Six weeks ago, he launched Organize NYC, a door-knocking campaign urging New Yorkers to testify before the Rent Guidelines Board ahead of its vote on whether to freeze rents for 2.4 million residents. But when Josh Code signed up for a shift, he says, the line between nonpartisan civic engagement and blatant partisan campaigning quickly became very blurry. Read his report on a night with the mayor’s rent-freeze brigade. Read full story

America’s 250th birthday is less than a month away, and we’re celebrating it by paying tribute to the Great Americans who made this country what it is.

Next up: Sandra Day O’Connor. From 1981 to 2006, O’Connor served as the Supreme Court’s enormously influential swing vote, often deciding cases split between the four liberals and four conservatives. Today, Charles Lane reflects on her extraordinary journey from a remote Arizona ranch to the highest court in the land—and how she “made herself a formidable justice the same way she had, as a girl, learned to brand calves, fire a rifle, or turn a bobcat into a house pet.”